He turned around to find a girl on her knees.

She was lovely and ephemeral like freshly fallen snow. Her skin was almost transparent, her long hair silver, and her eyes a light crimson. Her face, respectfully looking downward, as well as her petite frame would perhaps be better described as cute rather than beautiful, yet the charming allure that seemed to ooze from her pores belied her girlish appearance.

She looked almost exactly like a human, but she was in fact an ignia.

“Yes, sir. It is I, Machina Soleige, Duchess of the Dazzling Blaze, one of the Six Dark Peers. I have been waiting for this moment long enough for a dragon to lose all of its scales.”

The Six Dark Peers were a group of powerful darkling aristocrats appointed by the Demon Lord Veltol. Machina was a particularly essential subject among them.

She looked slightly younger than Veltol, but she, too, was an immortal darkling. She was over a thousand years old.

“Please excuse me for receiving you in such crude attire, my lord.”

She wasn’t wearing her usual magnificently red formal armor but a thick white coat and hat.

Both her outfit and the situation were unnatural. The realization of Methenoel—the rebirth of the Demon Lord—should be a grand ceremony for all the Immortal Kingdom to celebrate. Machina should’ve been wearing ceremonial robes, and the entire country should’ve been present to receive Veltol.

And yet, Machina was the only one there in that bare, lightless place. What had happened?

Veltol didn’t reproach her for her unseemly attire. He had absolute trust in her loyalty. There had to be a logical reason why she was dressed the way she was.

“No matter. You saw to my revival and completion of Methenoel, and for that, I commend you.”

“Such is my duty as your vassal, Lord Veltol. Your praise is wasted on me.”

There were a few requirements for restoring a soul via Methenoel. There had to be a caster to activate it at the proper place and time. Methenoel, a ritual spell, couldn’t be performed alone. One person had to cast it on their soul while another resurrected that soul.

Veltol sat up.

“So where are we? Is this underground altar in Readelm?” he asked while getting down from the altar made of skullia. With a wave of his arm, aether covered his naked body in black armor and a cloak of the same color.

“No, Lord Veltol. We are in the underground cathedral of Nelldor’s dungeon, below the former Shinjuku Station.”

“Shin…juku…?” he repeated, confused at the unfamiliar word.

Veltol was familiar with the underground cathedral of Nelldor. It was built on an island to the far east of Alnaeth for the purpose of worshipping the Demon Lord and receiving him in his eventual rebirth. The word Shinjuku, however, was new to Veltol.

“Well, in any case…”

He paid no further attention to the little details. Five hundred years had passed, so it would be perfectly natural for the name of the place to have changed. Veltol had no need to cling to such changes to realize his objective.

“The Demon Lord has returned, Machina. Let us conquer the world once more!”

World domination: his mission and ambition, and the immortals’ dearest wish.

“Beg pardon, Lord Veltol…,” Machina interjected timidly. “If I may…”

“What is it?”

Machina was struggling to say her piece. After a moment’s hesitation, she got herself together and looked right into Veltol’s eyes as she told him:

“The world we were trying to conquer…has already perished.”

*

“It happened around eighty years ago,” Machina began as she and Veltol walked through the dungeon’s passageways. “Our world—Alnaeth, the planet of magical civilization—experienced an unprecedented disaster when it came into contact with another world: Earth, the planet of industrial civilization.”

Earth, January 2023.

Alnaeth, Month of the Behemoth 2023 CE.

Oddly enough, both planets’ calendars happened to align when their worlds merged across dimensions—nay, across universes.

“They…merged?” said Veltol.

“Yes. Earth’s scientists named this catastrophe the Fantasion.”

“Fantasion…”

The Fantasion, naturally, caused a variety of problems.

The planets and their respective worlds fused into one, causing large-scale changes on a geological, celestial, and climatological level. In just three years, the aggregate population of Earth and Alnaeth dropped to one tenth of its former number.

And then came the clash between species.

