The Day of the Demon Contract
That was the day of the demon contract. Roughly three days after the day Pladeus bought us from the slave market and began his human experiments.
The agony from the torture and the mutations induced by those experiments was truly indescribable. After three straight days and nights of horrific human experimentation, we began to change in all sorts of ways. Me and the other four, tormented in the pentagram magic circle, had our minds gnawed away by endless, unfathomable pain.
The strange part was that the bodies of the other four kids—everyone except me—were transforming too. One kid, who seemed like he was burning to death, suddenly turned into flames. Another became ice. One more started muttering nonsense, vomiting something ominous and black from beneath his feet. The last sprouted a pair of goat horns on his head and bat wings on his back.
And then there were the three kids trapped in the culture tanks, warping into grotesque new forms. One had a human upper body but a spider's lower half. Another ballooned unnaturally, swelling into a massive, muscle-bound giant. The final one sprouted reptilian scales around the left eye, her pupil slit into a triangular, lizard-like shape.
Everyone but me was turning into something other than human.
Crackle-crackle!
'Grrraaah! You goddamn lich bastard! What the hell are you trying to turn us into?!'
But this mad lich had no interest in the pain he inflicted on us. It was all about extracting something through the torture, observing our mutations into monsters, and recording it all. Like collecting data from lab rats in a vivisection.
Hummmm!
"Ahh—finally, a response to the summons!"
Crackle-crackle-crackle!
""KAAAAAAAAGH—!""
"Here shall five be filled. With pain. Despair. Fear. Screams. Rage."
"Behold five pains and five changes! Emerge through the new gate overlaid upon the inverted pentagram!"
⟨ Great Manbianja! ⟩
Hummmm!
Squelch! Squelch! Squelch!
Five culture tanks. Five sacrifices. Us. The magic circle on the floor stained black with us as the medium, and from it poured something pitch-black like ink. It quickly engulfed the lab, drowning it in utter darkness that let in no light. Then came a scraping sound from deep within the shadows—far more chilling than nails on a chalkboard.
Three days of starvation and torment had already blurred my vision, but my instincts screamed in my head. Run. Now. Escape this darkness. Or die.
The will to survive dominated my mind. But my body was wrecked from the pain. I didn't have the strength to twitch a finger, and my mind was too shattered to act.
'Ha! Reincarnated, six years as a beggar, human experiments... now a sacrifice to some unknown thing? This triple curse is way too much... goddamn life...'
Flinch! The voice from the darkness wasn't in my ears—it pierced my mind. Or maybe my soul. A single utterance, yet like the roar of thousands of soldiers, shredding my brain with a thousand blades.
The pain was indescribable. It jolted my fading mind awake with overwhelming terror, pounding my cooling heart back to life. The dread of facing something you must never meet. Like a herbivore staring down a predator in the wild. A mouse trapped in a dead-end alley. That was me.
Even the lich who summoned the presence from the darkness trembled in fear. Instead of the grandiose command to answer the call, he dropped to his knees like a vassal greeting his king, head bowed low.
"Yes! Yes! Yes! Pladeus, humble walker of the path of demonic arts, greets the Manbianja!"
Hummm—
The entity emerged from the darkness with a voice blending countless others into one. It was a pillar. A pillar of flesh, blood, and faces. In the pitch-black space like a curtained tent, it was a mass of flesh covered in hundreds of faces—men, women, young, old, without distinction. Its exact size and limbs were swallowed by the shadows, impossible to discern, but every face on that fleshy pillar turned to stare at us.
Monster... no! That's not just some monster. It's something else entirely!
"I have prepared children with pure mana aptitude and pristine souls without blemish. Please, form a contract with me—great Manbianja!"
This bastard... he was gonna use us as sacrifices to contract with this demon or whatever the hell it is?!
"Yes! That's right! To reach the pinnacle of magic, I stepped into forbidden realms, but I am still lacking! I need more knowledge! More power..."
Squelch! Squelch! Squelch!
Crunch!
Shhhhk!
"Graaaaaagh?! G-Great Manbi... anja... why..."
'Eh?'
Shhhhk! Crumble-crush!
The lich who babbled bullshit to offer us as sacrifices for a contract with some unknown entity. But the flesh pillar cut him off mid-sentence. Countless arms and hands intertwined like chains formed a massive fist, seizing him and pulverizing him—bones and all.
The skeleton wailed in agony despite himself, questioning why, but with "lie" as the final word, it ground him to fine dust. And it didn't stop there. It snatched the pale, smoky remnant—his soul?—and its central maw split open like a lamprey's, lined with hundreds of massive teeth, chewing it to bits. Each crunch echoed with the lich's soul-screams, like devouring a spirit whole.
'Fuck... this thing's utterly insane... now it's not just sacrifices—souls get eaten too?! Reincarnated six years, end up devoured by a demon?'
!!!
'It's really reading my mind?!'
The flesh pillar that had just chewed the lich's soul whole turned its gaze on me and spoke. A being that could read minds. No mere monster—this was something higher-dimensional. Not some book demon...
"What... is a 'pristine soul' anyway?"
"Purity?"