POV: Haruki
My deal with Lord Agares had been useful. A simple agreement that guaranteed me both protection and political value. Awakening an ability to use light, an ability that only the founder of our race once possessed, translated immediately into currency of belief and into a practical instrument of power. To others, light is a signal. To devils who have been taught for millennia that their origin bears a singular, sacred violence, the return of that light reads as a possible restoration of the original order.
That perception is an asset I do not squander. It buys attention. It buys invitations. It buys the willingness of fearful nobles to listen, and the willingness of the dispossessed to imagine themselves as participants in a new story. It is not mysticism that concerns me, but leverage, and the world is full of people who will trade their fear for an apparent answer.
I have been studying devil society piece by piece. I wanted to understand how something with this much raw potential could end up so fractured. They possess demonic energy that allows them to turn imagination into reality. In theory, that should allow them to create a nearly perfect structure. With such power, one would expect an advanced civilization with efficient systems, balanced distribution, and innovation. Instead, what exists is a stagnant aristocracy clinging to inherited privilege and a population too conditioned to resist.
If one strips the mythology away, the underworld is a polity whose institutions and psychology were formed by a single directive and then left without coherence when the directive vanished. The devils were created by Lucifer for a clear purpose. They were given a directive. Wage war against Heaven. An entire race molded around conflict, obedience to a singular cause, and a belief that destruction was their function. The purpose was explicit and the structure that supported it was explicit.
Then Lucifer died. The Great War ended without victory. The core purpose of their existence vanished. Being born into a world where your reason to exist was handed to you only for that reason to be erased within a few generations creates a psychological void. That is the void devils have been living with for a thousand years. A species defined by war forced to exist in peace without ideological replacement. It left them directionless.
The result was not merely loss but a persistent absence that every generation thereafter had to manage by improvisation. Purpose organizes expectation and distributes honor and blame. When it disappears it leaves gaps that are filled by habit, by myth, and by those who seize the rhetorical high ground.
The descendants of the original Satans attempted to fill that vacuum by claiming inheritance of authority. At first their claim had force, for legitimacy can be manufactured by performance and repetition. They were revered by the population. They spoke of continuing the legacy and of preparing for another confrontation with Heaven.
Over centuries, however, the population diminished through internecine conflict and attrition. The cost of maintaining an autonomous, martial caste exceeded available means because reproduction and replenishment no longer followed previous rhythms. The casualties from the Great War had been immense. The devils did not have the manpower to wage another full-scale conflict, let alone the will. This ideological conflict between a purpose-driven war identity and the exhaustion of a species was the first fracture. The crisis of numbers introduced an anxiety that runs through every institution of the underworld. Scarcity of bodies. Scarcity of heirs. Scarcity of those willing to risk all for a cause that now demands self-sacrifice without a clear promise of redemption.
That anxiety fed political conflict. In the background, noble houses like Bael and Agares began maneuvering. They did not want another war. They wanted to secure their own power. They cloaked it under the language of preservation and responsibility, but their goal was to supplant the authority of the old Satan descendants while keeping the population compliant. Eventually, a civil conflict began when interior factions concluded that power could be taken rather than inherited. The result was the rise of the current Satans. Sirzechs, Ajuka, Falbium, and Serafall.
The old elites were displaced after the civil conflict. The new Satans constructed a governance architecture that pretended to resolve competing claims by formal separation of power. An executive dominated by the new Satans. A legislative body held by pillar houses and nobles. A judicial body composed of older, supposedly neutral devils. The arrangement was deliberate and designed to produce stability by distributing authority. In practice it produced frozen conflict, for the institutions were grafted onto a culture that did not accept legal arbitration as the final arbiter of status. Too many actors remained convinced that force remained the ultimate language, and their investments in that conviction were too great for statutes to extinguish.
Politics then divided between two broad tendencies that will not appear in any official charter but which determine outcomes with greater force than any law. One set of actors, the conservatives, preserved the language of original purpose and hierarchy. They saw rights as accommodations offered at the discretion of the powerful and held that deviation from that doctrine threatened fragile order. They still romanticize the old era.
