Gasping and with the sort of headache that he had only experienced previously from a jealous and vindictive hangover, Randidly keeled over. The soft surface of the cloud gave a small amount, but it was a surprisingly uncomfortable surface on which to pass out. Most of the shades watched him silently, a constant crowd. Only Devick’s shade spoke, while she pulled more and more Nether out of him to solidify her own body.

“As I was alone, I thought very deeply about what sort of individual I needed to imprint upon to form my child. I would be the progenitor of my race, its one hope at returning to its former power. I tried to be realistic; I didn’t believe I would ever find someone who would willingly join their soul with mine, but I still preferred if I could find a man who would be willing to be present in the life of the child.”

After a short monologue, she fell silent again. Randidly was left alone with the sound of his own panting. Gritting his teeth, he pressed himself up and shook himself. The barrier began to unravel beneath his fingers, but he thought instead about the pain he had to endure whenever he touched the ladder. Is this really just raw emotional force that impacts me every time? If she had been tortured by this previously, no wonder she doesn’t want to remember what happened.

Even now, Randidly sensed that this story did not have a happy ending. If it had, would she have locked her emotions out of her body? Despite that, he reached out and grasped the ladder, doggedly climbing toward the summit that loomed above.

This time he prepared slightly by mobilizing his own emotional force to form a resistance, but Randidly almost bit off his tongue as the torrent of force waiting above bulldozed through his tiny emotions. In a sensation remarkably similar to swallowing an entire planet, Randidly felt those angry emotions force themselves down his throat and coil inside his body.

The minute awareness revealed that the emotions that poured into his Nether Core area, where they surged along the connection of significance to Devick’s shade. After absorbing those emotions, and having the details of her face sharpened, she began to speak. Randidly shakily tried to remain conscious.

“Perhaps nine individuals out of ten would have made the obvious choice of mate; I should imprint off Elhume, the hero of our time. He was the publicly acknowledged number one expert in the Nexus and was rapidly solidifying his power base.

“There were two problems with that. First, the Elhume of the Third Cohort stood at the center of the interconnected universe. Countless gazes fixated on him. LIkely due to that, he receded from the spotlight, allowing his fledgling organizations to handle all the day to day operations, rarely showing himself to the public. Even if I wanted to, finding and imprinting on Elhume would be difficult.

“But the real issue was that I didn’t want Elhume to be the father of my child. As he was such an obvious candidate, it just seemed… boring, right? Being predictable, after having my life destroyed, seemed like the worst choice I could make. I had to be singular.

“So I began searching for someone else.”

Randidly wiped the sweat off his brow and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Then he cracked his neck. His Nether Core was trembling from the strain of conveying so much emotion through to the shade. He gave himself a few minutes, gradually building back up the thick padding of dense Nether that he used to absorb the impact.

Randidly looked over his shoulder at Devick. Her iconoclast decision filled him with an impressed sort of disbelief. “You… really aren’t someone ordinary, are you?”

For a split second, Randidly thought he saw the ghost of a smile flit across the shade’s face. As though even the strange and tragic situation couldn’t mask her joy at being acknowledged as unordinary. Then her crimson hair swung down like a loose curtain and covered her expression. She was just a shade, gradually absorbing the emotions she had once severed from herself.

Randidly raised his head and looked up at the ladder. However, the personal will it must have taken to repeatedly shave off these layers of emotion- that’s why its growing stronger with each time I seize the ladder. The emotions probably grew back like weeds. So those last few rungs with be the entire force of your grief, several times in a row-

Randidly stopped himself from thinking about it and stood. Reach out, grab, pain enough to blackout. After he collapsed, his back arched as the emotions ran their course through him as they returned to the shade.

Perhaps due to a well-mannered upbringing, but the shade waited until Randidly’s consciousness drifted back before she continued her story. “However, being sure of what you don’t want and knowing what you want are two entirely different prospects. It is fair to say that I expertly handled the former while gambling with the latter. I traveled throughout the growing cities of the Nexus, visiting and sampling the local talented males.

“It is with only a little bit of vanity that I assure you that I left a trail of broken hearts in my wake. Not that I wasn’t happy with my partners; perhaps this was the happiest period in my life. However, several months into every city or relationship I would be washing my hands or training with the whip and straighten, suddenly so certain that I could see the trajectory of my life with the utmost clarity. My current position gave me far-reaching insight. If I remained in that place, with that person, I knew what I would become.

“And what I saw each time was myself unhappy. So I left.”

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Brushing himself off, Randidly dismantled the barrier. He reached out and heard the shade speak again, right before he touched the ladder.

“Of course, I hope I don’t need to point out the common element of all those situations.”

After another brief emotional strain induced seizure, Randidly leveraged himself up onto his elbows.

“So I traveled a lot, looking without knowing what I was looking for and finding about as much as could be expected. All the while, I grew increasingly desperate. Fighting might not be as common as it used to be, but there were a lot of rapidly shifting boundaries between the various factions. Violence couldn’t be avoided forever. Obviously, I was immensely talented and I continued my training; I had confidence in at least defending myself. But...

