**NNT — 12:01 AM — Fortress Zero, Rōran**
Raghoul stood at the highest tower of Fortress Zero, alone, watching over the black land he had willed forth from the desert. The fortress was massive, pressed into the earth—not built, but birthed from his will. Each stone vibrated with the rhythm of his heartbeat, obsidian walls thatreally breathe. They looked like dark stone but glowed faintly, as though alive, veins of molten gold threading through the black surface.
There was no sound. Not even wind. The world around him was still, afraid to disturb him. The desert itself had learned to hold its breath in his presence, sand frozen mid-swirl, dunes locked in perfect stillness. Even the air molecules seemed to move more carefully, as if sudden motion might anger him. It wasn't peace. It was power. The kind of power that made reality itself step aside and wait for permission to exist.
The tower beneath his feet stretched impossibly high, defying the laws of physics because physics now bent to his will. From up here, he could see everything—the scorched crater where Rōran once stood, the glass plains where his rebirth had melted sand into twisted sculptures, the distant mountains that cowered against the horizon like frightened children.
Far below, at the heart of the fortress, the portal he created waited. Thirty feet across, it hung in the air like a perfect circle of ink, framed by stone engraved with runes. The frame wasn't carved or built—he had ordered it to existence and so it was, reality buckling under the weight of what lay beyond. The runes moved like living things, symbols that predated human language, contracts written in the fundamental forces of existence itself.
It wasn't active yet. But it felt like it was watching him, waiting with the patiense of eternity. The air around it was thick, charged with potential that made skin tingles. Sometimes words leaked through—not heard directly instead felt, emotions. Rage older than stars. Hunger that could devour galaxies. And beneath it all, a terrible, seductive promise of unlimited power.
His hands were shaking. Not from fear—he'd burned that out of himself along with everything else human. The tremor was pure anticipation, like a starving man standing before a feast, like a conqueror seeing an unconquered world spread out before him. Every cell in his transformed body hummed with contained energy, power that could reshape continents straining against the boundaries of flesh.
The shaking was the only remnant of his mortality, the last echo of what he'd been before his transcendence . His skin was dark as burnt bronze glittering under the sun, but were harder than diamond, veins of red-gold flames visible beneath the surface like magma flowing through marble. His eyes blazed with inner flame that could melt steel or freeze souls, pupils dilated with the rush of impending domination.
Raghoul didn't speak. He never wasted words. Words were tools, and like all tools, they were only useful when applied with precision. He raised his hand and touched the spiral seal carved into the portal's edge. The spiral was warm beneath his fingers, briming with dimensional energy that made his bones vibrate. The response was instant and violent.
The portal stirred like a massive eye opening after eons of sleep. The air trembled, reality bending around the edges of the circular opening. Light bent and twisted, colors bleeding into spectrums that eyes weren't meant to perceive. Then there was a sound, soft but sharp, like glass cracking in reverse not breaking, but healing, reality mending itself around the growing tear between worlds.
Then came the scent. Not fire, but something else maybe older—the smell of the void before creation, of the space between stars where light goes to die. It carried the weight of history written in blood and carved in stone, the accumulated essence of every atrocity committed in the name of power. The smell was conquest made manifest, fear distilled into its purest form.
The circle began to spin, slowly at first, then faster. The rotation wasn't mechanical—it was mystical, like watching a fairy wake up from hibernation. Inside it, shadows moved with purpose, reaching through the dimensional barrier like fingers testing the strength of a lock. The shadows had depth that could not be looked at directly, absence given form and hunger.
A low hum spread through the tower floor, into Raghoul's boots, up through his legs, resonating in his bones. The frequency was -- just perfect, tuned to the vibration of his transformed cells. The entire fortress sang with the portal's awakening—every stone, every carved symbol, every dancing light pulsing in harmony with the gateway's malevolent song.
The dimensional pressure built until the air itself seemed to thicken, reality straining under the weight of what was about to happen. Cracks appeared in the space around the portal, hairline fractures in existence itself that leaked otherworldly light. The boundary between dimensions was dissolving, worn thin by his presence and his will.
He stepped forward, calm and silent, feeling the pull of infinite possibility. The portal reached for him with invisible hands, dimensional currents that wrapped around his consciousness like welcoming arms. He didn't resist—he embraced it, let it draw him into its hungry depths.
And entered.
