Minute Mage: A Time-Traveling LitRPG Progression Fantasy

Chapter 122.2: Welcome to Hell. Where Are You?

PART 2/2

The Devil lay there for a while, trying to see how long he could stay still. Maybe if he stayed unmoving for long enough, he’d get swallowed up into the ground, or something. Maybe one of the things that had made all of these craters would come by and crush him. But nothing happened. As usual. Nothing happened for twenty-four hours.

Why was there nothing up here? Surely, if Demons were regularly teleported into this place, they’d leave some sort of sign that they were there.

Well, it wasn’t like there was anything around to make an office with, or whatever, but maybe they’d arrange the rocks into their name?

Though, the Devil hadn’t done anything like that, himself. Why would he? To comfort the next Demon that got pushed through Door 999? It wouldn’t offer him any solace to help out some other person he’d never see. He wanted to help himself.

Though, if he was out here for another six months, surely he’d eventually get bored enough to make some sort of rock formation. Or, at least, that was what the Humans he’d watched had done. He hadn’t always known that people did that sort of thing—the Humans were the first to show him. What had the Humans called it? …Art?

Yes, he’d make art. He laughed, thinking to himself. A Demon! Creating art! A completely pointless, worthless activity that accomplished absolutely nothing of note! Such a Human thing to do.

He sighed. Those Humans had grown on him. Like little rats running around in his hallways that he’d eventually become fond enough of to call his pets. They were still rats, and he still thought they were gross and disgusting and stupid, but couldn’t he appreciate the inanity of their little lives sometimes?

Art. What a silly concept, he laughed. What was the point of such a thing? A Human gets bored and paints a picture of themselves. Then what, they sell it to the other Humans for some money? Okay, perhaps then it was time worth spent, if they got some money out of it. That raised the question of why the other Humans were buying it, but still.

But why would a Human make art if they weren’t going to sell it? He’d used divining tools, he’d watched their little lives as they ran around. He knew some of them still did that. Why? For status? To impress themselves upon others? Maybe, maybe…

But some of them still did it for no reason other than for the satisfaction of making a piece of art. To leave their mark on the world. So that, after they died, or even just when they weren’t in the room, someone out there would think of them. Someone out there would look at the thing that they created and think, “Wow. What a work. What expression of skill. What expression of creativity. What was the artist thinking when they made this choice? I’d love to speak with them about it.”

Was that why Humans created art?

…Maybe. It seemed plausible enough. Really, the Devil could see the appeal in it, to a certain extent. Maybe…

He looked around. There were some loose stones, all scattered throughout the place. Maybe he could do something with them. Not because he wanted to make art. Of course he didn’t. He would never want to leave something out there, so that maybe someone who came after him, someone in his same scenario, would have a bit of an easier time. He didn’t want someone to see what he made and think, “Woah, I love what he did when he put that stone there. Ooh, when he placed that stone in that spot, it really brought the whole piece together for me.”

He would hate that. Of course.

He was just doing it for…science. Or something. Just to see what would happen. Maybe he would arrange the stones in the correct formation to open a doorway back to the Underworld, or to summon an ancient deity.

Or something.

He began gathering stones.

An hour passed.

Then, once he had enough, all piled up in a crater, he began arranging them. He was a Demon, of course he’d want things to be orderly.

An hour passed.

An hour passed.

Once all of the stones were in perfect order from largest to smallest—he measured this by weight, obviously—he got started. Working in a big, flat area—not that there was any other type of landscape out here—he grabbed some rocks and started arranging them. First, he got some of the larger stones and put them in some basic locations to create the thing he had in mind.

A big, flat slab here, and then he put a slightly smaller slab on top, to create some depth. He looked back to what he was trying to create a replica of. Yes, yes, that looked correct. Another slab over, across from it, with a bit of a gap in between. Another slab to the south of them both, and another slab beside that one, creating four little masses, just how the real thing looked.

Then, he got some of the smaller stones and used them to start decorating. Adding details, bumps and ridges where there were supposed to be bumps and ridges. He even used his fingers and teeth to carve the stones into the perfect size and shape when there wasn’t any that fit what he had in mind.

An hour passed.

An hour passed.

An hour passed.

Finally! The Devil had finished up the detailing. By the end, he really hit his stride and began to truly feel like he improved. He’d even gone back and retouched on some of the first things he’d done, using his newfound basic proficiency to make things look a bit better.

Finally, he just had to add on the last bit. Using a special pile of stones he’d set aside just for this, he went in and created a large circle around the whole thing, the four islands of rock surrounded by a perimeter, making it a big ball with the islands on the inside.

It was the ball in the sky. The blue one, that he was still somewhat confused by.

He didn’t know what it was, but it had a certain beauty to it. The pale blue, the lush green, it rippled and waved as it moved along the sky, like greeting an old friend. The replica of this strange cosmic body that the Devil had made was imperfect, of course—it was his first ever work—but it was something he was proud of.

Maybe the next Demon that came out here to die would come across this replica of that blue sphere, and they’d see that someone out there cared. Even if the Devil was long gone, they’d see a legacy he left behind. In a way, he would never truly die, right?

The Devil blinked. W-well, he wasn’t creating the art for that reason, of course. It was an experiment. To see if he could understand why the Humans did what they did.

Oh well, he told himself. Experiment over. And since the experiment was over, and he didn’t care about the art—not one bit—he would destroy it.

He would destroy it.

He would destroy it.

The Devil looked at his replica of the blue ball. He’d spent so many hours on it. The painstaking detail. The little bumps and ridges in the stones to recreate the green parts that seemed to be raised up above the blue parts, everything with its own texture.

He wished he could go there. He wished he could explore the blue sphere, instead of this place. Surely, dying out there would be infinitely more enjoyable and interesting than dying here, in this empty, gray wasteland. There was nothing here. Nothing to see. No color, or variations in the terrain. No people.

But he wasn’t there. He was here.

So he destroyed the replica.

It was imperfect. Not the blue place. It was just some awful wish to have what he didn’t have.

He tore it apart, tossing everything away and shattering the large rocks into pieces. It would never be created again. A curse of his life. He would never create art again.

Twenty-four hours passed.

The Devil tried his hand at creating art again, just to pass the time. He wanted to see if he could make something else. This wasn’t because he wanted to, of course—that would be ridiculous, for a Demon to waste his time on something worthless and pointless. But just to test his skill. Yes, that was why. He wanted to test his skill at creating something.

Creating that sculpture before, it had taken lots of fine motor movement, see? And he had noticed that his proficiency had increased quite a bit while working. So he wasn’t “creating art” like the Humans did, he was just training. He was working on his motor movements, and his abilities of visualization. That was what he was doing. It was really one of the most productive things he could do, out in this wasteland.

This time, he decided to create a replica of his own hand. How more appropriate could things get, creating a portrait of the thing that was creating the portrait.

Twenty-four more hours passed.

And the Devil worked some more.

Maybe eventually, he thought, he would create something worthwhile. Perhaps he could even find out where he was.