"Although I'm annoyed at the fact that you four were given a clear task, and went off script because of something a mortal said." The demon lord said, his attention shifting back to the four Demi Gods kneeling before him. But before any of them could open their mouths to beg for mercy or offer an explanation, he laughed lightly.
"Then again, he played his cards perfectly. First, he got into Seraph's good side, and went on to use that as a bridge to get you four to listen to him. The plan he set up was perfect… I understand why you four did what you did." The demon lord said softly, and the four Demi Gods kneeling before him let out a collective sigh of relief so heavy it was almost audible.
They had been prepared for the worst—execution, torture, public humiliation—but the demon lord's understanding was genuine. He recognized that they hadn't been outwitted by incompetence. They had been outmaneuvered by something far more dangerous than raw power.
"My son seems not to care about race; he sticks his dick in anything that has a pretty face… let's put his capability to the test. Shadow." The demon lord said softly, his tone shifting from amused to cold in the span of a single breath.
From behind his throne, a figure emerged—a demon that looked like a shadow taken form, its body undefined and shifting, as though it were made of living darkness that couldn't decide on a single shape. It moved without sound, without weight, without any trace of presence that a normal being could detect.
"Go. Kill my son. You know his capability with his tongue; don't give him a chance to speak." The demon lord said with a smile that didn't reach his eyes.
"What!" Ellen's image in the mirror glared at the demon lord with an intensity that cracked the air between them, even through the barrier of the mirror's surface. The demon lord's smile faded instantly, replaced by a hard stare as he turned to face her reflection.
"You want to kill him? Try it… in fact, go ahead, I will tell you where to aim. I dare you to." Ellen said coldly, her voice carrying the kind of quiet fury that was far more terrifying than any scream. The demon lord's face darkened at her words—not because of the threat itself, but because of the sheer audacity behind it. She was threatening him. A being who could erase planets with a wave of his hand, and she was daring him to act.
"Go ahead. I want to see how fast my growth would be with the motivation to avenge his death driving me," Ellen said coldly, and the demon lord's aura spilled outward in heavy, suffocating waves that pressed down on everything in the throne room.
The four kneeling Demi Gods flattened themselves further against the floor, barely able to breathe under the weight of his anger. But after a long, tense moment, the demon lord took a deep breath and reeled his aura back in, forcing himself to calm down.
Making Ellen his enemy wasn't a wise decision. After all, this was the number one genius of the lower realm—a cultivator whose talent for both cultivation and comprehension was completely unmatched by anyone in her generation.
Her growth rate was terrifying, and the trajectory she was on pointed toward heights that even the demon lord himself couldn't afford to ignore. After all, he could be considered her father, in a manner of speaking. He knew her talent as he knew what he gave her. Killing the one person she actually cared about would turn that monstrous potential against him, and that wasn't a gamble worth taking.
"Just kill him and have him revive through those treasures of his." The demon lord said coldly, settling on a compromise that satisfied his annoyance without crossing Ellen's line. But behind his calm exterior, his mind was already racing—calculating, planning, mapping out ways to eliminate Ellen before she grew too powerful to deal with. She was useful now, but a tool that could turn on its master was a tool that needed to be broken before it gained the strength to do so.
***
Meanwhile, back on Earth, Ethan could be seen sitting in a room within his underground base, leaning back in his seat while looking at his newly formed harem gathered before him. Iris, the Blood Queen, Raven, the Ice Phoenix Sect Ancestor, and the elder of the Dragon Clan.
Out of every woman who had been present at the wedding, these five were the only ones capable of cultivating the Nigh-Omnipotence Cultivation Art. The art had chosen them the moment Ethan extended it, recognizing something within each of them that met its impossibly high standards.
"I don't even need to lose my cultivation. By cultivating this, my cultivation would be converted to this…" Iris said, her eyes bright with a mixture of shock and excitement as she examined the cultivation art Ethan had shared with them.
"You're not a normal mortal. What is this?" The silver-haired woman—the dragon clan elder, currently in her human form—asked in shock. When Ethan had said he wanted to show them something, none of them had expected anything remotely close to this. A cultivation art at this level shouldn't have existed in the hands of a mortal. It shouldn't have existed at all.
"Yeah, a while back I regained memory from my past life… that's one of the things that I brought forth into my current life," Ethan said with a smile, and the explanation—as casual and understated as it was—caused all five of their eyes to widen in unison.
"Go ahead and cultivate. I have to deal with a few things. Enter the time chamber, feel free to do as you wish." Ethan said, and with that, the five of them headed off to cultivate, leaving him alone with his thoughts.
'Why do I feel danger...?' Ethan thought, rubbing his chin as an uneasy sensation prickled at the edges of his instincts. It wasn't sharp enough to pinpoint, but it was there—a low, constant hum of warning that refused to go away.
