Prologue
The boy stared up at the sky, his hands red with blood. His father’s blood. He cried and cried as he watched life slowly drain from his father’s pale face.
“Please save my father.”
He prayed to the sky. To the trees. To the wind. To all the Gods and Goddesses he had read about in his books. He had begged the humans first and they ignored him. Now he begged the deities.
When life finally left his father’s gaze and the soul emptied, he learned that the deities ignored him too.
The boy stopped crying then.
The Count of Monte Cristo was his favorite book as a child. He took its words to heart. And so, from the ashes of his grief, the boy made his decision. If both humans and Gods had turned their backs on him, he would go somewhere darker. To the pit where power had no moral obligation. Where justice didn’t wait for permission.
Fifteen years later, just like the Count reborn, the time had come.
For wrongs to be made right. It took him a while to get here. But here he was. And the battle had finally begun.
For fifteen years, the boy had lived with a raging war inside him. He had auctioned his soul to the highest bidder.
The nobles. The Gods. The half-Gods.
None of them came for him. Only the devil came — uninvited, but summoned by his desperate plea for justice, drawn out by the raging anger inside his tainted heart.
The devil smiled from above, his fangs bared in full display. The devil was a vile creature, one that would never stop crushing him until he was nothing but bitter dust — payment for the bargain he made.
But since the devil was his only bidder, he sold him his soul.
