Chapter 296 Sacrificial Ritual
After spreading out the Demon Eyes, Roy stayed in the camp for the next few days.
He did not go out, but his army was causing trouble everywhere in Ur-Hekal!
The demons Roy summoned from the Abyss had witnessed the strength that he displayed. With a leader like Roy, they naturally held their heads high and were insufferably arrogant. They wandered in groups in the city and unscrupulously snatched the soul food of other demons. Those bullied demons knew who these new demons’ backer was, so they either swallowed their anger or resisted and were beaten.
If the demons were only bullying them, then Giovanni, his vampires, and the undead of Cassandra were all walking taunts. Demons already hated undead creatures, so as soon as Giovanni and the others appeared on the streets of the city, countless hateful gazes would immediately stare at them from the dark. Although Roy had taught them a lesson by killing some of them before, demons were hot-tempered and easily angered, especially those low-rank demons. They might have forgotten the previous lesson and attacked Giovanni and the rest.
Giovanni remembered Roy’s urging. He did not take the initiative to attack, but if other demons attacked them, they could fight back.
Therefore, in just a few days, hundreds of fights had occurred in Ur-Hekal. Both sides suffered damage, and the undead troops had lost hundreds of low-level undead. Similarly, many of the low-rank demons on Xeron’s side died.
As the headquarters of the demons, the city was naturally very chaotic. But before Roy came, this chaos was not too bad. Xeron and the rest of the demon heroes had always ignored it. Now that Roy was here, many buildings in the city were burned down every day, and houses collapsed. The sound of fireball explosions could be heard in the city at any time, all due to the fights between the two sides.
The demon heroes reported this situation to Xeron, and he was also suffering from a headache. He had actually expected this to happen, but he could not do much about it.
In the center of Ur-Hekal, in an enormous black hall, Xeron was sitting on a large chair in the middle, listening to the demon heroes report the situation while suppressing his anger. His fierce gaze kept glancing at Grawl in the corner. Now, Grawl seemed to realize that he had done something bad out of good intentions and attracted a troublesome demon, so he did not dare to say anything. “Your Excellency Xeron, we can’t continue like this!” a demon hero named Alastor said to Xeron. “We have to send away Osiris and his army as soon as possible.”
“But where should we send them?” Another demon hero, Nebiros, hesitated. “In order to carry out Sovereign Kha-Beleth’s plan smoothly, all the demons in Eeofol are pulling back. There’s no war outside!”
“Since there’s no war, create war!” Alastor said. “Just send Osiris and his army out. As for whether to fight the elves or the orcs, let him figure it out himself.”
Beside him, another demon hero, Nymus, interjected, “Osiris is very powerful, and the troops he leads are definitely not weak. Given his character, he probably won’t stop after attacking a couple of cities. It’s very likely that he will drive straight in. What if his actions make the various races mistakenly think that we are going to start a new invasion and then gather to deal with us?”
The demon heroes remained silent. After a long while, Nebiros asked Xeron, “Your Excellency, how long does the sacrificial ritual need?”
“Eighteen days!” Xeron sighed. “This is the shortest time I can guarantee!”
“In eighteen days, even if Osiris provokes a hornet’s nest, the various races might not be able to reach our interior in such a short time, right?” Nebiros said. “I think it’s feasible!”
However, Xeron said with a gloomy expression, “Eighteen days is only the first phase of the sacrificial ritual. In fact, there’s a second phase in Sovereign Kha-Beleth’s plan. This second phase… at least twenty years!”
“What?!” The demon heroes present were stunned when they heard this. They exclaimed, “Your Excellency Xeron, what do you mean?! Are we going to continue holing up for another twenty years?!”.
Xeron nodded with difficulty. “Very likely!”
“How can this do?” Alastor was stupefied. “You said that the sacrificial ritual required a month before, so it was fine. We can endure it for twenty years, but the demons under us will rebel! There’s no blood, no slaughter, and no souls to prey on. No demon can stay in one place for twenty years!”
“Yes, Your Excellency Xeron! Do you want to reconsider?” the demon heroes echoed.
