There was, Randidly found, a very thin margin of temperature that was hot enough that the blazing metal bands on Nrorce’s gloves superheated the air so quickly that it became plasma, but also before the gloves themselves began to melt. The required temperature range was so high that even Randidly’s powerful body was scalded. But this little amount of pain was nothing to him.

He moved in the darkness with his weaponized torch hands, proceeding at a brisk pace down one of the many underground tunnels. Behind him, the corpses of Absolute Darkness Ants twitched. Acri curled around his waist, gratefully absorbing all of the resulting Experience. Apparently, it had understood some of Randidly’s dilemmas and used the Experience it had earned from the battle in the Fifth Cohort to learn the capability to almost completely siphon off Experience from Randidly, at will.

Without an image, using his blazing palms was the most efficient method of cutting down these Absolute Darkness Ants. Plus, it was a novel experience to weaponize his hands and simply chop them to pieces. The other method Randidly found was simply using his own body from a bulldozer and crushing all these human-sized ants, but that strategy left him covered in sticky ant gore.

Plus, Acri was much more sensitive to the heat radiated from his gloves than he was.

With his hands occupied, his tail took over full time experimenting with Nether. Randidly was a little dubious at first, but the more he used it the more proficient the appendage became. During the eight hours that Randidly assumed the role of an exterminator, his tail became just as capable at creating Nether Arrays as his hands were.

Randidly took a brief, looking down at the light-saber-like energy flaring up around his hands with amusement. After coming to the farm, perhaps I’ve discovered my true calling: An exterminator. Bugs everywhere will learn to fear the Ghosthound…!

Centipedes? No problem!

Giant spiders? Gone in seconds!

A secret race of subterranean worms with carapaces as hard as diamonds? Hah!

Chuckling to himself, Randidly continued to lawnmower his way forward through the complex network of tunnels underneath the warehouse. The only illumination was the burning heat released by his gloves. Honestly, even he had a headache as he thought about clearing out the several million-strong population of these ants. And that was only the ants in the immediate area. If he forced his Grim Intuition to spread outward, he realized that the surface of Nrorce’s world was basically only inhabited by a few farmers. It was the underground where most of the population was; he could detect almost a hundred different varieties of ant in his brief examination.

Congratulations! Your Skill Cosmic Necessity (M) has grown to Level 310!

But, luckily for Randidly, they really just possessed an insect level of intelligence. So he felt no qualms burning his way downward, slaying the queen, setting fire to the egg sacks, and then slaughtering the several hundred thousand that got in his way. Then he returned to the warehouse and began another thankless task: disposing of all of the spoiled food.

This was a great deal more difficult than Randidly had expected, because he could only use his physical body, not images or Skills, to do it. Even worse, dealing with the rancid organic matter was the first time since his shoes had been burned away by acid, all those years ago in that first Dungeon, that Randidly regretted being barefoot.

The warm feeling of maggots popping beneath his toes… was not something he would soon be able to forget.

Ultimately, he just dumped the stuff down into the caves. It would attract more ants in the short term, but he could easily deal with them. Plus, it would be convenient for Randidly if the ants would feast on this shit so that the air down here would begin to clear out.

Randidly even dropped Acri down into the tunnels when ants began to arrive, to let the Soulseed have some fun.

Then he heated up his gloves again and used plasma to melt away the haphazard Engravings that covered the warehouse floor. Some of the Engraving resisted, drawing their energy from whatever core lay beneath the farmhouse, but they all eventually were wiped away. Only then could Randidly and Neveah begin to cobble together a much more efficient Engraving System, free of any images.

The task was so big that they had only started brainstorming when Nrorce came back and announced it was time for breakfast. Randidly was only too happy to stop and follow Nrorce into his home, where enough friend ham, pheasant eggs, and a cheesy potato casserole to fill several barrels waited for them.

But the true reward for the night’s toil was a breath of clean air.

