Having traversed countless realms, can you possibly be as clever as me?

"My friend, tell me, how long have you been working in the mine?"

The demon, half-petrified, froze. He hadn't expected to be asked such a question. He scratched the solidified shell on his head and answered honestly.

"One...one hundred and twenty years."

“One hundred and twenty years,” the horned demon repeated, turning to face the entire tavern. “Did you all hear that? One hundred and twenty years. Every day he was in the mine, chiseling stone on walls hotter than lava, breathing in sulfurous steam that could burn through his lungs, sparks flying into his eyes with every swing of his pickaxe, yet he dared not even close his eyes, because…”

841 >>

The foreman is right behind you; one lash of his whip can send pain to your very bones.

The Stone Demon subconsciously touched the crisscrossing old scars on his back. The scars were darker than his skin, as if they had been branded one by one with a hot iron.

"Do you know what the sun on earth is like and what it feels like to be bathed in it?" The horned demon's voice suddenly became very soft.

Stone Demon shook his head blankly.

"It's warm," the horned demon's lips twisted into a grimace. "Not the sulfurous fire that turns stones into lava, nor the freezing pentagram of the night, but a kind of irresistible, relaxing sun that soothes you completely."

"And the sun in heaven is even more perfect than him!"

The demons throughout the tavern seemed to be immersed in the beautiful sun described by Sitra—after all, most of them had never left the ring of their birth.

Sitra turned and walked toward another demon. It was a skeletal succubus, the membranes on her wings torn in several places, and streaks of makeup washed away by sweat from the corners of her eyes. She huddled in a corner, clutching an empty wine bottle in her hand.

"Madam, tell me, how many customers did you see tonight?"

The succubus raised her head, her eyes showing an instinctive resistance born of pain. But under Sitrana's burning gaze, she still spoke: "Ten...twelve."

"Twelve." The horned demon's voice echoed in the tavern. "Twelve guests. Does your body still hurt?"

The succubus didn't speak, but her slightly raised legs answered everything—she was indeed a demon who made her living this way, but not every demon was as powerful or as glamorous as Verosika.

Most succubi born in the Color Gamut Ring are not much different from hellhounds; they all need to serve their 'masters' to survive.

"This poor lady has to see twelve customers every day," Sitra shouted to everyone.

"For what? To get that damn money, to exchange it for a loaf of bread harder than a rock, a jug of salty water from the ring of jealousy. She has to tear herself into twelve pieces just to barely survive the day. And then tomorrow, twelve more. The day after tomorrow—still twelve. Six hundred and sixty-six days, every single day. Ten years, a hundred years, three hundred years—forever."

He suddenly turned around, jumped onto a table, and his voice suddenly rose in volume.

"And you!"

All of you! Which one of you isn't like that?!

His fingers swept across every face in the audience, like an invisible scythe.

"You—the workshop worker, hammering away in front of the furnace for eighteen hours a day, your lungs filled with iron slag, the phlegm you cough up could stain the entire street red! How long have you lived? Two hundred years? Three hundred years? What have you accumulated?"

The demon being pointed at instinctively lowered his head, looking at his rough, cracked hands.

“You—the slaughterhouse porter, carrying endless corpses of your compatriots every day, your shoulders calloused so thick a knife can’t cut through them. Your spine is bent, your knees are broken, but you still keep carrying. Because if you don’t carry, you won’t live to see the next payday.”

"And you—" He pointed to a small demon with a broken horn.

"You started working as soon as you turned 18, didn't you? Shoveling lava by sulfur pools every day, burning the skin off your feet again and again. How old are you? Twenty? Thirty? Have you ever seen green in your life? Have you ever seen a tree, a flower, or a real sky?!"

The little devil shuddered and shrank into the crowd. His eyes reddened, but he desperately held them back, for in this hell, tears were a luxury, and to show weakness was to declare to others that one had a righteous reason to die.

Sitra’s voice suddenly lowered, so low that everyone had to lean forward and hold their breath to hear it.

Do you know why?

No one answered.

"Do you think it's because you didn't work hard enough?" His voice held an intense, suppressed anger.

“Who the hell dares to say you don’t work hard?! You work eighteen hours a day, so tired your bones are falling apart, so tired you don’t even have the strength to dream! You work a thousand times, ten thousand times harder than those winged bastards in heaven! But they live in palaces made of pearls, playing harps, drinking nectar, without lifting a finger! And you—you can’t even get a sip of clean water!”

He paused for a moment, letting those words burn into everyone's hearts like a branding iron.

"Who—made all of this decision?!"

His finger suddenly pointed to the ceiling, to that unseen, distant direction guarded by angels. Every vein in his arm bulged, and the muscles beneath his skin trembled violently.

"It's heaven!!"

"They drew this damned Iron Curtain! They locked us in this scorched earth! They decreed—demons are forbidden to set foot on earth! Forbidden to compete with humans for land under the sun! Forbidden to breathe a breath of fresh air without the smell of sulfur!"

841>>>>

His voice began to accelerate, growing louder and louder like an avalanche.

"Have you ever thought about it? How big is the human world? It's a thousand times bigger than the seven rings of hell combined! There are forests, oceans, snow-capped mountains, grasslands, countless fertile lands, and inexhaustible resources! Humans—those weak, foolish creatures—have taken all of this!"

“They can occupy an entire house by themselves, and there’s a bed in it that’s bigger than our whole shack! They eat three meals a day, and half of each meal is so much that they throw it away! They even flush their toilets with water—water that’s ten thousand times cleaner than the best things we drink!”

“And us!” Sitra’s voice was hoarse, sounding like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing against each other.

