Chapter 7: A Demon-Tongue Poem, and Footsteps That Made No Sound
Four years later.
Deep in the overgrown garden behind House Vance's estate, where the canopy of charcoal-purple magic trees tangled together and blocked out the sun, a ten-year-old boy stood perfectly still on the damp grass.
Lucian parted his lips and let out a low, guttural sound — thick, choked, like rusted metal scraping across stone.
With every breath he took, black magical shadows rose from the ground, coiling like tendrils of darkness, winding gently around his legs and up to his fingertips without making a single sound.
A few steps away, a three-headed Hellhound the size of a warhorse — the estate's notoriously vicious patrol beast — lay flat on the ground, all three heads pressed down, tail tucked between its legs, its whole body trembling, not daring to breathe too loudly under the natural aura of darkness radiating off the young master.
Lucian carried no killing intent. He held no hatred for the world, either. He was simply doing something entirely ordinary: practicing irregular verb conjugations in the Ancient Demon Tongue.
To tap into the enormous well of power he'd inherited from his mother's half-demon blood, Lucian had spent the past six months studying the language of the shadow race.
Contrary to what humans believed about demonkind — that they were mindless monsters built only for slaughter — the Ancient Demon Tongue was, in truth, an extraordinarily rigorous, deeply mathematical linguistic system. Every one of their spell commands was a complete logical matrix, compressed into phonetics. But after the Primordial Demon King's defeat ten thousand years ago, that civilization had shattered into hundreds of broken dialects.
The biggest obstacle for Lucian was this: traditional Demon Tongue required the caster to hold onto genuine cruelty, rage, and bloodlust in order to activate the mana at all.
Lucian approached it like a programmer instead.
Rather than cultivating hatred, he used 'Layered Focus' to break down each word's sound-wave frequency, reduce the grammatical structure to a set of logical propositions, and force the shadow mana particles to obey the exact formula through will alone.
"That word for 'Grind to Dust' (Khar'ash) really is a pain to pronounce," Lucian muttered, thinking back to the turbulent pronunciation lesson he'd had with his mother a few days earlier.
That day, when Lucian had knocked on the tea room door and innocently asked, "Mom, could you teach me how to pronounce the Ancient Demon Tongue?" — Lady Valeria had frozen solid for a full ten seconds.
Then the woman who had once single-handedly erased three ancient kingdoms from the map wrapped her son in her arms, tears of pure maternal joy welling up in her eyes.
"My Lucian... you've finally embraced your bloodline's calling, haven't you? Do you want to wipe out the Empire, or purge the Church? Whatever you choose, Mother will back you completely!"
That very afternoon, Valeria had eagerly hauled out a collection of thirty-six cursed skulls belonging to ancient high priests, presenting them as "visual teaching aids" for her son's pronunciation practice.
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She gently adjusted the shape of his mouth as she spoke, smiling wistfully as she reminisced:
"When you say this word, you have to pour every ounce of fury and every hunger for destruction straight into your throat — the same way I felt when I cursed three hundred thousand holy knights into ash beyond the border..."
Meanwhile, Lucian sat beside her, quill in hand, calmly taking notes:
Verb denotes wide-area destructive action. Suffix conjugates for masculine gender and past perfect tense. Note carefully to avoid confusion with the word for slicing bread.
Lucian's intense focus and the sharp, calculating look in his eyes as he studied the cursed skulls left Valeria with a deep, and deeply mistaken, impression. She became utterly convinced her son was quietly nursing grand ambitions to restore the Demon Race to glory.
To encourage her "future Demon Lord," she secretly tucked a jet-black spatial ring into the collar of his shirt — a divine-tier artifact capable of holding an entire small mountain — along with a meaningfully knowing bit of advice: "For storing your equipment and secret weapons, when the time comes."
Naturally, Lucian's current use for this godly artifact amounted to hiding a few jars of strawberry jam he snuck for himself and a couple of emergency pouches of gold.
Ting!
The clear, mechanical chime cut through Lucian's memory. Pale blue lines of text burst into view:
[Ancient Demon Tongue comprehension: 25.0%!]
[SUCCESSFULLY TRIGGERED: Bloodline Assimilation (Tier 1).]
[Skill unlocked: 'Silent Step' (Tier 1).]
[Effect: For 10 seconds, fully suppresses both body weight and mana fluctuation caused by each footstep. Leaves no trace on any terrain.]
Lucian let out a long breath, the corner of his mouth curving into a satisfied smile.
He began testing the combination of his three current skills.
Layered Focus: Activate. Sound Cadence: On. Silent Step: On.
In an instant, every trace of Lucian's presence vanished from the physical world.
He walked across a bed of crackling dry leaves and jagged pebbles. Not a single rustle. Not a single blade of grass bent under his feet. Not the faintest ripple of mana leaked into the air.
He drifted through broad daylight like an invisible ghost — a perfect fusion of elvish sound-suppression technique and demonic trace-erasure magic.
With this skill set, his naturally low C-grade mana was no longer as crippling as it looked. Against someone who wasn't actively scanning for him, even a far stronger mage might fail to notice his approach until he was dangerously close.
"So the twenty-five percent mark unlocks this skill," Lucian said, pulling his notebook from the spatial ring, fingers flipping quickly through the pages. "To push the Demon Tongue up to fifty percent, I'll need to start Volume 2."
In Volume 1, he'd sent his protagonist wandering the world. So for Volume 2, following pulp fiction's iron law, the protagonist had to plunge into some abyss, encounter a wicked demonic remnant spirit, get corrupted, and pick up some suitably edgy forbidden dark arts.
The more grim battle scenes, the more brooding, rebellious dialogue — the more Demon Tongue vocabulary he could cram in.
Lucian sat down on a stone bench, dipped his quill, and was just about to write the opening lines of Volume 2 when—
Woooo... Woooo...
A low, deep horn made from a magical beast's antler blasted from the direction of the estate's front gate, shattering the quiet of the fading afternoon completely.
The rapid pounding of hooves, the heavy grind of wooden wheels against stone, and the chaotic shouting of guards echoed across the whole estate grounds.
Lucian frowned and stood, looking toward the front gate.
That was the signal from House Vance's armed trade caravan — the one that hauled strategic supplies to the northern front — returning after a six-month journey.
But this time, the commotion sounded different. The reek of blood and battlefield dust was already riding the wind straight into the garden.