When Randidly woke back up from his twelve-hour rest, he returned to the forming of Claudette’s blade. He approached the toil with the determined familiarity of a spouse in a bitterly unhappy marriage. Hatred became a seething pair of gloves that protected him from the strangling sense of abandonment as he worked.

His gaze was clear and without reproach; he did not resent Claudette’s image for its thorns. If anything, he inwardly rejoiced; it was only because of the dangerous edges that Randidly would be able to create something worthy of slaying one of the powerful figures of the Nexus.

The bellows beneath his heart pumped ceaselessly. His emotions buzzed.

The dream he just had was only part of the story of Clarent, but Randidly began to see the patterns of how the story would develop. He darkened the blade at the edges and created black veins that ran inward toward the core within the hilt. Much to his chagrin, Randidly also re-introduced light blasting outward from the sword. But now, that light had more focus; it was clustered around three glowing stars that were sealed within the actual blade of her image.

The black veins weren’t exactly jail bars. However, it was clear that their pulses weakened the orbs of light within the weapon. Those small conduits were the physical representation of the restrictiveness that Claudette carried with her every moment of her existence. Considering the light-hearted young woman that Randidly had gradually come to know, he was surprised when he very easily drew out a deep darkness from her subconscious.

The suffocating blackness ate through Randidly’s emotional gloves even more quickly than the sense of desolation. But at the same time, he perhaps understood this side of Claudette. Because she had grown up in the Nexus. She had no choice.

Congratulations! Your Skill Conviction of the Celestial Cataclysm (T) has grown to Level 512!

Randidly carefully sharpened the branching lines of those veins. After experiencing Nether flowing through his body, he easily replicated the pulsing shadows of that substance existing inside of him. Clarent was Claudette, but within her she held those three struggling points of light, completely suppressing them with a deep, frigid isolation.

However, Randidly was quickly forced to grimace and withdraw his tight focus. His Grim Intuition began to swim around him from overuse. Working directly with the sword is even more exhausting than I thought. Even if I keep my images flared, I’m emptying my mental reserves as soon as they creep back up to healthy levels. And taking breaks in the middle of the work is so inefficient.

Gah. At this rate… Well, might as well risk heading deeper into the Fatepiece.

Randidly laid the chill weapon to rest within the ground once more and pulled out his Visage of Obsession. To his surprise, the painting had changed. The dark staircase still dominated the central area, but in the distance, Randidly could just make up a mist-covered ground that stretched endlessly below.

-which remained extremely distant even as he spun down through seventy-seven million steps to reach the barrier of liquid shade, with Shal standing guard with his hands folded in front of him. He showed Randidly his teeth. “Are you prepared? The next sacrifice is your ability to choose when you activate your Fatepiece. You will have totally given up control.”

Randidly took the news stoically, which earned a bark of laughter from Shal. Despite these restrictive prices of using the Visage of Obsession, the current progression was definitely an improvement from his previous delirium after activating it. He wouldn’t complain about this flimsy price.

He descended through the shadow, his skin crawling as he felt something shift inside of him… but what really brought Randidly up short was the fact that when he passed through the barrier, he was still standing on the staircase. The dull coolness of the heavy black stairs remained a constant presence. Immediately, he could feel that the Fatepiece had activated its capability and made him descend two levels, back to back.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Randidly muttered. “If you were going to do this, why not just make whatever this sacrifice is the previous one…? We don’t have that many left.”

The Fatepiece didn’t deign to answer. After a hissing sigh, he could only lower his head and continue his journey down. Gravity did most of the work, allowing his mind to wander. Occasionally he peered over the edge of the stairs and saw the seething mists below, but his pointlessly high eight hundred and eighty-eight million steps did little to close the distance.

Heading further down did dim the ambient light in the area, however. Randidly practically swam in the darkness as his descent continued.

Due to the extremely high number of steps he needed to take, even the patient Randidly began to be irritated as he manually had to take each step. His bodiless existence couldn’t just hop over the edge of the staircase and fall to the proper position. He very quickly redirected that frustration back to the task at hand. Even if he was confined to the Fatepiece, that didn’t mean that he couldn’t ponder the details of Claudette’s image.

In truth, the break was helpful. He had designated rest periods, but those were suddenly consumed with chaotic and vivid dreams. But the doldrums of descending a staircase truly gave him a true pause. When he finally arrived at the waiting Shal projection, his mind was at peace and he had rediscovered his sense of direction.

Shal tilted his head to the side. “Miss me?”

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Randidly looked helplessly at Shal. “Have some propriety. The real Shal would never make a joke like that.”

The projection shrugged. Then he pressed his lips together before speaking. “You have finally arrived at the difficult portion. I wish you good luck. This time, you must sacrifice your ability to clearly differentiate between the past and the future. You will be forced to walk between them; specters of other times will walk with you in the present.”

Randidly blinked. “How… how will that even work?”

But the projection vanished rather than explaining. Randidly was alone with the barrier of shadow. For several seconds he tried to conceptualize what he was about to experience. But he could only shake his head. There’s really only one way to find out.

