"It’s the work of demons."
We all froze mid-step.
Beside , Tessa let out a sharp, terrified gasp, her fingers digging painfully into my arm.
From the rear, Scarlet let out a low, vibrating growl.
She narrowed her bright green eyes at Edric’s back.
"Demons? What nonsense are you babbling about?"
I couldn’t exactly bla her for the reaction.
In this world, demons weren’t a tangible threat.
They were a myth. A boogeyman.
The holy scriptures ntioned them, sure, but only as vague, philosophical taphors for sin and corruption.
Servants of dark gods, bringers of chaos, enemies of civilization itself.
But actual, docunted existence? Evidence of real demons walking around causing problems?
I’d never heard of anything like that. Not in the estate libraries. Not in guild records. Not in any conversation I’d ever overheard.
They were just the terrifying bedti stories mothers told their children to keep them from wandering into the woods at night.
"Be good or the demons will take you in the night."
In all of recorded human history, there wasn’t a single sighting, no recovered corpses, no established lairs. They simply didn’t exist in reality.
Till now...
I looked at Edric more carefully, trying to gauge if he was serious or having so kind of breakdown.
His expression was completely calm. Dead serious. The look of soone stating facts, not delusions.
He simply resud walking, his boots echoing rhythmically in the dark labyrinth.
"It’s natural you won’t believe ," he said, his voice completely devoid of judgnt.
"This topic is heavily guarded, and the truth has been buried under centuries of deliberate mistranslations. But they are real."
We followed him, trailing closely behind his dark cloak as he navigated the ruined stone pillars of the first floor.
"I don’t know everything about them," Edric continued. "But from most of what I’ve learned, demons aren’t what the children’s stories make them out to be, the scriptures describe them as beings of pure malevolence, chaos incarnate, enemies of all life. That’s... partially accurate, but oversimplified."
Tessa had recovered enough to engage her curiosity, though her voice still shook slightly.
"What are they then? If not what the scriptures say?"
"They’re beings from sowhere else. Another plane of existence."
"During my travels, I ventured into so of the forgotten, unmapped ruins in the Deadlands. I found texts that predate the current religious orders. According to the oldest texts I’ve found call them The Cleansers. The Cullers of the Unworthy. The Great Equalizers."
Scarlet made a disgusted sound.
"Those sound like titles they gave themselves. Pretty grandiose for monsters."
"No." Edric shook his head.
"Those are what ancient texts called them. Pre-Kingdom era, before the churches consolidated power and rewrote history."
He looked back at us.
"But that’s all we have. Titles. Nas. No one seems to know what they actually are..."
Edric’s frustration was evident now.
"Every source contradicts the others. So say they’re fallen gods. Others claim they’re manifestations of cosmic balance. I’ve even seen texts arguing they’re tools created by ancient mages that went rogue."
I felt sothing cold settle in my stomach.
Scarlet scoffed. "So you actually don’t know either."
"I know they exist," Edric said firmly.
"I know they appear... roughly once a century, though the timing isn’t exact. I also think they’re connected to the dungeon formations. The pattern is too consistent to be coincidence."
"But you don’t know why?" I asked. "Why they do this? What they gain from it?"
"No." Edric’s jaw tightened.
"That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out. The texts that ntion ’cleansing’ but didn’t explain what’s being cleansed or why it’s necessary."
I nodded.
"If they’re called Cleansers, that implies removing sothing. But cleansing what? Corruption? But it seems they’re the ones spreading corruption..."
Edric looked back. "Exactly. It doesn’t make sense. Unless the corruption is a tool, not the goal. A ans to an end we can’t see."
I processed this, feeling the pieces of a puzzle I couldn’t quite see the full picture of.
"You said the authorities know about this. The churches, the kingdoms. If they know demons are real, why hide it?"
Edric’s expression darkened.
"That’s another question I can’t fully answer. Fear, maybe. If people knew there was an organized force behind the Culling Tides, it might cause mass panic. Or maybe they don’t know how to fight demons, so they pretend the problem doesn’t exist."
He paused, then added quietly, "Or maybe so of them are compromised. Working with demons, knowingly or not."
Scarlet was still skeptical, I could see it in her posture.
"This all sounds like interesting conspiracy theory," she said, her voice dripping sarcasm. "But how do you know all these are real?"
I had the sa question.
"Yeah," I added. "How do you know? What evidence do you have that any of this is true?"
Edric paused in his walking.
A chilling silence fell over our group.
"If the temples hid all of this," I said, "and the old texts were buried in unmapped ruins... how do you know for an absolute fact that it’s more than just a myth? How do you know the texts weren’t just ancient fiction?"
Edric reached his hand into his spatial storage ring.
There was a faint ripple in the air, and when he withdrew his hand, he was holding a crystalline orb about the size of an apple.
But it didn’t emit light.
It seed to swallow it.
The orb was pitch-black, swirling with a sickening, violent violet energy at its center. The mont he pulled it out, the temperature in the dungeon plumted.
A suffocating aura of pure, concentrated malice washed over us.
Scarlet let out a sharp hiss, her body violently tensing as she took a rapid step backward, her survival instincts screaming at her to run.
"What the fuck is that?"
Tessa just stared, unease written all over her face, her hand unconsciously reaching for like she needed anchor.
I activated my debug vision, focusing on the orb.
The interface flickered wildly.
The data didn’t load properly at first, spitting out lines of corrupted, red syntax and glitched symbols.
My eyes burned as my Debugger class forcibly compiled the unknown data, finally resolving it into a single, line of text.
[Item: Demonic Core]
I gasped, my eyes widening.
"I-Is this..."
Edric nodded, his face illuminated by the sickly violet glow of the object. "A demon’s core."
Scarlet stared at it, her eyes trembling. "How... how did you get it?"
Edric calmly lowered his hand, letting the dark orb vanish back into the safety of his storage ring.
The oppressive weight in the air instantly vanished with it.
He looked dead into my eyes, his expression completely hollow.
"I killed it."
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