The aliens who were picked up by Superman at the beginning

Li Zhen and Jason exchanged a glance.

The two men went over, grabbed Constantine, and quickly led him out of sight.

Once they were outside the Hall of Justice, Constantine cursed as he broke free from the two men.

"Damn it! Can you guys even consider that my body can't withstand your monstrous strength?"

Li Zhen ignored the other party's complaints.

The fact that this guy could show up here uninvited means he must know a lot about Nero, who claims to be the current lord of hell.

"What do you know?"

Jason pressed Constantine for an answer.

"You know? I know far too much."

Constantine slapped his sleeve in annoyance.

"How many of you actually agreed to his trade request?"

Li Zhen briefly recalled, "Me, Jason, Wolf, and Joker."

Constantine let out a very exaggerated scream.

"Five people?! No wonder I've felt like the air around the world has been filled with the stench of hell since just now!"

Jason looked down and counted on his fingers with suspicion, then asked in bewilderment.

"Where did this fifth person come from?"

Constantine remained oblivious, his voice still high-pitched.

"Of course it's me!"

Li Zhen and Jason were both stunned for a moment, then each chuckled.

They genuinely had no idea how Constantine could be so self-righteous.

"So what will be the consequences of making a deal with him?"

Constantine did not immediately give a direct answer to the question.

He reached into the inside pocket of his trench coat with his left hand, muttering to himself as he fumbled around for a while before finally pulling out a coin. Unlike the silver coins that Li Zhen and the others had received, Constantine's coin was gold, and the reliefs engraved on both sides were more intricate and ornate.

Li Zhen and Jason also took out their respective coins.

The silver luster paled in comparison to Constantine's gold coin.

Constantine then took a deep breath before slowly introducing Nero's origins to them.

Because Hell's timeline is unaffected by cosmic changes, it always maintains a straight development path regardless of whether the universe is destroyed or restarted.

Nero was not initially a strong contender for the title of Lord of Hell.

No one knows where he came from, and Nero was not a strong person when he first appeared.

Long before Nero, the position of Lord of Hell had been ruled by the First Fallen, the Trinity of the First Fallen, Lucifer, the Trinity of Lucifer, the Trinity of Etrigan, and so on.

Nero was relatively weak compared to those former lords of hell.

However, from the moment he first appeared, Nero possessed a law-level authority that no one knew about.

He used that authority to create an extremely complex ritual and sought to gain even greater power through it.

"He failed." "Because of his excessive ambition, the ritual he set up was too complicated. Although he had achieved unparalleled success in that universe, he ultimately failed."

Jason pondered what he had said, which seemed to have said nothing at all, and was somewhat dissatisfied.

"Couldn't you have explained it in more detail?"

Constantine reluctantly added more details.

"Before that, he obtained the soul contracts of nine people, including superheroes and villains in that universe, through that complicated ritual, but the last soul he targeted was beyond his control."

Li Zhen narrowed her eyes slightly as she looked at the coins in the three people's hands.

"The ritual you're talking about, you're not just about going around finding people to trade with, are you?"

Constantine glanced at Li Zhen.

"You reacted quickly, but unfortunately, I don't have a reward for you."

Li Zhen breathed a sigh of relief.

"Then perhaps there's no need to worry. I was careful when Nero proposed the deal, and none of us offered overly demanding terms."

Yes, aside from Rob the Wolf who didn't understand Li Zhen's subtle hints, Jason and the Joker did. However, Rob's thought process has always been eccentric, so the deal he proposed wasn't too outrageous.

"His gains were not substantial enough to even weigh our souls."

Constantine remained silent.

Li Zhen sensed something was wrong.

"Hey, it's not like I'm completely ignorant about magic. Whether it's an agreement, a contract, or a transaction, ultimately, as long as the demon doesn't absorb a sufficient amount of souls, it's harmless, isn't it?"

Constantine's voice finally softened a little.

"Did Doctor Fate tell you that? That old man's knowledge is outdated. That was true in the last universe."

"What do you mean by 'this was like this in the last universe'?"

Constantine tossed the golden coin in his hand.

"When Nero first approached me, I was just an underground rock singer, and I wasn't very good at magic back then."

Li Zhen's gaze turned dangerous.

"So you gave him a sufficient amount of soul?" "What? No! Damn it, of course not!"

Constantine vehemently denied it.

"In order to save my life, I talked to him for a few more minutes."

"After that, he actually told me about his troubles, and since I had drunk quite a bit, I boasted that I could help him upgrade that overly complicated transaction ritual."

"I swear I really just wanted to save my own life and buy time."

"As a result, Nero set his sights on me from then on. He led me into the realm of magic and found me all sorts of magic books."

Constantine caught the gold coin that had been tossed into the air and was now falling back down, holding it between his index finger and thumb.

"I tried to do it, although my main goal was to prevent Nero from taking my soul, but damn it, I think I succeeded one day after I was high on drugs."

The next day, Constantine woke up feeling extremely frightened and immediately burned the draft paper that contained instructions on how to upgrade and improve the transaction ceremony.

But since that day, Nero never came to see Constantine again, leaving only a gold coin by Constantine's pillow.

"I kept telling myself that maybe something happened to that guy in hell, and since he hasn't shown up for so long, he might have forgotten about it."

But just recently, at the point when Li Zhen and the others returned to Earth, Constantine noticed that the gold coin he always carried with him was getting hot, and at the same time, a hint of hellish energy began to fill the air.

The aura was not strong; in fact, most Earth magicians had not yet noticed it.

But Constantine was different; he dealt with the forces of Hell more times than an average magician would cast spells in his entire life.

"So I followed the scent and found you."

Constantine stared at Li Zhen and Jason's silver coins with deep melancholy.

"This is the worst part. He used that new ritual and set his sights on Earth in our universe."

Finally, under the pressure of Lee Jung and Jason, whose faces were dark with anger, Constantine briefly explained the effects of the new ritual.

"I reduced the emphasis on the soul in the ritual, stressed the transactional process of the ritual itself, and reduced the number of transactions required to complete the ritual."

"In other words, from the moment you agreed to Nero's deal, he was already close to achieving his goal. The simplified ritual I've created only requires the exchange of six people. You two idiots..."

Forced by the impression Li Zhen had left on him in the past, Constantine ultimately swallowed back the words of his insult.

Jason was even more puzzled.

"What does this have to do with us? We're in outer space, and a hell lord suddenly appears and forces us to make a deal. We have almost no room to refuse." Li Zhen nodded and began to shift the blame.

"If you hadn't helped him modify the ritual, wouldn't things be a little less bad?"

Constantine was also getting anxious; he couldn't let these two shift the blame back onto him.

"So I made amends later! Why do you think I know the First Fallen Ones? It's because I was worried later, so I made a special trip to Hell and teamed up with the First Fallen Ones to restrict Nero's movements. Logically speaking, without the corresponding conditions to be triggered, he couldn't possibly have reached the real world!"

Li Zhen and Jason suddenly fell silent.

They remembered that Nero had said that whenever Black Mercy proliferated, Nero would come down to earth to take a look.

Constantine keenly noticed the change in their expressions and looked at them with great suspicion.

"What else did you do?"

"It has nothing to do with us, it's Mongo."

"Yes, this time it really doesn't concern us much."

This time, the two of them unanimously shifted the blame onto Mengo.