God-Tier Enhancement Chapter 294: Episode 294Descent of the Demon King (3)

Chapter 294: Episode 294_Descent of the Demon King (3)

3.

The more ti passed, the more disadvantaged Han Simin beca.

Even if the Heavenly King’s power was sealed and he had no way to prove his identity right now, there was no guarantee that would last forever.

No matter what, Epia was the Demon King, and the Heavenly King was the Heavenly King.

Their essence did not change.

The problem was that the only ways humans had to verify their identities were dark magic power, divine power, and outward appearance. If ti passed, giving the Heavenly King ti to think and the Imperial Princess and others enough ti to listen to him and reflect, then the day would surely co when Han Simin’s lies were exposed.

That was an unchanging truth.

Justice will prevail.

The saying didn’t exist for nothing.

If soone cared enough to pay attention, the truth would be revealed sooner or later.

Han Simin hadn’t told this lie with the intention of deceiving everyone forever.

He just needed the lie to hold for a little while.

And during that ’while,’ he intended to press his advantage relentlessly, without giving them a mont to breathe.

“Demon King. I knew you would pull sothing like this, so I brought it. An item that proves who I am.”

“No, that’s—!”

The Pope, who was present with them, unconsciously took a step forward with a shocked expression.

There was no way he couldn’t feel it.

The waterfall of divine power overflowing from the divine relic was so dense that it made his skin prickle.

And there was no way the one holding it could be the Demon King.

The Pope was speechless.

The Heavenly King, too, was struck speechless by the sheer absurdity of the situation.

He had entertained the possibility.

He had hoped, ’Please, no,’ but at the sa ti, he had thought, ’It could happen.’

That was why he had crossed over to the continent, even at the risk of annihilation.

But seeing it with his own eyes made his blood boil.

It couldn’t be helped.

He would have been less angry if everything in the Heavenly Realm had been destroyed—no, even if the Heavenly Realm itself had been shattered.

The Heavenly Realm was all his.

If it broke, he could rebuild it.

The Heavenly King had no greed for material things anyway.

But divine relics were different.

Divine relics were, quite literally, gifts from God.

Over millions, tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of years, successive Heavenly Kings had done everything in their power to protect the divine relics and pass them on to the next Heavenly King, preserving them completely and intact.

Three such relics had been gathered over the ages.

Naturally, each divine relic, bearing the weight of all those ages, possessed a value that could not be expressed in words.

They were the history of the Heavenly Realm made manifest.

They were also the vessels of God’s will.

There had been a ti, tens of thousands of years ago, when they had been completely overrun by the Demon World, and even then, the Heavenly King had sacrificed his own life to protect the divine relics and hide them for the next generation.

That was how important they were.

Divine relics.

They were things that had to be protected and handed down to the next generation. Only then could the position of Heavenly King stand.

Only one who had the power to stake everything and protect them could sit on the Heavenly King’s throne. In that sense, the current Heavenly King was stripped of his qualifications.

Not only stripped; he could no longer face the next Heavenly King.

And that was not all.

This was the mont when all the toil of the previous Heavenly Kings was coming to nothing.

’That a divine relic would one day fall into the hands of the Demon King...’

His vision went dark.

Even so, the Heavenly King clung to his sanity and asked,

“The other two—where are the other two?”

He didn’t even think to protest or insist it was his.

He just wanted to confirm it.

He wanted to hear it clearly.

That the other two hadn’t been found, and that they had only brought one.

That they hadn’t used them because Aria’s divine power alone had not been enough to power the dinsional transfer gate.

“Ah, the other two? Honestly, I wanted to bring those too and sell them, but unfortunately, we were a bit short on divine power to cross over to the continent. So we used them.”

He was too stunned to speak.

The Heavenly King’s hopes and expectations were rcilessly shattered by a single sentence from Han Simin.

“So that ans...”

“Yeah. They’re gone. Now. From this world. Ah, maybe they’ll still be there when you go back. As traces, at least?”

He remained silent, trembling.

The Heavenly King’s body trembled.

Han Simin, anwhile, turned to the Princess with a triumphant smile.

“Don’t kill him. Keep him locked up nice and tight. He’ll just resurrect in the Demon World before long anyway, even if he dies.”

“Yes, Husband.”

It felt rushed, but they had officially succeeded in turning the Heavenly King into the Demon King.

’The ending he wanted.’

Thinking back to the ti when he had barely escaped at the crossroads of whether Epia would live or die, this was the most satisfying revenge he could have imagined.

Now all that remained was to stride forward as the hero who would control the continent.

However, Han Simin did not let himself celebrate too soon.

’Not yet. It’s too early.’

The world was not that easy.

If you tried to swallow the world whole without paying the price, you were bound to choke.

And then, it appeared as a hologram.

[“Scenario Quest: Act 4” has been changed to “Scenario Quest: Act 4-1 (Truth of the Darkness).”]

[Truth of the Darkness]

[Grade: Main]

[Content: On the surface, the continent has regained hope. The Demon King has been captured, and the warlocks have been purged. But in reality, that is not the case. Reveal the unseen darkness, the truth of the darkness that grips the continent.]

Han Simin.

The hamr of justice had been raised against the man who was trying to take the continent for himself.

4.

BetaGo didn’t nitpick individual actions.

Whatever a user did was, in that other world, simply a natural occurrence, undeserving of special attention. Even if that action were to destroy the continent, it had nothing to do with BetaGo.

Good and evil were aningless to BetaGo.