---
**Naraq-Zhul: The First Harvest World**
Crossing over wasn't like stepping into another place. It was like stepping into nothing and all at once, into a wound that had never healed and never would. The transition was seamless and violent—reality tearing around him like wet paper, then reforming in patterns that made his enhanced mind reel with their magical geometry.
The sensation was indescribable. Every atom in his body was pulled apart and reassembled, his consciousness scattered across dimensional barriers before snapping back together like a rubber band. For a moment that lasted eternity, he existed in multiple states simultaneously—human and entity, living and dead, real and imaginary.
Then he landed.
The sand was hard and gray, made from crushed bones and ashes. Not metaphorically—literally. Eons of years of war, suffering, and death had been ground down into this surface, compressed under the weight of eternal torment until it became a foundation solid enough to support the weight of damnation itself. Each step released tiny puffs of dust that might once have been kings, saints, or children who had wandered too far from the light.
The bone dust crunched under his feet like snow, but the sound was wrong—too sharp, too hollow. When he knelt and picked up a handful, he could feel the desperation of their final moments, the depression, the prayers that had gone unanswered, the slow realization that no salvation was coming.
The air was thick and hot, not with physical heat no, but with something heavier— if he wanted to be philosophical he would have thought despair. It clung to his skin like damp warm towel, making each breath slower, more deliberate. The atmosphere itself was tormenting, saturated with the accumulated emotions of every soul who had ever suffered here. It pressed against him, trying to seep through his defenses.
But he was no longer vulnerable to such things. His transformation had burned out every weakness, every soft spot where fear might take root. The oppressive atmosphere washed over him like water over stone, unable to find 'purchase' on his hardened soul.
The sky was what he expected. No stars. No moon. No sun. Just moving clouds in colors that didn't belong in any natural spectrum—deep red like blood, purple like bruises, and yellow like infection. The clouds moved with purpose, forming patterns that suggested intelligence, observation, judgment. Sometimes lightning flashed inside them, but the lightning was weird too—it moved too slowly, lingered too long, and when it struck the ground, it left patches of something that wasn't quite darkness and wasn't quite light.
HELL
The word came to him with perfect clarity, dredged up from memories of his previous life as justin. He'd read about it in an online article—The Seventy-Two Kings of Hell By King Solomon. Back when he'd been some nobody browsing the internet in his apartment, thinking he understood the hidden world, thinking he cracked the conspiracy of the powers in high places controlling the government. What a joke that had been. He'd been a seeker, a fool who thought knowledge equaled power, who believed that reading about demons made him dangerous.
Now he was going to meet those so-called "kings" and show them what real power looked like.
The perks of becoming an entity meant remembering everything with perfect clarity. Every word of that article came back to him now, crisp and clear as if he'd just read it yesterday. Seventy-two demon kings, each ruling their own little slice of hell, each thinking they were apex predators because they could possess some pathetic human or make someone's crops fail.
How quaint. How utterly, pathetically limited.
He remembered the descriptions with photographic precision: Bael, who commanded sixty-six legions and appeared as a cat, a man, or a toad. Agares, who could teach languages and make earthquakes, mmph even genins could do that. Vassago, who could reveal lost things and predict the future. Parlor tricks, all of them. Party favors compared to what he'd become.
They'd spent eternity fighting over scraps of influence in a single dimension while he'd learned of greater power. They were children playing with toys, convinced their sandbox was the entire universe. He couldn't blame them, he was once like that until his enlightenment.
The irony wasn't lost on him. They called this place Hell, as if it were the ultimate destination of evil, the final word in darkness. But his enhanced perception could see through the illusion. This wasn't the bottom—it was just another layer, another stepping stone on the path to true power. The real darkness lay beyond, in the spaces between spaces, in the void that existed before creation and would remain after everything else had crumbled to dust.
Raghoul said nothing. He surveyed the landscape with the eye of a conqueror, cataloging resources, identifying strategic positions, measuring the strength of potential resistance, habit from when he'd been a ninja mercenary. He looked once at the endless expanse of bone and ash, then at the beach made of broken fragments that stretched to the horizon.
Most beings would have been overwhelmed by such concentrated anguish. But Raghoul felt nothing but satisfaction. All this suffering, all this accumulated torment—it was potential energy waiting to be harvested. Fuel for the engine of his ambition.
He let his fire touch the bone dust. It glowed gold and red, burning silently without heat or smoke. The flames didn't consume—they transformed, turning the ancient remains into something new, something that belonged to him. Where his fire touched, the bones became crystal, beautiful and terrible, a monument to his power over death itself.
