If there really was no other choice, then he could not say much. If it was truly that serious, serious enough that even Chloe had to act this way, then opposing it would have been pointless. If Safas himself could not accept it, Chloe would have rebelled long ago.
What finally steadied him was the line about Dawn already taking action. After taking a few deep breaths, he sat down on a nearby chair and lowered his head.
"...No matter what, I at least want to know the truth." "You can rest assured. I'm over a thousand years old already. I'm not as impulsive as I used to be." "And my ability to accept things mentally is stronger now."
Under his unsettling stare, Ham eventually sighed and looked at the old man in front of her. In theory, she was far older than Safas, but she did not dwell on that. She suddenly felt that recovering her memories might not have been such a good idea after all.
If only she had fully reset back then, maybe she should have wiped her mind clean as well. Muttering like that, her expression grew more serious, because what came next was not easy to explain.
"Before I say anything else, let me ask you something. You know what a soul is fundamentally made of, right?" "We won't talk about the soul's core essence. Let's talk about things like memory and will. You understand?"
"..." "Memory is an attachment of the soul, the result of time piling up. As for its true nature... I don't know."
What the soul truly was remained an unsolved question across The Continent. There were many taboo spells and blasphemous rituals that could interfere with or even control souls. But to observe it in detail was like trying to see cells or microscopic particles with the naked eye.
You could sense it and even touch it, but it remained unclear. Even he did not truly understand it.
"If you could see it, then you'd probably understand the reason. I can answer part of it. It's made of light and dark." "Light and dark aren't just physical phenomena. They're something deeper, and it's hard to classify them as elements at all."
"If the soul's core were like the brain or heart, then light and dark would be the moving limbs and other organs. Without the core, you're truly dead." "But without those two forces, the simplest description is a walking corpse. No thought, no memory, no different from a stone by the road."
"The source of these two forces... light comes from the sun hanging in the sky. And by now, even if you think with your backside, you know where the other one comes from."
If light came from the sun, which best embodied its nature, then where could darkness come from? What place in the world best represented the concept of dark? The answer was already obvious.
"...Abyss?"
The word left his mouth trembling. His pupils shook as the meaning sank in. If that was the case, then did it mean Chloe, as the the Lord supplying darkness to keep the world alive, had to remain there like a pump?
If there were no other source of darkness, relying on light alone would surely not end well. Even without knowing the details, the outcome was easy to imagine.
"Didn't you... have another solution before?"
"I told you, stop overthinking. We're really not that heartless. Grabbing some random person and using them as a pump was never considered." Ham shook her head, then lowered it heavily with a sigh. "At the very beginning, the plan was to open a gate. I'd go in front and hold the line, then pull some out."
"It was like giving a dying man in the desert a sip of water. At least it keeps him alive. But accidents always happen." "And you can't tear open a new wound every time you need water, right? So a place was made, a dedicated faucet."
"We underestimated things. The world was only dying of thirst, but those in Abyss were starving to madness. A madman can do too many things, things you can't imagine." "One opening. One wound that could never heal. That's how it appeared."
A very long time ago, so long that even Ham can still vaguely remember it, there was no Demon King here, and there was no Demonkind either. Still, troubles were never in short supply. The cause of everything was simple, with no twists at all. During one attempt to open a passage to fetch water, a group of starving madmen gathered together and tried to tear the world apart with Rend.
They failed, because someone among them rushed out to take a fatal blow, dying on the spot and reincarnating who knows where. At the same time, a massive Rift was torn open. What poured out was endless darkness, and the despair and resentful cries from Abyss crawled out along that opening. It was hard to describe, but it felt familiar.
It was like a broken ship rocking on the sea, where people sometimes risked their lives to scoop seawater, then went through a long process to turn it into barely drinkable water just to keep everyone alive. Now the broken ship had opened a huge Rift. The good news was that there was no longer a lack of water. The bad news was that there would never be a lack again.
In the end, they were forced to come up with an awful solution. The most capable among them built a door in what is now the land of Demonkind. It barely sealed most of the Rift, but a small part still remained, and the darkness spewing out of it was filled with vengeful souls and corruption that could not be left alone.
So another device was created to deal with that remaining part, a pitch-black Pentagonal Iron Crown that symbolized self-inflicted torment. "That is Demon King's Crown." "Are you saying the Demon King were created by you?"
Safas clenched the armrest, crushing the Shard within it. The root of his past nightmares, and the suffering of his current friend, turned out to be a creation of gods. Did that mean that every Demon King in history was essentially a sacrifice pushed out to keep the world alive?
"The one who first wore it was not called Demon King, and do not overthink it," Ham said. "Those problems came later, and the first ones to wear that Crown were us." She paused before continuing. "It was not an easy job. I even sat on it myself for a while. Back then, we worked in shifts."
"…You, meaning all of you." The "we" in Ham's words clearly referred to other gods that Safas himself had never known. That alone felt strange. Many racial legends and hidden ruins hinted that gods other than God of Light once existed.
So why had none of those gods shown any miracles now, leaving only God of Light and the barely surviving Bahamut? This question had troubled Safas for a long time, and now the answer seemed partly revealed. Those gods may have fallen in an ancient era almost erased from history, destroyed by disasters and upheavals from Abyss.
"Upgrading Demon King's Crown to its current form took us a lot of effort, and the Throne was created later as a load-sharing device," Ham continued. "Using the Crown and the Throne could suppress the darkness of Abyss, but the price was that the one sitting there had to endure the corruption themselves. Can you imagine it, countless vengeful souls, and dozens of Evil God watching from below?"
Almost none of them could endure it for long. Even the god who created the device died because of it, and no one knows where they reincarnated. Ham suddenly stopped, frowned, and tapped her head, as if recalling something familiar yet unclear. After a glance at Safas, she decided to finish the story first.
"After that, it reached events you might know. Thousands of years ago, the Rift was torn open again by Abyss, creating Demonkind, and the Crown was damaged in the process. Almost none of us could endure the corrupted Crown anymore. Honestly, there were not many of us left."
She went on, explaining how the earliest sacrifices had already died, how the creator had gone mad and chosen suicide before reincarnating. In the end, she alone tried to hold back a group of Crimson God trying to crawl out of Abyss. She kept being killed, over and over, each death real, each revival like crawling out of an old grave.
The pain was far beyond ordinary physical sensation. Even her barely maintained cycle of Fate and Authority was dragged into endless darkness by the foreign influence of Abyss. At that time, the world was already halfway into the coffin, and even now the lid had not been closed.
She cleared her throat and finally reached what Safas most wanted to hear. "There was a brief vacancy at the position of the Crown. The beings from Abyss seized that chance and used the Crown as a medium to create a puppet in reality that could hold all of their combined power. That is what you now call Demon King."