Chapter 644: The Birth of Hell (II)

Before those familiar words faded, the Spider Queen felt a powerful force of order emanating from behind her, causing her expression to change drastically.
“Slap!”
A small wooden whip appeared behind the Spider Queen’s towering form and lightly struck her firm buttocks.
Faced with another advancement, just one step away from becoming a higher-tier divine artifact, even Flora’s powerful true form as a mid-tier god could not resist this force. Under the influence of order’s power, she was still intimidated for three seconds.
Fortunately, she had already infused her will into the Eight-Legged Scythe. At this critical moment, the divine artifact attacked on its own, preventing the opponent from launching another attack and giving her a brief respite. The Spider Queen immediately regained her ability to act.
“It’s you…”
Without caring about her dignity, she fled back to her lair at top speed.
“Damn you, Natural Guardian! I won’t let you get away…”
The Spider Queen’s threatening words, though fierce, revealed her fear. It was obvious that Flora, a mighty mid-tier god and demon lord, was afraid of this incarnation of a true god.
Donald was used to such cruel tactics, but the Spider Queen, who had been struck in a vulnerable area, couldn’t feel joy—only humiliation and anger.
Seeing Flora retreat without fighting, Donald’s incarnation chuckled lightly. He glanced at the several demon lords lurking nearby, then guarded the Hell dimension as they passed right by the 66th-layer abyssal web.
Even the Spider Queen, one of the most powerful demons in the abyss, was scared into fleeing with just one strike. How could these so-called strongest demons, mere lower-tier god-level lords, dare to act? They could only watch as the Hell dimension drifted away toward the upper layers of the abyss.
In truth, only Donald knew that the Spider Queen had been scared away by him. His sudden attack with the Whip of Order, combined with previous failures, had made Flora fear his presence, leading her to subconsciously believe she would lose again.
In reality, Donald knew that without revealing his two higher-tier divine artifacts, even with the Whip of Order, he wouldn’t be a match for a top-tier mid-tier god. Otherwise, only the power of the Book of Doom could deal with the Spider Queen—after all, Flora was using her true form this time, far stronger than her incarnations in the previous encounters.

But it was he who successfully dealt with the Spider Queen. Yet this inevitably hindered the ascent of the Hell Realm, so he took the risk of creating a ruse to scare her away. Once the Spider Queen realized he could escape, the Hell Realm would likely suffer greatly, and their plans to leave the Abyss would undoubtedly fail! Fortunately, the actions of the demon goddess Flora were mostly within Donald’s calculations, allowing them to barely pass this obstacle. After overcoming the 66th layer, the Hell Realm would directly move toward the shallower realms—this would be their last barrier in the Abyss world! Basically, there was no force left to stop them from leaving the Abyss, or rather, there were forces capable of stopping them but chose not to act. In fact, the earlier layers of the Abyss did have powerful forces. The ancient demons dwelling in these realms, though no longer in touch with most realms of the Abyss world, still retained the immense power of lower or intermediate gods—this was precisely why the new demon lords feared them. These ancient demons, as if seeing through the ways of the world, claimed territories in the shallower layers or crevices of the Abyss to live in seclusion, such as Pazuzu, the lord of the lower sky realms. This ancient demon once ruled most of the skies in the Abyss, but after the decline of its ancient demonic kin, it withdrew from the competition for power in the Abyss and came to Pazunia, the first layer of the Abyss. It never cared about other demon lords in this layer and rarely interfered with their affairs or Pazunia’s largest city, the Steel Fortress. Out of respect for this ancient demonic monarch, no demon dared claim sovereignty over Pazunia’s skies. The countless flying demons inhabiting the jagged stone mountains built tall towers to show respect to Pazuzu and occasionally captured travelers from the surface to sacrifice to their proud king. Since winged demons were always searching for new innocent victims to corrupt and ultimately destroy, when lawful good characters traveled in Pazunia, as long as they were in this layer, they had a 5% chance every day of attracting Pazuzu’s attention. Upholding the ancient demons’ penchant for corrupting souls and leading them to corruption, they did not, like later demons, prefer blind and chaotic slaughter. Most of the time, Pazuzu would wait for good characters to be in trouble and appear at the last moment to help those unfortunate souls—only to demand terrible services in return.

