The story begins countless eras ago.
The Immortal World was flourishing. It was a time of great prosperity and endless growth across the vast universe. It was at this time that the Timeless Demon God started gaining fame, though his shadow had not yet reached every corner of existence.
In a nameless dimension, a vast clan existed.
Lin Clan.
To the ordinary people of this dimension, the Lin Clan was incredibly powerful. They watched over countless small worlds, guiding their development and protecting them from everyday threats.
However, the universe is vast. Even though the Lin Clan was a very large clan in their own dimension, they were just ants when compared to the large Heaven of Balance and the true powerhouses of the cosmos.
This day started like any other. The clan members were practicing their abilities, trading resources, and teaching the younger generation how to use the basic laws of space and energy.
But, without any warning, the dimension itself was torn open.
A massive army of Devils passed through this dimension. They were not an organized military looking to conquer territory, nor were they searching for ancient treasures. They were simply a migrating swarm, moving from one side of the universe to the other.
Wherever they passed, only destruction, massacres, wailing cries of the victims, and rivers of blood were left.
The Devils swarmed without any fear, without any obstruction. They were driven entirely by a base, overwhelming hunger. When they saw the small worlds protected by the Lin Clan, and the rich energy of the clan members themselves, the Devils simply descended to eat.
When the invasion began, panic naturally spread. The clan leader, an older man named Lin Zong, immediately stepped forward to the front lines. He was the strongest in the clan.
Seeing millions of giant, monstrous Devils pouring from the crack in the sky, Lin Zong knew they could not win a direct physical fight. He needed to trap them.
Using advanced spatial teleportation, he focused all his energy on the area where the Devils were the thickest. He grabbed hold of the space around the front line of the Devil army and forcefully cut it out from the dimension, attempting to lock them away in a completely isolated cube of space and pushing that cube deep into another dimension.
For a brief second, it seemed to work. A massive portion of the Devil army disappeared, locked in the spatial trap. The remaining Lin Clan warriors cheered, drawing their weapons to fight the stragglers.
But their hope was immediately shattered.
The Devils possessed powers based on pure, destructive concepts. A Devil commander, a towering creature with dark gray skin, simply looked at the invisible spatial walls trapping him. He opened his massive mouth and used the concept of gluttony.
He literally ate the space itself.
The Lin Clan watched in horror as the empty air shattered like glass between the Devil commander's teeth. He chewed through the spatial boundary with brute force. The moment the boundary broke, the commander appeared directly behind Lin Zong.
Lin Zong sensed the danger instantly. He tried to use his spatial teleportation to jump a thousand miles away, but before his body could even begin to shift through space, the Devil commander reached out with his hand, grabbed Lin Zong's head, and simply squeezed.
The clan leader's protective barriers broke instantly. The Devil crushed his head and ate it in one bite. Lin Zong died bravely, standing at the very front to protect his people, but his strength was meaningless against such a monster.
Nearby, an elder named Lin Yue saw the clan leader fall. She commanded the younger clan members to evacuate while she held the line. Lin Yue specialized in the concept of reflection. She flew into the sky and spread her arms wide, creating a massive, invisible mirror over the retreating clan members.
The Devils below looked up and launched thousands of attacks. Some shot beams of concentrated heat, others threw massive boulders, and some fired blasts of pure force. As the attacks hit Lin Yue's shield, the concept of reflection activated.
The attacks were instantly sent right back at the Devils with the exact same power. Hundreds of Devils were killed by their own attacks, their bodies blown apart by the reflected energy.
For a moment, Lin Yue held back an entire section of the army. She pushed her energy to the absolute limit, bleeding from her eyes and ears to keep the reflection active. She was buying precious seconds for the children to escape.
However, the Devil commander who had killed Lin Zong noticed her. He simply jumped into the air, punched the invisible shield, and began to devour it. The Devils' sheer brute strength and hunger were too overwhelming for a simple reflection. The commander's attack devoured the very concept of reflection she had summoned.
Because Lin Yue was directly connected to that concept, the destruction traveled back through her energy. The backlash was instantaneous. Lin Yue's body shattered into thousands of pieces, scattering like ash in the wind. The Devils below opened their mouths and eagerly consumed the pieces of her body as they fell from the sky.
The bravery of the Lin Clan was immense, but it was useless. Warriors used teleportation to appear right next to the Devils, detonating their own energy cores in suicidal explosions just to injure a single enemy. Others tried to use concepts of weight to crush the Devils, or concepts of fire to burn them, but the Devils simply ate the fire and absorbed the impact.
The gap in power was absolute.
In the inner courtyard of the clan's main castle, a young couple realized that the evacuation routes had been destroyed. The Devils were already inside the compound. The couple, Lin Chen and Mu Lan, looked at their young son. They knew there was no escape. They could not fight their way out, and they could not outrun creatures that could teleport across the dimension in a second.
