Elsmeth’s stunned state didn’t last too long, since his oblivious new companion was continuing forward with his plans.

‘Can he not see what I’m seeing?’

It was obvious that Israfel didn’t have the same amazement around the portal. This wasn’t something explainable by him simply being used to it.

The kind of awe the soul energy invoked would likely stick with Elsmeth forever, and he doubted that his companion would be any different if he was seeing the same thing.

Instead, Israfel was wearing a casual look as he stopped in front of the portal and placed his hand on his chin.

“Is there a problem?”

Expecting the demon to already know what he wanted to do, Elsmeth was surprised to see him stop and think.

“Nah, I’m just wondering how much energy this is going to take. Well, I guess I’ll just have to see as I go.”

The demon shrugged his shoulders and began to amass a dense collection of darkness energy before directing it towards the portal.

“This will be the easy part.”

The first step of his plan was quite straightforward. He didn’t even need to cast a spell. All it would take was a bit of energy.

The plan for the demons revolved around the humans being distracted by their war. It was expected that there wouldn’t be any dungeon trips during that time period, so the abnormalities, such as strengthened demons and portals, would not be discovered.

However, since he likely greatly angered the humans, and also showed some atypical behavior by fighting them when unprovoked, it was very reasonable to assume they’d still send more people.

That being the case, he couldn’t leave the portal in its strengthened state. His goal was to make it seem like they all killed each other, and that there was nothing more to find. But that wouldn’t really work out if they noticed the portal suddenly made a drastic jump to the next tier.

To solve this, all he needed to do was exactly what the humans did to weaken their portals. Sending matter or energy through, that wasn’t mana or light energy with the Attribute of the Dead, disrupted the flow, and consequently the connection.

Of course, none of them knew this. They simply discovered at a point that the portals were weakened by sending stuff through.

Only Elsmeth got to see the process clearly. The mana and light energy with the Attribute of the Dead trying to cross over from the Abyss was having its path impeded. Less of it came through, and the connection began to weaken, making the ‘path’ between the two worlds ‘smaller’.

In other words, only less powerful beings would be able to pass through as it got weaker, and if the connection was disrupted too much, it would close altogether.

The smaller path that Elsmeth saw was the connection itself, but the size of the portal that everyone else saw didn’t change.

Thus, observing the size wasn’t the method of determining the portal tier for the different races. Even if altering the pathway affected its size, the blue artifact used to hold it was expandable and retractable, and how it was adjusted affected the size shown.

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Instead, the intensity of energy gathered and flowing that could be seen and felt gave everyone an idea of what rank it reached.

Once Israfel could roughly sense that the portal had diminished to the same state it was before the Demon King's spell, he stopped sending more darkness energy.

The next step is what required more effort. If he was capable of doing so before, he would’ve chosen to play dead to begin with after killing the first party. Unfortunately, this magic was out of his reach at the time.

Now, after being enhanced, he was confident he could achieve it.

His expression briefly contorted into one of sadness before settling on a resigned one.

He couldn’t keep all of his hard-earned Zombie Knights. As much as he believed that humans were complete buffoons, he doubted that an investigation team would overlook their missing bodies.

The bright side was that they were so full of darkness energy infused flesh that he could make two pass for one, but that was also where the tricky part came in, getting the appearances right.

The magical abilities of the bodies when they were alive were irrelevant to their capabilities as undead since demons didn’t know how to use anything but darkness energy. Therefore, the most useful bodies among them came from the Rogues and Warriors that retained their dense storage of pure mana, making them more powerful than other undead of the same type.

Taking this into consideration, he was definitely keeping the two male Warriors, the brothers Aric and Arth. The male and female Rogues from the different parties were also chosen to stick around.

That left the two female Clerics and two male Mages.

Without putting much thought into it, he decided the two Mages would suffice to replace themselves and the two Warriors. The two Clerics would each replace themselves and the two Rogues.

Standing to the side, what Elsmeth witnessed was four of the Zombie Knights plop to the ground, each with their stomachs facing up.

The surface of the entire upper layer of their bodies began to rise gradually.

Their arms, legs, stomach, face, and everything in between were elongating vertically while thinning out.

The eventual conclusion to this was four other bodies that split off from them. The previously enlarged four Zombie Knights became eight bodies of average size. They then began to mold into slightly different proportions to match how the men and women appeared in life.

Half of them retained the appearance of the bodies they came from, but the other half slowly started to look like the still-standing Zombie Knights.

All dark flesh sank inwards for the ones that looked like the second party of adventurers, so as to not reveal that they were animated at any point.

Elsmeth could tell that the aim the demon had was to make it look like he had a great battle in the portal room using his zombies against the second party of adventurers, before all of them ultimately perished.

Israfel began altering the terrain to show traces of battle and even made artificial wounds on all of the bodies.

“Now for the final step.”

Obviously, if he wanted it to make it seem like he died too, he and his other zombies made from demon corpses had to be included. It wasn’t necessary to show the defeated skeletons since they would dissipate into darkness energy after their summoner died.

“I hope you have some kind words for me. We’re about to attend my funeral.”

Elsmeth merely tilted his head at the demon’s words that were spoken through a cheeky smile.

Two of the three Zombie Knights made with demon corpses collapsed to join the humans and underwent the same process of diverging into double the number of bodies.

Three of them matched the original demons he brought, and the final one looked identical to Israfel.

“All of the good ones die young.”

Israfel was obviously enjoying himself standing over his fake corpse. Elsmeth too was amused, but he was too focused on replaying the process of the demon’s magic in his mind to respond. That is until he realized that there was something the demon had yet to address.

“So, the portal looks as it should. You killed the first group of adventurers and used them as undead against the second group. They made it to the portal room, and you all killed each other. But where are we supposed to go now? Aren’t these dungeons usually under surveillance? This staged scene won’t convince anyone if we’re still here.”

Rather than worry, it was anticipation that brought forth his questioning. He was growing fascinated with the methodologies of the demon and wanted to know how it would handle the next hurdle. What other magic was it going to show him?

Israfel gave a confident grin.

“Not to worry my skeletal friend. The ability to manipulate the appearance and forms of my undead wasn’t all I gained from my advancement.”