Chapter 1

I have guarded the Abyss on the Ashen Plains for a thousand years.

My daily routine: chewing rock-hard rye bread, single-handedly crushing the skulls of trespassing demons, wiping their slime off on a ragged surcoat, and leaning against a bronze pillar to catch the wind.

Today, a dying girl stumbled into the wasteland. Her fingers were locked in a death grip around the bloodstained iron crest I had left behind a millennium ago. Up on the ridge, three hundred heavy cavalrymen of the Alliance drew their lances, forming a wall of steel as they closed in.

I stared at the blood on the ground. I didn't make a sound.

I just brushed the biscuit crumbs off my lap and stretched my stiff neck. Turning around, my fingers hooked onto the hilt of a rust-eaten battleaxe resting beneath the bronze pillar. I dragged it along with casual ease.

"Troublesome."

I muttered that single word, and walked alone toward the formation of steel.

 Chapter 1

The smell of sulfur on the Ashen Plains hasn't faded once in a thousand years.

Leaning against the bronze Sealing Pillar, I swallowed the last bite of rock-hard rye bread. The coarse bran scratched my throat raw. I casually tossed the remaining crumbs into the darkness ahead.

The black hound at my feet didn't even bat an eyelid. It simply opened its jaws, caught the crumbs, chewed twice, and swallowed.

Right at that moment, the abyssal rift in front of me—which had been dead quiet for centuries—let out another teeth-setting crack. The dark red fissure, originally no wider than a fingernail, was forcefully pried open to over ten feet wide by whatever was underneath. Thick, purplish-black smog surged upward, carrying the stench of the earth's core.

Seventeen abyssal demons squeezed their way up to the surface.

The one leading the pack was an old acquaintance, wearing bone armor that glowed like dark magma. Three or four hundred years ago, it had tried to breach the gap once before; I had snapped off half its horn.

If this were the outside world, seeing a Duke-level abyssal monstrosity crawling up to the surface with sixteen high-tier demons would probably have the Alliance's warning bells ringing so hard the city walls would crack. Two thousand men from the Order of the Silver Shield would instantly be written into the casualty lists.

But this is the Ashen Plains. There is only me here. And a pillar.

"Aldric..." The Demon Duke locked its eyes on me, standing in the shadows just beyond the firelight. Its voice sounded like it had been ground against sandpaper. "You deathless old hound... The abyssal tide is full. You cannot hold it down."

I didn't speak. I just patted the biscuit crumbs off my leg, stood up, and walked toward it.

To be honest, cleaning up trespassing trash like this is an incredibly tedious physical chore. Having sat here for a thousand years, I'm too lazy to draw a weapon or chant some bullshit incantations.

I walked straight into the formation of the seventeen demons.

The Demon Duke roared, projecting an abyssal force field so heavy that the black rocks on the ground began to shatter inch by inch. Ignoring a pressure that could have crushed a standard heavy knight into meat paste, I walked right past it and stopped in front of one of its high-tier subordinates.

I reached out and grabbed its barbed neck. A tiny fraction of the Power of Chaos spat out from my palm.

Crack.

Cervical spine snapped.

Holding the still-twitching, massive body, I nonchalantly tossed it back into the red-glowing rift.

Next.

There was no fierce battle, no heroic shouting. I was just like a farmer dragged out of bed in the middle of the night to catch wild foxes in the yard. Break a wing, crush a shield, pop a skull. In the span of ten breaths, sixteen demon corpses were shoved back into the Abyss, one by one, like I was filling a pothole.

Finally, I stood before the Demon Duke.

Its gigantic frame was trembling violently. It desperately tried to shrink back into the rift, but I had already reached out, clamping my hand single-handedly over its face.

"A thousand years... why isn't your power depleted..." Frantic, terrified wheezes escaped its throat. Under the suppression of my Laws of Chaos, its lower half was already beginning to melt and disintegrate. "You're going to rot to death here, Aldric! The outside world has long since—"

I flipped my wrist and slammed its head ruthlessly into the Abyss below, forcefully cutting off its nonsense.

Surging Chaos energy poured down the rift from my palm like molten iron, violently sealing that ten-foot-wide gash shut. The wailing stopped abruptly. Everything reverted back to a dead, lifeless dark-red line.

I looked down at the slime on my palm, wiped it off against the hem of my surcoat in disgust, walked back to the Sealing Pillar, and sat down on the rock I had polished smooth with centuries of sitting.

The wind blew on. The plains were so quiet you could only hear the black dog snoring.

Leaning against the freezing bronze metal, I glanced up at the mottled inscriptions above. Though the words had long been worn away by the sand, I still remembered what they said.

A thousand years ago, brutal demons flooded the surface through the abyssal rifts. I, along with a dozen or so guys known as "The Founders," fought our way here and used this very pillar to nail the throne of the Abyss shut. But the pillar needed a "lock core." My Power of Chaos was the only option.

"Aldric, just one hundred years."

Back then, the Alliance Commander, wearing his flashy, ostentatious silver armor, patted my shoulder with a tragic, solemn expression. "In a hundred years, the Alliance will select a new successor to rotate you out. As compensation, House Carroll—the family you established—will have its name permanently etched on the walls of the High Council. As long as the Alliance stands, your descendants will bask in glory for generations!"

I believed him. For that promise, and for the peace of the outside world, I sat down.

For a whole thousand years, not a single person ever came.