The transformation spread outward from his touch, racing through the bone dust like a living thing. Wherever his flames kissed the ground, the gray wasteland bloomed with veins of crystallized light. The effect was stunning—a garden of jeweled bones growing from the soil of the damned.
"Acceptable," he whispered, and his voice carried across the stillness like a pronouncement of judgment.
The sea beside him wasn't water. It looked like molten metal mixed with liquid light, silver and gold swirling together in patterns were hypnotizing. The surface was mirror-smooth, reflecting the twisted sky above while simultaneously revealing depths that seemed to go on forever. It gave off no heat, but Raghoul could feel emotions radiating from it—anger, fear, sadness, despair. Like a beast trapped beneath the surface, the accumulated feelings of every soul who had ever drowned in its metallic embrace.
The liquid moved with subtle currents, forming whirlpools that appeared and disappeared without warning. Sometimes shapes moved beneath the surface—not fish, but fragments of well.. maybe consciousness, pieces of broken minds that had been dissolved into the metaphysical ocean. They swam in circles, eternally seeking something they would never find.
He turned away from the sea of sorrows, he'd decided to name it that, unimpressed. He had seen oceans of fire in his dimensional visions, lakes of frozen screams, rivers of liquid time. This was just another curiosity in a realm full of curiosities.
---
**The Ashen Wastes - Tier 1**
Past the bone beach lay a plain of dark sand stretching to the horizon, broken only by the massive skeletons scattered across the landscape like monuments.
The skeletons were huge.. enormous, but compared to his true form still children, but that does not mean to undeesmate the sizes of this bones that are clearly not human. Some had too many ribs, their chest cavities expanded to accommodate organs that had never existed on Earth. Others had no skulls, their spinal columns ending in twisted knots of bone that suggested consciousness had resided elsewhere. Still others were twisted into impossible loops, their forms defying every law of anatomy he knew.
The wind picked up as he moved deeper into the wastes, carrying small grains of sand and sharp fragments of stone that scratched against his cloak. His transformed body didn't react to the abrasion—damage was a concept that no longer applied to him. The wind howled with voices, the accumulated grieve of everyone who had ever walked this path and failed to return.
Shapes appeared in the distance, barely visible through the haze of perpetual twilight. At first, they looked like smoke or heat distortions, but as he approached, they gained definition. Figures, half-formed and translucent, drifted across the wasteland like lost thoughts given shape. Their faces were like burnt paper, features suggested rather than defined, eyes missing or replaced by empty sockets that kept licking what could be ash.
The Cinderborn.
The name came to him from his perfect memory banks, along with their complete profile. They were the lowest tier of Hell's hierarchy, the bottom feeders of the infernal ecosystem. Once, they had been souls—human, angel, or demon, it didn't matter now. They had been broken down by the weight of eternal punishment until nothing remained but hunger and the faint remembrance of what they had once been.
They saw him approaching and began to converge, their movements fluid and purposeless. They had no strategy, no plan—only the instinctive drive to feed that kept them moving through the eternal wasteland. One drifted toward him, its form wavering like smoke in a breeze, its mouth opening to reveal teeth made of crystallized sorrow.
He didn't stop walking. He didn't even slow down.
He raised his hand, and fire appeared. Not the wild, chaotic flames of his youth, but something controlled, refined, perfect. The fire didn't roar or crackle—it simply was, existing in the space between his fingers. The flames were beautiful, hypnotic, carrying within them the power to unmake reality itself.
One Cinderborn touched the flame and simply ceased. Not destroyed—unmade. Its entire existence was erased, deleted from the fundamental code of reality as if it had never been. There was no scream, no final moment of awareness—just the sudden absence of something that had been there a moment before.
The others stopped, sensing the magnitude of what they had witnessed. Then, driven by hungers older than reason, they moved closer. They were drawn to the flame like addicts to their drug of choice, unable to resist despite the obvious danger.
One tried to speak, its voice like wind through broken glass. "Fire... from... the .... god... above..."
The words came out in fragments, pieces of surprisingly language he could understand but barely held together by will and desperation. These creatures had forgotten most of what they had once known, but they still recognized power when they saw it. And his power was unlike anything they had encountered in their countless years of existence.
He looked at them with eyes that burned brighter than the flame in his hand. When he spoke, his voice carried the weight of absolute authority.
