The dark-toned stage was bathed in brilliant beams of light, like stars ignited in the night sky.
As the Great Poetess of Love pressed a hand to her chest and gave an elegant bow, the lights dimmed. A haunting melody began to flow.
At the rear of the stage, Lan Qi lowered his head, his gaze sharp with focus. His fingers brushed across the piano keys, pressing down to weave the overture of Hell’s Prelude.
At the front, the Great Poetess revealed a wild smile, and with her voice like a gift from the heavens, she began to sing.
Beneath the stage, the four music mentors all frowned, their eyes flickering restlessly across the performance. Dissatisfaction and impatience were already surfacing on their faces.
This overture, soft and restrained—
was not the kind of strength they wanted to hear.
Yet before they could piece together what Lan Qi was truly aiming at—
Lan Qi’s left hand pressed firmly on the keys, while his right hand, like a magician performing tricks, produced card after card of spellcraft, playing them one after another!
Every card was from the [Mistaken Cure] series—filled with the aura of healing and rebirth.Without hesitation, with unwavering determination, Lan Qi poured all that healing power—
directly onto Diseased Toxin Body, one of the music mentors!
A cure for deep illness must be a fierce medicine.
Before anyone could react—
“Aaaaaghhh!!!”
Diseased Toxin Body convulsed violently, his body writhing as though strangled by a thousand mad serpents. A scream tore from his throat, echoing through the hall, demonic howls rending the air as pain surged through him in waves.
Onstage, the Great Poetess’s voice resounded, her melody slithering like venomous snakes into his ears. His shrieks grew sharper, his reason disintegrating under the tide of agony.
“You—!”
The host-teacher’s voice roared from the side of the stage, ready to intervene. But then he noticed—
the Demon Eye hovering above the theater remained unmoved.
He realized in a flash: Lan Qi’s spells were not attacks. They caused no “damage.”
But what unfolded next shattered any last fragment of his composure.
Everything happened too fast. Too fast for anyone present to grasp how the calamity before their eyes had come to be.
“Stop this!!”
“Spare me!!!”
Diseased Toxin Body’s voice howled like a beast being torn apart in the night. His scream itself carried the sharpest psychic power, far beyond anything the students could endure.
All across the hall, demon students staggered as though struck by lightning, clutching their heads in torment, their bodies trembling under the impossible pressure of this psychic storm.
Meanwhile, on the stage, the Great Poetess basked in the spotlight, singing with abandon.
Her voice soared, beautiful and pure—
but instead of easing the atmosphere, it magnified the pain that Diseased Toxin Body inflicted on every student.
His agony, reflected through her intoxicating song, became a suffering multiplied tenfold.
The demon students broke. Their cries, piercing and wretched, echoed like the wails of restless ghosts throughout the theater. One by one, their minds unraveled, their eyes turning clouded and fevered—madness devouring them.
Their screams bounced against one another, twisted like curses, feeding into each other, compounding the torment.
The cries of pain spread like wildfire. The echoing misery looped back upon itself, amplified with every cycle, until the theater transformed into a hell of unending lamentation.
Lan Qi had nudged only a small stone at first—
but that stone had triggered an avalanche.
The vicious cycle had begun, and now nothing could stop it.
Weaker demons, like Bacher, had already collapsed, frothing at the mouth and twitching in their seats. Yet their torment didn’t end—awakened again by the nightmare chorus filling the hall, they rejoined the screams, adding fresh fuel to the infernal symphony.
Even Huperion, curled in her seat, pressed her hands over her ears, burying her head in her lap, desperately whispering prayers to her goddess.
If not for her prior preparation against the Poetess’s allure, she too might already have been broken.
At the side of the stage, the once-composed host-teacher now stood pale as death. His confident posture had crumbled; his hand clutched the wall, trembling violently, as though he might collapse at any moment.
His eyes stretched wide in horror, unable to believe what he was witnessing.
“What… are you doing?!”
His voice cracked in a scream, fully aware now of the catastrophic severity of Lan Qi’s performance.
But at the center of the stage, Lan Qi acted as though he heard nothing.
He played on, calmly, serenely.
And with the poise of a lecturer, as if reciting poetry, he began to explain—
“In nuclear fusion, when temperature, pressure, and time all reach a critical threshold, the heat produced sustains further fusion.
This state… is called self-sustaining burn.”
His tone was steady, his words carrying a weight that resonated far deeper than the chaos surrounding him.
The infernal screams of the theater did not touch him.
In his world, there was only the piano.
Only the music.
“What nonsense are you speaking?!”
The host’s voice rose sharper, desperate, terrified.
To his ears, Lan Qi’s words were mad whispers from some unfathomable abyss.
But Lan Qi merely answered with utter seriousness:
“This is my research result.
And the artistic concept of this performance.”
Once self-sustaining burn is achieved, nuclear fusion no longer needs input.
It burns forever.
He glanced across the theater. Already, he judged, the pressure was more than enough.
And with over a minute left of his spellcasting time—
All he needed was to add more heat.
Then the performance would ignite into a self-sustaining cycle, eternal until every last demon in the theater burned out and collapsed.
Even if he ceased playing, even if he dispelled the Great Poetess—
the infernal engine of suffering would grind on.
Only when the four mentors and all the demon students were consumed, their consciousness extinguished, would the fusion of Hell’s Symphony reach its end.
And that, Lan Qi believed, would perfectly fulfill the four mentors’ demands:
the emotions of the students, the sound and spectacle, the intoxicating descent into chaos—
all aligned, all satisfied.
“This way, everyone should be pleased… right?”
Seated at the piano, Lan Qi lifted his head and gazed around the theater, observing the mentors reveling in the experience.
And with tranquil satisfaction, he thought to himself—
Today, once again, his merits were full.