Free Web NovelChapter 1602: Chapter 1602: The Demon Rises
In order to defeat the goddess, the Demons were endowed with greater Strength and higher freedom, and through a series of chemical reactions, they developed a certain degree of self-awareness.
The confrontation against the goddess ended in failure. The Main War Faction decided everything had to be planned for the long term, and countless new project proposals were put on the table.
But before the Main War Faction could stabilize society and discuss the feasibility of all these plans, the reborn Demons destroyed the devices that had been pulling them back to life, took the Cores that guided Magic Power to gather, and fled the laboratories.
Humans had created the Cores only so that Demons who fell in battle could be reborn at designated locations, regroup, and return to the front.
As long as the Core was not destroyed, a Demon could be reborn again and again, countless times.
The Demons used the abilities Humans had granted them to occupy vast tracts of territory and began to act with wanton abandon.
Having witnessed the power of the goddess, many, many Demons felt fear.
It was fear of true Death.
Some Demons were completely purified in battle with the goddess, and even with a Core they could not be reborn.
If they could keep being reborn, no matter how powerful the enemy they faced, they would not be afraid. But in a fight with the goddess, their very existence would be erased.
The Demons had been created precisely to deal with Angels and the goddess.
Humans would definitely keep coveting their Strength and send them once more onto the "gallows" to be used against the goddess.
Thus, among the Demons, rebels appeared.
They refused to be manipulated by Humans and used as Human tools.
Humans were so insignificant, their Strength so feeble—what right did they have to point fingers at the lives of the Demons!
They had already repaid the Humans’ "Favor of Birth" by felling the Twelve Angels once for them; from now on, they would live for themselves!
At the outset, when designing the Demons, Humans had given them an ultra-strong regenerative ability, and taught them the maxim "as long as the green hills remain, there will be no shortage of firewood," thereby giving them a survival instinct no weaker than that of ordinary creatures.
After acquiring the Strength that allowed Demons to be reborn, Humans did not erase the Demons’ will to live.
It took time to re-gather scattered Magic Power; making a temporary escape to repair themselves was far faster than waiting several months for rebirth.
Humans had only given the Demons the "Courage" to fight the goddess, so that even when there was a vast disparity in Strength they could still fight for victory.
But the disparity in Strength was too great, and it utterly destroyed the "Courage" Humans had instilled in the Demons; the Demons went completely out of Control.
The gap in power between the Demons and ordinary civilians was far too wide.
Common people could be wiped out in the mere lift of a Demon’s hand.
One Demon simply wanted to taste the food in a shop, so it tapped the clerk on the head to make him go fetch it—and ended up tapping the clerk into ashes.
As their exploration deepened, the Demons grew ever more contemptuous of the creator that had made them, believing Humans to be so insignificant that they had created the great Demons only to deal with the goddess.
The legends of Demons had always circulated across the world as a kind of subculture.
Based on various legendary Demons, Humans manufactured real "Demons."
After hearing Demon legends, some Demons began to think that puny Humans could never have created Demons at all—that they had been summoned from the Abyss by Humans.
Demons had their own way of life; they began to imitate the Demons of legend and took delight in toying with Humans.
The original purpose of creating Demons had been to bring down the goddess and Angels. Having lost their goal in the face of fear, they searched, in all sorts of ways, for the pleasures of life and the meaning of survival.
In doing so, they brought immense suffering to Humans.
Fengte led successive generations of upgraded Subhuman troops into battle again and again, annihilating Demons at a bitter cost.
Unfortunately, annihilating Demons was only temporary. No one knew where the Demons had hidden the Magic Cores used to guide their Magic Power back together. If the Cores that Controlled the gathering of Magic Power could not be found, the Demons would still be reborn over and over.
Humans once tried to capture Demons and find ways to process that Fallen Magic Power, so that even if the Demons hid their Cores flawlessly, they would have no ability to be reborn.
But during their escape from the laboratories, the Demons learned Human cunning.
When they were outmatched, the Demons would all choose to self-destruct, and the aged Fengte died in one such Demon self-detonation.
After Fengte’s Death, the Main War Faction, chastened by pain, carried out a new round of technological upgrades under the pressure of the Demons.
Then they implemented the "Abyss" Project.
Fallen Magic Power possessed the ability, through specific Magic Techniques, to cause surrounding Magic Power to become "Fallen" as well.
To completely eliminate Fallen Magic Power would likely require a great deal of time.
The Demons’ rampage not only tormented the populace, it also eroded the people’s trust in the current ruling class.
To prevent tensions from further escalating, the Main War Faction decided to use the nodes opened up by the Nine-Life Cat Demon to construct the "Abyss," lock the Demons inside it, and deal with them at some later date.
Using all sorts of stratagems, Humans finally managed to gather all the Demons together, and with a gigantic Magic Device, sealed every Demon into the Abyss.
Afterwards, they carefully searched for the Cores that enabled Demons to be reborn, but the number of Cores they found did not match the number originally designed. As for the Twelve most powerful Demons they had created, not a single Core was found.
Had the Demons hidden the Cores inside their own bodies and been sealed into the Abyss along with themselves? Or was there some other secret? No one could say for sure...
Stumbling and struggling, the Demon affair was finally brought to a close of sorts.
Even if the whereabouts of the Cores were unknown, as long as they could develop technology to completely pacify Fallen Magic Power, dealing with Demons would be "a trivial matter."
Unfortunately...what awaited the Luka Civilization was a brutal civil war, and research on restoring Fallen Magic Power was temporarily shelved.
Angels and Demons kept each other in check. During the Demons’ rampage, the Goddess Sect persuaded the Angels who had remained on this planet to protect the populace, thereby earning considerable goodwill toward the Goddess Sect.
More and more people threw themselves into the Goddess Sect, believed everything it preached, and began to fight for the Sect.
In order to force the Main War Faction to release the goddess, they raised the banner of "Holy War."
To turn the tide—and also to prove that Human technology could stand shoulder to shoulder with Gods—Fengte was resurrected.
As he wrote this, Fengte’s pen quivered slightly, and a single tear soaked into the page.
He had never imagined that the religion they had once utterly cast aside would be reborn in this form, that in this era he would once more hear the words "Holy War."
Perhaps they really had taken the wrong path. But perhaps they had not.
Fengte did not know what to say; here his pen paused.
The entire record was not written in a single day, but completed over many separate sessions.
Yang Yu’s gaze seemed to see through the strokes left in the diary to the man, weakened by the side effects of resurrection yet forcing himself to sit at his desk time and again to write.
Fengte’s wounds had barely healed when he immediately Engaged in Battle, trying to stop the disintegration of Human society.
But no matter how hard he tried, it was all to no avail.
Time flew by, and events gradually developed in precisely the direction Fengte least wanted to see.
In countless wars, Fengte slowly lost sight of any hope.
Until a message arrived from their twin world—distant, yet so very close.