"Ohh oh You not bad, since you recognise it."
His voice hit them like a physical blow, forcing them to their knees in the bone dust. Their translucent forms flickered as they struggled to process what they were experiencing. This wasn't just power—it was dominion, the right to command that transcended species and dimensions.
"Good. That means you understand order."
The Cinderborn trembled, their forms becoming more solid as they focused on him. For the first time in eons, they had found something worth their complete attention. His presence was like a lighthouse in their world of perpetual twilight, impossible to ignore.
"You will speak," he said, his voice carrying the authority of natural law. "Tell me everything about this place."
It wasn't a request. It was a fundamental reordering of reality that made compliance not just likely but inevitable. The Cinderborn had no choice but to obey—their very existence now depended on serving his will.
Another voice answered, stronger than the first. "Seven... tiers... deeper... each one... harder... more... dangerous..."
The words came out in a rush, as if speaking them provided relief from the terrible pressure they felt. The creature's form solidified as it spoke, becoming more real through the act of serving him.
"Names," Raghoul said, his tone sharp as a blade.
"Seventy-two... kings... middle tiers... below... archdukes... above... princes of... darkness..."
The information flowed like water through a broken dam. The Cinderborn couldn't help themselves—his presence compelled truth, demanded complete honesty. They told him about the hierarchies, the power structures, the ancient feuds that had shaped Hell's political landscape for millennia.
He folded his arms, processing the intelligence with the mind of a military strategist. "Which one controls this tier?"
"Duke... Asmodeus... commands here... thirty-six legions... rules from... the Brass Citadel... in the... seventh circle..."
The name sent a ripple of recognition through the realm. Asmodeus, the thirty-sixth spirit of the Goetia, ruler of the seventh circle, commander of thirty-six legions. In his previous life, he'd read about this particular demon king—described as mighty and strong, appearing as a man with three heads and the feet of a cock, breathing fire and ruling over mathematics and handicrafts.
How disappointingly mundane.
He stared into the distance, seeing past the immediate wasteland to the greater tapestry of Hell's geography. Somewhere out there, in a citadel of brass and bone, sat a creature that thought itself a king. Soon, it would learn the difference between ruling and true power.
"I know that name," he said, his voice low and sharp as a whisper of death. "The thirty-sixth spirit. Is he strong?"
The Cinderborn exchanged glances, their forms flickering with what might have been fear. "Strong... among... the old powers... but... nothing... like... you..."
He turned his head slightly, a predator's smile playing at the corners of his mouth. "He will come. He will test me."
The smile widened, revealing teeth that gleamed like polished bone. "He will fall."
---
## **The Message**
He stood in the center of the ashes wasteland, his cloak fluttering in the unnatural wind. The flames on his hands quieted to a gentle glow, but the power behind them remained unchanged—a star's worth of destructive potential waiting to be unleashed. He looked at the gathered demons, these broken remnants of what had once been mighty beings, and saw in them the perfect instruments for his purpose.
"Listen carefully," he said, his voice carrying across the wasteland like the tolling of a funeral bell. "You are now my eyes. My voice. My instruments of will."
The Cinderborn lowered themselves, their translucent forms flattening against the bone dust like smoke settling into valleys. They had found their purpose again, their reason for existence. After eons of meaningless wandering, they had a master worth serving.
"Tell your betters," he continued, the words carrying weight that made the very air tremble. "Tell them a new ruler has arrived. Not a demon bound by ancient law. Not a man limited by mortal flesh. Something beyond both."
One of the creatures dared to whisper, its voice barely audible above the wind. "What... do we... call you...?"
He stared ahead, his gaze piercing the veils of distance and dimension to see the brass towers of Asmodeus's citadel glowing in the hellish twilight. When he spoke, his voice carried the finality of a closing tomb.
"You don't. You listen. You obey. And when the time comes, you will witness the birth of a new order."
Then he walked forward, leaving the Cinderborn to scatter like the wind. They would carry his message to every corner of Hell, spreading word of his arrival like wildfire through dry wood. The hierarchy would hear. The demon kings would tremble. And Asmodeus would prepare for war.
Behind him, the bone dust swirled in patterns that looked like writing, forming words in languages that had died with civilizations. The message was clear to anyone who could read the signs: The old order was ending. The harvest was about to begin.
And at the center of it all, a figure in a dark cloak walked deeper into Hell with the confidence of a man who had already won the war.