In Randidly’s mind, there had always been a link to the Nether chain that he had been missing. Perhaps he had never consciously acknowledged the missing information, but his experience in the Nexus had left him feeling… slightly off-balance. Something didn’t quite fit. Specifically, Randidly’s increasingly flagrant use of Nether had never drawn the ire of either the NLC or Military High Command, despite the fact that both could have used it to threaten him. He had his justifications loaded for any challenge, but the challenges never came.

Randidly’s eyes narrowed. Like a perfect metronome, his finger tapped against the bone around him. Dark currents of midnight-blue Nether spiraled around him.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Randidly chewed on his lip as his thoughts continued to whirr. His gaze slowly turned upward, watching the raging torrents of emotions blast past him and strain against the near-rubber rind of the border between above and below 50% Nether content in the air. It seemed that there was a filtration quality to the near liquid substance in which he now floated which severely weakened the emotions before they escaped upward. Which probably did a great job of protecting the fools like Randidly who decided to spend some time in the shallow portion of the Web.

The downside of this was that Randidly had spent the last two weeks, the time since he had killed his doppelganger, mostly defending against emotions while he observed and considered the behavior of Nether; the danger at this depth was a constant threat that kept his nervous system buzzing with tension. Still, the experience was fruitful. Even if Nether and the wild emotions didn’t interact directly with each other, Randidly could witness the way that strong emotions could affect significance.

And the more he watched, the more he was developing a theory about the piece that he was missing.

Congratulations! Your Skill Nether Sensation (L) has grown to Level 335!

Briefly, Randidly glanced downward; there was some movement in the depths below him, which stretched downward like a midnight blue chasm. The slight coloration made it even more difficult to see very far in this place. At first Randidly had believed it was just the emotions rising that drew the eye, but now he was becoming a little less sure of that. And in his heart… he held a strong desire to descend further and slaughter whatever monsters might wait below.

Heh. Even that mass of significance that drove Roy to suicide...

He moved his hand and reached downward, seizing his opponents. The corner of Randidly’s mouth quirked upward as he briefly allowed himself to revel in his bloody imagination. But he quickly suppressed that indulgence and shook his head. He reached out with his right hand and ran his fingers across the etchings on the wall that had been left by his doppelganger. Until he was finished thinking about how to make a Nether Class, it was probably for the best for him to linger here.

But Randidly truly believed he had discovered the Path forward. And with the etchings left by the doppelganger acting as the catalyst to mobilize his understanding, his emerald eyes began examining the factors present in the Nexus with an entirely new penetration.

Suddenly, the act of Engraving seemed extremely suspicious to Randidly.

In the darkness of the hollow spine, emotions continued to surge past Randidly’s drifting form. Gradually, his brow began to furrow. His mind meticulously gathered all the information he had ever encountered about Engraving.

In the past, he had learned Engraving without thinking too much about its mechanisms for functioning. Honestly, pop culture on Expira had a large influence on his immediate acceptance of Engraving: there were many examples of such runic symbols possessing power in the fiction of Randidly’s childhood. Why would the System be any different? You had a strange language of meaning and energy that could add strange effects.

But even from the beginning, there were already several suspicious points about the act of Engraving. Rather than having any true ‘language’, the shapes of Engraving were drawn from personal experience. There seemed to be some objective actions that could be taken to improve your understanding of Engraving, but each individual developed their own school of thought as they improved their Skill.

Different individuals could accomplish different results, depending on their area of concentration. That was why obtaining Yystrix’s tomb was so valuable; she had provided insight into ten different areas.

From the Engraving Encyclopedia Randidly had received years ago on Tellus, he had learned that there were many methods of achieving the same result. At the time, he had certainly found this strange but the knowledge wasn’t really actionable; he was too weak to really think deeply about what this meant. He simply labeled Engraving as a Skill that depended heavily on context.

Now, the word context seemed insufficient. Rather, Engraving seemed to be based entirely on significance.

The second suspicious point was more innocuous; unlike most other sources of power of the System, Engraving was physical. Contrary to the dominant and amorphous Skill sigils that formed inside of an individual’s Soulspace, a physical Engraving had the ability to create a Skill not from energy, but from patterns and meaning.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, there were the strange messages that Randidly had received from the Engraving Guild of the Nexus since his tenure as Head Drill Sergeant had begun. At the time he had basically ignored those messages without thinking twice. They were just another scroll in the daily pile. But now, thinking back to their content, they were perhaps a bit desperate to rein in his actions and request that he meet with them.

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Of course, after his first encounter with Velio Dunn, Randidly had no intention of leaving the Rally Station. That thought made Randidly now grimace, then grin and laugh aloud as he continued to use the stretched emotions to hold his position in the depths of the Nexus. The 61% Nether content of the air swirled around him, now largely kept in check by his own recovering Nether Nebula.

It wasn’t ideal for careful meditation, but it was good enough.

Randidly shook his head. These observations, and a few others, led him to one conclusion: that Engraving was ultimately a Nether method that had been repackaged. With that as a guide, Randidly finally experienced several breakthroughs in understanding as he recalled the briefly witnessed Nether King, as well as Neshamah Rex’s dense energy.

