Chapter 341: Ch 341 : The Echo Protocol

“Mammon,” Sunny whispered.

The word didn’t travel through the air. Instead, it rippled through the intricate mental connection that connected Sunny to his creations.

It was a bridge of pure Faith, a spiritual tether that bypassed the physical limitations of space and the prying eyes of the void.

“Greetings, my Master,” Mammon’s voice replied, saturated with a tone of ecstatic relief.

To Mammon, it had been centuries since his master had last reached out.

For a creation, silence from the Creator was not merely a lack of instruction; it was an existential void, a punishment that made physical torture seem like a mild inconvenience. Every year of silence felt like an eon of abandonment.

“I require a report,” Sunny said, his voice cold and empirical. “How many demonic cities have been successfully subverted and placed directly under our covert control?”

“Master… providing an exact tally is difficult as the numbers fluctuate by the hours,” Mammon replied, his voice humming with pride.

“We are currently assimilating several hundred cities every month. To put it in perspective, the total territory currently shadow governed by our apostles is roughly equivalent to the entire surface area of our original multiverse.”

Sunny leaned back into the star-glass of his throne. “A respectable pace. But in the grand scheme of the coming war, it is merely a drop in an ocean.”

“Still, it is the best we can achieve without alerting the Demon Lords to a total desperation. Continue your work, but do not… under any circumstances perform any overt theatrical displays. A parasite is most effective when the host doesn’t know it’s being eaten.”

“If the host knows that he is being eaten… He will surely use medicines that can kill that parasite completely, do you understand?”

“Understood, Master,” Mammon said. “The initial stages were sluggish due to the complexity of the blessings. But with the aid of Mire and Yggdrasil, the blessing process has become the least of our worries.”

“Because of them, brother Loki and me don’t need to bless the lifeforms by ourselves, which saves a lot of time for us, and with the clones of Yggdrasil and Mire, these blessings can be given to billions of apostles at once, which is very efficient”

Mammon paused, a sinister chuckle echoing through the link. “The fusion of Brother Loki’s talent for identity theft and my own talent for greed has created something stronger than we anticipated.”

“Now we don’t even need to rush for any business deal, we can directly kill them and take their identity, then do a business with their friends…. using my greed, we can take the identity of all the influential demons living in the city. Our expansion is now exponential.”

Sunny’s lips curved into a sharp, predatory grin. “Excellent. The harvest is ripe. It’s time to put those stolen seats to use. I want you to instruct your deep-cover apostles to begin the dissemination of a specific rumor.”

“As you command, Master,” Mammon said, and the connection snapped shut, leaving a lingering aura of greed in the throne room.

Sunny tapped his fingers against the armrest. Loki and Mammon are the perfect tools for this. They are shrewd, they are shameless, and they find joy in the art of the lie. Precisely what I need to destabilize a Demon Lord.

[Master, I could accelerate this process by spreading these words through the deeper parts of the demon realm.]

Thea’s voice, melodious and clear, rang within Sunny’s mind.

[My particles can bypass the physical travel times of the apostles. I could ensure these rumors reach the ears of the Seven Demon Lords within a hour. It would be far more efficient than relying on the whispers of shadow-demons.]

Sunny’s plan was a slow burn. He intended for the apostles to spread word that Lom had struck a secret bargain with the “Emperor of the Pantheon.”

If the rumor reached the Demon Lords, they would be forced to interrogate Lom.

They might even recall Belial, the Lord of Lies, to serve as a walking lie detector.

It was a strategy designed to turn the demons against each other before the first shot of the war was fired.

However, the cost of a mistake was high. If Lom’s counter-intelligence tracked the rumors back to an apostle, that apostle would be tortured and executed.

While they would revive within the Empire due to their Nine Lives, a permanent piece of their nine lives would be lost forever.

“I haven’t allowed your particles to permeate the Demonic Realm for a reason, Thea,” Sunny whispered, his tone uncharacteristically grave.

