novelleonline Chapter 166: Abomination
Chapter 166: Abomination
’A hologram... that’s somehow able to control this pocket dimension with a tap. I’ve never heard or even seen one before.’Noah thought.
The concept was entirely foreign to his understanding of magic. The idea of a weightless, light-based interface that could command a whole pocket dimension felt like something out of a bizarre fever dream.
Seeing that his master was curious, Kael didn’t hesitate to take initiative.
The ancient dragon used his dragon command again, focusing his violet eyes on the captive as he issued a crushing mental order, asking Yaroth to explain how it worked. He demanded a full, breakdown of the foreign device to satisfy Noah’s curiosity.
Yaroth felt like killing himself in embarrassment and disgrace.
To a proud member of the advanced demon kingdom, being forced to explain basic, fundamental mechanics to an ignorant human was the ultimate humiliation.
He thought to himself, his inner voice dripping with supreme arrogance and spite, ’I’m being ordered around by these monkeys who don’t even know simple techno—’
He couldn’t complete that thought. The moment the derogatory word formed in his mind, the absolute constraints of the Dragon’s Order violently triggered a severe backlash.
His chest heaved violently, and he suddenly coughed out a thick mouthful of black, corrupted blood that splattered across the deep blue ice sheet.
His porcelain-white face turned entirely pale, draining of whatever remaining vitality it had left, and he collapsed back onto his knees with a heavy, hollow thud.
His body shook with uncontrollable spasms as the mental contract ripped through his internal mana channels.
Kael smirked coldly, his massive snout tilting downward as his chilling voice echoed loudly and mockingly within the supervisor’s mind: ’You just had a bad thought about my master, didn’t you? How dare you...?’
The dragon had designed the parameters of the absolute command to be flawless; even a stray, disrespectful thought harbored in the depths of the demon’s consciousness was treated as a direct violation of the sovereign decree.
Yaroth shivered in absolute terror, the sheer psychological weight of the punishment completely breaking whatever shred of defiance he had left. He realized with absolute certainty that his very mind was no longer his own.
He slowly and painfully pushed himself up from the frost, his legs trembling violently as he stood up, muttering weakly: "I’m... sorry..."
The brutal, self-correcting mechanic of Kael’s command wasn’t finished with him yet, forcing his jaw to move against his will to deliver a thorough, demeaning apology.
His body froze rigidly, and he muttered unwillingly, his voice dropping into a flat, broken drone: "This lowly, idiotic, scumbag creature is sorry... for daring to think bad... about you... L-lord... White..."
Kael scoffed, a low rumble of satisfaction vibrating through his massive chest as he thought to himself, now that’s better.
With the demon thoroughly humbled and broken into absolute submission, there would be no further delays in getting answers about the strange holographic technology.
Yaroth felt like killing himself at that exact spot. The sheer, overwhelming weight of the disgrace was too much to bear, and he wished with every fiber of his being that the frozen ground beneath his boots would simply open up and swallow him whole.
He wanted to be erased from existence, to vanish into the dark void so he wouldn’t have to face the reality of his actions.
He had just committed the most abominable thing in demonkind history... calling another person lord.
In the rigid hierarchy of the demon kingdom, that sacred title belonged exclusively to the supreme ruler of their world.
To bestow it upon anyone else was the ultimate sin, an act of unforgivable treason that branded a demon’s soul with eternal shame.
And this person he was forced to call lord wasn’t even an entity close to being as powerful as the Demon Lord. He wasn’t a cosmic devourer or a deity of absolute destruction.
Instead, he was a mere human, a mere arch magus whose entire life span and power base were completely insignificant on a universal scale. The humiliation of bowing to an inferior race tore at Yaroth’s sanity.
He couldn’t think much though, as Noah’s voice came again, breaking through his internal spiral of despair.
The masked young man stepped closer to the hovering light, his golden eyes narrowing behind his black cat mask as he muttered: "I can’t see what’s written there..."
To Noah’s vision, the floating interface was nothing more than a blur of strange, unrecognizable symbols and shifting geometric lines that made absolutely no sense.
Under the absolute weight of the Dragon’s command, Yaroth was forced again to speak, his vocal cords tightening as the compulsion wrenched the explanation from his throat.
He said, his voice a flat, mechanical drone: "That’s because it is... written in the demon language, and can only be used by one."
The interface was biometrically and linguistically locked, completely unreadable to anyone outside their specific lineage.
Noah nodded in understanding, his analytical mind storing the information away without a word. He didn’t care about the semantics of the security lock; he only cared about the practical results of getting out of this compromised laboratory.
Yielding to the silent pressure of Kael’s gaze, Yaroth clicked a button on the hologram, simultaneously channeling his nether into it to activate the spatial transition sequence.
The moment his energy touched the floating interface, the air around the device grew visibly heavy and suffocating.
The mana of demons was very different from that of humans, far more vile and corrupted in its fundamental nature.
While human mana felt natural and attuned to the raw elements of the world, the energy flowing from Yaroth’s hand carried a sickening, predatory pressure that instantly caused the surrounding frost to wither and turn a sickly grey.
It was precisely because of this unique, tainted composition that they were able to freely use dark elements like shadow and darkness without destroying their own internal pathways.
Their bodies were built to withstand the rot of primordial decay.
In fact, it wasn’t called ’mana’ even. The energy that fueled their entire civilization was an entirely separate power source called nether, which was basically the far more corrupted, high-density form of traditional mana.
As the dark, oppressive nether flooded the glowing hologram, the transparent triangle flared with a sinister purple light, ready to tear open the exit of the pocket dimension.