CH 114 The Castle And The Ball

Everyone feared hell, where all sins finally come together.

In the long and winding River of the Departed in hell, the souls that crowd there have all committed unforgivable crimes. They came here not to wait for salvation but to eventually fall into the bottomless abyss.

This was the dark side of the world.

The translucent departed soul sat on a jagged rock, and he wore ancient and complicated attire. He was a court dramatist from many years ago. Now he was sitting on the strangely shaped rock, singing a very old story with his hoarse and deep voice in the howling wind. A story about contracts, blood and bones.

In the description of the story, the true face of this world was countless fragmented authorities, and different races walked the earth, going all out to ascend to the supreme throne. Different races have different powers, but only humans alone did not. It was as if human beings were children abandoned by heaven and earth, born as grass and trees that were left to be trampled. The endless war, the endless death. In that era, someone wanted to seize the highest throne in the world, and use power and majesty to shatter all chaos.

In that absurd story, a King with nothing made a pact with a lonely Devil.

Their contract was destined to change the world from the moment it was born.

In the singing, the howling wind collided with the Peak of a Thousand Knives and dispersed into whimpers. The skeletons crawled on the ground, the smoke from the ironmaking blast furnace mingled, meteors fell, and the dragon skeleton raised its head…..

It was like, the world was falling apart because of the story in that song.

………………………

The Castle of Dragon Bones.

The crow Mela perched on the slender rose branch, looming at the throne of bones in the middle of the palace.

It was a throne made of shrunken bones of different hell creatures, gathered together, and then piled up with the most exquisite craftsmanship. The throne made of thousands of bones itself represented a mountain of corpses and a sea of blood. That throne had been vacant for many, many years, but now it once again had its master.

The King sat on the throne of bones.

He no longer wore the crown that was used in the Pope's coronation. The gold and gems twisted and changed shape silently, and finally turned into a crown of thorns, dotted with dark red gems. The crown of thorns encircled his temples, his silver hair hung down to his shoulders, and lace embroidered with silver threads decorated his collar and cuffs.

He opened his eyes.

The coldest, darkest, and most gorgeous palace in the world was reflected in the King's ice-blue pupils.

The slender white bone pillars rose straight up, supporting the staggered vault ribs, and those curved long beams were built with the ribs of genuine legendary creatures. Countless flying buttresses were lined up on the side of the palace, like thousands of winged beasts flapping their wings in mid flight. The window lattices inside the castle were beautifully curved, forming thousands of patterns, and roses were everywhere. Starting from the rib frame like the open branches of trees, the roses traveled upward to the slender and luxurious fan-shaped vault, while the branches and leaves hung down around the bones.

Deep, deep down in memory there seemed to be a string that had been gently touched.

A kind of indescribable familiarity, like the wheel of time turning slowly, and more than a thousand years have passed by, but when the old friend returned after more than a thousand years, everything remained the same as before.

"Welcome back, my dear Majesty."

The Devil stepped forward on a dark red carpet in a black suit with silver hems, a blooming rose pinned to his collar. This "soul merchant" from hell was tall and thin, pale and handsome, and as polite as a butler who had been guarding the mansion for his master for many years.

——Welcome back to the throne, welcome back to tear this world apart with me.

When he bent down in a bow, his voice held unprecedented joy.

"What is this place?"

The King asked.

"The Castle of Dragon Bones, your palace."

The Devil answered.

The crow Mela was so excited that it almost wanted to cry, it imagined too many times the scene of the throne finally seating its owner. But when the time finally arrived, it didn't dare to pounce forward and prostrate itself before the King. Because the Devil stood before the King's throne, their gaze meeting in midair. The King's face was expressionless, and the Devil's face wore a smiling mask.

The air was tense.

The Devil seemed unaware.

"How rude." He said briskly, "Your arrival is such an important day, everyone should congratulate you…..But please forgive them, after all, it takes a lot of time to come from the various territories."

The "them" in the mouth of the Devil were the targets of the King and the Devil——the lords of hell.

 "So——"

The smile widened on the Devil's face, and he extended his inviting hand to the King with grace.

"Would you like to attend a little ball? This is the castle's invitation to you."

When the Devil's voice fell, all the rose vines coiled around the castle shook their leaves gently, and the rustling sound was as gentle as those beautiful departed souls whispering softly. Tiny specks of snow-like lights fell from the dome, and the empty palace shone a diamond-like brilliance.

