Dimensional Keeper: All My Skills Are at Level 100

Mark's reply came without hesitation and with a tone that cut like ice. "Why would I do that? Reclaiming my full soul and full my full strength will not change my purpose. I will free the demons regardless because this world belongs to me, and when I am whole I will remake it to suit my will. The demons will be instruments for that reconstruction, but first I will deal with that devouring entity that threatens to consume everything."

Lucien exhaled and shook his head. "This matter will not be solved easily," he said, the weight of the problem settling heavily between them.

"Why so many questions do you have?" Mark asked as his pressure swelled, his voice calm but threaded with dangerous impatience. "Let us battle some more. It has been a very long time since I have gone all out."

"Buddy, you may unleash your full might if you wish, but should I do the same the world will be destroyed," Lucien said, his tone weary and grave as he met Mark's cold amusement. "Do you want this world to be devoured into a black hole?"

Mark inclined his head in a motion that was almost courteous. "True, I would not want that either," he admitted. "I do not seek annihilation for its own sake."

"Why do you not simply fix the spatial domain of this world?" Lucien asked, his voice soft with a strategist's logic.

Mark shrugged with a slow, measured motion that betrayed no panic. "That is not something I can accomplish at present," he said. "To alter the shape of this world permanently I require my full strength, and for that I need my missing soul fragments."

At that moment the earth beneath the Bright Buddha Palace convulsed as if something vast had stirred in the bones of the world. An eruption of demonic energy burst upward from the heart of the palace, and the sky was split by a pillar of black light that shot like a spear toward the heavens.

The radiance was not noble but hungry, and it carved a wound through the morning like a blade through silk. The golden forms and ornate pavilions of the Bright Buddha Palace could not withstand that malignant column; masonry cracked and statues crumbled, gardens were torn into smoking ruin, and the palace collapsed into rubble beneath the ravenous light.

From within the newly opened wound came a roar that was older than memory. The seal that had held ten thousand years of torment could not hold against the surge, and in an instant thousands of demonic shapes exploded from the fissure.

They streamed into the air like a storm of shadow and fang, and they filled the skies with a chorus of triumphant whoops and howls.

The demons did not hide their joy; they celebrated like beings reborn.

"We are free at last," one voice cried, high and sharp, echoing across ruined tiles.

"Chains that bound us for ten millennia have been smashed," another bellowed with savage laughter.

"Taste the air, brothers and sisters, the world we were denied is ours once more."

Amid that teeming mass a single figure rose larger than the rest, crowned in eldritch flame and exuding a presence so vast that the winds themselves seemed to bow.

The being's voice rolled like distant thunder as it addressed the sky and the ruined palace. "I am returned," it declared, and the title that followed froze the blood of every mortal who heard it.

"What? How did the demons get free? How could the seal be broken?" For the first time, Lucien's composure faltered, his voice carrying the weight of genuine shock.

Mark's lips curled into a sneer, his expression laced with cruel satisfaction. "Did you not listen to what I told you before? I have been plotting this for thousands of years," he said. His eyes gleamed with triumph as he continued, "And one of those plans included planting an Ascendant deep inside the Bright Buddha Palace. You think their seal was eternal, but even eternity has cracks when someone like me is determined enough to find them."

He tilted his head slightly, his smile widening with mockery. "Did you think I was wasting my time standing here, toying with you and the others? I was not stalling. I was simply waiting, biding my time until the demons were freed. Everything that has happened was nothing more than part of the design I laid long ago."

Lucien's face grew grave as Mark's words sank into him like stone weights dragging into deep water. His gaze swept across the sky, and what he saw turned his solemnity into dread. Thousands of demons had already flooded into the air, their bodies blotting out the heavens with a sea of wings, horns, and shadowed forms. Their roars shook the land, triumphant and wrathful in equal measure.

Among them, hundreds exuded the undeniable power of the Divine Rank, their auras crashing against one another like storms colliding. But what made Lucien's heart sink further was the presence of one figure who towered above them all.

The Demon King himself, carrying the unmistakable weight of the tenth cycle of life and death within the Divine Rank, hovered with eyes that gleamed like bottomless pits. His power pressed down over the battlefield, heavier than mountains and more suffocating than the abyss.

Lucien clenched his fists, the shock fading into grim calculation. The seal was shattered, the demons were free, and the balance of the world had just been rewritten.

Joy turned to vindictive hunger across the demonic assembly. They shouted in a dozen tongues and in a dozen snarls, and their words carried the old wound they had nursed for countless ages. "Humans chained us with their prayers and sealed us with their false gods," a demon with a fractured crown hissed as it beat its great wings.

"We were bound by your priests and buried by your zealous hands," another spat, its voice wet with bile. "Now you will taste the debt for every life we were robbed of."

"Kill them all," a deep voice commanded, and thousands of demonic forms converged into a rolling sky of teeth and claws. Their hatred for humanity was not a whispered plan but an open vow, and they screamed it as one: "We were imprisoned by your kind. We will bathe this world in your blood."

Leaders and onlookers scattered at the first true sweep of those freed fiends, and cries of alarm rose from every broken courtyard and mangled hall of the Bright Buddha Palace. Isaac Abbot's golden Buddha had been reduced to a shuddering husk in the explosion, and molten light dripped from its fractured features like tears of iron.

Mark watched the unfolding liberation with an expression that did not change, yet something like satisfaction brushed his features. The destruction of the Bright Buddha Palace and the release of its prisoners seemed to vindicate the patient cruelty of his plan, and he folded his hands as if to applaud a long-awaited act.

The sky was full of demons, their shouts drowning the brittle cries of the ruined gods, and the Middle Domain had slid irrevocably into a new, darker hour.