The other set, those who styled themselves reformists, argued for practical reforms. Legal recognition of the reincarnated. Limited extension of protections to lower strata. Cautious cooperation with external factions. Measured openings to human resource networks. The latter position is difficult to maintain in a polity formed by elite longevity and conditioned obedience. Long life produces entrenchment. Those whose memory spans centuries see novelty as peril.
The devil lifespan makes reform even slower. A being that can live up to ten thousand years does not feel urgency. When change occurs, it is measured in centuries. The old doctrines of Lucifer still echo. The belief that devils are creatures of corruption and conflict still shapes their identity. The idea of power as the only metric of worth dominates every interaction. In such a mindset, concepts like equality or rights for the weak are not just resisted. They are considered unnatural.
The technical innovation that upset the demographic equation only complicated political alignments. The evil pieces, engineered through Agares crystals and insulated research, permitted the biological and metaphysical reincarnation of non-devil beings into devil hosts. On paper the device solved a demographic problem, for the new bodies could be animated under devil law, replenishing numbers. In practice the device created a new subordinate class.
Reincarnated devils are legally property when first created, and despite speeches and promises of the new Satans they lack the cultural recognition of purity that still defines status. The conservative houses brand them as synthetic, a contamination of lineage, and they use that stigma to deny rights and to cement labor markets that depend on disposability. Clerks and servants. Soldiers in the lower registers. Transported in their thousands into an underclass that carries a devilish physiognomy but no political weight. The result is a demographic bulge of persons who are both essential for the functioning of the underworld and excluded from its moral economy.
Economic disparity exacerbates the political fracture. Wealth and the resources that follow from it concentrate in the hands of the high class and the pillar houses whose territories include the human world and its markets. Wherever power can be monetized, it is monetized with little restraint. Teleportation and long-distance movement of goods and people require enormous expenditures of demonic energy, and the costs put the human world beyond reach to all but the well-endowed. The underclass, deprived of access to those channels, cannot compete for resources. They lack the energy and lack the institutional patronage that secures safe passage. And even if they reach it, other factions control territories there. Exorcists. Yokai factions. Various supernatural authorities would view rogue devils as threats. The Underworld is a closed basin. They are trapped by their own structure and by external hostility.
A handful of houses enjoy the returns of human trade while most of the race scrapes along within the underworld, subject to the casual violence of functionaries whose status imagines itself permanent.
The high-class nobles live in luxury that seems detached from reality. The lower classes exist in poverty that contradicts the supposed magical prosperity of this world. Even in modern times, the divide persists. The lower-class devils cannot rise because power determines status, and power in devil society is hereditary. A high-class devil can erase entire districts without consequence. With that level of asymmetry, rebellion becomes unthinkable. Centuries of conditioning have stripped the lower classes of ambition. They have internalized their helplessness.
This structural inequality is not merely material. It is symbolic and psychological. Devils are told across epochs that their identity entails supremacy and that power is the only legitimate metric of worth. That doctrine persuades elites and corrupted peasantry alike that the gap is natural rather than constructed. It lends rhetorical force to the conservative argument that reforms are unnatural and dangerous. It also breeds the resentment that becomes raw material for movements. Long-lived creatures adapt to hierarchy and then ossify, and the weaker come to accept a narrative of their own disposability. Acceptance is brittle. When an institution or a signal interrupts the narrative, acceptance fractures into rage.
The grating friction between old elites in hiding and the new government produces persistent sabotage that takes many forms. Rumor campaigns. Covert alliances with external factions. Legal obstruction. Targeted violence. The old elites have not disappeared. They have reformed their networks into clandestine mechanisms that strike at the legitimacy of the reforms whenever opportunity presents. Propaganda amplifies grievances and redefines rights as privileges to be revoked for the common good. In that climate trust is scarce and every reform becomes a test for power.
It resembles what happened in Germany after the First World War. The Weimar Republic tried to establish liberal governance over a population that still longed for the imperial authority they had lost. The old elites bided their time, weaponized societal discontent, and eventually facilitated the rise of a new regime. The Underworld stands in a similar position. On the surface, they have a government, diplomacy, trade, and celebrations. Beneath that, there is tension between old and new factions, a segregated population, discontent among lower classes, and a lack of unified identity. Psychologically, they are a race still trying to answer a question left behind by Lucifer's death. What are devils meant to be without war.