“Shut up! All of you shut up!” Xeron said angrily. “Do you think I want to stay here for twenty years?! But this is Sovereign Kha-Beleth’s plan. You don’t know the specific plan, but I do! I can tell you with certainty that as long as Sovereign Kha-Beleth’s plan succeeds, the prison the Seventh Dragon Sar-Elam used to imprison us a thousand years ago, Sheogh will no longer exist! All the powerful demons in Sheogh will return to the world and completely cleanse it! For this great goal, waiting twenty years is worth it!”
The demon heroes were dumbfounded. To be honest, they had never been very clear about Kha-Beleth’s plan. Only Xeron and Biara, the two main leaders, were carrying out the actual execution. They were only following Xeron’s instructions and seizing countless living creatures to carry out the sacrificial ritual. From Xeron’s mysterious behavior, they knew that this might really be a big plan and vaguely guessed that it might have something to do with Sheogh. But what they guessed at the beginning was that Sovereign Kha-Beleth might have wanted to escape. But after unexpectedly hearing this information and confirmation from Xeron, they realized that it was not only Kha-Beleth but also other powerful demon lords!
Sheogh was a prison, and the ones imprisoned were all powerful demons who had followed the Dragon of Chaos, Urgash, to fight. Among these demons, there were many demon lords. But during the war, some demon lords had died, and the rest were all sealed in Sheogh. Over the past thousand years, the demons inside had been constantly searching for ways to escape from the prison. But only during lunar eclipses would Sheogh’s seal weaken.
However, even if it weakened, there was a limit to the number of demons that could escape. This was because the seal barrier had a filtering function. The stronger the demon, the greater the influence, and the more they could not escape. In the past thousand years, the demons could only slowly seep out. First, some low and middle-rank demons escaped, and then a few high-rank demons escaped. These high-rank demons began to summon companions from the Abyss, and gradually, the demon camp regained activity on the surface.
However, there was a problem here. The helpers that high-rank demons could summon from the Abyss were basically equal in strength, and it was impossible for them to summon powerful demon lords.
This was also why demons lacked a unified leader in previous demon wars and often fought separately.
However, it was different now. It seemed that as more lunar eclipses occurred, the seal barrier further weakened. In the previous lunar eclipse, Demon Lord Kha-Beleth finally escaped from Sheogh for the first time with the help of his clone ability. Although this clone only had half of his strength, it had indeed reached the standard for being able to escape.
Even with only half the strength, a demon lord was still a demon lord, and he was still stronger than all the high-rank demons. Now, there was finally a true leader in the demon camp. It was his appearance that unified the power of the demon camp.
However, Kha-Beleth himself knew that even though he could escape, he might not necessarily be able to defeat the alliance of the other races. Therefore, after coming out, he did not rush to make any big moves. Instead, he secretly began plotting to release all the demons of Sheogh.
This might have also been an agreement between Kha-Beleth and the other demon lords. So when the demon heroes heard Xeron’s words, they realized that Xeron could not disobey Kha-Beleth’s will because what he represented was the will of all the demon lords in Sheogh!
“Okay, in that case, we’ll obey your orders!” Nebiros and the others said. “But Your Excellency Xeron, please resolve the issue with Osiris as soon as possible. Since there is no external war, then it shouldn’t be a problem to eliminate the enemies in Eeofol, right? Didn’t a dark elf clan infiltrate recently? Why don’t you send Osiris to eliminate these dark elves? The underground world is complicated, and even if he succeeds, it will take a lot of time.”
Xeron nodded. This was a solution.
But he still felt that Osiris was an unstable factor. Perhaps because of Roy’s demon name, Xeron had always been wary of him. So after the demon heroes dispersed, Xeron thought for a while. Then he went to the back of the hall and stood on a pentagram teleportation formation.
Purple light flashed, and Xeron disappeared. But what he did not know was that an invisible Demon Eye had been following him. When he was teleported away, the Demon Eye disappeared at the same time.
Roy, who was far away in the city camp, had been using the Demon Eye to spy on the discussion between Xeron and the other demon heroes. Their suggestion was not out of Roy’s expectations.
The operation against the dark elves fell on Roy’s head as expected…
And now, after the Demon Eye was teleported with Xeron, Roy immediately became energetic. The scene transmitted by the Demon Eye appeared in front of his eyes. When he saw Xeron in a large secret room, Roy immediately understood that he had found the place where Xeron would perform the sacrificial ritual…