“The Demon Realm is not merely another realm. It is an entirely separate ’Bubble,’ likely created by a different member of the Nihilium Clan. Its laws are different; they are designed to corrupt.”

Sunny stood up, pacing the starlight floor. He had spent eons theorizing about the origin of Lady Sansa’s world.

He guessed that the Demon Lords didn’t create that realm… they were merely the kings of a rot that someone else had planted.

It was a guess on his part, but it made perfect sense. Otherwise why would Lady Sansa create demon lords in the first place and how could these demons create such a big realm by themselves, a realm that could contend with the size of the bubble created by Lady Sansa, the royal void beast.

“Mammon’s talent uses a demon’s own greed to consume then entirely. It’s a camouflage that can fool even a Demon Lord, if they doesn’t focus much on their lifeforms. Loki’s talent works similarly, stealing the very concept of their identity,” Sunny explained, his mind racing through the tactical risks.

“But your particles are not connected to demons, Thea.”

He stopped and looked at a floating manifestation of a system screen.

“If the demons capture even a single one of your particles, they won’t just destroy it. They will corrupt it. They can prevent the self-destruction protocol by saturating the particle in demonic miasma. And once they gain control of one…” Sunny gasped, the mental image of the fallout appearing in his mind.

“…they could use the ambient demonic energy to replicate your particles. They would gain their own System.”

The implications were catastrophic. The only thing keeping the Demon Realm from total Multiversal dominance was their lack of instantaneous communication.

They relied on artifacts and spatial-traveling Gods to send messages. If they gained a network like Thea’s, their coordination would become absolute.

“Worse yet,” Sunny continued, “every particle of yours is a window into our world. It contains the data of every lifeform, every technology, and every talent I’ve fostered.”

“If Maledictus, the Lord of Curses, gains that data… she wouldn’t even need to send an army. she could curse every one of my followers by name and their aura that is registered within your database. She could kill them from the comfort of her spire.”

The Demon Lords were currently blind to the specifics of Sunny’s power. That ignorance was his greatest shield. To lose it would be to surrender the war before it began.

[Master… you are correct regarding these vulnerabilities,] Thea replied, her voice remaining eerily calm.

Suddenly, her starlight particles began to coalesce in the center of the room. She manifested a physical avatar, a woman of radiant light, her smile illuminating the darkest corners of the throne room.

[However, I have developed a way to bypass these flaws. I do not intend to send active particles. I wish to send Echo particles…. hollow shells that contain only the rumor, with no link back to the central server. They are designed to dissolve upon the first touch of a divine sense, leaving behind only the memory of the information.]

Sunny looked at her, his eyes narrowing behind the mask. He reached out, his hand hovering over her glowing forehead.

“That’s a great idea, you can create a server in the city of Gods that will store all the data in it, and your particles that are out of the city will have to send a request to the server, only after the server approves, the information will be transfered to the particle that requesed it” Sunny repeated Thea’s idea with a chuckle.

“Also for the problem of replication, only destroying the particle is not enough, we can also add server request feature in it, in short only particles that are approved by the server can use the replication talent”

Sunny sighed, a mixture of pride and caution swirling in his chest. He placed his hand on her head, feeling the hum of quadrillions of calculations per second.

“If we do this, we will be saving millions of apostles….” Sunny whispered. “And Lom will be fighting a war on two fronts before he even realizes he’s been exposed.”

He looked at the statistics of his current empire. Trillions of demon cities, an entire multiverse and mamy universes…. This was something that Sunny had never even imagined as a human back on Endor.

“Very well,” Sunny commanded, his voice dropping to a low, authoritative tone. “Initiate the ’Echo Protocol.’ Let the demons hear the name of Lom in every shadow and every nightmare. Let’s see how long his ’Vault of Secrets’ lasts against the paranoia of his lords.”

Thea’s avatar bowed, her form dissolving back into a golden mist that seeped through the cracks of reality.

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