ButcherPete
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Chapter 85: Buy Immediately
🕑 Added 2025-07-08 11:51:22 +0000 UTCThe Grand Temple of Greed was without a doubt a peculiar place.
It didn’t open into a quiet sanctum like the others did.
It opened into a courtyard of screaming chaos.
Rows of sharp-shouldered devils in immaculately tailored suits stood beneath columns of onyx and brass, shouting over one another beneath banners of embroidered crests, scrolls were waved like auction slips, golden coins clinked with language. floating contract parchments drifted overhead like paper doves, waiting to be snatched mid-air.
“Four lives and a soul imprint! Binding clause guaranteed!”
“Do not trust the Dregmark scrolls! Look at the fine print, fools!”
“Businessman! A pleasure! I’ve a flesh vault you must see!”
Greed devils bargained the way starving beasts fought over corpses, with fanged smiles and ledgers thicker than archmage tomes.
A marketplace of exploitation, dressed in formality and gilded ink.
And at its center, a large plinth broadcast the day’s Contract Index, rates of soul trade, flesh costs, favor debtors, and bounty yields from demon-harvest expeditions in Hellnia.
Cashmere passed through the courtyard, cloak rippling like silk dipped in molten silver. The others recognized him immediately, parting with murmurs.
“Businessman.”
“Investor Prime.”
“Businessman, sir.”
“Ah, Cashmere. May your margins be blasphemous.”
He nodded to each, though only once did his lips twitch.
“May your blood be locked in premium chains.” he returned.
The temple of Greed’s interior was no less dramatic. Ornate vaulted halls towered overhead, draped in cascading ledgers detailing major contracts from the last two centuries. Massive stained glass murals depicted historical buyouts, devilish mergers, and a particularly infamous subjugation of a demon monarch’s heart sold as a ‘devil’ artifact.
The Greed Faction didn’t just worship Avaritia, their father god.
They quoted him.
Their prayers were market forecasts. Their hymns were fine print.
And today, Cashmere was looking for something that shouldn't exist.
His polished shoes clicked on the gold-trimmed obsidian tiles as he approached the secured wings of the temple.
One of the silent brokers standing guard eyed him and bowed stiffly. “Special intelligence wing. Access permitted, Investor Cashmere.”
He nodded and passed through the arch inscribed with the faction's core commandment:
Information is Worth Before It's Known.
The halls beyond were cooler, quieter. Lit with flickering blue soul-lights and lined with rune-etched safes, contract vaults, and the mirrors, those dreadful things that watched both ways.
But Cashmere paused a moment before stepping into the inner sanctum.
His gloved hand reached into his coat.
From his inner pocket, he pulled a black-gold coin, worn and pulsing faintly with arcane code.
He flipped it once.
[Golden Investment]
Last Forecast: [Sell your shares immediately.]
New Forecast: [BUY IMMEDIATELY.]
Cashmere frowned again, harder this time.
It had never reversed that fast.
Six months ago, he’d gone to visit Abigail, the Archmage and former hero. She’d been in her tower, spiraling into obsession over teaching her foolish little pet mage-in-training. What was his name? She’d never said. Probably. The boy was young, rowdy, eager-eyed, and…
Cashmere thought.
…Unfit for what she demanded of him.
The way she had doted on the boy had irritated him. She was trying to raise a king from a peasant she treated like a puppy.
And that day, when he woke up, his investment coin burned black and told him:
Sell. Immediately.
Now it told him the opposite.
And the only thing that had changed was a single request, asked in secrecy last night.
“I need information about a devil named Hannya.”
Cashmere hadn’t heard the name before. Not surprising. He lived in Neel’s western continent, not Hellnia, and Hannya, apparently, was young. Maybe five years since emergence. At most, ten.
But what surprised him was how little anyone had on her.
When he stepped into the mirrored chamber at the core of the intelligence wing, he faced the great black-glass mirror embedded in the wall. It shimmered like a pool of ink suspended in frost. Bound with a pentagram of obsidian and gold thread, it connected directly to Greed’s old northern territory in Hellnia.
Still very active, but maybe a bit cruder, given their…market demands.
The northern bastion of the Greed Faction remained fiercely independent, even after 1st Greed, Avaritia, had left for Neel. They ran demon-hunting expeditions, collected devil organs for alchemical processing, and sold devil hearts and marrow to humans hungry for magical shortcuts and powerful artifacts. Here, devil blood was product, not sacred.
