The portable grandfathers that appear are all problematic.

Thousands of these lifelike human statues are scattered throughout this vast cave, seemingly fleeing in all directions, perhaps out of fear or hiding from something, but their faces are filled with terror.

Whether it's the remnants of demonic power or the fact that the statue is in a cave where the weathering is less severe, Xue's Law can't even determine how many years old the statue is based on the degree of weathering.

Like a work of art just completed by an artist, this place is filled with such masterpieces.

Soon, as Xue's laws were explored, he saw a pile of twisted stone chips and the records here.

"My name is the Petrifying Demon, one of the primordial demons. Those who could discover this place, perhaps I am already dead, aren't they?"

The stone tablet was engraved with these words, and when Xue Dinglu saw the pile of rubble on the ground, he was also stunned.

“Petrifying… Demon?” he murmured the demon’s name, looking once more at the city that resembled a group of statues, and at the lifelike statues with expressions of fear.

Is this demon's masterpiece the only remaining trace of ancient civilization?

Also, why would anyone be afraid of petrification? Is this a fear unique to ancient civilizations in hell?

Chapter 363 A Civilization from Hell

Xue Lude can confirm that he has never killed a petrifying demon. Although he often forgets some unimportant things now, he still has a relatively deep impression of the demons he has killed.

Even those who were found and killed by him because they were hiding underground, Xue Law still had some memory of them and knew what kind of demon they were, even if they were as weak as little bastards like human skin demons and crocodile demons.

But he had absolutely no recollection of the petrifying demon.

They either disappeared long ago because no one feared them, or they were conceptually devoured by similar demons such as the "Stone Demon".

The rubble we see here now is probably mostly from the former.

Xue Dinglu looked at the building from afar and discovered a stone tablet buried in dust and mud among the rubble.

The stone tablet recorded many stories. After the translation module left by the great sage began to extract the text one by one, the original translated text was soon presented to Xue Lude.

"The world-destroying giant tree... man-made gods... dealing with the crisis of the world-destroying giant tree..." Xue Dinglu read the words above and suddenly fell silent.

Although much of the text has been damaged over time and even translation modules cannot restore it, Xue's Law can still piece together a story based on the remaining text.

In Hell, there once existed an incredibly advanced civilization, excelling in both technology and magic. Technologically, they were capable of flying to the nearest planet, and in terms of magic, they possessed a combat power of Tier 4, even to the point of being able to mass-produce Tier 4 items through technology.

They became extremely arrogant as a result, and for a long time they even had the illusion that they were the overlords of the universe. Therefore, after developing the portal, they tried to open the portal to unknown coordinates to find other alien civilizations, and even conquer and colonize them.

Until, their random opening of doors actually led them to an apostle's colony in the vast universe.

Xue's Law: "6..."

When Xue Lude saw the description of another planet, inhabited by a barbaric civilization whose branches were covered with the corpses of billions of humans, and how they destroyed the sacred tree with a single shot to stop this barbaric ritual, his lips twitched slightly.

Good grief, if you guys had been a little cowards and run away when you saw this, maybe the problem wouldn't have been so big.

That must have been a colony of the apostles, where they were planting trees when suddenly a cosmic bumpkin shot it in the face, and the divine tree used that shot to sneak into their lair.

Next, just as Xue's Law predicted, things unfolded.

They fired their cannons in the morning, were caught by the Divine Tree at noon, and by the afternoon, their home planet's coordinates had been located and they were found by the Apostles' retinue.

Upon receiving the message, the native civilization above Hell immediately made thorough preparations, essentially gathering the vast majority of its forces to prepare for a desperate war.

Then, in just 7 minutes, the entire army of the Hellish Civilization was wiped out.

This was not a war at all; it was a one-sided massacre.

However, the pre-hell civilization did not come away empty-handed; in their most critical moment, they gained an unexpected power called "Authority."

They embarked on the bloodiest experiment, searching for "fit individuals" to suit all sorts of authority. After a long period of modification and adaptation, they created a group of beings who were nearly invincible on their home planet.

Its name is, the artificial god!

The Petrifying Demon was one of the first generation of adaptors. It claimed that it had a human name, but had forgotten it, and from then on, it would only be called the Petrifying Demon.

The story continues within the stone tablet.

The artificial gods engaged in a fierce battle with the invading apostles' retinue. Because the artificial gods' power was authority, each one of them was a humanoid catastrophe on their home planet. Gradually, the artificial gods suppressed the apostles' retinue and even launched a counterattack to reclaim lost territory.

Even during the war, the artificial gods discovered that they were almost immortal. For example, the petrifying demon controlled an authority called "petrification," which allowed it to transfer souls in any area it petrified.

That is, as long as there are individuals in the world that he has petrified, he will be immortal.