"We can only squeeze onto this cursed, scorched earth that has been barren for countless epochs even after being transformed by the Ring Lord! We work ourselves to the bone every day just to barely avoid falling into that so-called 'kill line'—do you know what the kill line is? It's that invisible line. Once you cross it, it proves that you have no value to Hell, and you will be 'cleaned up' and thrown into the lowest wasteland to slowly rot with all the discarded garbage!"

The entire tavern held its breath. They had never heard of any "kill line," but they all knew of this suffocating fact.

This hell, so close to the human world, still holds cruel rules for immortal demons: those with value live, those without disappear. Despite being immortal, they still struggle to live, their immortality turning into a life of perpetual torment.

"And what about Heaven?!" The horned demon's voice suddenly rose to a tearing level. "Heaven has never had a line of death! A true angel, from birth to eternity, does nothing, proves nothing, and can enjoy eternal peace! Humans turned into angels are the same. What right do they have? Are we born sinful? But we are not sinners at all!"

"Bullshit!!!" A demon smashed the table in front of him with a single punch. Lava spewed from his joints, burning the fragments to ashes.

“Yes—that’s bullshit!” The horned demon pointed at him, his voice trembling with ecstatic joy. “We’ve been deceived for far too long! From the very beginning, from the day Lucifer fell, Heaven drew a circle around us—this is hell, this is your prison, and you’re stuck here, not allowed to leave, not allowed to complain, not allowed to look up! They told us this was punishment, that we deserved it!”

He suddenly opened his arms wide, as if to embrace the entire pub.

"But I tell you—that wasn't punishment! That was fear! Heaven is afraid of us! Afraid of us, the demons they trample underfoot, the demons they've sentenced to life imprisonment, the demons they've defined by the word 'evil'! They're afraid that once that iron curtain is removed, once we stand in the sunlight of the human world, we will prove—those who truly deserve that land are not those pampered angels, not those weak and incompetent humans, but us! We are the ones who have been tempered in the fires of hell for millions of years!!!"

The cheers erupted like a tsunami, but he didn't stop. His severed horn gleamed menacingly under the lights. He crouched down, looking directly at the little devil with the broken horn. "Do you want to see the tree?"

The little devil nodded frantically, and tears finally streamed down his face.

"Do you want to step on the grass? Real, soft, green grass. When you step on it, it bounces back gently, like a tickle."

"I want...I want..." the little devil cried, unable to catch his breath.

The horned demon pulled him into his arms and hugged him tightly. Then he released him, stood up, and his voice boomed.

"Then you can! All of you can! Because our new king is already sitting on that throne! He killed Satan, he subdued the Ring Lord, he didn't come to keep us as slaves! He came to lead us to shatter that Iron Curtain!"

"Then—the humans will scream in terror, the angels will tremble, and the stained glass windows of the churches will shatter into millions of pieces under our claws! We will stand in the sunlight, breathing deeply, inhaling that warmth into our lungs, and then roar towards heaven—We're coming!!"

"We will rule Heaven, and we will take everything from the human world for our own use!"

"Vatican!" a demon roared from the corner, raising a battle axe.

"Paris!" the succubus screamed.

"New York!!!" The howl of the hellhound drowned out everything.

The horned demon picked up the only glass still standing on the bar, a glass of ale so full it was almost overflowing, the liquid a dark gold color under the light, like molten amber.

"—Homage to our Crimson King!!!"

The sound exploded. Hundreds of glasses slammed onto the table simultaneously, the liquor splattering like blood, mirroring the spreading madness and desire.

“They’ve gone mad.” Billiz, hiding among the demons, watched the demons lost in their war-torn state and whispered.

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"They've all gone completely mad." In the book club forum's poll for best multiverse novel, "Crossing Through the Heavens, Can You Be Smarter Than Me?" ranked highly!

The disordered chapters are urgent!

842

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561. A Divided Paradise

Is the demon's ambitious desire to attack Heaven a sign of competence or incompetence?

Tsuruga is somewhat difficult to judge, but since the being that created this world ultimately shaped it into a hell that is highly similar to human society, then Tsuruga will deal with it in a way that is similar to human society.

It was easier for him to incite the demons of hell than he had imagined, or rather—he hadn't done anything at all.

The mere declaration of war has stirred these primal demons into a frenzy, their thirst for war boundless!

From the ring of pride to the ring of envy, almost all the demons in the seven levels of hell were praising him, the new king.

They showed no reaction to Satan's death, only eager to talk about the endless war that was about to begin.

On the contrary, the powerful Goetia nobles were terrified and furious, and tried their best to stop it—only to be killed and eaten by Beelzebub.

This is an interesting joke in itself—the powerful Goetia nobles, knowing the power of Heaven, dared not attack, but only oppressed the lesser demons. The demons, unaware of Heaven's power, knew they could not resist the nobles of Hell, so they chose to believe in diverting the conflict.

The powerless imps crave war, but the powerful nobles avoid it.

Ha, this is such a fucking farce!

But Tsurugi didn't care. The demons craved war, so let them fight! But dying in heaven was no longer his problem.

While the demons were gearing up, what was Heaven doing?

Tsugumi opened her eyes

Today marks countless days since he was imprisoned in this dark, silent, and utterly desolate prison.

The holy light within him remained dormant—no, it should be said that it was severed.

He could summon holy light and justice, but this dazzling power could not reach him; it was intercepted by the radiant representative.

A silvery radiance entered this dark void.

"Ah, isn't this our Archangel of Slaughter?" Tsugumi said sarcastically as she looked at Sira approaching.

"Are you here to take revenge on me? Or are you here to report on the fragmented paradise under your control, as always?"

Bang! Xila slammed his hand on the railing in front of Dongjiang, his voice filled with hatred.

"Shut up, you sinner! It's all your fault!!!"

"All these years, all these years, it was only after you came that Heaven went from being a place of supreme virtue to what it is now!!!"

Heaven is now completely shattered.