Because Randidly saw another pattern from these memories. To have an image was to take the immaterial and use it to affect reality. Then the reflection that Nether should follow is to take the concrete and generate the immaterial. Therefore, the energy flows that Randidly witnessed were not isolated constructs, but rather the natural consequences of some physicalized manifestation that was at the core.

His metaphor about witnessing the body of a car was more apt than he had realized.

The resulting energy flows might be layered, but that just meant that the core was correspondingly complex. Randidly’s eyes slowly blinked and then closed. He could see Neshamah’s smug smile as she noticed his intense examination of her Nether. Then, with that snapshot of energy as his guide, he began to work those flows of energy backward to discover what was at the core.

Gradually, the complexity began to unravel.

But after a few seconds, Randidly opened his eyes with a growl. Of course, he couldn’t manage to completely deduce her core. At least not yet. But Randidly didn’t stay annoyed for long. He turned and looked at the markings on the wall next to him. The desperate scrawlings of the doppelganger still made Randidly slightly bitter about his heavy-handed actions. As he ran his fingers across the markings, he could feel how long the doppelganger had worked to make these Engravings. That effort and time became inertia that continued to push Nether through them, even though the original creator had died.

Randidly wondered if these would naturally give birth to some version of a Nether beast, as an immense amount of time passed and those flows were naturally allowed to deepen. Because what seemed to have happened was that the doppelganger had planted the seeds of significance in the base Engravings.

Randidly touched the twisted tree, the brilliant sun, and the perfect human body on the wall each in turn. They represented degeneration, abundance, and contentment or fulfillment. The significance spoke for itself. And Randidly wasn’t entirely sure that he was interpreting the nested meaning of the etchings correctly, but he could vaguely sense its shape.

Randidly could feel the deep significance held by the doppelganger toward each of these ethereal concepts, despite the fact that its life had been short and twisted. Each was a large part of his experience.

Well, god knows how long it existed down here… Randidly frowned at the wall. Time is stretching even further, but it’s tough to know the state of the outside world…. Hehehe, if it wasn’t so inconvenient to escape this place, it truly would be a great area for training…

Then Randidly gritted his teeth as a long-nagging thought surfaced in his mind. “How the hell did Velio Dunn know I would be in the Web…?”

It was a question that plagued him, but he forced down his curiosity and returned to the creation of a Nether Class. There seemed to be a trick to mobilizing Nether instead of Mana to form the base of the Engraving, but Randidly had rather quickly picked up the knack. Still, he held his finger wreathed in black energy aloft without scratching against the bone. His mind continued to whirr.

Rather than the process, what now made Randidly hesitate was the goal.

Architecture of the Primordial Ways was the Engraving Skill he had created in the past, and now it would become the ultimate weapon toward the establishment of a powerful Nether Class. Yet that didn’t mean it would be a simple process.

Because Engraving was a tool that Randidly had always wielded with a goal in mind. Or more accurately, Randidly’s Engraving was always some means to accomplish a goal. He Engraved to create an arm, to empower a Skill, to suppress his physical abilities with an array, etc. Meanwhile, the process of immortalizing his own significance was not a means of creating a Nether Class, although it could be viewed as such. Rather, it was truly the pursuit of self-actualization.

Just the thought of such self-examination gave him a headache.

But Randidly sensed that proceeding without some care and thought would inevitably taint the final product. He could not view this as a way to discover a Nether Class. He truly needs to clear his mind and reflect on the significance of each of his images. Rather than their shape, Randidly needed to pinpoint what each meant to him.

Thinking shallowly about himself, the results of his significance examination were quite simple. Yggdrasil was his first image and the one that spurred his growth. The Grim Chimera was the image that allowed him to adapt to any circumstance. And the Stillborn Phoenix was the most recent, and the phoenix that represented the difficulty of Randidly’s dream.

Randidly began to chuckle. “Will it really be that easy, I wonder…? Significance, huh… what a loaded word…”

Humming to himself, Randidly pushed himself to the side away from the doppelganger’s pictures. While drifting through the overly thick air, he casually unleashed a burst of Nether to deflect some emotions that were heading up from below toward his previous position. But then Randidly swore quietly and grimaced as those emotions managed to shatter his Nether defense and ripped large chunks of flesh from his body. As the muscle, fat, and skin tumbled through the air, they began to wriggle slowly.

Learning from his previous mistake, Randidly’s left eye immediately darkened. Light in the surrounding area bent inward and was absorbed. Then the egg of depression shrieked and unleashed a wave of force; those pieces of flesh were crushed to naught. With a deafening clap.

Congratulations! Your Skill Hallucination of the Bloodless Heart (T) has grown to Level 301!

Sensing Randidly,’s decisive movements to destroy his flesh, the flow of emotions curled up and regarded him as though they possessed intelligence. It was a curious cobra, regarding prey that continued to struggle despite its previous attack. In its stillness, Randidly felt a lurking threat.

Yet before Randidly could lash out with a more concentrated blast of Nether, Randidly looked sharply upward. A powerful image shot downward. His expression soon turned horrendous. “Are you fucking serious…?”

A metal spike radiating a waning image slammed into the boundary between below and above 50% Nether content, sending a wave of force through the surrounding space.