Underworld
Five Days Before Grim Reaper Disciple Tournament
“Leonora! Come out!” Asmodea banged the door angrily.
She couldn’t believe she, the 14th ranked Grim Reaper, had become a nanny to her lazy disciple.
If it was anyone else, Asmodea would’ve whipped and ordered them to take their job seriously.
But she couldn’t do that with Leonora.
Why?
Because Leonora was too competent!
Recently, she was the 1st ranked on the scoreboard of Grim Reaper disciples for the maximum amount of escaped souls caught.
She was lazy, but competent!
“Open the door, Leonora! Or I’m going to smash it open–”
The door creaked open. Asmodea lowered her gaze, and saw a cat standing on two legs opening the door.
“Where is she?” Asmodea asked.
“M-Master is… sleeping.” Paw scratched her cheek, knowing what was about to happen.
“Why is she sleeping?”
“She was playing the VR games for weeks and got too tired.”
“What?”
Asmodea’s pupils shrunk to the size of needles.
“Weeks? What about her job? Don’t tell me she didn’t collect a single soul during the break.”
“Oh, you don’t need to worry about the work. She outsourced some other SoulKeepers, and paid them for work.”
For a moment, Asmodea couldn’t understand what Paw meant.
It took her time to remember that the Underworld had changed greatly.
The Underworld’s technological and societal advancements had reached the level of Luminera, if not higher.
The reason?
It all started when Leonora was bored.
Until five hundred years ago, a person could do only one of the five things in Underworld.
Catch souls, eat, live, sleep, become monster.
There was no entertainment.
There were no games or consoles in Underworld.
Leonora decided to make a console and a game.
But wait, what about the game’s storyline, who would make that? And where would the materials to build the console come from?
Leonora set out to find Soul Hunters who had a talent to become writers, and a talented forger to build a console.
The game took fifty years to be made.
It kept her entertained for… one week.
By then, she had completed all routes in the game several times.
“I need more games, but I can’t build them myself again, it takes too much time.”
After a quick brainstorming session, Leonora came to a conclusion.
“I need to make everyone like games. Then, many more game creators would come into existence as they try to profit from the games.”
Making games famous wasn’t hard.
For one, they gave an adrenaline rush to the people of Underworld who lived bored lives.
Secondly, she was a celebrity – a Grim Reaper disciple – and people followed her example and tried to do what she did.
As gaming became a famous entertainment industry, industrialization began.
Companies appeared. Stocks came into existence.
Soul Hunters, envying the life of characters in the games, built things they saw in them.
Pool, baseball, fashion, infrastructure.
As they copied the vibrant lifestyles in the games, colors seeped into the life of people of Underworld.
Five hundred years later, the Underworld had been revolutionized.
And Leonora?
She ruled it from the top since she had built everything. It allowed her to be… lazy.
She could get other Grim Reaper disciples to complete her tasks and pay them, she could order the ghost cities’ mayors to search for souls by using their radars.
Soul Hunters lined before her mansion for an appointment with her.
The Grim Reapers watched the revolution with amusement.
It wasn’t against the rules, and they found the changes brought by her to be interesting.
Best of all, the living as a soul hunter was no longer a bleak life.
“Leonora! Wake up!” Asmodea shouted. “You need to participate in the Grim Reaper disciple tournament!”
Leonora groaned and lifted her head from the bed.
Her hair was a mess.
“Do I need… to go…” she yawned. “I’m only Stage-2. All top-ranking Grim Reaper disciples are mostly Stage-3. My participation won’t do anything.”
Leonora was being honest.
After all, this was something she found after living in the underworld.
The ranks of Grim Reapers were distributed by strength and ‘seniority.’
While it was allowed to challenge high-rank Grim Reapers to take their position, not many Grim Reapers did that since it was seen as a rude behaviour.
Similarly, some of the Grim Reaper disciples were even stronger than their masters, but they did not become Grim Reapers, since they could not see their masters part from this world.
“Yes! You need to come! Many Grim Reapers want to meet you!”
Asmodea yanked her out of the bed and dragged her out of the room.
Paw sighed as she shook her head. She had told her lazy master she would need to go to the tournament, and she should prepare for it, but her master ignored her words.
In fact, Leonora was planning to surrender in the first round since she couldn’t be bothered to fight.
On the way to the tournament location, Asmodea asked Leonora.
“Why haven’t you broken to the next rank yet?”
“I’m facing a bottleneck.”
Asmodea’s eyelids twitched. “Leonora, all Grim Reaper disciples have a droplet of the Monarch in their blood. Thanks to it, they do not face any bottleneck – or gene limit, in your words. So stop giving excuses, and make a breakthrough after we return.”
After the two reached the tournament location, Asmodea dropped Leonora and went away to meet other Grim Reapers.
Leonora saw that quite a few Grim Reaper disciples were pointing at her.
Since she was the richest and the most famous person in the Underworld, she did not find that strange.
Nonetheless, no one approached Leonora.
They were all busy making final preparations for the tournament.
It was then, a woman with black hair and black eyes approached Leonora.
“Hi, I’m Nyx,” Nyx said.
Leonora talked with Nyx.
As it turned out, Nyx was from Luminera too.
She said she knew Jack and Neo, and had been trying to meet Neo since ages.
Unfortunately for her, whenever Neo appeared in Underworld, he would either leave quickly, or move around too much and it would make it hard to meet him, and this was six hundred years ago – the last time anyone saw Neo.
“Why did you want to meet Neo?” Leonora asked.
“Because he can leave Underworld without restrictions, and I want to talk to someone through him.”