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Chapter 190: Torture Session
The king-stage devil tried to unleash his technique, circulating his energy to the maximum to break the influence of whatever Aldrian had just done. The energy surrounding them felt heavy and couldn’t be absorbed. At their cultivation stage, they could typically use the surrounding energy as a boost to strengthen their techniques. This ability is inseparable from the fact that high-level cultivators can perceive the energy of heaven and earth more easily and effectively.
However, Aldrian did not give them a chance, as he teleported to one of them and delivered a punch to his middle dantian, where the energy was stored. The force of this punch was enough to shatter the dantian instantly, leaving him crippled. Not stopping at just destroying the dantian, Aldrian also infused his golden energy into the devil, imbuing it with a poisonous property that inflicted agonizing pain.
When the others finally managed to unleash their techniques, Aldrian simply created a space crack to swallow their attacks and looked at them with his piercing gaze. The grand duke-stage devils who met Aldrian’s eyes felt as though they were staring into the eyes of death itself, as if they were falling into an abyss of darkness—an abyss of death from which there was no escape.
They tried to resist it, to fight the fear seeping into their hearts. The king-stage devil realized that Aldrian was using some kind of illusion technique on the others, but, quick-thinking, he dashed to escape the room. However, this was a mistake in itself, for the moment he turned his back on Aldrian, it would mean his end.
Before he could reach the outside of the room, he felt an immense weight and dropped instantly to the ground, as though the weight of an entire mountain pressed upon him. He trembled at the power he sensed, realizing that this man had been toying with them from the very start! If this young man had truly wanted to, he could have killed them long ago—but by choosing to play with them, it was clear they meant nothing in his eyes.
He saw Aldrian’s foot from the corner of his eye as Aldrian stood there. Suddenly, he felt intense pain and coughed up blood as Aldrian’s fist struck his lower back, directly at the middle dantian. He knew instantly that his dantian had been shattered.
"NO!" His cultivation he had painstakingly gathered over a long lifetime, slowly dissipated from his body. An extreme weakness spread through him, unlike anything he had ever felt before. Gritting his teeth, he struggled to look up at Aldrian’s face from the ground, but all he could see was Aldrian’s smile—a smile that seemed more demonic than human.
"Isn’t it ironic that you would call my smile demonic after the acts you’ve committed in this town?" Aldrian said. "Come on now, I want to see the devils struggle. Stand up. Your friends seem unresponsive, so I hope you can give me something interesting, Rex Yarin."
The king-stage devil trembled when Aldrian called his name. He didn’t know how this young man knew his name, but he forced a smile and said to Aldrian,
"Who are you to dare barge into this place? Do you know that you will regret it once the one truly in charge here comes out to hunt you down?"
Aldrian tilted his head. "Do you mean the man inside the main bedroom? Don’t worry, his turn will come. Unfortunately, you won’t be around to witness it." He smiled. "Wait here for a moment."
Aldrian then moved toward the other devils, still frozen in place. They were still resisting the illusion, so Aldrian simply woke them up by punching each of their abdomens, shattering their dantian with ease.
Once they woke up from the illusion, the only thing they could comprehend was that their cultivation had already dissipated, slowly draining from their bodies, and before them was the smiling face of Aldrian. All of them instantly collapsed to the ground with a loud thud, the sudden shift in gravity so heavy they couldn’t even lift their heads. They desperately wanted to see Aldrian’s face again, so they forced their heads up, just as Rex had done.
Clap!
"Gentlemen, let’s go with this rule," Aldrian said. "I will ask the questions, and you will answer. If anyone catches a lie, or if no one gives me an answer, you will be punished. Is that clear?" He looked at the devils, who were arranged in a circle, ensuring they could all see each other clearly. The devils remained silent, listening to Aldrian’s playful tone. They already had a hunch of what he would do to them.