Similarly, the one who controls the hurricane, as long as wind exists in the world, even if it is killed countless times, will be resurrected by the wind and return to continue fighting to the death with the apostle's retinue.

After a long period of fighting, the Apostle's retinue seemed to think that this world was really meaningless.

Like a rock in a toilet, smelly and hard, so they gave up on this world. There was no way to deal with a group of immortal monsters that were attacking them relentlessly. Basically, as long as they were on their home planet, there was no way to deal with them. The only way was to destroy the world directly from outside the world.

But the apostles came to harvest people, not to destroy the world for fun.

So after harvesting a group of people, they left and stopped fighting the artificial gods.

The artificial gods and native humans triumphed, albeit at an extremely heavy cost. The war against the apostles reduced their population to only one-tenth of its original size, halted their technology and magic, and left the world devastated, with most areas becoming barren wastelands.

But they still won.

Up to this point, things were still normal; it was a story of a civilized, man-made god uniting to defeat the invaders and achieving victory.

Then, things started to go crazy.

The artificial gods immediately broke out into a civil war. In the long period of death and war, these beings, who had become one with power, seemed to have long forgotten their memories of their human days, as if they had been infected with some kind of nihilism.

These humanoid concept cataclysms began a civil war, and after the first artificial god, who ruled over several human cities, discovered that he could gain power from humans, all the artificial gods began to fight amongst themselves.

They plundered people, seized cities, and then became entangled in a power struggle, killing each other and creating other gods.

The entire world descended into complete chaos. The war between artificial gods became even more bloody and brutal than when they had once repelled the apostles. They even discovered that killing anything related to the other's "concept" could weaken other artificial gods, which made them even more unscrupulous and cruel.

For example, there is an artificial god whose authority is "explosion," but all man-made explosives in the world are destroyed by other artificial gods, and all people who can make gunpowder, even scientists, are killed directly by other artificial gods following their thinking.

In just a few years, the power of the artificial god will be weakened to the point of being nothing more than a roadside stall.

Once this was discovered, an even more brutal war ensued. They no longer tried to kill each other, but rather to eradicate the concept of the enemy from its very roots.

As a result, more and more beings related to the concept of artificial gods were erased. Once the first one to erase the concept of others existed among the artificial gods, it was like opening Pandora's box, until an artificial god died completely or the whole world was destroyed.

……

Xue Dinglu took a deep breath; he understood everything by now.

Artificial gods are the precursors to demons.

The so-called demons were originally artificial gods who protected civilization. When facing the apostles, they were always the first to charge forward, using their souls and bodies, which had been arbitrarily modified to adapt to authority, to fight against the apostles' followers.

They were immortal and indestructible, dying and restarting countless times, fighting until even the apostles abandoned this planet...

Until they killed until they forgot their human memories, forgot their humanity, forgot their original intentions, and finally became madmen who fought only for the sake of fighting...

They utterly degenerated and became demons...

This is the power of authority. Will this be the outcome if humans wield this authority?

Xue's Law didn't know, but the original form of these demons was a group of children who fought desperately against the invaders for the future of humanity.

Until they became a complete catastrophe for the world, killing the humans who ruled by the other in order to eliminate other created gods, killing everything connected to the other concept, weakening the authority of others, and even devouring the authority of others...

At this point, they were no longer man-made gods, but utter demons.

A demon who has completely lost his humanity!

This is the precursor to the demon.

Therefore, the demon's craving for human fear is merely a means to perpetuate its "concepts" and carry them out. Many demons, however, can maintain their concepts without human fear, such as the powers of volcanoes, lava, hurricanes, and the deep sea…

However, many forms of authority require the existence of a "concept" to be powerful, such as "machinery".

Therefore, the artificial gods who tried to kill each other's authority eventually experienced the disastrous consequences of the avalanche. After numerous wars, humanity was on the verge of extinction. Only then did these artificial gods, who had long since fallen into demonic ways, realize that something was wrong.

So they established a basic order to sustain the remaining population, but at this time there were still various factional struggles and power struggles.

After a period of peace, the war between demons broke out again. However, this time it was no longer a war between individual demons, but a war between demons from different factions and forces.

Even after all of humanity was wiped out, the demons continued their relentless battle. They were born to be weapons of war. In the end, humanity was not wiped out by the invasion of the apostles, but destroyed by the Pandora's Box that they themselves created and opened.

These twisted demons were once a group of warriors fighting for their own world...

Is this the price of using human nature to control the world?

Xue's Law, who has had extensive contact with the world's authorities, has a deep understanding of how powerful authority can be. But can authority really erode human nature in such an exaggerated way?

As the human being who has the most contact with the world's authorities, aren't I doing just fine now?

It's just that a small part of the emotions have been lost.

