Over the fire, an animal roasted slowly, something that looked like a wild boar and, in fact, was a wild boar. Its thick layers of fat melted in the heat, dripping into the flames and releasing a heavy, intoxicating aroma that filled the small hut.

"Sniff…"

The girl sitting nearby couldn't help swallowing her saliva. The scent of roasted fat, the rich sweetness of real meat, was something she hadn't tasted in months.

Usually, Trulgren lacked the strength to hunt anything larger than a snow hare. Even those were rare and costly, each leaving him scratched, bruised, or empty-handed.

But tonight was different.

Ever since Trulgren had received the gift of from Gaia, everything about him had changed. In just one day, he'd brought down prey that once would have hunted him. And he had done it alone.

"Here," Trulgren said with a small smile, tearing off a roasted leg and handing it to his sister. "Eat."

She took it eagerly, biting into the crisp skin and juicy meat with trembling hands. For a long time, she said nothing, only the sound of chewing filled the firelit room. Then, suddenly, she froze.

"Brother," she said quietly, her voice uncertain, "shouldn't you offer part of it to the Mother? Isn't it wasteful to eat it all?"

In their world, every hunt was sacred. A share of every catch had to be sacrificed to the Mother of the World. Through sacrifice came strength. Through strength came her favor.

"Don't worry," Trulgren said softly, tearing another piece for himself. "I already made the offering in the forest."

"Ah?" She looked at him in confusion. The boar still looked whole. Normally, a proper sacrifice required at least a quarter of the body. The stronger the creature, the greater the offering owed to the Mother.

Trulgren laughed lightly. "I'm serious. During the ritual, the Mother only asked for a small piece of its brain, nothing more. And after that… I felt stronger than ever."

He flexed his arms, now solid beneath the firelight.

"But next time," he added, "she told me I must bring her something new. She seems… curious about the creatures of the jungle. She even told me to make something called a [Map] as part of the offering."

He spoke for a long time, describing the strange words and visions that had come to him during the sacrifice. His sister listened quietly, though most of it made little sense to her. Her mind was still half lost in the taste of meat.

By the time they finished eating, not a single scrap remained.

Trulgren leaned back, watching his sister's content face. For the first time in years, she looked alive. Since their parents' deaths, the two of them had lived like ghosts, two orphans clinging to survival.

But now… things were different.

He stepped outside. The cold night air struck his face, carrying the scent of smoke and ash.

"With her power," he whispered, looking at his hands, "everything changes."

He could feel it beneath his skin, the strength, the hunger, the promise of more. Yet his eyes dimmed as his smile faded.

Not everything he told his sister was true.

"She did ask for new sacrifices," he murmured, "and for that strange thing called a map… but she also asked for something else."

In the darkness, a faint red glow surfaced in his eyes.

"She told me to sacrifice an enemy, someone who once humiliated me. Someone who trampled my dignity."

Trulgren's breath grew heavier. In their tribe, killing one's own was forbidden.

Discovery meant exile, or worse. Yet the Mother's voice still echoed in his head:

If you fail to obey, all I have given you will be taken back.

He turned to glance inside the hut. His sister lay curled beneath a ragged blanket, sleeping peacefully for the first time in months.

"No," he whispered, his voice barely a breath. "I won't go back to being powerless. Not again."

Even if it meant defying the tribe. Even if it meant blood.

He slipped into the shadows, silent as the wind. At the far edge of the camp, he loosened a section of the wooden fence and slid through. Beyond it lay the open field, drowned in fog beneath a moon half-hidden by clouds.

Trulgren crouched low, waiting.

Minutes later, a young tribesman about his age stumbled from his hut, yawning as he approached the fence to relieve himself.

When he looked up, two crimson eyes stared back, from the darkness.

"Who's there?" the boy stammered. But when his eyes adjusted, he relaxed and sneered.

"Trulgren? Hah. So it's you." He laughed. "I heard you somehow killed a boar today. Must've been luck. If I'd been there, you wouldn't have gotten a single scrap."

He smirked. "I bet your sister cried when she saw real meat for once."

A blade flashed.

The laughter stopped with a wet gasp. The boy fell, clutching his throat as blood poured through his fingers.

Trulgren crouched beside him, expression still.

The dying boy tried to speak "Don't… you…" but no sentence came.

Trulgren said nothing. He dragged the body into the darkness beyond the fence, the sound of shifting earth swallowing the last faint gurgle.

There, beneath the clouded moon, he whispered softly:

"Sacrifice to the great [Mother of the World]."

And outside the world shaped like a figure eight, the Demon Prince Fabudi stood suspended in the void, clutching a pale and flickering soul in his clawed hand. His lips twisted into a greedy, ecstatic smile.