The wind passed between the slender pillars and beams, and the slender eaves of the flying buttresses like winged beasts unfolding their wings. It turned out that the eaves were made of countless delicate bat wing bones. When they unfolded again, the thin wing bones flapped gently in the wind like a conductor's baton. The wind was cut by the thin wing bones, making a strange sound, like thousands of slender hands plucking at the same time wind as their musical strings. The melody was extremely beautiful, forming a symphony that had never been seen before.

The Devil was right, it was indeed a welcome ball.

It was the castle that had been silent for many years that hosted this ball.

Over the heads of the Devil and the King, the exquisite stained glass windows opened one after another, and a pale light slanted down from above their heads. And there stood the Devil in a beam of light, in his black formal suit, reaching out to the King.

Gulu, gulu.

A skull rolled in, and the crow Mela spread its wings and landed in front of the skull. It found two drumsticks from nowhere, held them with its wings, and beat a drumbeat on the skull that accompanied the melody of the wind.

"There's always dancing at a ball, Sire."

The Devil invites.

The symphony played with the wind as the strings were poignant but also had an unprecedented magnificence, as if heaven and the earth were singing softly. The King felt a tinge of joy and anticipation——the joy and anticipation of the castle itself. Like Mela playing the drum, the castle looked forward to the King accepting their welcome.

He reached out his hand.

The Devil took the King's hand with the rose ring, pulled him up, and led him off the throne. The moment the King accepted the Devil's invitation, the melody of the wind suddenly became passionate, like waltz music at a ball. The Devil took the King in his arms and whirled him around in the middle of the empty palace.

The King attended quite a few balls. As Legrand's monarch, he had received the most complete etiquette training, including dancing.

But the dance the Devil led him in was not any dance step seen at a human banquet.

The melody of the wind was magnificent, and the Devil held the King's hand with the rose ring the whole time, and the King felt the ring gradually becoming hot. The rose vines wrapped around the white bones bloomed one after another, and following the roses blooming along with the elegant melodies, petals were blown down by the wind continuously, and were carried to all directions of the castle.

In the dead rooms of the castle, wherever the rose petals fell, silver coffins suddenly opened.

Out of the coffins came maids and servants dressed in gorgeous attire.

With their pale, delicate faces and dark red eyes, they began to tidy up the castle and let it become splendid again.

On the darkest side of the world, the Devil embraced his King, dancing to a melody of bones and wind. And at the moment the castle woke up, a cold light fell from the crack in the dark red sky of hell.

It was not the color of blood, it was not the orange of sulfur, but a cold and pale light like snow.

The singing departed souls of poets stopped, the kneeling skeletons raised their heads, the dead corpses hanging on the Peak of a Thousand Knives turned slowly, and the restless lords of the abyss fell silent. After so many years, other colors finally appeared in this dark world under the dark red sky.

A slice of pale moon rose slowly from the gap, slender and curved, inlaid in the sky like a sickle white.

Hell suddenly fell silent.

"Welcome back."

The Devil whispered, a smile on his lips.

……………………

The scene of the meteor falling left a deep shadow on Terge, and by the time the moon rose in the sky of hell, it had a hunch that something bad had happened.

It struggled to understand from the other lords what the rising of the pale moon meant.

It was a pity that the lords who were similar in strength didn't know much about it, and the lords who knew were much stronger than it, so it dare not ask.

The only consolation was that apart from the dragon's roar that day, there was no other movement in that Blackstone Castle.

It probably wasn't a big deal.

Terge comforted itself in this way.

Just when it was thinking this way, a black butterfly flew slowly into its lair. When it saw the black butterfly, Terge became vigilant almost subconsciously——all hell creatures knew that the black butterfly was the representative of the soul merchant.

Oh, hell! It didn't do anything to provoke that lunatic, did it?

In front of Terge, the black butterfly shattered and turned into a black invitation card, fluttering down from midair.

Terge looked at the invitation card as if he was facing an enemy, and he only picked it up and held it in front of his eyes after confirming that there was no danger. It was a very delicate invitation card, and the gorgeous style of the invitation card was very reminiscent of the bloodkin who had disappeared from hell for many years. And on the invitation card, a piece of rose petal was used as the seal.

"What's this?"

Terge asked suspiciously.

At the same time, all the lords of hell received exactly the same invitation.

The content of the invitation was about a banquet, which would be held in a few days.

The location of the banquet——

Blackstone Castle.