Meanwhile, back at the Demon Lord’s castle...

Zenith’s eyes snapped open the moment she felt a familiar presence depart the castle with haste.

She calmly walked toward the heavy metal door of the prison she had been confined to as punishment for aiding a possible coalition spy.

After Elion had left, she had been forced to explain herself to her greedy father.

In the end, she had chosen to remain silent, but not without consequence. Her father’s commanders had demanded that she be executed immediately.

The more disgusting ones, like her brother, had suggested having her turned into a breeding bitch for the male commanders, which probably included his disgusting ass.

Fortunately for her, and perhaps even for them, her father, the Demon Lord Asmodeus, had decided to put off her judgment until later, after having one of his servants deliver hundreds of lashes to her back, of course.

Those who had been watching seemed to enjoy watching her face contort in pain every time the grated whip landed on her back.

If only they knew that it took her quite a bit of effort to fake the pain and distress.

The lacerations on her back had healed almost instantly after she was brought into this prison. And creating that same illusion of her broken body was as simple as snapping her fingers when she received the few visitors who liked to pretend to care for her.

Fooling these weaklings was as easy as breathing. If her father visited, however, then she might have been in trouble. Fortunately, she knew him well enough to know that he would do no such thing.

The only things that seemed to stir his cold heart were war, blood, conquest, and bedding many women at the same time for sport. She had learnt this about him years ago, unfortunately.

Asmodeus probably still wanted to use her in the war, since she was so powerful, and would only decide on her actual punishment once the war ended, if they won, which was very unlikely.

In fact, it was not happening. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

’I will make sure of it,’ she thought quietly.

If she wanted even the slightest chance of making it out of this damned trial, then she had to find the Philosopher’s Stone.

Yes.

Zenith knew this was nothing more than an old, forgotten world. How did she know, you might ask?

Well, she had lived through this exact same trial countless times already.

She was trapped in an insidious time loop, and it wasn’t until perhaps the twentieth loop, maybe the twenty-fifth, that she finally found out the truth, when that version of Elion told her.

From then on, she had somewhat retained her memories and accumulated strength from the previous loops, until she became as powerful as she is now.

Unfortunately, Elion died each time the loop seemed to come to an end. She suspected it was partly because of what she told him, or partly because she had tried to warn him and help him with the trial.

But doing so openly had only seemed to have brought the trial’s ire down upon them. This damned trial had a will of its own!

How troublesome it had been.

And once it seemed to realise that there was a little mouse trying to evade its clutches, the two of them had been playing a game of cat and mouse for the past fifteen loops.

Each time Elion died prematurely, Zenith had to kill herself to reset the loop and try again. And the worst part about doing such a thing was not knowing whether she would actually make it back into the next one.

What if she suddenly died permanently? The thought had been gnawing at her sanity for a long time now.

Even though she had managed to become impossibly strong across the one hundred or so loops she had endured, even reaching the level of a Saint Mage, she could not use a large portion of her strength.

She was using a spell to conceal her existence from the trial itself, and drawing on too much power would risk her being found out.

It had almost happened when she helped Elion escape.

Unfortunately, that meant she could not directly go against her father and his commanders to take the Philosopher’s Stone from them, since that would require her to go all out, which left her no choice but to plan an elaborate scheme.

The stone was currently being used to power and defend their territory against the coalition forces, creating the corrosive effect that weakened intruders and warped the land around the Demon Lord’s domain.

However, even if she were to fight Asmodeus in earnest without holding back, she would most likely lose.

After all, she had used something close to a shortcut to become a Saint Mage so quickly, which meant she was not as strong as a true Saint who had reached that realm properly.

The only choice left to her was to keep her eyes open and wait for her father to leave when the coalition Saints attacked.

She had planned all of this meticulously to pull the odds in her favour as much as she could.

She had given the coalition insider information about how the Demon Lord was creating the corrosive effect around his territory to weaken them.

And while they were planning to take possession of the stone through infiltration, they had no idea that they were nothing more than bait.

Now was her chance.

Zenith cast a spell.

A clone split away from her body and stood calmly beside her.

Then the original became invisible and incorporeal before phasing straight through the prison door and reappearing in the stone hall outside.

She could only hope that the failsafes surrounding the stone were not impossible to undo because she still had another problem to take care of.

She still had not figured out how Elion died every single time before the end of the trial!

She had tried keeping him confined a few times, but he somehow managed to escape on his own every time.

She had also told him everything several times, and they had tried working together at least ten times, only to fail each time when the loop inevitably reset, even when he stayed alive.

It seemed she was the only one who had been pulled into the seemingly endless loop, and trying to involve someone else directly would not work for some reason.

Eventually, Elion himself had told her to keep him in the dark for the next few attempts. And so far, she had been fairly successful, for the most part.

Things had turned out a bit differently in the last few loops. The only perpetual problem was that Elion still kept dying!

So each time, she killed herself to restart the loop as quickly as possible.

There was even one loop where she stayed with him personally to ensure he would not escape or die. But the loop reset again anyway.

That alone told her something important: She was doing it wrong. Keeping Elion confined was not the way to proceed, and staying with him until the trial ended would not end it.

In the end, she had come up with this plan.

If what she had researched about the Philosopher’s Stone was true, then it should solve all their problems, as long as she used it correctly.

She had even begun to suspect that the loop’s goal was for her to take possession of the stone all along. Perhaps whoever had put this trial into a loop was an ally?

It certainly wasn’t the trial that had caused this loop. It seemed to have caught onto what she was trying to do, and in the last few loops, it kept spawning Elion further and further away from the actual day he had appeared in this trial.

That seemed to be the full extent of how much it could interfere in a trial of its own design. Perhaps she should have been happy that this was all that it could do; maybe in another situation, it would have straight-up killed the rat trying to interfere with its world.

Her eyes narrowed as she began moving swiftly, floating in the air.

’The stone is our key to success. I have to find it quickly.’

After all, she still had no idea where it was, only that it had to be somewhere inside this castle.

She had to find it and claim it before Asmodeus returned.