The mirror flared, and a familiar face came into view: a Greed enforcer, standing in a bone-and-gold observatory, shelves lined with chained scrolls and organ jars.
“Investor Cashmere,” the devil greeted, mildly surprised. “It’s been a while.”
“I need everything you have on a devil named Hannya.”
The enforcer hesitated. “She’s not missing or fake. But she’s… thin data.”
“Elaborate.”
“She emerged six months ago in the southern wilds. No registered bloodline. No known patron. Within a month, she was aligning with the Feast Faction, 1st Gula, specifically. Within two, she’d joined the dream knights of the Mountain Faction and offered alliance terms to nobles in the capital, Dreamveil Compact they call it.”
“Ambitious for a five-year-old devil.” Cashmere muttered.
“That’s the thing,” the enforcer said. “We don’t know her exact age. She seems… fully functional. High charm laws. Rumors of dream mist abilities. Several faction envoys have already rated her as a potential ruling-class candidate.”
Cashmere’s brows rose.
“She came from nowhere,” the enforcer continued. “And every attempt to track her aura any earlier than that… failed. One shadow demon tracker went rogue trying. Another just stopped reporting. The last thing we know is that she’s locked down the mountain she lives on, repelled a Pride envoy, and negotiated directly with nobles outside their chain of command.”
Cashmere tapped the coin in his fingers.
Still glowing.
Still pulsing.
[BUY IMMEDIATELY.]
He stepped closer to the mirror and grinned.
“She came out of nowhere,” he whispered, “and made the market panic.”
He turned away, brushing dust from his coat sleeve.
“And I think it’s time I bought in.”
Beyond the Intelligence Wing, Cashmere descended into the temple’s lowest vault.
Only investors with special clearances or permanent soul-binds were allowed entry here. It wasn’t just about security. It was about risk containment.
Because what lay below wasn’t knowledge.
It was interpretation. Dangerous, volatile, weaponized prophecy.
The vault doors opened with a clink of teeth.
The chamber beyond was circular, lined with carved obsidian domes that pulsed with pale light. Each dome was sealed in layered hexagrams, and behind each shimmered the presence of a Devil.
Fate Devils, six in total.
Oracles. Curse-ridden analysts of the unwritten ledger.
They did not speak unless asked.
They did not lie, but they didn’t always tell truths in ways others understood.
Cashmere approached the central viewing podium and cleared his throat.
“I’ve a market anomaly,” he announced aloud. “I want insight.”
Nothing happened.
The vault remained dim, the fate devils unmoved.
Then, slowly, one of the domes began to pulse.
A voice slipped out, dry as wind across a closed ledger.
“The Path is still broken.”
Cashmere narrowed his eyes. “Still?”
Another dome echoed the sentiment, this one with a different voice. Feminine, bored.
“Since the eclipse… six months ago. The road cracked beneath all forks.”
A third dome glimmered but did not speak. A fourth shuddered with cold static.
Cashmere frowned. “All your windows are closed?”
The first devil answered, voice like coins falling into a deep well.
“Every future we cast returns in shards. No progression. No outcomes. Just… silence.”
The second devil added:
“Each of us has a waiting period, dependent on strain. Mine will complete in a month. For others… longer.”
Cashmere clicked his tongue. “And what caused the break?” He’s well aware of the break, it cost him plenty of potential coin. But the reason behind it all had yet to reach his report desk.
There was a pause after the question.
A long one.
Then the first replied. “We do not know. But something entered the weave that does not belong.”
He felt his coin in his pocket glow slightly warmer.
And then…
The sixth dome lit up.
Brighter than the others.
It pulsed in golden glow, its sigil web slightly frayed, as if it had been scorched recently.
Cashmere turned to face it fully.
“I take it you’re the outlier.”
A voice echoed out, this one more animated. Younger. Slippery sounding.
“I can see parts. Flashes. Mostly impressions. The window's still cracked, but I’ve always been good at peeking through things.” He chuckled.
Cashmere smirked. “Then peek for me.”
“Not without a price,” the voice replied. “You know the rules, Investor.”
Cashmere sighed and pulled out a small ledger from his sleeve. “What do you want? Coin? A debtor's oath? A minor clause in a human contract-”
“No, no,” the Fate Devil interrupted. “I want something rare. Something… deeply yours.”