“But could I also defend a child? What if I was wounded and lost the ability to bear children. Now, more than ever, I wanted to make sure I found a powerful father figure. And during one transition from one planet to the next, it finally hit me. Although Elhume had united the Nexus, wasn’t it the individual who invented the Nexus Ways that truly paved the way for the relative civilization of the Third Cohort?

“I investigated and the creator was indeed a man. I had finally found my target. And sight unseen, I was pretty confident in my decision.”

The barriers before the ladder were becoming more complex, but Randidly still unraveled this newest one after only a few minutes. He flexed his hands and then let his fingers settle on the ladder. A concentrated spray of emotional lava blasted up through the contact and made his eyes roll back in his head.

“It didn’t take long for me to find out who he was. Or to find an opportunity to see him. And somehow, seeing him, having him seeming so perfectly tall, reliable, distinguished, confident… he was everything I had been waiting for to find in a male. Suddenly I could wait no longer. Without even speaking to him, I imprinted.

“What followed were several weeks of anxiety and stalking. I trailed in his wake, like a shadow that had come unmoored. I am confident in my looks and charm, but perhaps he was not attracted to women? Even more ominous was the fact I had used him to create a child; how would he feel to have been left out of the decision? Days quickly became weeks and I could not figure out how to proceed. The old fear lurked in my heart. If I put myself out there and was rejected, I would be truly alone.

“Perhaps I would have continued, locked into that cycle of fear and avoidance, had something not started going wrong inside of me. My baby, the precious daughter I could sense growing… was not as she should be.”

Randidly let out a hiss as he moved through the barrier this time. He looked up at the mist-shrouded mountain top. He had not been paying close attention during the various flashes, but he sensed how close it was now. And after that latest emotional blast-

Randidly tightened a hand into a fist. Now is when we get to the emotional base of her pain. Okay, deep breath in… deep breath out…

He reached out and touched the ladder, but his hand twitched and was flung backward. Randidly’s expression darkened; the emotions basically had knocked his grip away, unwilling to be forced back into the shade’s body. He unleashed a snort and reached forward with both hands to seize upon the ladder-

Pure undesirable sensation, cutting up through his body-

The bulging golden veins standing out along his forearms-

His Nether Core, barely able to contain the emotions that flowed through him and into the shade-

This time, Randidly persisted. His image physicalizations were completely manifested, but when the emotional transfer finished, he had only taken a few steps backward. He released a shaky breath and swayed.

Devick’s shade continued her narration. “At first I assumed it was my imagination. I had grown up on stories of how paranoid women could get while they had a child, usually for no other reason than their own nervousness about whether they would be good mothers. And my own emotional state in the past month had not been very balanced. I was a breeding ground for fear.

“However, as the pregnancy developed, I knew with chilling certainty that something was very wrong with my daughter. Unfortunately, I was still unwilling to face the truth. I’ll spare you the details. In the end, my daughter was born but she was empty. There was not a scrap of life within her body. She seemed to be sleeping. And I so, so desperately wanted to shake her awake.

“But my hands were powerless as I held her small shoulders.”

The strange cloud Randidly stood upon had darkened to the point it was an impenetrable black. Intermittently, it rumbled beneath his feet. The mist of the mountain summit drifted down, a tantalizing sign of how close Randidly had now come.

He raised his hand and pressed it against his chest. His heart was pounding. This should be the last one.

Congratulations! Your Skill Motif of the Hungry Deep (P) has grown to Level 327!

Once more with both hands, he seized upon the ladder. For an eternity, he could not move, burning and bucking and struggling, the funnel between an entire sea and that fragile shade behind him. His Nether Core trembled, struggling to keep up with the strain. The veins in Randidly’s eyes bulged and then popped as the pressure grew and grew. The knuckles of his fingers tightened painfully.

Eventually, Randidly’s three images stepped forward and flared their power. They formed a barrier that kept the emotional torrent at acceptable levels, letting it steadily pass through him rather than trying to withstand all of it at once. His tension rose, but his body and soul endured.

Afterward, Devick spoke. “Holding my dead and empty daughter, I stormed the base of the father. He had begun developing an isolated zone to seek the Pinnacle and would only see those who were extremely talented. He sat on the summit, waiting for applicants to pass his tests.

“In terms of talent, I’ve never met my own rival. Every grief-ridden, I was unstoppable.

“I made it to the summit. I stood before the Master of this place, the creator of the Nexus Ways and later the Grand Pattern, and begged for his help. I couldn’t understand why my ability had failed. Why my daughter had not simply died but had never lived.

“And do you know what he told me? The imprint and birth had failed because HE wasn’t alive. The perfect mate I had fixated on… was just a failed image, a byproduct of some more powerful being’s attempt to reach the Pinnacle. And he couldn’t help me, because he had been trying to figure out this problem for his own sake for his entire existence.

“Somehow, I had managed to pick one of the few men in the Nexus who wouldn’t help be produce the daughter I so desperately wanted.”