After eating, Nrorce gave Randidly more tasks around the farm and then wandered back to his kitchen to do the dishes.

Randidly paused then, tapping his fingers against the table as he stared at the goblin’s departing back. The way things were developing… it seemed that Nrorce would allow him to stay here and work for a while. Which made him happy… but also made him hesitate.

Still, Randidly eventually shook his head and banished those thoughts. For now, this is fine.

So his days settled into a new pattern. He worked on the farm in the mornings and then trained with Nether and the Hierarchy of Burden through the afternoon into the evenings. His body gradually became accustomed to simply coping with his significant physical Stats, moving through the various motions. When Acri grew bored with tormenting ant, Randidly practiced his spear forms and savored the simple ache of pushing his body to its limits.

Or at least, as much as he could push without setting Acri on fire.

At nights, he shared a dinner meal with Nrorce and the Randidly continued to clean up the warehouse. After the second night, he and Neveah had come up with the shape, but implementing it proved a bit difficult without an image. An image functioned as an inherent quality control toward Engraving, making it much easier to output an even layer of Mana for a long period of time.

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Randidly paused in his Engraving and shook his head. No wonder the original maker just said ‘fuck it’ and added everything on top… getting an Engraving this big to work…. Pah…

Honestly, Randidly wished Neveah was physically present, and even considered trying to explain the situation to Nrorce for her to show up. But ultimately, he saw this as training. So Randidly buried his complaints and practiced.

On the third day, Randidly paused after dinner and looked at Nrorce. The subject of how much of a debt he owed to the talented goblin chef never came up. Somehow, Randidly sensed that he could stay here working as long as he wanted. And that he could leave anytime he had felt that he had repaid the debt he owed. But Nrorce kept a tight grip over his emotions, meaning that Randidly was mostly left to guess why the repayment method was so open-ended.

But he forced himself to clear his throat after dinner on the third night. “Is it alright… if I leave the farm for a few hours? There’s something I want to do, and I can only work with my image.”

Nrorce waved a hand in the careless way that he had as he gathered up the dirty dishes and carried the items through to the kitchen. “You know the way out. Just make sure you put your gloves on before you come back. And wipe your shoes- well, feet before you tramp filth all over the farm.”

Randidly stared after the goblin for several seconds. Then he stood and stretched. He stooped down to pass through the low threshold and left Nrorce’s home, proceeding directly to the Southern entrance. When he passed through the white lightning tunnel and closed the door behind him, he gratefully took off the leather gloves.

However, even as he delighted in the sensation of power that suffused his body as his passive Skills kicked back in, he looked upward and the levity steadily left him. He could sense it now, the general, ceaseless encouragement from the System, pushing plants and animals to grow in size and strength at a rapid pace. Randidly sniffed lightly and wrinkled his nose. Now I sorta get it… all this image pollution is radiating off people constantly… Even on a small planet like this, there are quite a few low-grade influences that can affect your image.

Randidly began walking back toward the teleporter to return to the Nexus, but then he changed his mind. Instead, he activated Hallucination of the Bloodless Heart and lifted himself off the ground. When he had risen about twenty meters, he stopped holding back and rapidly accelerated toward the sky.

Darkness condensed in his left eye, forming the keening Stillborn Phoenix. Light melted and spiraled toward his eye, where it was soon devoured by the image. Small bolts of red electricity crackled off of the edge of the event horizon as it began to stabilize.

Randidly blasted up through the cloud layer and then pierced further and further up in the atmosphere. As the physical particles around them began to dissipate, Randidly began to feel the Stillborn Phoenix become more and more active. But due to its recent good behavior, Randidly didn’t bother to restrain it. The sensation of having a quarter of his face devoured by the darkness of the Egg of Depression was a strange one, but Randidly wasn’t too worried.

Even his own images would have difficulty damaging his remade body in a short amount of time.

