Rather grumpily, Randidly exited the Sea of Dreams and returned to the island. His body ached and his temples burned with stress and strain. Once on top of the volcano, he settled back into the core area of the Nether, made a few small adjustments to the churning storm of Nether, and closed his eyes to pay back some of the seconds he owed to the Penance.

For a while, he knew nothing. Time flowed past, the cost of the extra efficiency he achieved on gathering significance.

When he woke back up, all of the bleariness with which he had left the Sea of Dreams had faded away. At the very least, the sleep still had the function of allowing him to recover somewhat from mental strain. Randidly’s eyes were sharp as he looked up at the rotating clouds overhead. Earning PP might take a little bit more time than I thought. My emotional resolve for the separate images is a bit lacking at the moment. Before I nail down that sensation, proceeding more deeply in that area is just going to wear me down without much benefit…

For a few seconds, Randidly’s expression turned bitter. Walking nine steps forward through the Sea of Dreams had given him firsthand some understanding of some of the fraught experiences of the high-tier images. As he had to soldier through the strange impressions and vague emotions, he could suddenly understand how easy-going astray could be.

What if you lacked the resolve to pursue a particular emotional flavor? What if you couldn’t find the relentless Willpower to push a certain point of view? What if you lacked the correct understanding of how your image could be manifested? What if this was the limit of your understanding?

Maybe even more dangerous, what if you knew what sort of emotional force was required to mobilize the image but you, personally, had markedly changed since the image had been created? What if your values or focus had shifted and suddenly there existed a small incompatibility with the image you had carried with you and refined for all these years?

That gap would remain, limiting your potential.

“Luck is important,” Randidly whispered to himself. The road to the Pinnacle was long and there was only so much you could do to change your foundation. You needed luck that something tragic didn’t happen to destabilize your image of peace and healing. Or luck not to fall in love and find contentment while nursing an image of incendiary revenge. Or to somehow have the tragedy fit perfectly into your images, in Randidly’s case three images.

To have it rip out a chunk of his soul and deepen the hunger in the Egg of Depression. To have it feed its darkness.

To strike like a bolt from the blue, reminding the Grey Creature that even it wasn’t safe. To motivate it to plant contingency plans like seeds, everywhere it could.

To sprinkle yearning for a better world in Yggdrasil. To have the tragedy tempered by the heart of the stern and stubborn woman who would tirelessly spar with him, but gag herself when she truly needed help but there was nothing he could do.

Randidly closed his eyes and spent several minutes meditating. His current work required emotions, but that was somewhat different from being emotional. He allowed the memories of Helen to recede slightly before he began to work.

He examined his inner images, also using the Penances ability to perceive the shallow reflected Authorities that his foundation might someday become. As always, he felt oddly frustrated by the mysterious fourth Authority. For the moment, he simply used it as extra evidence to examine his foundation and his current emotional state with his image.

To his great relief, it felt like none of those dangerous emotional rifts had emerged. He found small flaws, especially in the Grey Creature now that he had reached an amount of power that seemed to indicate he wouldn’t die suddenly from an ambush, but all of it was within acceptable levels.

What he needed to do now was perfect the emotional affect for each of the images and then return to the Sea of Dreams for training. His lip quirked up at the edges as he followed that train of thought. And also then learn how to maintain three emotional affects at once and balance them for simultaneous use.

“Hopefully I won’t trick myself into developing a schizophrenia Skill,” Randidly said aloud, only half-joking. Then he shook himself. For the moment, more attention on the emotional affect would likely hurt. Better to put it in the back of his mind and allow his subconscious to turn the problem over while he worked on other things. And for that reason, Randidly looked down at the beach, where several dozen warriors trained their physical bodies.

Grinning, Randidly sent a message down to Heiffal to gather some more willing volunteers to experience the electromagnetic radiation. However, the response that he received from Heiffal left him shocked.

Most of the recruits believe that bothering you to help with their physical training won’t be necessary. You are busy enough as it is.

Randidly’s lips twitched. “Trying to get out of this? Heh.”

He rolled his shoulders to loosen up a bit and raised his hands with a purposeful theatricality. His Nether Core hummed in response, no longer simply coasting on the momentum of patterns that he had created, but now began to forcefully accelerate those energy interactions. Ripples tumbled and bounced off of each other as the whole working intensified. He dragged his fingers through the air. On cue, thunder rumbled overhead and the clouds darkened. They even seemed to hunch lower over the island, squeezing themselves out to create a heavier rain.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

However, his true goal quickly became apparent; the Nether content of the atmosphere began to climb. Nether gushed out from his fingers, gobbled up by the rising wind. Rotating the storm more quickly pulled Nether more tightly together and allowed Randidly to release thick streams of the binding energy to fill in the gaps. To Randidly the sensation was comfortable, but he was also aware of the heavy pressure it cast across the island.

