Chapter 435 A long time ago
Zaos punched the demons' faces until all his teeth had been lost. His face was also impossible to recognize… Zaos broke so many bones in there that it looked like the entire head had been smashed by something. The demon barely had the strength to lift his arms or even grunt in pain.
"Are you ready to talk now?" Zaos asked while he was healing the face of the demon in order to give him the chance to talk.
After noticing some light returning to the demon's eyes, Zaos didn't hear anything. The asshole was trying to look unconscious… Since Zaos was getting impatient, he grabbed his sword again and then pierced the demon's right foot. He grunted in pain, but then Zaos began to increase the temperature of his sword…
"I will talk, I will talk!" Ozath said. "Just stop and let me go once I give you the answers you want. Promise me that you will let me go… I am a lesser demon, so it will take years before I have enough power to take another vessel."
"So, the stronger the demon, the faster they can return?" Zaos asked.
"Yes… give me your word that you will let me go," Ozath said.
"That will depend if you give me satisfying answers…" Zaos furrowed his eyebrows. "What is the demon god's goal?"
"I don't know… I am just a lesser demon," Ozath said. "Probably not even his most powerful servants know that."
Zaos enhanced his sword with fire magic, and then steam began to leave the foot of Ozath. Burning a wound that wasn't closed yet was quite painful, even more, so it reached the way to the bottom of Ozath's feet.
"I swear that I don't know!" Ozath screamed. "But I can tell you everything I know about him!"
"Spit it out," Zaos said.
That was a pretty good opportunity for Zaos to hear things about the past from someone who actually lived in the past. It was impossible to tell if everything he might hear would be real, but Zaos was bound to hear a few truths.
"From what I heard from my real grandparents, twenty-nine hundred years ago, the world was on the brink of collapse when monsters began to appear out of nowhere, we tried to fight back, and we managed to do so since we had the high magic aptitude, but our numbers were small, so we began to be decimated," Ozath said. "The other humans ignored us because they managed to deal with the monsters thanks to their physical strength and large numbers, but eventually, even them began to suffer many losses. All the people on the planet began to face some dire problems with the continuous battles… but then a certain man appeared, a man who had strong magical powers. He led our tribe in many battles, and we won all of those he participated in… he was the demon god, but at that time, he was only known as the king of magic."
Zaos frowned when he heard that… It smelled like a lie. The demon lord supposedly was someone who was killed twenty-six hundred years ago. So, the dates didn't match. Besides, Zaos knew that people in that world couldn't live for three hundred years, not even magicians. No magic could increase one's lifespan.
Another weird thing was the mention of monsters. Zaos never heard about the existence of monsters in the past. Even if they existed, he should have found traces of their existence after so long. However, what bothered Zaos the most was the fact that the demon god was apparently born in a village of humans who had more mana than the others but still were ostracized. For a hero to be born like that and then save the world from a catastrophe, Zaos couldn't help but wonder, was the demon god someone who was reincarnated like him? That would explain why Darkaun said that they had some similarities...
"Our lord fought the monsters until they stopped coming from whatever they came from, we suffered many losses, but all the monsters were completely exterminated, and the world knew peace again," Ozath said. "For a while, we enjoyed our victory, but after some time, the other humans began to fear us since they thought that we had the same potential as our lord. In the end, they ended up banishing us to the cold lands in the North. Our hero didn't like that, and he tried to negotiate with the other realms. He didn't want to kill other humans since he thought that everyone was equal, but after getting threatened so many times, he gave up on the idea of negotiating, and he also began to realize that he shouldn't have fought for the entire world, since the world had many dirty people like those who ostracized us."
Zaos began to wonder if that was the truth or just the biased opinion of someone who followed him until death. The demon god was a hero and probably gained the admiration of those who fought alongside him countless times, so that kind of respect and admiration that was almost blind made sense for some people to have.
"Our lord decided to find a way for our people to live in better lands, but since we had the disadvantage in terms of numbers, a direct confrontation wasn't possible," Ozath said. "So, he researched magic that would increase our reproduction speed and increase our life spans. After many years, he obtained some results, but apparently, that came with a price. To increase our lifespan and our physical strength, he cast a continuous spell in each one of us that would consume our mana at every single moment to improve our body functions, but he was the sole exception. All the others didn't have enough mana to keep that active. So, our lord developed another spell that consumed our emotions and transformed into mana. To make sure that it would be as efficient as possible, the spell made us angry and wished to have back our rights and lands to become even stronger. Still, the spell was so powerful that some people began to mutate, and we began to look like the very monsters that we fought years ago. That made us become even more ostracized…"