He frowned at the feeling, then summoned the other versions of himself that had been cultivating separately. One by one, they returned to him and merged back into his body, each fusion sending a surge of power rushing through his veins. His cultivation skyrocketed, climbing rapidly until it settled at Level 25 Martial Disciple.
With him growing stronger, the number of clones he could sustain also increased proportionally. This meant each version of himself could then go off, cultivate independently, grow stronger on their own, and then fuse back with him once they had made sufficient progress. And then he could split again, creating even more clones than before, who would each cultivate and return even stronger. The cycle would feed itself endlessly, which meant his cultivation speed would never truly slow down no matter how steep the requirements for each level became.
'I can fight a Level 10 Martial Master... not bad.' Ethan thought, sensing the limits of his new strength. He also noticed something about the way his levels worked compared to those of normal cultivators.
Every twelve levels he broke through could essentially be summed up as a single level in traditional terms. So Levels 1 through 12 were the equivalent of Level 1 Martial Disciple, but that one level's worth of growth had been spread out across twelve individual stages, each one refining and building upon the last. Levels 13 through 24 were essentially his version of Level 2, compressed and expanded in the same way. And Levels 25 through 36 were his version of Level 3.
So in practical terms, Ethan was currently at the equivalent of Level 3 Martial Disciple in his system, far from reaching Level 4… and yet, despite being stuck within the Martial Disciple realm, he could face a Martial Master head-on and win. If that wasn't overpowered, he didn't know what was.
'Better...' Ethan thought, closing his eyes and stretching his senses outward. His perception range had expanded again—some Martial Grand Masters now fell within the scope of what he could detect and read. Although his raw combat power only sat at the Level 10 Martial Master mark, that was raw power alone, without factoring in his techniques, his abilities, his passive buffs, or the dozens of other advantages that stacked on top of one another. And even that baseline was improving with every passing second as his cultivation continued to climb in the background.
Ethan's body flickered, and millions of copies of himself came into existence simultaneously, each one peeling off from the original and filing into the time chambers to cultivate, train martial arts, comprehend laws, and handle every other task that needed doing. The underground base, which had been relatively quiet moments ago, was now filled wall to wall with versions of Ethan, all of them moving with purpose and vanishing through dimensional doors within seconds.
'My cultivation speed can be considered slow...' Ethan thought calmly, and he meant it. Despite the absurd number of clones working around the clock, each one cultivating inside time chambers where years passed for every day in the outside world, it still took years between breakthroughs.
If not for the mountains of resources the system provided and the sheer volume of clones he had running at any given moment, Ethan was sure it would have taken him dozens, if not hundreds, of years to reach his current level of capability. The Omnipotent Cultivation Art was unmatched in terms of what it offered, but its requirements were equally unmatched. Each level demanded more than the last, and the curve only got steeper the higher he climbed.
The art was overpowered, but it clearly came with its flaws. Nothing this powerful came for free. But that was okay—the trade-off was more than worth it in the long run. What mattered now was planning for the future. He had dealt with the immediate crisis, secured his harem, and set his forces on the path to becoming something truly dangerous. But the world wasn't going to sit still and wait for him to finish growing.
'The other races would target humanity after what happened, even if they know humanity is innocent...' Ethan thought, settling onto his bed and staring up at the ceiling as the gears in his mind began turning at full speed.
The broadcast had done its job in exposing the demons, but it had also painted a target on humanity's back. Perception mattered more than truth in galactic politics, and the perception right now was that humans had been colluding with demons. That stain wouldn't wash off easily, no matter how much evidence they presented.
'Iris for now would be humanity's strongest active expert... but what about the demon race? What about this galaxy as a whole...?' Ethan thought, the scope of his thinking expanding outward from Earth to the stars beyond it. This wasn't a story where one race became evil for no reason and attacked another world on some shallow, one-dimensional motivation.
The war between this galaxy and the demon race galaxy had been going on for millions of years. It was a conflict so deeply rooted and so important to the demon race that they had gone to extraordinary lengths to gain an advantage—lengths that included engineering his birth. Yeah, he knew. He had figured it out a long time ago. His mother was a cheater, secretly working with the demon race behind the king's back while pretending to be a loyal wife and queen.
But why? Why did the demon lord go through the trouble of having his mother conceive twins—one fathered by the king of the United Empire, and one fathered by the demon lord himself—creating a pair of children from two different fathers sharing the same womb? Why go through the elaborate, painstaking process of having Ellen absorb his talent and cultivation before they were even born, crippling him from the start?
Was all of this simply for world domination? Was it just another move in the million-year war, another scheme to weaken humanity from within? Or was there something special about this galaxy—something deeper, something hidden—that made all of this effort worth it?