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A magical veil separates our realm from the demonic realm, designed to keep supernatural creatures out. A summoning spell bypasses this barrier by directly summoning a demon directly to our plane. These spells require human sacrifices equal to the level of demon being summoned, with the strongest requiring millions of sacrifices to cross over. All demons contain essence, the life energy of their souls. A demon can draw on their essence to perform powerful feats of arcane magic. When a demon is killed on the mortal plane, it doesn't die permanently, but is reborn in hell. The demonic Lords of hell are referred to as the greater evils, and are equivalent to gods. The number of sacrifices needed to allow their summoning would be astronomical, and therefore impractical.

https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Diablo, the greatest of demons, strikes a bargain with Adria, a witch from a coven of demon worshippers. The coven conducts a ritual that would allow him to be incarnated into this world, using Morgan as a vessel. By consummating their union through this ritual, Diablo would be born as a god on earth. He would embody the flesh of a human, but possess the soul of the demon. Things didn't go according to plan. The incarnation led to the birth of a girl, Leah. The ritual had the unintended affect of "purifying" the demon's soul, removing all traces of demonic essence. However, the child-god retained its arcane powers and its immortality.

Being born through a witch on this side of the veil apparently caused the demon's soul to be purified, but somehow didn't lose its powers or abilities connected to magic. How could this be the case?

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    $\begingroup$ Are demons the only creatures with magic? If not, how do others get their magic? $\endgroup$
    – Skyler
    Commented Mar 9, 2020 at 21:23
  • $\begingroup$ What is a demon? Is the original meaning of the root word, it's just Greek for "spirit". They were neither good nor evil. Along comes Christianity, and no non-angel was anything but evil, just by virtue (pun) of not playing for the right team. Additional (not necessarily later) Judeo-christian mythology even goes so far as to claim them fallen angels.But the generic Buffy/D&D "demon" has no rules so feel free to make up your own for this process. $\endgroup$
    – John O
    Commented Mar 11, 2020 at 14:04

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Removing the obvious answer of bargaining in bad faith and tricking the demon king into being reincarnated as a human in a plan to destroy him in some way ...

In part, the answer is in your own question ... kind of.

A summoning spell bypasses this barrier by directly summoning a demon directly to our plane. These spells require human sacrifices equal to the level of demon being summoned, with the strongest requiring millions of sacrifices to cross over.

The actual truth is that a demon cannot cross over without the sacrifice of a sentient being ... or many of them. We assume that humans are the sacrifice because we have ready access to them and there are not really other qualified sacrificial races in the world. Morgan's and Diablo's gambit was a bit to cheat the system by incarnation into a mortal instead of a proper summoning. However, magic knows and does not approve of such cheating the system.

When the spell did not interfere with the "Diablo crosses over into the mortal realm" part, the ancient laws of magic still demanded their price. Since Morgan can't be the sacrifice (the spell would fail if she dies), the laws sacrificed Diablo to his own summoning into the world.

But to snuff out Diablo's soul to the ritual defeats the ritual, and thus invalidates the need for his life to end. To resolve the causal loop, Diablo's life is forfeit while his soul is free to migrate into the child. Without the context of his life, the immortal demon's soul is just a very powerful soul -- powerful enough to influence the child physically by giving it the power and immortality of the demon lord without all the evil from Diablo's life and deeds.

TL;DR: They tried to cheat the system and Diablo paid the summoning's price

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    $\begingroup$ Demonic Essence isn't naturally allowed on our realm. The sacrifice of millions merely exists to recreate the Demonic Essence in our plane. By attempting to skip out on paying that price, The existing Demonic Essence from the Demonic Plane is used to fuel the spell and has no existing re-creation in ours. Thus, Purified. $\endgroup$
    – IT Alex
    Commented Mar 10, 2020 at 13:58
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Diablo's code writers lifted the plan from the reincarnation mechanism.

When tasked with implementing Diablo's plan, his code magicians looked for something that they could adapt. There already exists a well-tested mechanism for lifting a soul from a dying human body and placing it into a newborn baby - reincarnation. Pretty much all of the reincarnation mechanism was kept intact by Diablos code writers. They added some flashy special effects to keep the boss happy and make it look fresh.

It worked great, as it almost always does. As with other reincarnated souls, the baby has little or no memory of the entity which used to have its soul.

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His heart got purified. The incantation had positive intentions or words which created positive intentions in this demon's heart. This purified all negative emotions. His magical abilities remained intact.

Just like any other ability (psychic, physical, etc.), magical abilities are not necessary destroyed upon changing the quality of the heart form demonic to divine. A strong demonic man can decide to become good human being. Will he loose his strength? No, he will use all his strength to perform actions of goodness and service.

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It's possible because you, the author deem it to be possible. There are no rules you need to work around here but those you make yourself.

Presumably no demon's ever done this before, so Diablo didn't know it would happen, and must feel pretty silly.

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