Chapter 32
As the five hours of work Zeth had contracted from the demon came to an end, he asked her to bring the prisoners down into the single-room base underground and pick one out to kill.
Before she did, he tried once again to interrogate this person, but to no avail. This man was much further gone than the woman he’d been able to get some basic information out of before, spouting out insulting gibberish like the others he’d seen. So, after a minute or two of failed conversation, he told the demon to go ahead and kill him. The moment she did, she disappeared, apparently eager to leave as quickly as possible.
He looked around the room, now alone except for the bound and gagged thralls all lying in the corner. She’d done quite a bit of work in the little time she’d been here. Technically speaking, this room, the hallway, and the staircase leading down to it would work just fine as a humble, defensible base from him to operate out of.
But he had eight more prisoners here, and that meant eight more demons to summon. And if he had eight demons available, he was sure as hell going to use them. With them, this small, humble room would transform into a massive complex with more defenses than the entire town combined could hope to get through.
It likely wouldn’t even take all eight sacrifices to get the base into peak condition, too. So Zeth could theoretically hold on to a few of them and save them in some prison down here for an emergency when he needed a favor from a demon with no way to quickly find a life to offer in exchange. Though, the idea of keeping prisoners long-term carried with it a whole host of problems like getting food and water to them on a regular basis, but he was sure he could figure something out.
Regardless, he wanted to go ahead and summon his next demon. Not just to continue working on this place, but also because he wanted more information about the Thirteenth Realm. Being able to choose where he put that beacon down wasn’t just helpful because it let him skip the waiting period; if he got enough information about the different locations in Hell, there was a possibility he may be able to find a place where the demons weren’t so horrible to work with.
As such, he spent the next three and a half hours drawing up another circle. Down in this protected bunker, he didn’t need to focus nearly as much on his surroundings listening for monsters, so he could just relax and allow Vile Focus to take over the drawing process itself.
By the time he was done, he found himself bent over a completed, eight-and-a-half-foot ritual circle with a notification tickling his mind.
[Vile Focus’s Rank has increased to 7.