Xue Lu thought to himself, but after seeing this, he also felt a little threatened. Would losing his emotions really turn him into someone just like those demons?

His current situation is actually not much different from that of the artificial gods who were the predecessors of the demons, except that he returns the power after each use, instead of constantly occupying the power.

Seeing the fate of those demons and artificial gods, Xue Dinglu couldn't help but think of himself.

A group of noble warriors who fought to resist foreign enemies and never died, but in the endless cycle of death, slaughter and reincarnation, they forgot their original intentions, forgot their humanity, forgot everything about themselves, forgot their original purpose, and completely degenerated into demons.

The last human was killed by the petrifying demon in this underground human city. This place was originally the territory ruled by "death," but the death demon destroyed the petrifying demon faction's city, and then it came and killed the last human under the protection of the death demon.

Only after humanity was wiped out did the petrifying demons realize what they had done.

Perhaps they rediscovered a sliver of humanity in the end, or perhaps they finally realized before their death just how foolish the demons had been.

So after leaving this record here, believing that the carrier of the inner concept had disappeared, and after recording the story of these fools, the petrifying demon was petrified here and gradually died.

Upon seeing this, Xue Dinglu fell silent.

Why Hell was captured by Green Star is perhaps an answer only Margaret knows, but now, Xue's Law at least knows the origin of demons.

A world invaded by the apostles, where even the world's consciousness may be shattered, only after the world's consciousness is shattered does it decide to hand over its authority and power to humanity for a final, desperate struggle.

Thus, an immortal, artificial god was born, as well as the terrifying, utterly twisted demon that would later emerge.

The demon is the conceptual embodiment of world authority.

Therefore, after capturing this world, Margaret immediately thought of devouring the authority and mass of another planet to strengthen herself.

But whether Margaret was corrupted by the concept of the devil or it was her true nature, in the end, she became just like those fallen artificial gods, a complete devil.

Perhaps Margaret could also be called the "Devil of the World"?

Xue Lu thought to himself, silently taking the petrified demon's stone tablet back into his consciousness space. Similarly, he found most of the texts in the city, art, design, and even the pictorial traces that seemed to be still in class on the petrified walls...

He photographed all of these with his phone; this is the last record of this civilization.

It took Xue Dinglu almost a whole day to collect all of this information until his phone gave him a message that it was running out of memory.

Xue Dinglu checked and found that the photo recording had used up 59 GB of memory.

This 59GB of memory represents the final size of this civilization.

Chapter 364 The End of the Demon, Xue's Law's Critical Illness Notice

Xue's Law continued to search for information left behind by this civilization.

Whether it was books, paintings, texts, or the information terminals of their civilization, everything had turned into petrified products. In particular, among those books, only the covers could be barely unearthed with a small amount of text; the paper inside had completely turned into stone.

The 59GB in my hand is the last bit of information and civilization that can be left behind in this petrified city.

Finally, Xue silently sealed the petrified city, imprisoned by demonic power, inside the cave. Even the great shift of the mantle pulled by gravity failed to cause it to collapse. Perhaps this was the last piece of information about a pre-civilization he could find.

However, just as Xue Daolu cleaved out the cross-shaped teleportation portal and was about to leave, in an instant, the entire hollowed-out mountain cave behind him completely collapsed, debris flew everywhere, and the shockwave blew the stray hairs off Xue Daolu's forehead. The sand and dust behind him seemed to be dancing wildly.

The flying pebbles grazed Xue Dinglu's cheek, leaving a small mark.

He silently watched the dust billowing up behind him, like a mushroom cloud rising into the sky.

He didn't know if his entry had disrupted the balance of demonic power, or if the ruins imprisoned by the petrified demons had simply collapsed by chance.

But looking at the traces of civilization behind me, for some reason, a feeling of sadness welled up inside me.

Overwhelmed by this rare emotion, Xue Dinglu slowly closed his eyes and carefully put away the last 59G of photos he had kept.

The search continued throughout Hell, but no further information came in. It was likely that there were no more relics of the previous civilization, since demons continued to live in this world for thousands of years after the previous civilization was wiped out.

Thousands of years is enough for humanity to evolve from a primitive age of eating raw meat and drinking blood to an information age of flying into outer space, and it is also enough for these restless demons to completely bury everything.

These demons, once artificial gods of a hellish civilization, are now desperately plundering humans from other planets, simply to ensure their own existence.

They even erased their own information, civilization, culture, customs, and art, becoming like a pure, inherently evil monster, acting solely for the purpose of abducting other people.

Xue's Law finally sighed and stopped searching in hell.

The roots of the divine tree have spread across this planet, which is not much larger than the moon. Its surface area is only about the size of the Eurasian continent. In just over a day, Xue's Law and the divine tree have explored the entire planet.