Cashmere stilled.
“I’m not offering my core, if that’s what you’re angling for.”
“Of course not. I’m not suicidal. I want…”
He paused.
“...Your favorite regret. Bottled and signed.”
Cashmere blinked.
“What kind of poetic nonsense-?”
“One vial. One memory. Yours. The one you savor because it hurt so perfectly.”
There was a heavy silence in the chamber.
Even the other Fate Devils grew still.
Cashmere reached into his coat… then hesitated.
His hand stopped over a hidden pocket inside his left breast.
As if the devil before him predicted this outcome, Cashmere already had it bottled. Carrying it on his person.
He hadn’t touched that memory in two hundred years.
The girl in white. The deal that shouldn’t have worked. The contract that cost more than gold.
He exhaled slowly.
“I want names,” he said at last. “Movements, affiliations, anything you can give me on a devil named Hannya.”
“Deal,” the voice whispered, almost gleeful.
Cashmere withdrew a crystal vial, pure black glass etched with his family crest.
He uncorked it.
Whispers spilled into the air like perfume and ashes.
A faint image of a woman with white gloves, kneeling beside a pool of blood, flickered, and then vanished into the chamber’s center.
The sixth dome inhaled sharply.
“Ohhh… Delicious.”
Then the vision began.
A light flickered from the top of the dome and projected visions into the chamber, sketches made of pure will, incomplete and jittering.
A mountain wrapped in mist.
A black pavilion.
A devil girl veiled in shadow, her aura threading between colors, charm, dream, dominion.
A Luxuria-style presence. But not born of them. Something new.
Then…
Gula’s symbol. A feast of flesh and blood, with reluctant anticipation and horrified delight.
Then another flicker.
The image turned cold.
A void of warped space, empty and lifeless. An abyss.
The abyss was unnatural. A sealed pocket-dimension, gilded with the pattern of endless vaulting, a planar structure of greedy recursion. A space that folded in on itself, trapping everything inside in eternal storage.
“Avaritia’s [Deep Pocket],” Cashmere muttered. “That’s 1st Greed’s signature.”
At the center, a young devil, bare-chested, covered in cursed scripts, pierced with stakes, his body shackled by white order chains. His body glowed faintly, horribly, with the remnants of divine weapon wounds and suppression sigils. And yet his face…
Cashmere stared.
Then his breath froze.
He knew him.
Six months ago, Abigail had paid for a lead.
He’d found this same devil locked deep inside an abandoned vault.
No records. No name. No signature.
Just an “awakened youth,” sealed and forgotten.
Cashmere had assumed Avaritia discarded him, another failed project the First Greed Devil no longer found useful. That happened often. Avaritia hoarded more than he used.
So Cashmere sold the devil’s location to Abigail.
She hadn’t said what she wanted with him, but he knew enough about a wizard’s “research” practices.
Organ harvesting. Core partitioning. Soul de-threading.
He hadn’t asked questions. The devil was powerless, forgotten.
Not worth investing in.
Now that same devil appeared again, still bound, but now linked to Hannya’s projected path.
Cashmere turned away from the fading projection, face unreadable.
“That’s all I have,” the fate devil whispered, satisfied but weary. “She appeared from nowhere, but she walks like she was always meant to be here. And that place, the one with the chained devil, was off the ledger. No signatures. No access. Not even the business archives had it.” The devil sounded like he was grinning. “But you know that already… right?”
Cashmere didn’t answer, the fate devil knew he was crossing a line asking questions like that.
he pivoted toward the first fate devil, still sealed, still faintly glowing.
“You told me once,” Cashmere said slowly, “back before your vision broke... that chaos was coming to Hellnia. That a splinter would form. Was it this? Her?”
A heavy pause.
Then the voice answered, more amused than dismissive.
“No. The chaos I glimpsed was older. Hungrier. Gula. Not some little devil girl playing princess.”
Cashmere’s frown deepened.
Because it wasn’t just Gula.
It was both of them now, tangled. Turning something ancient into something personal.
Cashmere’s coin pulsed.
The message still burned.
[BUY IMMEDIATELY.]
And now, for the first time, Cashmere felt the weight behind that demand.
He turned, walking from the chamber with brisk elegance, coat swaying behind him.
For the first time in decades, his instincts twitched.
There was something buried under this devil girl’s name, Gula and her feasters, and the boy in the abyss.
And he was going to dig it out, ledger by ledger.
