While Sunny spent years as a phantom architect, weaving the fabric of the bubble into his own soul and trying to find the reincarnation of the Old Gods, the Demonic Realm was descending into a state of panic.

The peace of the Demon Lords had been replaced by a grinding, psychological attrition. They were predators who had suddenly realized they were being hunted by something they could not see, smell, or strike.

For decades, the Seven Lords had attempted to map the attack patterns of Lom. Every strategy, every trap, and every scrying ritual had resulted in a humiliating, empty-handed failure.

The cost of this vanity was steep: over a hundred thousand Demon Gods, the elite vanguard of the Abyss, had been kidnapped by Lom.

These weren’t mere foot soldiers; they were the backbone of the demonic military, and their absence left a hollow ache in the realm’s power structure.

In a desperate bid to stop this, Deimos, the Lord of Discord, had issued the Black Mandate. Every remaining Demon God was recalled to the Capital.

Deimos reasoned that by concentrating their strength within the heart of the realm, a space directly protected by the auras of the Seven Lords, Lom would be forced to reveal himself. Any ripple in the dimensions, any whisper of a spatial rift, would be instantly detected by the Lords.

But Lom was not a gambler; he was a master of the pivot.

The moment the Demon Gods withdrew, Lom shifted his focus. He ignored the high-tier targets and turned his predatory gaze toward the foundation: the demon prodigies, the rising demigods, and the gifted mortals.

One by one, the future of the demonic race began to evaporate. A brilliant sword-master in the East vanished during his breakfast; a genius ritualist in the West disappeared while standing in a crowd of a thousand onlookers.

Inside the obsidian spires of the Capital, the atmosphere was thick with the scent of blood and the heavy, stagnant pressure of the Lords’ collective anger, their massive forms casting long shadows against the walls.

“Our previous assessment was flawed,” Maledictus hissed, her eyes glowing with a sickly, grey light. She paced the floor, her very footsteps etching curses into the stone.

“Lom and that Cosmos are not merely in cahoots, they are a single, synchronized strike. Lom has the Pearl to house the stolen, but it is Cosmos who provides the speed. He is using those reality-tearing portals to bridge the realm.”

She slammed a clawed hand onto the table, the obsidian surface cracking under her grip.

“Otherwise, it is a physical impossibility! How can Lom be seen in the Eastern crags at one moment, and a heartbeat later, kidnap a prodigy in the Western marshes? That speed is not spatial; It is Cosmos’s hand moving the piece.”

“You give this Cosmos too much credit,” Ichor, the Demon Lord of Corrosion, growled.

“He is but a man who got lucky with a few laws. Let me go out there. I will dissolve his portals and melt the skin off Lom’s bones.”

“Sit down, Ichor,” Deimos commanded, his voice a low thrum of authority.

“Belial returned from his encounter with his pride in tatters and his Law suppressed. Do you think your acid is more potent than the Law of Lies? If we scatter, we die. That is exactly what they want.”

“So we just sit here?” Belial shouted, his voice cracking. He had been the most vocal since his defeat, his paranoia reaching a fever pitch. “We sit here while our legacy is plucked like ripe fruit? Every prodigy taken is a soldier for their side! We are being harvested!”

“We wait,” Maledictus snapped, her voice cold enough to frost the air. “A predator who rushes into the dark is a predator who becomes prey. Lom is arrogant. He will eventually reach too far. He will make a tremor so large that even his portals cannot hide it. And when he does, we will collapse the sky on his head.”

The fear of Cosmos had become a silent eighth member of their council.

They knew Deimos had to remain in the Capital to protect the demon Gods in the city.

If the remaining Lords scattered to hunt Lom, they risked being picked off individually.

Belial’s description of his encounter had grown in the retelling; the image of a being who could manipulate a Lord’s law made them hesitate.

They were the masters of the Abyss, yet they felt like children hiding under a blanket.

While the Demon Lords endured their mental breakdown, the perpetrator of their misery sat upon a throne of shifting shadows in a realm that existed in-between the folds of space.

Below him, gathered in silent, disciplined ranks, were the strongest entities under his command, The Calamity Heralds.

Lom looked down at a map spread across his lap. To a mortal, it would have looked like a scrap of crimson parchment dotted with random ink stains.

But to Lom, it was the Abyssal Cartograph, an anchor that allowed him to peer into any coordinate of the Demonic Realm by focusing his intent.