It was only a minor soul, foreign and weak, yet it carried something precious.

Fabudi grinned and tossed the struggling soul into the churning black mist behind him, the body of the Endless Abyss itself.

In an instant, the soul screamed, its essence unraveling as it was devoured by the mist. Every thought, every law embedded within it, was stripped away and absorbed. The Abyss drank deeply, parsing every fragment for what it could learn of this alien world.

Souls from intelligent beings, especially those born of enclosed realms, were saturated with their world's rules. Each was a key, however small, to the structure of reality itself.

And now, Fabudi had offered one such key to the Abyss.

Almost immediately, the Demon Prince noticed something extraordinary. The rate at which the Abyss corroded the plane's crystal wall, its outer shell, had increased. Only slightly, So slight it might seem meaningless to any other creature.

But to him, it was everything.

An advantage.

A way in.

"It works," he breathed, eyes wide with fervor. "It works!"

Then came the inevitable greed. "But this is far from enough… I need more. More souls from this world."

Fabudi extended his consciousness through a hairline crack in the world's barrier and slipped once again into the sea of thought belonging to his puppet, Trulgren.

The boy's fragile mind trembled as Fabudi's voice whispered through it, smooth and divine.

"You've done well, child. You deserve a reward."

A dark breath of the Abyss seeped into Trulgren's soul, weaving through his spirit like ink through water. His power swelled, his senses sharpened, but deep within, a piece of him withered, replaced by something cold and alien.

The demon said nothing of this.

He simply watched, amused, as the boy trembled with delight and confusion. Then came the next whisper.

"Sacrifice more. The more you offer, the stronger you'll become."

Before Trulgren's eyes, countless whirlpools of black and red light spiraled into existence, each one humming with the promise of new strength, new skills, new blessings from the so-called Mother of the World.

His gaze darkened. The hunger in his heart mirrored the same hunger that burned within Fabudi.

They were, in that moment, reflections of one another, two faces of the same corruption.

⸻———x——————

Far below, deep within the heart of the Endless Abyss, Cillian sat observing everything through the flowing currents of chaos.

He watched Fabudi's machinations play out with a faint, knowing smile.

"At last," he murmured. "A demon prince who understands how to use the Abyss rather than be consumed by it."

The Endless Abyss, to outsiders, was thought to be nothing more than a wasteland of darkness and chaos. They saw it as a pit, a lower dimension gnawing at creation's edge.

They were not wrong. But they were not right, either.

In truth, the Abyss was more than decay. It was a consciousness. A hunger given form, a plane built upon the temptation that pulls all souls downward.

To mortals, the creatures that dwelled here were horrors, monsters of twisted flesh and insatiable cruelty. Yet even the most dreadful demon was merely an extension of the Abyss, not its core.

Parasites clinging to infinity.

They could never harm the Abyss; in fact, they served it. Each invasion, each act of destruction, fed its growth.

Cillian understood that well. He had designed it that way.

To him, the actions of the demons were no different from the crusades waged by so-called divine beings in other worlds. Under their gods' banners, they too invaded, slaughtered, and desecrated. They only called it holy war.

The difference lay in honesty.

The Abyss did not lie about what it was.

Its essence, its weapon, was corruption itself.

Not imposed by law or command, but born naturally from the world's own chaotic core. When Cillian created the Endless Abyss, he had never written "corruption" into its rules. And yet, from the very moment it came into being, corruption existed.

He had searched for its source, tearing through the rule-structures, the formulas of chaos, even the core law of [Extreme Chaos]but he had never found it.

It was invisible, untraceable. Like a shadow without a body.

From the first creature he had ever shaped, the First Fallen, to the countless horrors that now filled the Abyss, all had succumbed to it. Every being, no matter how pure its creation, fell eventually.

But why?

Was it the Abyss itself that drew them down? Or something deeper, buried within the soul of creation?

That question haunted him still.

And yet, even without an answer, Cillian had long since learned to wield corruption as his greatest weapon.

Nothing could resist the pull of the Abyss forever.

And Fabudi, perhaps thanks to him reckless ambition, was finally beginning to understand that.

⸻———x——————

While Cillian observed him from afar, a ripple appeared at the edges of the Mist Realm, a faint shimmering light.

A sphere of radiance unfolded from the fog, singing softly with the purest hymns of life and creation. The glow rippled outward until a figure emerged, a man of flawless form, draped in light.

He hovered above the ground, golden wings unfurling behind him, each feather inscribed with divine script that could move mortals to tears. Beneath his feet, the air shimmered with holy fire.

A Subordinate God from Mount Heaven had descended.

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