Especially on those who were used to existing primarily with Aether.

How understanding of all the recruits to think of me, Randidly began his message. But let it be known that if there aren’t always a certain number of individuals experiencing the Hierarchy of Burden with me, I will need to compensate by increasing the Nether content in the air.

It did not come as a surprise that soon Heiffal found whole slews of individuals, both from the Vulpis Squad and from Expira, who were willing to bear the burden of the Hierarchy to pause the growing storm. During that short period where Randidly exerted himself and the patterns were allowed to gallop as much as they wanted, the area covered by the heavy clouds doubled.

This shift, in the end, turned out to be quite a lot of work for Randidly. Individuals who bore only a single layer would experience the same baseline difficulty, but a bunch of people only handling the first layer did very little to help him. Subsequent layers were a lot less dangerous with the first layer handled, but that was only on the scale of Randidly’s body.

To an average human, the difference between layer 1 and layer 2 could kill them several times over. These weren’t average humans, but that just meant that they could survive for a little longer underneath the writhing serpents of crimson lightning.

In the end, Randidly managed to find an arrangement that meant no one had an undue risk of death and he didn’t need to worry about the first fourteen layers. Most of the latter spots were held by the Vulpis Squad, with Raymund and DiOrtho handling thirteen and fourteen.

Randidly watched them, both growling and stomping around the Nether clouded beach, with a small smile on his face. She bore more layers at once, but the increase in difficulty means you are very close to matching Helen’s physical prowess. She’d scowl, but I bet also she’d be pretty proud by how far you’ve come.

We need… to make her proud. Then something else occurred to Randidly. He grimaced. I should go see what’s going on with that bundle of Nether where we buried her, as well. At some point.

He spared one last glance for the slate-grey storm clouds that circled the island and then sat down cross-legged at the edge of the volcano. He cut off his physical senses of the world and simply reached out and tasted the images and emotions that animated the world, in preparation for his own internal examination.

Compared to the ripples of energy, the waves of emotion were less flashy. Randidly sucked in a breath through his mouth and released it through his nose, his sensation expanding to follow the subtle interplay of emotion across the whole of Expira and then the Alpha Cosmos. Most of that larger emotional space seemed to be dominated by the actions of himself and the Pantheon, but he noticed something else that brought a frown to his face.

A dense storm of pressure was brewing across Expira.

Repressed tensions and frustrations bubbled up in every cultural center that Randidly could sense. Kharon was relatively free of the taint of this near-feral resentment, but he also understood that this was simply because Kharon stood on a particular side of this issue.

Buried underneath the more aggressive negative emotions were a lot of individual fears and worries about the future. There were clear threads leading from isolated groups, creating the vast coverage of this storm. He felt the hopelessness and the jealousy that had fermented for so long in a lot of people’s hearts. Although he couldn’t make out the specifics, he could also detect the way that so many people needed an easy answer, a simple way to ascribe blame.

That’s not surprising. There were always a lot of people who prefer an easy answer to a complex one. Randidly shook himself. However, this isn’t my problem.

As soon as Randidly thought it, he hesitated. In a lot of ways, it was his problem. This issue, whatever it may be, arose within his world and would affect his Soulspace. He had experienced wars in his Soulskill before; if this situation went to the worst-case scenario, he was not interested in cleaning up the mess that individuals who had been empowered by the System could create.

Well if it does come to that, I’ll intervene. But for these normal tensions… Randidly’s awareness swept through Expira. He sought out the familiar vein of Nether running through all these bulging and mutating negative emotional pockets. More than anything else, what he feared was some hidden architect, a lingering hand behind the curtain that made the population of the world dance to the sick tune of their own destruction.

But he found nothing; these emotions might be becoming extremely pervasive across the surface of Expira, but they were simply normal human emotions. Their growth felt almost inevitable. Their ubiquity spoke less to the uniformity of their source but of some shared viewed held by the population. And Randidly both didn’t want to be the sort of individual who stomped out these mundane emotions through the threat of force and also didn’t believe it would be very effective.

In a way, it would probably just unite the antagonism in targeting him. Which would be foolish and likely pointless of most people to do, but it did seem like a hassle.

His eyes cracked, his irises flashing emerald. His gaze pierced through cloud and distance and arrived at the capital city of Zone 7, one of their closely protected hive cities. At the moment, three individuals that Randidly recognized were fighting their way through the defenses. And although it was an isolated incident, Nether was gathering above that area; for whatever reason, that event would be the fuse that broke the silence on this issue.

Despite himself, Randidly’s heart ached as he saw Todd, riding a small wooden skateboard through the air, his eyes grey and sightless. The lingering image of the Calamity lingered in the wounds, scaring him.

He forced himself to close his eyes. For now… let the issues develop. I have my own work to do.

Randidly’s attention turned back to his images and the emotions that animated them.