Seeing that fighting to win was impossible, they decided to fight just to hide their child. They placed their young son in a small ditch beneath the heavy stone pillars of a collapsed castle hall. Then, Lin Chen and Mu Lan stood above the debris and used all their remaining energy to cast a desperate technique.
They used their energy to completely erase their young son's presence from the surrounding area. They removed his scent, his body heat, the sound of his heartbeat, and his very connection to the physical world, ensuring the Devils couldn't see or sense him.
Doing this required total concentration. While they were erasing his presence, a group of Devils broke into the courtyard. Lin Chen and Mu Lan did not stop their technique. They used their own physical bodies to block the Devils' path.
A Devil grabbed Lin Chen's arm and ripped it off. Lin Chen did not scream; he just kept pouring his energy into the concealment technique. Another Devil bit into Mu Lan's shoulder, tearing away a chunk of her flesh. She just looked down at the rubble where her son was hiding, making sure the technique was perfect.
The boy hid under the heavy debris of the collapsed castle. Because the technique was complete, the Devils did not notice him. But he was forced to watch as the Devils tore his parents apart. He watched his father and mother get eaten alive, their blood dripping down into the rubble just inches from his face. They died so he could live, never once breaking their focus even as they were consumed.
The entire Lin Clan was massacred because the Devil Race passed by this area and they were hungry. Despite their bravery, their sacrifices, and their mastery over space and concepts, they were wiped out. The Devils cannibalized most of them, leaving nothing but ruined buildings and blood-stained earth.
A few days later.
The Devil army had mostly moved on, leaving only a few stragglers behind to pick through the ruins. The nameless dimension was completely silent.
In the center of the ruined clan, a very ordinary, yet completely unordinary man appeared. He was the person who had died in the hands of the Devils during the very first wave of the attack. But he wasn't consumed. Maybe because of the disgust the Devil felt looking at his dead body, or maybe because his body lacked any nutritional energy to them, the Devil didn't even try consuming him. He had just been left on the ground.
Now, he slowly stood up. He dusted off his clothes. His eyes seemed to see through everything in the universe as he calmly looked around the destroyed clan. He walked slowly through the broken stones, his face showing no emotion.
He casually waved his hand in a direction. Instantly, a massive pile of large debris, which had collapsed from the main castle, simply disappeared.
Beneath where the debris had been, the young boy was curled up in a ball. The man casually walked towards the boy, who looked up at him with wide, terrified eyes.
The boy recognized him. He glanced at his uncle. "Uncle, I..."
He couldn't speak anymore. The shock, the terror, and the sheer grief finally overtook him, and a loud cry of agony escaped his mouth. He had watched with his very own eyes how those devils had killed and eaten his father and mother. Yet all he could do was hide in this dark debris, completely powerless, and wait for them to leave in order to survive. He felt overwhelming guilt and sadness.
The man didn't speak. He did not offer words of comfort, nor did he try to calm the boy down.
His gaze simply moved forward. He looked at the Devil Commander who had appeared in the courtyard after hearing the boy's loud cry.
The Devil Commander bared it's fangs and immediately cloned itself into three Devils, each bearing equal battle strength as it possessed.
They looked at the man and the child. They felt no fear, only a deep killing intent. Without hesitation, they instantly launched a coordinated attack.
The man calmly glanced at the devils.
The moment the devils attacked, the rules of the physical world bent into impossible paradoxes.
The first devil successfully used his power to freeze the space around the man, trying to lock him perfectly in place. But a paradox of absolute stillness took hold. To enforce zero movement on the space around the man, all the kinetic energy in that area had to go somewhere. The devil became the anchor for his own trap. The harder he locked the man's space into perfect stillness, the more his own body was forced to absorb the displaced movement. The absolute stillness around the man forced absolute, violent motion into the devil, vibrating his physical form so fast that he instantly shattered into a mist of blood.
The second devil sent out a wave of rotting energy to decay the man's body. But as the energy rushed forward, it encountered a paradox of distance. In this distorted reality, moving away from the source was the exact same as moving toward it. As the rotting energy poured out of the devil's hands toward the man, it simultaneously rushed backward into its creator. The stronger the devil pushed the decay outward, the faster it eroded his own body from the inside out, turning his organs and skin into a pile of gray ash before the attack even reached the man.
The third devil successfully thrust his blade directly at the back of the man's neck. But the man's presence had twisted the geometry of the area into a paradoxical loop, like a ring with only one side. The devil thrust the blade forward, but in this folded space, moving perfectly forward brought the blade right back to where it started. The harder the devil pushed the weapon forward toward the man, the deeper he plunged the blade into the back of his own neck.
The only thing that remained in the hearts of the dying devils was horror and intense confusion. The three clones merged back into one, as he recognized what this specific power was. Only a slight murmur escaped his quivering lips as it closed it's eyes for eternity!
"A-v-enu-e of Pa-ra-dox!"
"You a-re the An-gel of Wis-dom!"