Cashmere exited the intelligence chamber with long, purposeful strides.
The air still hummed around his skin, as if his body was trying to catch up to what his mind had already decided.
Hannya.
Unknown.
Unaffiliated.
Tied to Gula.
Linked to Avaritia’s Abyss.
And somehow, the axis point around six months of broken fate readings.
His gloved fingers tapped rapidly on a data sigil embedded into his wrist. Gold light streamed from it, forming a floating ethereal triangle, the personal contact channel used only for Greed’s northern enforcers in Hellnia.
“Cashmere. Western Domain. Full flag priority.” he said.
The pause was longer than he liked.
Then static.
Then a voice crackled in.
“...Investor Cashmere. Surprised you’re reaching out. Things are... hectic here.”
“Understood,” he said calmly. “I require a status report. I’m preparing a recon move, either a negotiation party or a soft capture team. Something’s triggered a Tier One watch alert in your quadrant. A devil named Hannya.”
Silence.
Then the voice returned, this time less formal.
“We’ve heard the name. Barely. We’ve been meaning to log her... but other things took precedence.”
“What sort of ‘things’?” Cashmere’s tone sharpened.
Another voice joined the call, deeper, scratchier.
“We’ve had a series of... incidents.”
Cashmere’s brow twitched. “Speak plainly.”
The response came like a sigh through broken glass.
“Slaver outposts are reporting mass suicides. Entire crews of contract devils, those pushing high-interest body-debt clauses, blood-price deferrals... they're just offing themselves. No signs of combat. They wake up with star losses and no memory why they died.”
Cashmere’s pulse slowed.
“Contagion? Void Song?”
“No curses detected. No soul interference. Just... random despair. An emotional collapse so sudden and synchronized that entire slave transfer groups simply fall apart.”
Cashmere frowned deeper.
"And this is recent?"
“Started two months ago. Ramping up.”
Another voice, possibly from a background operator, cut in.
“And then there’s the apples.”
Cashmere blinked. “Apples.”
“Apples.” the voice confirmed flatly.
A third voice now entered, muttering sarcastically.
“We’ve got four cities now with black-market demand for apples at nearly twelve times value. High-tier restaurants have started offering apple-only menus, and some nobles have begun requesting enchanted apples as ceremonial gifts.”
Cashmere’s head tilted.
“This is idiocy.”
The first enforcer groaned. “We thought so too. But the trend keeps spreading. Especially in towns bordering former Feast or Mountain-aligned lands. No origin point. Just... hunger, and a fixation on red fruit offerings.”
Then came the last report.
“Also, we’ve lost six slave cargo shipments in the past three weeks.”
Cashmere froze.
“Lost?”
“As in vanished mid-route. Escorts slain. Contract trackers burned. The only thing left behind were... signs of resurrection.”
His voice thinned. “Resurrection?”
“Yeah. The devils guarding the shipments were killed in ways that triggered their core respawns, burning star markers.”
Cashmere stepped into his private study, closed the door, and dismissed the sigil with a swipe.
He needed silence.
His hands folded beneath his chin.
Then the final report arrived via courier, a secure orb flickering with keyed priority. He opened it with a whisper of his name.
Inside was one image.
Three figures.
Draped in maid uniforms, faces obscured by dark veils. Their skin was tinted in shades of hot pink, like a fevered blush gone nuclear. A color uncommon on devils. They stood calmly amidst the wreckage of a devil caravan, blood on their sleeves, but no expression visible.
The message beneath the image read.
[
Unidentified targets. Demon signature confirmed. Not native to region. Highly synchronized. Likely coordinated assassins.
Codename: Cherrymaids.
]
Cashmere leaned back in his chair.
The room felt colder.
All of it, every shred of oddity, from the apple cultism to the resurrection-killing, pointed to something deeper than coincidence.
And all of it had begun within a narrow window of six months.
The exact same time the Path of Fate broke.
The exact same time a devil named Hannya emerged from nowhere.
Cashmere closed his eyes.
Even with all his education, memory, and greed-given instinct...
He could not shake the feeling that Hellnia itself was shifting.
Primordially.
And someone was holding the pen on this new story.
Someone he hadn’t invested in.
Yet.
Comments
Butch Perterson
lol what does that mean 😭
Aune
great ompfhh at the end there.
Wintermelody
Thanks for the chapter (≧▽≦)