Earth had only one ruling species—Earthoid humans—while Alnaeth was home to a plethora of species besides their native Alnaethoid humans: elves, orcs, therians, ogres, goblins, dwarves, among others, each with their own territories.

Both Earth and Alnaeth had internal conflict by the way of race, religion, and politics, but Alnaeth had interspecies conflict in addition.

“These otherworlders had not only different cultures and languages but strikingly different appearances as well,” said Machina. “And from their point of view, we had appeared out of nowhere in their territory…”

“So conflict was inevitable.”

“Indeed…” Machina nodded.

Existing infrastructure was destroyed, followed by food shortages, epidemics, territorial and residency disputes, technological disparities, and finally, discrimination among species. Problems piled on top of one another, and it wasn’t long until war broke out.

The Fantasion mayhem mixed species and territories up, rendering any previous national borders meaningless. Countries became defunct, and it was only a matter of time before cities started acting as their own autonomous nations.

Conflict arose between cities, and over a total of forty years, two massive City Wars took place.

“It’s been just over two decades since City War II ended. Those scars are finally starting to heal… And that brings us to the current state of the world. In Alnaeth terms, we are in the former underground cathedral of Nelldor in the Myrd archipelago, which also corresponds to the former special ward of Shinjuku in Tokyo,” Machina explained as she guided the Demon Lord through the dungeon.

Veltol couldn’t understand all of it. Or rather, he couldn’t believe it. It was too sudden and bizarre, and it felt more like he was hearing a fairy tale. His incredulity kept him from noticing the rusted ticket gates and machines they’d passed.

“The world you’d known has perished, Lord Veltol. A new one was built in its place.”

They were in an amalgamation of what was once Shinjuku Station and the underground cathedral of Nelldor’s dungeon. The old train station had transformed into a full-fledged labyrinth.

The broken escalators extended for over fifty meters. Machina and Veltol made their way to the top—the labyrinth’s exit.

“It is now year 2099 of the Fused Era.”

The heavy metal door before them was closed.

“This is the new world.”

Light flooded in when Machina opened the door, making Veltol squint.

And that’s when he saw the world.

The landscape far exceeded his imagination.

It was overwhelming.

Aether neon lights so vivid it made his eyes hurt.

Lights from the buildings’ windows.

Lights from the gigantic hologram displays covering the buildings.

Lights from the red lanterns hanging from the buildings’ eaves.

The glow of taillights from the land vehicles racing through the streets.

Lights indicating the positions of the drones and flying vehicles soaring through the sky.

Lights, lights, endless lights…

It was night, and yet it looked as if the stars had fallen to the planet’s surface, their dazzling lights ridding the world of any darkness.

Veltol couldn’t take it all in. It was exceedingly more luminous than the Immortal Royal Capital or the Imperial Capital Astrica’s castle town. This was the light of a city that never sleeps.

The chilly, somber sky was far off in the distance. Thick, black clouds obscured the darkness of night as polluted snow fell on the city, illuminated by the vivid hues of the lights yet sparse enough not to sound alarms from the nearby speakers.

“Wha—?”

Veltol’s eyes and mouth were equally agape as he took in the sights, incredulous.

From the city’s center rose a giant pillar 243 meters tall—the aether reactor. It drew aether from the underground aether lines, converting it into mana and electricity for the city’s consumption as well as the cryotolerance zone that protected Shinjuku from the cold. The barrier wasn’t perfect, however, as there were still spots throughout the city that reached subzero temperatures even during daytime. Just one step outside the zone was uninhabitable.

Surrounding the aether reactor were brand-new limestone buildings of slim neo-elvish architecture, intermingled with squat structures made from reinforced concrete. The latter were clearly made on the cheap; there was no sign that a single thought went into their structural integrity. Unfettered expansion led to an increase in vertical construction of slipshod steel frames stacked one on top of the other. The resulting homes were no sturdier than tofu, all grouped together in clusters like tombstones.