Chapter 27: Their Nature

With the Incubation Pool awake, Koda could finally start raising soldiers in earnest.

Every spawn in the pool was now open to him. The only problem was that he lacked what the more specialized ones demanded.

Still, the list in his mind had changed. Before, it had felt cold and distant. Now every name on it burned warm, and that was proof enough that the pool was working.

Koda didn’t hesitate. Through the throne, he pressed out the rest of his surplus essence, keeping only what his Core Seed needed to stay stable at Peak. The throne turned most of it into soul stones. The rest it twisted into crude, dark flesh and blood, at a rate so poor it almost felt like robbery.

"The Lesser Imps, the Lesser Demons, and the Coil Demons only need souls and flesh," he said. "So for now, I don’t need anything else."

"Besides, there’s nothing worth gathering around here. Exploring would just waste time."

He looked at the withered, barren land around him and settled on it.

Normally, a new lord spent a great deal of effort exploring the land around his throne.

There were two reasons for that.

First, it kept the territory safe. Wild beasts and hostile bands could be found and dealt with before they found you.

Second, if he discovered something useful nearby, he could quickly set up an outpost there and grow faster.

Koda didn’t need to worry about either one.

The Third Layer had long since withered and died. Nothing out here could threaten his throne. The nearest smoke was days away, and every claimant under those banners was racing toward the Tithe Lands, not across a dead plain with nothing to steal.

In other words, his territory was practically completely safe.

That left only one problem.

How to attack!

"If I want to keep growing, my only choice is to plunder the Tithe Lands."

"But before that, I should raise a few of the basic ones and see what they’re actually like."

With that, Koda dropped the required soul stones and flesh into the pool.

The black water began to churn.

Moments later, ten cocoons of different colors rose out of it. Each one stood about waist-high on a grown man.

Their shells were covered in strange, twisted patterns. Some looked like ghostly faces. Others looked like symbols nobody should be able to read. No two were exactly alike.

Yet they all shared one disturbing trait.

Anything with a decent amount of sense or feeling would look at those patterns and instinctively know that something terrible was inside.

A newborn pool could only hold ten of them at a time.

They were called Demon Cocoons.

Inside each one was a Lesser Imp that hadn’t finished growing.

Through the throne, Koda could feel how close they were. About thirty heartbeats.

Among the lowest spawn, Imps were known for hatching quickly.

"Grrk!"

"Yaa!"

When the thirty heartbeats passed, the cocoons burst open.

One after another, hideous Lesser Imps crawled out. Each had a pair of leathery wings and a body roughly the size of a human child.

The throne told Koda exactly what they were, in a tone that felt almost like contempt.

They were the fodder among the fodder of Hell. Built for mining, hauling, chopping, and every other kind of grunt work. Their one real talent was adapting to anything.

Use them however you like, the throne seemed to say. Remember, use them! Put them in the mines, enslave them, cut them open to see how they work, or simply eat them. Any of those would be a decent ending for their wretched, evil little souls.

The moment the Imps opened their eyes, they showed exactly what was inside them. Pure malice, and pure greed.

Their gazes swept across everything around them with naked hostility.

Including Koda!

They might have been Lesser Imps, but they were still demons.

The chaos and evil in their blood was the same as in their stronger kin.

However, the moment they sensed the lordly aura around Koda and the invisible weight pressing down from the throne beneath him, all of that malice vanished without a trace.

"Hmm?"

Yet when all ten had fully crawled out, Koda frowned.

"What’s going on? Why is each one different?"

"That one could probably lift a boulder twice its size, and that one can barely carry a rock."

"That one’s sharp enough to count. That one’s as stupid as a brain-dead kobold!"

Koda had never seen anything like it.

He had never even heard of spawn of the same kind turning out different.

Everything a Seed’s structures raised came out identical, like coins from the same mold.

Yet the Imps he had just raised had nothing in common!

Unwilling to accept it, Koda raised another ten Imps, along with ten Lesser Demons.

As expected, the new Imps came out just as uneven.

And it wasn’t only the Imps. The Lesser Demons were the same!

"Their strength is completely random?"

"No. It’s not just their strength."

"It’s this whole layer. Everything here is chaos."

Watching the Imps, Koda slowly began to understand something basic about the Third Layer.

Its chaos wasn’t limited to the land and the laws. Every living thing in it, and in truth everything that existed here at all, was shaped by that same absolute chaos.

Once he understood that much, Koda decided not to dig any deeper.

He wasn’t a scholar. He didn’t need to understand every detail of this place.

He only needed to use it.

But just as he was preparing to raise them by the hundreds and send them flooding into the Tithe Lands, something else went wrong.

"Alright, let me split these Imps into squads through the throne. I don’t have any champions or commanders yet, so I’ll have to give every order myself."

As Koda began sorting them, he noticed something alarming.

The first batch of Imps was down to eight!

Two were missing!

They had vanished completely. Even the throne couldn’t sense them anymore.

Puzzled, Koda turned his attention to the remaining eight.

What he saw left him stunned.

The eight survivors were tearing into the corpses of their two dead companions.

They were gleefully enjoying the first meal of their lives!

They felt incredibly lucky.

Lucky that they were the ones still alive.

They didn’t care in the slightest that the flesh in their mouths belonged to their own kind.

They understood only one thing: their hunger had to be fed!

Yet even after the two corpses had been picked clean, the Imps still weren’t satisfied.

Their hunger had dulled, but their desire for more never went away.

And so, their eyes turned toward their own kind once again.

This time, the first batch fell to just seven...

Greedy, evil, ravenous, and never satisfied.

Every creature with those traits had been born of this layer.

And they...

Were simply following their nature!