“Hah… I would give a million souls to see Deimos’s face right now,” Lom chuckled, his voice echoing in the vast, quiet hall. “Can you imagine it? The Great Lord of Discord huddled in a dark room, jumping at every shadow? It’s poetic.”

“My Lord,” a voice rose from the ranks below. It was the leader of Team 23, a creature known as Vax, whose skin was a patchwork of void-matter and scales.

“The Lords have completely abandoned the outer sectors. The harvest is easier than we anticipated. But the Demon Gods are no longer in our reach. They are all behind the Capital’s shield.”

“Let them stay there,” Lom dismissed with a wave of his hand. “The Gods are the branches, Vax. The prodigies and the mortals are the roots. If I tear out the roots, the tree dies anyway. How many have we taken this week?”

“Six thousand prodigies, Lord,” Vax replied. “And three entire sub-realms of mortal demonic talent.”

“Excellent. Deploy Team 23 to the Eastern quadrant,” Lom commanded. “Merge with Teams 12 and 6. Initiate a mass-harvest of the bloodline prodigies there. I want the air to smell of their absence. Let’s poke the Lords until they finally lose their patience and come screaming out of that tower.”

Vax stepped forward and gripped a dark, swirling orb. It was a copy of the Pearl of Calamity.

Lom currently commanded a million such teams, each consisting of a hundred elite Demon Gods.

He had scattered them across the entire bubble, hunting for the reincarnations of Old Gods and harvesting untapped multiverses.

Only a thousand of these teams, the Heralds, were currently wrecking havoc within the Demonic Realm.

Because of these thousand points of simultaneous interaction, it felt as though Lom was omnipresent.

In reality, he was merely the conductor of a global orchestra of chaos, sitting safely on his throne while his teams did the heavy lifting.

His goal was simple: force the Demon Lords to abandon the Capital. He needed the basement of the spire to be empty. He needed to speak once more with the Hidden Entity from the Real Void without seven pairs of eyes watching his every move.

“Should I send the Heralds toward the sector where the Multiverse of Gods vanished?” Lom mused, his finger hovering over a dark spot on the map. He hesitated, then pulled his hand back as if burned.

“No. That beast is still wandering the bubble. If any team gets near, they would be unmade before they could even register his aura.”

It was a strange, silent symmetry. Just as the Demon Lords kept their forces huddled in the Capital to avoid Lom, Lom kept his Stalkers away from Sunny’s territory.

Initially, Lom had been as baffled as the Lords by the disappearance of the multiverses.

But after consultation with Edgar, Lom had learned the terrifying truth. He learned of the Nihilium Bloodline, the royal lineage of the Real Void, and their innate talent of nurturing multiverses inside their inner world.

“He is integrating them” Lom whispered to himself, a shiver of genuine fear tracing his spine. “He is eating the very multiverses to fuel his own growth.”

Vax looked up, sensing his master’s hesitation. “Lord? Should we not reclaim the territories Cosmos has taken? They were rich in lifeforms…. We could have captured them as our farm animals.”

“Are you suicidal, Vax?” Lom barked, his eyes snapping to his commander.

“If you see a ripple of violet starlight, you retreat. You do not engage. You do not look back. To Cosmos, you are not rivals… Your are merely snacks.”

“He is a chosen one of the Real Void. You guys don’t understand what that means…. It means that to him, our Laws are nothing more than spices on a steak.” Lom thought inwardly, his face losing colours from the growing appetite of Sunny.

Lom turned his attention back to the Demonic Capital on his map. He was frustrated. His plan to lure the Lords out was taking longer than expected because they were more terrified of the Third Participant than they were of him.

“The bubble is shrinking,” Lom muttered, his gaze darkening. “Between the Lords’ stagnation and Cosmos’s hunger, there is very little room left for me to hide. We need to reach that basement. We need the Entity’s guidance before Cosmos grows out of our reach.”

“Team 23! Move!” Vax shouted, sensing his master’s urgency. “The prodigies of East will disappear by a month time!”

As the Heralds vanished into the darkness of the pearl of calamity, Lom leaned back, his eyes fixed on the two maps in front of him.

He was playing a game with two titans, hoping they would crush each other before they noticed the flea in their armor.

But as he watched the violet sector of the other map grow larger with every passing day, he realized that hope was a very thin shield against Cosmos’s hunger.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep