Chapter 88: Solitär

Macht's remembered past resumes amid the ruins of yet another slaughtered village in the Northern Lands. A would be ambusher reveals himself as Wahrheit, one of the region's three great knightly houses, who attacks under imperial orders to wipe out every trace of the Demon King's forces. Macht parries the volley of arrows with his blade until the knight voices a theory, that the gilding curse must rely on some elaborate trigger because not every raided settlement turned to gold. Amused and offended, Macht declares his power needs no such condition and proves it by transmuting Wahrheit on the spot, adding that he withholds the spell only because winning instantly bores him.

On a nearby shore Solitär seeks him out, a female demon devoted to studying humankind, found examining a beached orca she calls a fish. She brings him to a repurposed hangar and displays the skeletons of an orca and a shark, using them to teach the idea of convergent evolution, how the orca's land dwelling ancestors reshaped themselves into a fishlike form over ages while remaining mammals within. Brushing his question about malice and guilt aside as trivial, she explains that demons evolved purely to deceive and devour people, making them creatures so foreign that grasping human emotion is as hopeless as fathoming an insect's mind.

Macht refuses to accept her verdict, insisting that time is the one thing he holds in abundance and that coexistence could follow if he ever decodes those feelings, an answer that delights her. Later, seated alone among the wreckage of another destroyed settlement, he is approached by Schlacht the Omniscient, who seeks his help in bringing down the Hero of the South.

Macht slays the knight Wahrheit with his transmutation curse after the man deduces too much about it. He then forms his first real connection with Solitär, the demon researcher who lays out the theory that their kind can never share human feeling. The chapter ends as Schlacht the Omniscient recruits Macht for the coming clash against the Hero of the South.

Released March 30, 2022, the chapter is titled Solitär after the new demon it introduces and opens volume ten of The Golden Land arc. A note on the gilding curse, Diagoldze, establishes it as an undetectable, irreversible spell beyond even a goddess's power to undo, one Macht can cast at will and even at range, producing gold that cannot be broken or reshaped.