There are many powerful beings like Pazuzu in the lower depths, but perhaps due to the depths’ initial support for new demons and their subsequent abandonment of the ancient demons, they all hold complex feelings toward the depths. As a result, none of them stepped forward to stop the ascent of the Hell dimension.

Even in Pazunia, one of the three great abyssal rulers who holds his own territory, the Sovereign of Descent, took no action either.

What Donald didn’t know was that before the Hell dimension ascended to the lower depths, a tall figure appeared within the First Layer’s Pazunia Plain of Endless Abysses. Though this figure kept his aura subdued, his handsome and masculine features and upright human-like physique made it clear he was no ordinary person. Weak human mortals do not appear in the depths, and considering that demon lords often take human forms to tempt such mortals, his identity became somewhat apparent.

When the Hell dimension passed the final barrier of the depths, countless demonic creatures, driven by the will of the depths, surged toward this traitor who had abandoned the depths in an attempt to stop Hell from fully separating. Yet this tall man gazed at the incarnation of the true god who had protected Hell with a glint in his eyes. “What an interesting deity—to be able to seize a dimension deep within the depths! This is truly an unprecedented feat! I must see how far he can go…”

Meanwhile, the shock caused by Hell’s complete separation from its orbit caused no less than a dozen demon lords, driven by the will of the depths, to abandon battle and leave the Pale Kingdom to chase after the 422nd layer that had broken free from the depths. However, due to the rules within the Pale Kingdom, they lost a lot of time. By the time they reached the separated dimension, it had already passed its final barrier and completely left the depths, settling at a distant location above the depths and below the Underworld.

At that moment, all the godly beings across the multiverse, including those of the Pantheon, heard such a voice: “Sinful souls will fall into Hell after death to endure endless torment as punishment, until their sins are washed away and they are freed! I, Astimos, shall be the King of Hell!”

As this oath-like voice rang out, many true godly beings noticed a strange change in the multiverse, and the will of the depths roared even more fiercely once again.

It turned out that this was a method devised by Donald, drawing on myths and legends from past lives, the Buddhist Dharma of Great Vows, as well as theories learned from Ignatius, the Lord of Elves. By making vows to the laws of the universe, he indeed gained recognition from the multiverse. After Astimos vowed to create another lower world beyond the Abyss to gather evil and corrupted souls, the hellish realm immediately received a stream of evil energy derived from the Abyss. Though it was less than one percent of what the Abyss obtained, it was still a tremendous force for ordinary demons—enough to elevate a demi-god demon lord straight to the rank of a mid-tier god. As the ruler of hell, Astimos, the realm’s lord, was immediately immersed in the intense light of primal energy. It took several minutes before the power bestowed by this cosmic will on the founder subsided, during which Astimos rose from the peak of a lower-tier god to the strength of a mid-tier god. At the same time, due to the shift in allegiance caused by their separation from the Abyss, the entire hellish realm was transformed by this pure evil energy. Both the realm itself and all its creatures were altered, completely abandoning their chaotic traits to become beings of ordered evil or neutral evil. Of course, this did not include Donald, the incarnation of a true god, who was protected by multiple high-tier artifact-level powers that allowed him to ignore the transformation of the evil energy and shield himself completely from it. From then on, they shed their identity as Abyssal demons and became creatures of the lower world, adjacent to the Abyss. “Master! All these demons under my command have now changed their forms and traits. It’s no longer appropriate to call them demons. How about giving them a new name?” As the Lord of Hell, Astimos underwent the greatest transformation during the process of primal energy alteration. Aside from retaining his demonic wings and horns, he was now almost indistinguishable from a human. Of course, judging from his massive size and sharp claws on his hands and feet, it was clear he was no ordinary mortal. Donald nodded in agreement and said, “These demons have lost their chaotic and mad traits but still retain their evil hearts. How about calling them devils?”

As he spoke, Donald waved his hand again. A flash of light appeared before his eyes, and hundreds of figures showed up in the square of the Howling Fortress, including many in tattered clothes—those who were the remaining members of the Cursed Throat Fleet, aside from the main culprits captured in the Abyssal Sea. The rest were some disloyal and evil-minded followers whom Donald had subdued in the Dark Lands. He then said to Astymos, “There are still too few people in Hell. It will take a long time to transform the fallen, sinful souls from the underworld into Hellish creatures, just like in the Abyss. So this is the team I’m giving you. Humans are often the most suitable for being transformed into Abyssal creatures—I believe the same is true for Hellish demons!”