These conditions have predictable outcomes if left unchecked. First, a broad mass of disaffection accumulates among the reincarnated and lower classes, who see in their exclusion a moral crime and in their disposability a political grievance. Second, the conservative narrative will harden into a doctrine that demands a return to a defined past, offering the promise of restored honor in exchange for renewed obedience. Third, the institutional paralysis of the new government will encourage extralegal solutions. Private armies. Cults of personality. Protective patronage networks will proliferate.
All of these dynamics create an opportunity for a single figure who can perform two functions simultaneously. Embody legitimacy and translate grievance into directed action. Here is where my possession of the light matters. The idea of Lucifer revived functions as a mythic peg for many who feel humiliation and hunger, and cults already exist that will welcome an answer that appears to reconcile authority and renewal. If a claimant can plausibly claim the restoration of the founding principle while also promising tangible redress for the reincarnated and the poor, that claimant will attract both those who desire old order and those who desire relief. That coalition is unstable. Its coherence depends on the claimant's ability to maintain control over narrative and to neutralize the institutional checks that might prevent the consolidation of power.
The risks are numerous. A movement founded on myth can quickly radicalize because myth demands completeness and does not tolerate ambiguity. Allies of convenience can become enemies once purposed, and instruments raised for revolution can be turned into tools of a new hierarchy. The old elites are not neutral. They will attempt to reinsert themselves into the resulting order either by cooptation or by sabotage. External factions, frightened by the prospect of a charismatic restoration, will intervene diplomatically or covertly, making the terrain far more dangerous. And finally, the very fact of my perceived legitimacy makes me a target for the scorched-earth tactics of those who prefer extinction to surrender.
These are not abstract concerns. The structure of the underworld, the psychology of its long lives, the systemic inequality, and the existence of a dispossessed but numerically significant reincarnated class compose a field of forces that can produce either slow, legal reform or sudden, violent transformation. Both outcomes are possible and both would reshape the polity in ways that are irreversible. My advantage is that I can see the seams. My danger is that seeing the seams commits me to action rather than passive observation. I prefer action. I do not believe in salvation from above. I believe in leverage. I believe in narrative. I believe in the hard arithmetic of choices. Those who will follow me must be given a purpose that satisfies their hunger for dignity while also being disciplined enough to avoid turning the revolution into another hierarchy of extraction.
The Weimar Republic fell because the people lost faith in a system that promised change but delivered compromise. The French Revolution erupted when the lower classes could no longer tolerate a system designed to exploit them yet lacked immediate means to overturn it, leading to sudden, violent upheaval once the structure weakened enough. The Underworld matches both patterns. It has the stagnant aristocracy of pre-revolutionary France and the ideological vacuum of interwar Germany. It only needs a catalyst and a figure capable of harnessing discontent, uniting fragmented resentment under a singular direction.
That is the strategic fact. The moral question is a different one, and I do not pretend to be indifferent to it. I know the cost of dismantling a system and I know the cost of letting it ossify. I also know that history will refuse to be polite about which price it extracts. I will use the light I possess not as a miracle but as an instrument of persuasion, and I will thread between the aspirations of the dispossessed and the fears of the powerful until a new equilibrium is possible. If the experiment succeeds, the underworld will be altered in its fundamentals. If it fails, the consequences will be ruinous.
I find it almost amusing. The new Satans strive for peace but maintain the structures that guarantee future conflict. The old elites wait in hiding. The lower classes wait without hope. The reincarnated devils simmer with resentment but have no voice. All of them are held together by inertia. They are ripe for manipulation by someone who understands their psychology and speaks in the language they are conditioned to respond to. Power. Destiny. Identity.
My alignment with Lord Agares gives me entry into the political field. My ability to wield light makes me a symbol of anomaly and potential. I can move between factions without being immediately categorized. I possess enough distance from their history to speak without loyalty to any of their myths. A revolution does not need righteous ideals. It needs pressure points. It needs symbols. It needs control of narrative. And devils, for all their power, are still creatures defined by belief.
AN: Another chapter is here. This one is a bit different from my usual style, there's no dialogue at all. It's more of a cold, almost analytical breakdown of the Underworld's structure and function. I know it might come across as dry or "too scientific" compared to the character-focused chapters, but I felt it was important to show how Haruki thinks and how the Underworld actually operates.