Chapter 631 – Children of the Abyss

Instantly, that feeling of “breathtaking beauty” from moments ago vanished.

Sylph came to a sudden realization. “No wonder! I’ve never been able to appreciate non-human features other than Elven pointed ears.”

“This is only a incubus with mid-tier abilities among demons, Peak level at most, yet it was able to influence us even with our mental and psychic defenses active!” Lilith raised her guard to the highest degree against the demon race.

Though they hadn’t lost their rationality just now and had proactively blocked the influence once they caught on, the fact that they could be affected at all despite the gap in magical rank was already deeply unsettling.

If there hadn’t been a rank difference, if they hadn’t been using {Magic Card – Mental Defense} and {Magic Card – Psychic Defense}, wouldn’t they have fallen hopelessly in love with it?

“incubi and succubi who specialize in charm are much weaker in combat than other demons, and their physical defenses are much lower too. If it were a different kind of demon, the Scarlet Serpent Thornvine couldn’t have restrained it at all!” Mo Lan said.

“So incubi have weaknesses too!” Vasida now realized just how terrifying someone without weaknesses could be.

If it had been her, Sylph, or Lilith without cards, encountering a high-ranked demon or mage skilled in charm or Psychic Magic, they certainly wouldn’t have handled it as effortlessly as Mo Lan.

Mo Lan found the incubus’s constant release of charm to provoke their emotions rather annoying. She directly used Psychic Shock to interrupt his spellcasting, and while he was still dazed, followed up with psychic control to seize control of him.

This fellow’s resistance to Psychic Magic was slightly beyond her expectations — when first subjected to psychic control, he had actually managed to resist.

Mo Lan’s psychic control only reached Peak level, and without higher-ranked psychic control magic, she had no choice but to bombard his mental sea with Psychic Shock, Mind Blind, and other spells until his consciousness was thoroughly muddled, then seized control of his psyche in one decisive move.

Only after confirming he had completely lost his self-awareness and was entirely under her control did Mo Lan use Vine Sorcery to manipulate the Scarlet Serpent Thornvine binding him, dragging him to the edge of the fence. She reached out and pressed her hand against the center of his brow, then began copying his memories.

This was a incubus already over three hundred years old, though for the first several decades, he had been nothing more than a lowly lesser demon with no self-awareness, possessing only survival instincts.

That stretch of memories was entirely filled with his struggles to survive, growing stronger bit by bit through killing and devouring his own kind.

Only the process of his birth, along with the implicit knowledge of Abyss ecology and demon ranks contained within those memories, was worth examining.

Later, after he advanced to become a incubus, he finally gained rationality and intelligence, developing a clear understanding of his path to advancement and beginning to scheme for his own future.

Only from that point on did his memories become somewhat interesting to review.

After copying all of his memories, Mo Lan tossed him back.

“That’s all it takes?” Vasida asked.

Lilith and Sylph looked at her with equal curiosity.

This was the first time they had personally witnessed Mo Lan copying someone else’s memories. She had pressed her finger against the incubus’s brow for less than a minute before finishing — it was unbelievably effortless.

The {Knowledge Card – Psychic Magic} clearly stated that performing the memory copy technique placed enormous strain on the caster’s psyche. Under normal circumstances, it recommended using Memory Reading to quickly scan the target’s memories instead.

Yet Mo Lan looked as though she hadn’t felt any strain at all, still as bright-eyed and spirited as ever.

“Mm!” Mo Lan tapped her own head. “It’s all in here. I just need to properly sort through the information next.”

Vasida, Sylph, and Lilith followed Mo Lan out of the Blazing Flame Prison, then watched as she lay down on the grass and closed her eyes for about an hour before suddenly opening them and saying, “Done sorting.”

She then summoned the Book of Cards and, after a series of operations, produced three identical cards and handed them out.

The card faces clearly read “{Knowledge Card – Comprehensive Demon Guide 1.0}” — it appeared to be a card of the same type as {Knowledge Card – Comprehensive Angel Guide}.

Vasida, Sylph, and Lilith each took a card and began reading the knowledge recorded within, growing more astonished the further they read.

“Demons don’t reproduce naturally to produce offspring?”

“The class hierarchy within the demon race is this rigid?”

“That’s far too cold-blooded! They don’t even spare the souls of their own kind?”

……

When Mo Lan had been organizing the incubus’s memories, she had felt exactly the same way.

She had never before encountered a race as selfish, greedy, and utterly without moral boundaries as the demons.

The complete opposite of the Witch race — practically the embodiment of evil itself.

Demons could not naturally reproduce offspring among themselves. They were formed from the coalescence of abyssal energy and fallen soul energy. Innately lord-rank demons were even born within womb-vesicles that formed in specific regions deep within the Abyss.

Abyssal energy was no pure natural energy either — it was an aggregate of the desires and negative emotions of all living beings.

Mo Lan had merely glimpsed, through the incubus’s memories, the abyssal rift brimming with abyssal energy where he was born, and she had felt a terror that pierced straight into her soul. Memories from Earth related to the evil of human nature surged forth like a tidal wave, nearly shutting down her rationality.

Fortunately, she had deleted that segment of memory in time. Fortunately, her Earth memories were purely intellectual knowledge devoid of emotion. She then marshaled vast quantities of psychic power to reorganize her roiling memories before finally regaining her composure.

By now she had forgotten what that abyssal rift looked like, but the sense of terror it had brought her remained vividly imprinted in her mind.

Originally, Mo Lan had assumed the Abyss was just another place located deep within the Underground World, much like 《The Witch’s Wilds》, the Sacred Mountains, or the Beastmen grasslands.

Only now did she learn that in the depths of the Abyss, there existed something that could nearly inflict psychic contamination through merely a secondhand glimpse via memory.

That kind of overwhelming presence didn’t seem like something an unconscious, inanimate thing could emanate.

Mo Lan didn’t dare think too deeply about what manner of existence the Abyss truly was.

Now that she understood what abyssal energy was, she also understood why demonic dark magic was so much more formidable than Dark-element Magic in every respect.

Demons were practically children of the Abyss!

Demons had inherited the Abyss’s ability to manipulate desires and negative emotions. Dark magic, like holy light magic, infused influences beyond mere dark elemental force — it carried the weight of negative emotions and malicious intent. That was why it was more sinister and bloodthirsty than ordinary Dark-element Magic, and far more destructive.

Though Mo Lan had inherited memories from Earth, those memories carried no emotions whatsoever. Whether they were tragic memories or joyful ones, she could not empathize with them — she could only inherit the knowledge and abilities within them, like a detached observer.

She personally did not harbor enough malice or negative emotion to cast dark magic.

And using mana to convert into the energy of malice and negative emotions for spellcasting would, over time, constitute a form of contamination to one’s own psyche.