Life Vessel
The Lich shattered under the hammer.
The torn hem of his black robe was purified by divinity, and his skeletal frame was utterly destroyed — no room left for regeneration. Even so, I retrieved the hammer and immediately fell back.
KWAGAGAK!
"Tch!"
A heartbeat too late, hundreds of spiked bones, each the size of my forearm, erupted from the castle floor. And from between those spikes, familiar fragments of bone gathered together, weaving themselves once more into the Lich.
The Third Demon Heavenly King.
The king who had been purified into nothingness now stood before me again.
"Impressive. But it's all for nothing."
"So you do have a Life Vessel."
If the celestial race — souls and bodies dwelling in one place — possess the special power of resurrection, then the demon race possesses the Life Vessel. Hide your soul inside a special vessel or artifact, and so long as that vessel remains unbroken, you can never truly perish.
No matter how many times you kill the body, the soul itself stays perfectly intact, after all.
The surviving soul simply builds itself a new body and carries on. That's why killing a demon is one thing, but erasing one from existence is a genuinely tricky affair.
Most hide their Life Vessels somewhere in the Demon Realm. Invading the Demon Realm is next to impossible to begin with, and even if you managed it, there'd be no guarantee of finding the thing. Of course, you could detonate the vessel's internal circuitry or trace its location backward and shatter it remotely — but that's only when the gap in power is catastrophic. Against an equal, or even someone slightly stronger, obliteration is never on the table.
Purple miasma began to seep from the skull staff clutched in the Third Demon Heavenly King's hand.
"You've taken the name of the Third Demon Heavenly King far too lightly, angel."
"I'm not an angel."
"If you're not an angel, then what are you?"
Rattle, rattle!
A skeletal hound materialized at his side — a six-headed dog that looked easily ten meters tall, roughly twice the size of Cerberus. And that wasn't all. Around the beast, hundreds, then thousands of skeleton soldiers in violet armor rose from the ground.
These were on an entirely different tier from the ordinary corpses he'd dragged in from outside. Each one could stand toe-to-toe with a Low-grade World Boss. At their summit, the Third Demon Heavenly King's skull curled into a grin.
"Confident in a group battle, are you? Then taste it."
An eternal war, that is!
"KHAHAHAHA!! Hound! Tear him apart!"
KWAAAAANG!
The skeletons came surging forward, the hound leading the charge, the soldiers close on its heels. As always, I reached for my spear or hammer — then stopped mid-motion.
Hammers are great against skeletons, sure. But as the Lich himself had said, as long as that Life Vessel existed, this fight would never end. I needed techniques that were simple and cost me as little as possible, and…
"…What do I use?"
As it happened, I'd recently seen something interesting.
I took the stance. Fists clenched at both sides, right foot lifted, weight balanced through the body. Was this right? Well, it would be. Footwork is footwork, no matter the style.
The hound's advance began to slow. The surrounding miasma churned, as though the air itself were being sucked inward — and through that gap, the divinity steeped in my body swirled around me like a gathering vortex. An energy that rose naturally, despite my having no inner cultivation to speak of.
Without hesitation, I brought my raised foot down.
"Heavenly Demon Descent Step."
GU-GUGUNG!!!
The hound and the skeleton soldiers were crushed flat. The soldiers, empowered by their king's will, clawed their way back up — only to be crushed again with every single step I took. With each stride, the Third Demon Heavenly King's castle shuddered, and cracks spider-webbed across the Lich's body, breaking it apart.
"GRAAAAAGH!! You wretch!!"
Reassembling his shattered hand, the Lich soared into the air. He'd barely escaped my range — but his soldiers were already caught in an endless cycle of revival and death.
It was a reasonable call, honestly. The Heavenly Demon Descent Step crushes anyone whose feet touch the ground with overwhelming pressure and force. But that's the Heavenly Demon's version of it.
Here, I'd added a little modification of my own. Why should a technique named "Heaven" Demon Descent Step be confined to the ground? If anything, shouldn't it exert its full influence in the sky — just as the name promised?
The stance was identical. Only the direction was different.
The circulation of inner force — and the outward burst of energy that circulation produces.
From there, I expanded the burst in every direction at once. His resistance, the collateral damage, every additional variable — I papered over them with twenty-four magic formulae, and the strain on my body I substituted with divinity. I had more than enough of that to spare.
I raised my right foot once more.
And pressed down on the sky itself.
"Heavenly Demon Descent Step."
KWADUDUDUK!!!
"…!!!"
The Lich was driven straight into the earth, and the castle came down with him. I shook out my body lightly and slipped free through the falling rain of debris. In the blink of an eye, the Third Demon Heavenly King's fortress had become a graveyard of skeletons.
It's a far better technique than I expected.
It might not rival the techniques of the celestial or demon races, but it easily matched something the dragon race would devise.
"For a human to reach this level… no. No, that's not it."