The light around him began to shift. Finally, Randidly paused in his acceleration and spun around, savoring the feeling of weightlessness. Well, Randidly basically always felt no effort to move. But the perfect sense of inertia he experienced was something quite different. He twisted around until he could look down at the world beneath him. The cloud layer was satisfyingly similar to swirled whipped cream. Randidly chuckled soundlessly in the darkness of space. So, that’s a planet, huh…

It actually… seems quite small and fragile… Randidly’s smile gradually vanished. Substances were gradually strengthened by the presence of Aether in the atmosphere. That’s why the average person couldn’t just stomp and create a canyon on Expira, even after gaining one hundred Strength. But Randidly’s growth far outpaced the rate at which Aether could enrich most environments. In addition, he guessed that there was an inherent limit to how much more powerful materials could become. Likely it was an asymptote at the Stat limit of the System, so that the materials would become increasingly close, but never touch that limit even after an infinite amount of time.

And since I’ve moved beyond that… Randidly turned away from the planet, snuffing out that thought. He expanded his Grim Intuition and felt the way that the Aether constructs of the Nexus stretched out like a vein and covered the planet. Likely, those were the Nexus Ways.

Congratulations! Your Skill Hallucination of the Bloodless Heart (T) has grown to Level 346!

Randidly activated Hallucination of the Bloodless Heart and pushed himself further away from the Nexus Ways. He had considered finding just a small planet, but he quickly spotted some partial moons floating in an asteroid belt a relatively short distance away from Nrorce’s planet. By accelerating himself forward with gravity and then using Chimeric Impunity to avoid the intervening space, Randidly quickly arrived at the cluster of massive moons.

Randidly scanned the largest of the chunks and then smiled. About… one-tenth the size of Expira? But that still works fine; it doesn’t need to be an entire planet. Hum, there could even be a gravity difference on the Calamity, which would be an added challenge… But what are-

As Randidly’s Grim Intuition scanned the world more closely, his expression grew increasingly frosty. He guided his body down, accelerating toward the surface. He barely bothered to slow down at all before impact, meaning he smashed face-first into the ground and punched a crater one-fourth of the way into the moon. The floating piece of ground shuddered.

With burning eyes, Randidly stalked out of his impact site. Ridges and hills crumbled beneath him as he walked, falling into the growing sinkhole. He stepped once, twice, rapidly accelerating away from the destruction.

There was no atmosphere on the planet, which meant everything was preserved. So when Randidly stopped, he was standing above the mummified body of a blue-skinned goblin with droopy ears. The figure had collapsed with one arm stretched outward, as though it were reaching for something.

The figure was in the middle of a preserved road, in a neighborhood. Randidly’s heart began to pound.

Dotting the surrounding hills were the tiny, half-buried in the ground houses of the goblins. When Randidly’s senses scanned those structures, he found that more corpses were often clustered, gripping each other, gathering together for warmth in corners and bedrooms and basements. Randidly gritted his teeth and continued his investigation of the surroundings. His shoulders were trembling.

He couldn’t find even the slightest hint of Aether in the surroundings, so he had a theory: when the Nexus arrived, it didn’t need to supply energy to an entire planet’s worth of population. So it had… scooped out chunks when it remade the world, tossing these pieces out into space to cull some of the population.

Something horrible and implacable rose in Randidly’s chest. He looked down at his trembling hands, one flesh, one metal. The claws of the Grim Chimera flexed, wishing to rip into flesh. And this is why Neveah. This is why I cannot stop. Why I’m willing to transform myself into a force to change this. How long do you think they survived, tossed into space like this? How long did it take for those unlucky enough to be in the wrong places to suffocate?

And I’ll change it. Randidly clenched his hands into fists. He wondered how many humans from his planet had suffered a similar fate. How many had been frozen in the Wilderness and how many were deemed ‘too expensive'. I’ll change it all. At any cost.

He could feel Neveah sigh. But she didn’t have the heart to contradict him at that moment.