Around the five-hundred-year mark, I actually tried to walk out once, just to ask how things were going. But I realized I couldn't leave. The power inside me had grown together with the pillar. If I stepped more than thirty miles away, the Abyss would completely collapse.

Having no choice, I could only gather news right where I was.

My only channels were the smuggling caravans that braved the outer edges of the plains every few years for exorbitant profits. The current caravan master was a nimble, sharp-witted young man. I once pretended to ask casually who was currently running the High Council and if the name House Carroll was still known.

That profit-driven youth had given me a very weird look and simply shook his head.

I somewhat understood. Over these five hundred years, House Carroll didn't suffer some dramatic, overnight extermination. Instead, through the transitions of power, they were marginalized bit by bit, systematically stripped of everything. Until they were pushed out of the core, lost their halo, and became ordinary people that not even a traveling merchant had heard of.

Those bastards broke their vows. They purposefully erased a hero's existence.

When I found out, I didn't fly into a rage, nor did I howl at the sky like the heroes in those chivalric novels. I just silently walked back and looked down at the stone slab I had carved five hundred years prior—the one that read "A Century's Rotation."

Recently, that stone slab had finally weathered completely through. With a clack, it cracked into two halves.

I reached out and touched the rough fracture. My fingers paused at the deepest ridge, slowly curling inward until they formed a fist.

It doesn’t really matter, I thought. As long as the bloodline was still alive, losing their empty titles wasn't the worst thing. Living as law-abiding commoners meant they wouldn't have to sit in this hellhole catching cold wind like I did. That was the only way I could comfort myself.

The night deepened.

A rare black sandstorm rolled in from the eastern edge of the earth. The violent grit stung as it hit my face.

I loosened the fist I had been subconsciously clenching for the past few days and slowly lifted my heavy eyelids.

Having sat in this rotting place for a millennium, the slightest disturbance in the wind was as familiar to me as my own breathing. But right now, amidst the chaotic howling, I caught three scents that didn't belong here. They were plunging headfirst into the Ashen Plains, reeking of sheer desperation.

The first scent was a mix of cheap tanned leather and the cold sweat of absolute terror. It was that young caravan master.

The second scent was very faint. It carried the metallic tang of blood and was as fragile as a thread, feeling like it could snap at any moment.

But the instant I caught that wisp of a scent, the heart in my chest—which normally felt as still as a stone—gave a sudden, heavy jolt without any warning.

It was the bond mark I had personally carved with my own blood a thousand years ago.

The bloodline of House Carroll.

I thought they had long faded into the masses, reproducing peacefully in some quiet little town. Yet at this moment, this incredibly feeble presence was on the brink of death, stumbling and crawling as it fled for its life toward this land of the dead.

And trailing right behind them was the third scent.

I didn't need my eyes to see it; I could clearly feel the subtle vibrations trembling through the earth. It was the synchronized frequency of over three hundred warhorses cladded in anti-magic heavy armor, stomping against the ground. The clashing sound of their metal was cold, uniform, and entirely devoid of emotion.

These weren't ordinary bandits. This was the formation the Alliance’s highest-tier regular army—the "Silver Shields" or whatever codename they used now—deployed only when carrying out a no-survivors extermination order.

Three hundred fully armed Alliance elites, hunting down one fragile, orphaned descendant and a luckless merchant.

How very glorious of them.

The howling of the storm grew louder, drowning out the tremors in the earth.

The black dog, which had been lying still like a dead log, suddenly stood up. It shook its fur out, its pitch-black eyes locking dead onto the eastern front of the storm. For the first time in a thousand years, it bared its ghastly white teeth, letting out a low, vibrating warning from its throat.

I remained seated on the rock, looking down at my heavily calloused hands. These hands had crushed the skulls of countless demons, yet for a thousand years, for the sake of the "grand scheme," for the sake of this so-called seal, no matter how much it suffocated me, I had never used them to kill a single human.

But right now, less than twenty miles away from me, the outside world was coming to slaughter the very last piece of hope I had left in this world.

And they were doing it right in front of my face.

I stared into the pitch-black eye of the storm for a moment. Then, I slowly stood up and turned to look at the back of the bronze pillar’s base.

A battleaxe leaned against it.

This lump of iron had accompanied me as I hacked down countless infamous Demon Generals a millennium ago. But after I sat down here, it was cast aside. Weathered by the sun and wind for a thousand years, it had formed a half-inch-thick crust of dead rust. It looked no different from a long, flat rock.

I walked over, reached out, and gripped the coarse handle.

There was no blinding flash of light, no earth-shattering boom.

The moment my fingers applied pressure, a power that had lain dormant for a millennium poured silently into the weapon through my palm. The battleaxe let out an incredibly hoarse, muffled roar of thunder.

Crack—shatter.

The petrified rust on its surface peeled and burst off in an instant, like the dried husk of dead mud. The dark red metal edge of the axe sliced through the turbulent air currents around it. The raging black sandstorm tearing through the plains actually parted slightly, yielding a localized vacuum the exact second this rusted axe shed its disguise.

For the first time in a thousand years, I lifted it upon this soil. And the target was not the Abyss.

Dragging this heavy, oppressive grand axe, I walked step by step into the sandstorm, heading straight toward the advancing wall of steel.

Amidst the screaming wind, I casually cracked my stiff neck and spat out the only two words I'd spoken in a millennium that carried the genuine, murderous hostility of the living.

"Troublesome."