The Primordial Record

Merging with Kohron did not bring Tenma the expected sweetness of peace and victory but a life of endless battle.

A Demon was an entity of anarchy, and a Demon Prince magnified this trait by a million times. Kohron was the Prince of Strife, his essence craved disorder, for without it, he would wither away. His soul might not be present, but his body was an extension of his soul, and this was the body that Tenma had possessed.

Tenma was just a High god, powerful when placed on a galactic scale, even a power to watch out for when placed against a universal scale, but the heights that a Demon Prince stood at meant he could as well be an ant before a mountain.

The body of Kohron in this universe was just one of many places in many different universes where the dominion of the Great Abyss held sway. Their bodies and essence were nothing that a god could conceptualize.

Without the aid of Rowan in breaking the mind of the Demon Prince, Tenma would not have been able to possess the body of Kohron, he had spent centuries before the merger was complete, and through all that time he had to battle with such primal essence that he had repeatedly gone mad, only the firm container he was stuck in with the Demon gave him the chance to succeed.

Every time he failed, he lingered and healed, drawing from the experience of living for millions of years and pushing through all the tribulations that had felled both gods and men, and eventually overcoming them.

The ordeal before him was brutal, anyone else would have begged for a release. A god was not meant to inhabit the body of a Demon Prince, the sheer madness of that concept was absolute.

Tenma would not have it any other way. The greatest of wins came from the most difficult undertakings.

He looked down at his massive body as the black waters of the Primordial Sea ran down his frame, the coldness of this sea embracing him as one of their own and he clutched his left hand, missing the grip of his familiar weapon, but it was okay, he had so many new toys to play with.

Tenma allowed the power from Eva to fill him until it almost felt as if he was about to burst and more kept coming, there was not just power here but essence from a million planets and a hundred and fifty billion demons, including Demon Princes.

Even with the body of Kohron, there was no way he could have handled all this power, but he was not a Demon Prince, the time spent in Rowan's dimension had enabled the possibilities of certain upgrades that necessitated his advancement to a special class that Eva had termed… Reaper.

Tenma grinned and began channeling all the power to the seventy-two gates in his body.

The eyes in his spine began to close. Each eye on his back came from an Angel, a dead angel. These eyes were gates.

As it turned out, merging with the Shell of a Demon Prince as a god was an astounding feat, but Tenma was left helpless, all his attention was spent battling against the essence of Kohron and he could not move a single finger.

If he had been able to conquer the mind and soul of Kohron then he would have been able to have the capabilities to control this body, but that was a task that was too complex for his fragile mind. He was like an ant placed inside the body of a man, no matter how hard he tried, utilizing the body of Kohron was beyond him.

Rowan also realized this problem and saw no promise in this experiment and placed him aside, but Tenma never stopped fighting, his stubbornness had pushed him beyond his station countless times in the past, and he would not stop until he made a breakthrough.

He failed many times, until everything changed when Rowan began to create his Forge and met Caine.

The battle against that entity for the first time led to the death of Angels, not one Angel, but thousands. Their Celestial Suns were snuffed out and they lied broken.

Tenma learned something that day when observing Angels after that battle—They did not mourn their dead.

The bodies of the Angels were treated with respect, but they were left to lie where their bodies had fallen. To them this was an honor, in death, their bodies shall guard the grounds they had defended.

Tenma had been experimenting with demonic spells for a long time, and although he could not truly control the body of Kohron, it granted him a high infinite amount of demonic essence and the ability to easily comprehend and extrapolate new demonic spells.

In the battle against Rowan, he had used a unique spell that had summoned True Demons from the Abyss, and this was the reason Rowan had seen promise in Tenma. With enough time on his hands and with the talent of a Demon Prince body, he had explored deeper into this power and it had borne fruit, giving him a direction to evolve past his limitations.

A flustered Tenma had contacted the Lady of Shadow and informed her of his new spell, but for it to work he needed something special, the bodies of Angels.

The Lady of Shadow had listened to him and the surprised Tenma was amazed that she did not only accede to his request, she aided him by giving further assistance by granting him limited access to Knowledge Well.

Tenma was blown away by how much his processing capabilities increased, and he refined the spell to such an extent that from the pathetic three gates he previously planned, it ballooned to the impressive seventy-two gates.

These gates were so balanced it could accept more Celestial bodies and expand its power base, and so it was that Tenma was given the privilege to be the container of all the bodies of every fallen Celestial.

This was the first part of this spell. The second part of this spell was the ability for Tenma to link to the dimension of the Great Abyss where he could summon and control an army of True Demons.

"My gates are opened, and my hands are filled with weapons. Point me to the war Lady of Shadows."

The next waves of Demons did not enter through a million vortices, but from ten million, and this time they did not hide.

Eva may have butchered billions of them a moment before, but those had just been bred in the last six hundred million years, the demonic presence had been inside this universe for six billion. This was enough time to create horrors that could end existence many times over.

It was useless to count their number, as they descended into the dimension without numbers,

"Open your gates, Slayer."

Tenma roared and the seventy-two eyes opened wide, releasing beams of black light that created massive portals in the air, and from those portals, an old man stepped forth, wearing a faded robe that seemed as if it was on the edge of fraying apart.

Behind him, similar-looking figures emerged, both male and female, until they numbered in the billions. Their eyes were red like flames and in the darkness created by the black fog of the Primordial Sea of Darkness, it was as if a billion burning lanterns were floating in the void.

The demons Tenma could control with his gates were called Akashic Trell. In the Great Abyss, their entire race had been exterminated, because of all demons, they were the only ones whose primary sustenance was feeding on demonic energy.

Tenma was called the Reaper because the Lady of Shadows gave him the life goal to end the Great Abyss for their Lord.