However, they only grinned, for they had already endured many kinds of torture as devils. Their lives as devil cultivators within the devil territory had been cruel. They had experienced various forms of torment from their superiors, and some had even been tortured by members of the Seven Deadly Sins. Confident that no method of torture could make them yield, they faced Aldrian with a defiant resolve.
"First question: Where is the Lust Devil?" Aldrian asked, his gaze fixed on them as he waited for an answer. After ten seconds of silence, he still hadn’t heard a response.
As soon as the words left his mouth, the devils were overwhelmed by an intense, all-consuming pain throughout their bodies. It felt as though they were being ripped apart a thousand times over, their skin being flayed alive again and again. The excruciating physical pain was compounded by a searing agony in their souls, making their heads feel as if they would explode.
"I...I don’t know, whe...where Lord Lust...went! Bu...but I heard he’s still...targeting the Blizzard Witch," one of them finally stammered, his voice filled with difficulty. He never imagined the pain would be so extraordinary—he felt as though he was trapped in an eternal torment, both inside and out.
As soon as the words escaped his lips, the pain suddenly ceased for him. He gasped for air, his body drenched in sweat, his face pale. The veins all over his body were swollen, threatening to burst as he tried desperately to withstand the excruciating agony.
"One of your friends has already answered. Do any of you have information you’d like to share?" Aldrian asked as the others still writhed in agony.
"I don’t know either!" another one answered quickly.
"I don’t know!" One by one, they all spoke, and Aldrian could sense they weren’t lying.
To break these high-ranking devils, he had prepared a far more lethal and effective method of torture. It was more agonizing and efficient than merely cutting off their limbs or skinning them alive.
That is, Aldrian injected his golden energy into them at their weakest state and controlling their pain with it. Without their cultivation to protect their inner and outer bodies, they would experience a level of suffering they had never known before. The agony in both their bodies and souls, within mortal body without cultivation, was something that could not be endured. It was more excruciating than having their limbs severed.
"Good! It would’ve been better if you had just answered earlier, wouldn’t it?" Aldrian said with a smile. "Now, second question: What happened to Irene Rivas?"
"We don’t know the details, but the only ones who know are Lord Lust—I mean, the Lust Devil and the members of the Seven Devils of Disaster, Rexith and Karius," one of them replied.
Aldrian didn’t find any lies in his words, but he waited for the others to give their answers. One by one, they spoke, their responses more or less the same as the first. But when he heard Rex’s answer, Aldrian couldn’t help but grin.
"What did I tell you about liars?"
Rex’s body suddenly curled as he endured the intense pain.
"Do you think I can’t detect lies? Do you think you can lie to me, Rex? What a bad boy you are. I think you deserve some special treatment."
"The... The Blizzard Witch... is... on the run... the Lust Devil... to the north... that’s what... I know." He finally said it, and only after ten seconds did the pain stop. Aldrian didn’t want to kill him too quickly, as the pain could cause the soul to collapse and kill him instantly. However, hearing Rex’s answer made him abandon that idea.
The answer Rex gave him made Aldrian sigh in relief, at least his mother still had a chance to escape. But once he learned that the Lust Devil was after her, he decided to end this quickly. The Lust Devil was not someone his mother could defeat. Aldrian then walked toward Rex and touched his forehead. Rex could only endure Aldrian’s memory-reading technique as his eyes rolled back.
The others felt their hearts tremble as it seemed Aldrian was using a memory-reading technique. If he had something like that, why had they gone through all of this? He could have just read their memories and been done with it, but no, he was playing with them, clearly enjoying it. They had no rebuttal because this was what they had done to the weak, to the losers. But for them to experience it themselves, they still couldn’t swallow it.
Aldrian didn’t care about their opinions and simply read their memories one by one. Once he was done, he glanced toward one part of the mansion where the main bedroom was. He then intensified the pain for the devils, amplifying it to unbearable levels, until it finally killed them, as the pain exceeded both their bodies’ and souls’ limits.
"The successor of the Lust Devil, huh." He muttered.