It was a technique the Heavenly Demon had designed — but even she had only adapted techniques from countless sources. True, she was the one who'd actually brought it to life, yet she herself was still bound by the System's influence. It was entirely possible the Heavenly Demon Descent Step itself was some arrangement of the System.
Even so, one thing was certain: she possessed talent on par with the likes of Leo or the Sword God. I'll have to teach her properly when we meet someday.
Right now I'd filled in the gaps with magic and divinity to steer it the way I wanted, but there was surely a path to making it work through pure inner cultivation alone. And if she truly managed to complete the Heavenly Demon Descent Step on nothing but her own strength — then perhaps…
…she'd stop being mere user-level entirely.
By that point, not even Leo would be able to beat her. Though Leo wasn't exactly sitting idle either.
"GRAAAAAH!!"
The Lich burst out from beneath the castle's rubble, frantically trying to reassemble his incomplete frame. Maybe he was furious, because miasma boiled up through the gaps in his skull.
"That Life Vessel really is something else."
Any ordinary celestial would have withdrawn or collapsed by now after taking this much punishment. But then, his soul wasn't even present here — of course he didn't feel a thing.
When I gave him a troubled look, the Lich's expression shifted.
"Kekeke… I told you. You can't kill me."
"Then I'll just keep beating you."
"You've given me a scare, I'll admit. But try that for all eternity if you like. Time is the only thing I have in abundance."
Skrkrk.
From among the rubble-graves, skeleton soldiers rose yet again. I lifted my foot once more and brought it down. This time the entire castle grounds turned to powder, and the soldiers were crushed flat again. The Lich broke apart too, but whatever — he simply revived, and raised his soldiers once more.
I repeated the process about five more times. The Lich wasn't tired in the slightest.
"You just don't end."
My problem wasn't that he was strong. The Lich's own abilities were worse than the hound he'd summoned earlier — a decent single-digit ranker giving it their all could beat him one-on-one. But he resurrected without end. The soul and miasma stored in his Life Vessel endlessly revived him and granted him the miasma to raise skeletons.
Ordinarily his reserves would run dry around now, so he was probably a specialist built for exactly this kind of endurance. A demon whose physical stats hovered near zero — in game terms, think an extreme mage who dumped every point into spell power.
Besides, he seemed to have more or less caught on to the difference in strength between us, because he'd started deliberately summoning only weak skeletons with low upkeep. Not enough to melt in the divinity flowing around me, but not strong either — precisely irritating, and nothing more.
"Heh heh heh. What did I tell you? Time is all I need."
He laughed as he revived for the nineteenth time.
"The First and Second Demon Heavenly Kings won easily because they have no vessels! But I am different! So long as my Life Vessel exists, I shall never die!"
"Where is it, then?"
"Are you insane? Why would I tell you?"
"Hmm…"
Normally, once a Life Vessel breaks, annihilation is all but guaranteed — which is why demons hide theirs in the safest places imaginable. I'd assumed he'd concealed it inside his own castle, but since smashing the fortress to powder produced nothing, it was almost certainly elsewhere.
Perhaps…
The Castle of the First Demon Heavenly King.
"Try until the end, then! In the end, what remains in this place is my— GRUK!"
I seized the Lich by the throat.
The pure-white divinity steeped in my hand blazed to life, and the bones of his neck began to burn away. Just enough — not to break him. I started probing his circuitry. My targets: to map the Life Vessel's structure and locate it.
Divine magic began reading through the Life Vessel's spell structure, line by line. As I'd suspected — it was more intricate than I'd imagined.
"Wha— hahaha! Useless! You think some gutter celestial can pierce MY magic?!"
Unlike the celestial race, gifted with superb physiques and mastery of armaments, the demon race is a species that borders on gods of magic. Piercing a demon's magic is nearly impossible, no matter how low the demon's tier. Frankly, smashing through it with raw force would be faster.
The Lich before me was no exception. My spellcraft wasn't lacking, but my opponent was a creature specialized in magic to begin with — unraveling or rewriting the formulae of his Life Vessel on the spot was beyond me.
However.
"…!"
"Found it."
My ultimate goal, after all, was simply destruction. Tracing the direction the power flowed, mapping the structure, pinning down a location — that much was easy.
"It's in the Castle of the First Demon Heavenly King, isn't it? Probably being kept by its lord personally."
"You…!"
"Sleep for a little while. I'll break it soon enough."
As the Lich sensed something wrong and tried to abandon his body and flee, I drove the silver sword straight through his heart. The moment it struck — the Masterpiece infused with purification, the Silver Purifier — the Lich crumpled on the spot.
He'd struggle for a while trying to counter the Silver Purifier, packed to the brim with divinity and driven deep into his circuitry — but he was a demon, and it wouldn't hold him long. Three hours, tops?
By then he'd pull the blade out himself, whether by reclaiming his body or retreating to his Life Vessel. And three hours was more than enough time to deal with the remaining two.
Next up — the First Demon Heavenly King.