Once upon a time, the world didn’t have dungeons. There weren’t any monsters. Demons didn’t have access to Grimora.

  That all sounds pretty good, but the flip side is that Angels never came to Grimora either, and nobody had ever prayed yet to the Goddess Serelune.

  But they did have access to the System, so this story takes place after the System was created but before Grimora was connected to other realms, got it? Good.

  Now, because that was the case, people didn’t even know yet that other realms existed. And! Since the System was so new, people were still learning how to use it.

  That meant… a lot of bad stuff. Kids would learn spells they weren’t ready for yet, or people would combine spells in ways they shouldn’t. The System was still new, so there weren’t any guidelines yet, and a lot of people got hurt.

  That’s the problem. Because the First Demon King — well, he wasn’t a Demon King yet. He was just some guy who loved magic. He devoted his whole life to studying it, and even though he had access to the System he wanted to understand his spells as deeply as the old masters had. But nobody knows his name, so we just call him the First Demon King, or First for short.

  It was while First was studying that he met his husband, Rowan.

  Rowan lived on his own in the woods. The most interaction he had with the outside world was this one merchant who occasionally brought him some things, but outside that he kept to himself.

  Because he lived out in the woods like that, Rowan understood earth magic differently than most people did, and the System gave him access to some magic.

  First was trying to learn more about earth magic, which is how he heard about Rowan. That merchant took him out to the woods, and as soon as those two saw each other, they fell in love.

  First stayed with Rowan for a long time, and they taught each other what they could about magic. Rowan helped First gain an affinity for earth magic so he could get access to the earth magic skills, and First tried to teach Rowan the theory behind it all — but Rowan didn’t care, and that’s important. To be honest, a lot of people say Rowan couldn’t even read, and the System spoke to him aloud, like it does with babies. So Rowan didn’t want to hear about the math and the theory behind the spells, he just liked casting them.

  The problem was, First was able to teach Rowan skills that he should never have been able to access. He taught Rowan the theory, and then the System treated it like Rowan understood that, and gave him access to bigger and bigger spells, and Rowan loved magic — but not the same way that First did, you know? — so he had to try them out.

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  And that’s where everything fell apart. Rowan tried a combination of spells, and back then the veil between realms was very thin, so sometimes uncontrolled magic could rip a whole straight through them and let the demons in. I mean, sometimes the holes went to the holy realm, but you know they’re less likely to walk through.

  Anyway, so Rowan casts a big set of spells and a demon walks through and kills him, right in front of First.

  First. Was. Furious. Devastated. And he was so powerful that he immediately attacked the demon, even though that demon was a whole Demon Lord.

  Just before he landed the last blow, the Demon Lord begged for its life.

  First was too grief-stricken to have any sympathy for the demon, but he was wily. He told First that the reason the veil was so thin was because of the System, and the reason people like Rowan could pierce the veil was because the System gave them access to spell they shouldn’t know, and if First let him live, the Demon Lord would give him the secrets to dismantle the System and return magic to the way it was before.

  Well. It wasn’t easy to persuade First, but if you let demons talk long enough, they can talk anyone into anything. For a while he just kept the thing alive, letting it regenerate a bit of health and then torturing it back down to a sliver of HP. He was really upset about Rowan’s death, and he thought doing that would make him feel better — and it did — but it also twisted him up inside.

  So finally, First agreed to the Demon Lord’s proposal, and the Demon Lord told him that the way to dismantle the System was to kill each of the Master Mages who helped create it in the first place.

  It should have been pretty obvious that the Demon Lord was lying. I mean, I think I would have seen through it, anyway. If that was all he needed to do, then wouldn’t the System collapse whenever those guys died of old age? Like, that wouldn’t have been a very good plan, and those guys were definitely smart enough to think of that ahead of time, so there was no way killing them was going to do the trick.

  But First was all twisted up from Rowan’s death and from torturing the Demon Lord, and from listening to the demon’s sneaky persuasive words, so I guess he believed it.

  One by one, he visited the Masters and killed them. He got so powerful from doing that, that by the time he finished he was the most powerful mage in the whole world.

  But the System was still there, and that was when he knew that the Demon Lord had lied to him, and that he’d killed everyone who might have understood the System well enough to actually help him do what he wanted.

  So then, First was even more furious, and he was starting to go a little insane because of all the people he killed. He decided he was going to take his revenge on the demon, so he tricked the Demon Lord into telling him how to bind a demon into servitude, and he used that knowledge to create the summoning circles, so he could summon as many demons as he wanted and they would all be forced to work for him.

  Eventually, he had a whole army of them, and that’s when people started calling him the First Demon King.

  Well, actually at the time they just called him a Demon King, it wasn’t until later, when he got more of them, that we started referring to that first guy as the First Demon King.

  Obviously.