Chapter 369: Ch 369 : Theories

BAM.

The heavy, obsidian doors of the meeting hall were hurled back against the walls by a force of terror.

A high-ranking Demon Messenger, a creature usually known for his cold composure and razor-sharp intellect, stumbled into the room.

His scales, once a deep, lustrous crimson, had faded to a sickly, pale grey. He collapsed to his knees, his claws scraping the stone as if trying to find purchase in a world that had suddenly gone soft.

“Lords! Bad news! The impossible… it has happened!”

The Demon Lords didn’t move. Instead, they channeled a collective pulse of suffocating aura into the room, a pressurized wave of energy that forced the messenger’s heart to stabilize through sheer brute force.

“Speak,” Deimos commanded, his voice a low thrum that vibrated in the marrow of the messenger’s bones.

“Lord… the Multiverse of Gods… and the Realm of Advancement… they’re gone!” the messenger shrieked, the words tumbling out in a jagged rush.

“Our scouts were stationed right outside the barrier of the multiverse of Gods, watching the golden barrier as we always do. Then, out of nowhere, the space began to crackle. Not like a portal, but like glass under a hammer. We ran, we fled from the cracks… but they followed us, eating away the Gods that were left behind!”

He gasped, his eyes wide and vacant. “Then… in a single second, without a vibration, without a sound… The multiverse of Gods vanished into nothingness. There is no debris. No spatial echoes. There is nothing left but an empty, howling hole in the void! And the demon demigods that were monitoring the realm of advancement also reported about its disappearance”

The Demon Lords lunged to their feet, their auras clashing in a chaotic storm of black lightning and blood-red mist.

“Lom!” Maledictus hissed, her hood flaring. “The rat has finally made his move! He’s trying to swallow the entire Pantheon into the Pearl to fuel his own power!”

“No,” Deimos said, his eyes narrowing into cold slits as he stared toward the coordinates where the Multiverse of Gods once sat.

“That is impossible. Not even the Pearl of Calamity can swallow a Multiverse in a single second without tearing the fabric of reality itself. And what of Cosmos? What of Adam? Do you truly believe those monsters would sit idly by while a thief devoured their homes and their people?”

“Then what happened?” Ichor roared, his blood boiling so hot it steamed from his pores. “Massive multiverses don’t just fall into pockets!”

Deimos looked down at his own hands, which were trembling with a rare, cold sweat.

“Either Lom has grown far more powerful than we ever feared… or this Cosmos has allowed him to devour the multiverse from within. A universe at a time… a secret harvest. He let the infection spread until there was nothing left but a shell, and then the multiverse collapsed into the Pearl’s stomach.”

“But why would he?” Belial screamed. The Lord of Lies had been silent until now, nursing the wound to his pride from his recent defeat, but the mention of Cosmos’s intent forced him to speak.

“He is beyond powerful! In reality, it was not that I retreated back to the capital…” Belial whispered, his voice cracking with shame. “Instead, it was him. He chose to let me go. He wanted the head of Lom and the return of his prisoners. I don’t think he would willingly let Lom capture the very territories that anchor his godhood!”

The other Demon Lords turned their gaze toward Belial. For a long, suffocating moment, they looked at him with eyes filled with venomous suspicion, as if looking at a pathetic liar.

But then they turned away, shaking their heads. ’He is the Lord of Lies, after all,’ their silence seemed to say. ’He was lying to cover his own cowardice.’

“Maybe you are right,” Deimos said, his mind already weaving a new tapestry of logic. “Since you faced him, you know his mask better than us. But are you sure… he didn’t lie to you about everything?”

“Lie? In front of me?” Belial’s ego flared, his aura spiking. “The Demon Lord of Lies? Hah! Deimos, have you gone mad? I can smell a fabrication before it’s even conceived in the mind!”

“Don’t take it personally,” Deimos countered, his voice dripping with condescension.

“If you can catch every lie, then why weren’t you able to sense that my grief over my driver a million years ago was a total fabrication?”

“It’s easy to lie without technically lying, Belial. He didn’t need to craft a story; he only needed to ensure you were manipulated. Rephrase everything he said to you. Every word.”

Belial hesitated, his pride warring with a growing sense of unease. “He said… he would let me return to the Demonic Realm. He didn’t offer a price; I asked for it. He then said that Lom was plotting against us, the Demon Lords. He said he wanted Lom dead… and his assets returned.”

“It is a truth that Lom is plotting against us,” Deimos mused, pacing the chamber. “But why would he want Lom dead if they were partners? It’s simple. Cosmos saw you, and he understood that all seven of us would descend upon him next. He was scared. He let you go and pointed the finger at Lom to shift our concentration. He created a civil war among demons to buy himself time.”

“Still, why does he want lom dead?” Belial asked.

“Lom was likely charging him an exorbitant protection fee to keep the multiverse hidden,” Deimos explained, his gaze locked on the distant, dark sky.

“He wanted Lom dead to stop the payments, and assets refers to the control of the territory. Cosmos was using the time we spent hunting Lom to let Lom evacuate the multiverses into the Pearl for safekeeping! He isn’t being devoured, he’s being moved!”

Belial’s eyes went wide. “So… by diverting us, he used the Pearl as a celestial vessel? He let Lom swallow the multiverse chunk by chunk so he could relocate his entire civilization to a place we can’t reach?”

The Demon Lords looked at Deimos with newfound admiration. They nodded, satisfied with this elaborate, logical delusion that perfectly explained their loss without bruising their egos.

Meanwhile, in a folded layer of space deep within the meeting hall itself, a being sat cross-legged, barely able to hold back his laughter.

“Hahahaha! What kind of mental gymnastics is this?” Lom whispered to the shadows, clutching his sides. “I have to say, if I didn’t know the truth, I’d actually believe him! Deimos really is a genius at forming his own story… He should be a writer, i would willingly become his number one Fan.”

Lom sat within the absolute stealth of the Pearl of Calamity, watching the Lords bicker like children.

Behind him, hidden in the darkness of the Pearl’s internal dimensions, stood thousands of Demon Gods. Some he had rescued from Sunny’s prisons, others he had snatched from the Lords.

They were his secret army, though they were currently blind and deaf to the outside world, seeing only the void Lom allowed them to see.

But as Lom’s laughter died down, a cold stone settled in his stomach. He looked back at the empty coordinate on his map where the Multiverse of Gods should have been.

“But if I didn’t take them…” Lom whispered, his mind racing through his own theories. “Then where did those multiverses go? And why did the space crackle like that?”

Lom looked at the Demon Lords, then at the empty void beyond. For the first time, the thief felt like he was the one being robbed.

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