Everything that users and NPCs labeled as good or evil had, in fact, been created by BetaGo.

Programs. Data made of zeros and ones.

Naturally, whether the zeros won or the ones won was nothing BetaGo needed to care about.

The adage “a ga only exists if there are players” also ant little to BetaGo, who couldn’t “think” in the human sense and whose focus was set entirely on maintaining the world rather than on the company’s profits.

So whether Han Simin brought the Demon King over, passed her off as the Heavenly King, and then did whatever he pleased with the continent was none of its concern.

The reason a quest had appeared was that those actions intersected with the one and only directive programd into BetaGo: to operate within the frawork of the ga for the sake of the users.

The Main Quest.

Act 4 was currently focused on the fallen warlocks and the quest to hunt them down.

Then Han Simin intervened, suddenly bringing out the Demon King and the Heavenly King, who had no reason to appear yet.

Then he frad the Heavenly King as the Demon King and had him imprisoned.

Of course, if things had stopped there, BetaGo would not have changed the Main Quest.

Because at that point, this truth was known only to Han Simin on the continent.

But Han Simin had already turned on his stream in the Demon World and shown it to countless users, to the entire nation, to the whole world.

He had shown them the faces of the Demon King and the Heavenly King.

At that point, as the news that the Demon King had been captured spread among the NPCs, so users began to spread the truth: “That’s not right; the one they captured is the Heavenly King.”

That was the condition for changing the Main Quest.

From Act 4 onward, the Main Quest was given equally to all users.

Naturally, Act 4-1 was the sa, and users who didn’t understand the situation would have their participation restricted.

It wasn’t that they were blocked—they simply couldn’t participate without knowing what was going on.

—What does this even an?

—Can soone explain what this is supposed to be?

In reality, most users were too low-level to properly participate in Act 4.

There was no way they could understand the contents of a changed quest that ca with no explanation and only a pile of hints.

Even so, most users did understand.

And that was what mattered.

To Han Simin.

“Ugh. This is such a pain.”

He felt a twinge of regret.

The Demon World videos that had gone down in legend had already deposited over $10 million into his bank account and were still setting new daily sales records, so it wasn’t as if he was kicking himself over it. Still, he couldn’t help wondering: what if he hadn’t released the videos yet—no, not releasing them at all was out of the question—but what if he had just recorded them and released them later?

It was that kind of regret.

Not that it would have changed anything.

He had never imagined things would turn out like this, so even if he went back in ti, he would have made the sa choice.

So instead of dwelling on the now-annoying situation, he decided to face it head-on.

Once the Main Quest changed, the actions of the users who understood the truth were predictable.

At the very least, Han Simin wouldn’t be caught off guard by such obvious moves.

He sprang into action.

Users didn’t care in the slightest how Han Simin was carving up the continent for himself.

It had little impact on them, and they couldn’t feel the repercussions anyway. They were already scrambling just to kill the monster in front of them or finish a random quest from so commoner NPC in town, so why would they bother with the political situation of the entire continent?

They didn’t even keep up with how their own country was doing in real life, too busy playing the ga; they had no ntal bandwidth to worry about such things here.

But now, the Main Quest was involved.

That changed everything.

It wasn’t as if the consequences, which had never touched them before, would suddenly start to affect them. But if they paid attention and lent their strength to the cause, they could earn rewards.

And not just any rewards—Main Quest rewards.

There wasn’t a single person who didn’t know how massive Main Quest rewards were, or how the players who had monopolized them were now riding high, basking in fa and fortune in Fantastic World, a ga with over thirty million players.

That was why the players who understood the situation joined forces.

—Looking for people to go protest.

—Let’s hold a candlelight rally.

—We can’t just leave the continent like this!

No one went alone.

This was despite the fact that players would normally do anything to hog every opportunity for themselves.

They moved with uncharacteristic caution, each one gauging the mood.

They had no choice.

On streams—like those from Han Simin and a handful of other strears—it looked like everyone was chatting and trading with high-ranking NPCs, but in reality, the average player’s level was nowhere near high enough for that.

Besides, this wasn’t the real world.

Liberal democracy?

Most of them understood there was nothing more dangerous in this world than raising your voice alone in a place where such ideals had been thrown out the window.

In fact, so players who had naively taken to the streets, thinking they could stir up so aggro and make a scene by marching boldly toward the local lord, were summarily executed.

Their words never even reached the higher-ups. They were killed simply for the cri of insulting the current Emperor’s son-in-law.

That was the kind of world this was.

Naturally, they had to move in an organized fashion.

Even then, it might not be enough.

—At first, I thought this was no big deal, but why is this quest so damn hard?

—There’s no such thing as freedom of religion here. If we screw this up, we’ll get branded as heretics and have to spend the rest of our lives on the run.

—Wow. In just a few days, the Main Quest difficulty went off the rails.

Even rankers and players acknowledged for their intelligence put their heads together, but the answer didn’t co easily.

Which was only natural.

Fantastic World had never been a ga that was kind to its players, and only recently had a few of its walls started to co down.

That perception hadn’t changed.

Breaking through it was no different from trying to topple the ruling powers.

—State capture by Simin’s manipulation! Let’s set things right!

Of course, the players loved this kind of situation.

Clearing a difficult Main Quest was far more aningful than mindlessly grinding mobs.

For the first ti in a while, the community forums were buzzing with activity.

Naturally, any talk about Kenji, the first adventurer to conquer a kingdom, was completely buried.

It couldn’t be helped.