He descended the steps and sank into the pool of shadow. Unlike the prior sacrifices, this one Randidly felt. The substance of it was quite heavy. He took another step and the liquid squeezed him up to his calves. Swaying, he couldn’t banish a strange sense of weightlessness. Another step took him up to his thighs. His mind buzzed. His Soulspace hummed furiously as his Skills related to time flared and flickered. Stars danced across Randidly’s vision.

Something twisted within him; paying this price strained his body. Randidly choked out a breath. Maybe the whole reason this was split in two was to make this portion possible. Giving up my ability to differentiate time is a large thing...

He took another step. The liquid constricted, binding him up to his waist. He would have swayed, had the shadow barrier not held him in place. Randidly bared its teeth and took another step. His hands sunk into the shadow and were anchored there.

The next took him up to his neck. His head spun. He took a deep breath. Then he allowed his head to sink beneath the surface. Fog spun around him. Randidly could tell that he was back in the projection world, but suddenly the world was full of a chaotic mass of bodies. His senses fed him conflicting information.

The world existed in layers that rose and fell like the tide. Randidly did his best to remain calm and focused on only the strongest layer for now.

One moment he stood over Clarent corrupting the surrounding field with its internal darkness, the next the field was empty; the sword hadn’t even arrived on this planet yet. On the nearby slopes, Randidly could see members of the Lizakh in thick coats strolling along, admiring the surrounding sights. The aura of the world was filled with happiness and contentment. When the layers shifted once more, the field had been tainted black and a lone individual staggered across the cursed land to find the salvation for his people.

He looked so small and frail.

Randidly licked his lips as he watched the shifting layers of the world in front of him. He understood was seeing, yet somehow couldn’t put a name on it. The more he struggled to catch that vague understanding, the more it seemed to come apart and disperse. In its wake, he only felt vaguely puzzled.

As his awareness spread out to take in the whole of the world, the disorientation worsened. The layers did not coat the world evenly. Sometimes thriving cities filled certain areas, the next they would be filled with decaying runes. Even worse, sometimes the grand edifices vanished altogether, leaving a pristine and untouched world before even the Lizakh developed.

The worst part of all of the strange blending that he experienced was the humanoids themselves. Occasionally, layers full of bodies dominated the surroundings. Because the Fatepiece had taken away his ability to recognize faces, even amongst the Lizakh. Even if he focused on them, the details of their features melted away and left the front of their heads eerily smooth. Randidly walked amongst a billion faceless beings and then other moments he was left entirely alone on the planet. Sometimes he could recognize particularly important individuals based on their image, but otherwise...

The beings around him might as well be fickle ghosts. He wasn’t one to get easily spooked, but the experience did make his skin crawl.

Still, he didn’t forget why he was here: he needed to improve Claudette’s image. So he buckled down and focused on whatever was in front of him. Randidly felt a vague capability to influence which of the spectrum of scenes he was seeing between all the different layers, but he couldn’t quite control it. At least not yet. He flowed freely between the different moments and utilized a surprising amount of mental potency to refine the image.

Perhaps the biggest shift was his outlook; the current Randidly had an ease to his convictions that definitely empowered his image refining.

When Clarent was before him, Randidly used his hatred and desire for revenge to rip the sword out of the ground and hold it aloft. The veins were soon clearly defined, stretched upward from a pale blue sword that housed three disparate points of light. Perhaps the wickedly sharp blade of Clarent had even originally been completely transparent, but the influence of those veins was relentless. The area around those stretching tentacles grew murky and dim.

Does that mean that Claudette herself is the source of the corruption? Randidly wondered. Then the scene in front of him shifted. He watched again as D’min struggled to approach the unholy sword that poisoned his planet.

Randidly felt a certain sort of guilt as he looked on at the scene. D’min staggered sideways, barely able to remain upright under the force of Clarent’s aura. Unlike Randidly, the Lizakh did not possess the WIllpower to inoculate himself against its influence. The lizardman could only rely on grit and determination to put one foot in front of the other. His shoulders trembled, but he steadily advanced.

As he watched the scene play out, Randidly reached out and smoothed the blurry lines; he solidified the end of this planet’s tragedy. The thought process of the Lizakh was simple; they didn’t understand the totality of their doom, even as they lost ground to the desolation. The expedition, led by D’min and Yn’ulk, was to investigate the source of the corruption, which they had correctly identified as this sword.

However, after the group passed through the crumbling remnants of the Sun Temple, things did not go well for the expedition. But the reason this blow was so fatal was because it came from within.

Aside from the cold, the expedition had encountered no real obstacles. Yn’ulk, who heard his fellows continually praise D’min for his leadership, began to grow bitter. One long night as the group camped on the edge of the Field of Talons, Yn’ulk convinced a few of his followers to leave with him; they did not need D’min’s leadership.

Of course, as soon as they moved into the Field of Talons, the fallen Lizakh found them. With only a few warriors, the fallen Lizakh strangled Yn’ulk’s group through sheer numbers.

And the meet from these poor souls only served to whet the appetite of the cursed creatures that danced to the desolate song of Clarent.