Congratulations! Your Skill Revelations of the Atramentous Threshold (T) has grown to Level 680!

He sat in sea of purple-black flames and the complex intersection of Nether threads, just examining his ‘self’ that existed. The body, worlds, and soul that became Randidly Ghosthound in his current iteration. Space and time didn’t matter; everything flattened and funneled by his shifting perspective into a straight path to the future. Yet as he watched, those threads twined and spun together, then bloomed outward in complex patterns, flanked by those glittering flames.

Before him, he watched the possibilities flirt and multiply.

The future spread and widened and grew with only a hint of variance until he couldn’t keep track of all the interactions. The change accelerated until only a small examination took him to a place where the future was wider than it was long. Variance dominated his awareness, only a few weeks out. The patterns began to change color, as they spread out from Randidly’s Skill. The purple became red and green, the black became grey and ivory. Then came the yellows, oranges, cobalts, crimsons, and emerald. Shades and hues proliferated into a bouquet of possibilities.

Congratulations! Your Skill The Grey Creature Glimpses Providence (P) has grown to Level 472!

Using the two Skills together, Stillborn Phoenix and the Grey Creature arm in arm behind him, allowed Randidly to dig deeper than colors and patterns into the concrete truth of what waited ahead in Expira. Yet the truths he received were not easily interpretable. Voices shouted in his ears, protests and screams of pain and the babble of layered conversation turned intelligible as voices mixed. He saw a man standing upon a burning building, his arms raised to the sky. He saw Delilah, skulking up the side of the volcano, watching him with trepidation while he was sleeping. And finally, he saw a hand reaching out for a gleaming trophy-

The strain of enduring the onslaught of possibilities became to much. A tremor shook his psyche, the accumulated strain of holding the two most demanding Skills in his arsenal grabbing him by the shoulder and warning him of the result if he pressed further.

But due to his time within the Nether Ritual, his spine naturally straightened in defiance at the prospect that he couldn’t continue to proceed. A bold and majestic refusal unfurled from within Randidly’s chest, the humming emotional affect that he had been so long searching for amidst the crazy intersection of connections and colors. A hand with fingers of gnarled roots reached out and brushed against his shuddering mentality. Those fingers contained a vast influence, soothing his thoughts.

And his pained consciousness stilled. It acquiesced, allowing itself to be pushed beyond its limits by the root hand. In a way, it had no choice.

Congratulations! Your Skill the First Tree Suffers Only Fealty (P) has grown to 840!

Yet just as quickly as he firmed his resolve to press forward, another portion of himself gracefully withdrew. Without him needing to consciously shape the thoughts, he walked backward away from that stubborn continuation.

Randidly’s mental focus slipped out of the Nether Ritual, spent and small, and returned to his body. He found his arms trembling and sweaty. He looked down at his hands and attempted to smile, bemused and still slightly spooked by the cool and aloof fatalism that he had discovered within himself.

In the end, he had only managed to remain atop that Nether Ritual for eight hours. Even beyond his high expectations, plugging together his mind and the physical form of the Alpha Cosmos required vast amounts of processing power and mental fortitude. Randidly said a private thank you to his evolved Unnatural Capacity, Fidelity of the Ascendant Moirae, and Exquisite Piety. Without these improved versions of Wisdom, Control, and Focus, respectively, it would have been impossible for him to endure even those hours.

The sheer amount of possibilities and complex interactions would have lulled him into buzzing oblivion.

Abruptly, he twisted his neck and looked at the bushes at the edge of the path to the volcano’s lip. He very genuinely expected to catch Delilah in the act of sneaking up on him, her eyes widening as their gazes met. But there was no one there. The leafy ferns waved slightly, buffeted by the lazy winds lining the eye of the storm.

Ah. Probably happens further in the future, He mused to himself. Then he remembered the blood on the hand of the individual reaching for the trophy and frowned slightly to himself. He sent Tatiana a message about upcoming tournaments.

Someone was planning something. Even if he didn’t intend to intervene, he could least keep himself abreast of events.

In the meantime, he took several breaths and pushed himself to his feet. His preparations for the Penance had proved unnecessary; he now had several days’ worth of stored up time. So he leapt off his volcano and created another massive plume of salt water as he crashed into the ocean. Due to his previous activities, he discovered that it was actually quite pleasant to activate the Hierarchy underwater. In terms of sensation, the presence of water distracted him from his own tight thrashing.

The only downside was the continued strain he had on the local ecosystem, but at this point, all the organisms weak enough to be affected by him had been driven away anyway by the Nether storm. His aura of a natural disaster meant that being slightly more purposeful in his environmental degradation didn’t do much harm.

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

Randidly didn’t start the physical training for another fifteen minutes while Yggdrasil sipped at the world and his mental acuity trickled back. Sometimes, his mental recoveries felt like waking up from a long hibernation. With renewed awareness, he considered the assistance being given to him. Raymund Ballast himself had started onto the second layer of the Hierarchy, enduring a portion of that searing and jagged light that highlighted rips in reality, but Randidly knew how hard it would be for him to improve quickly.

He firmed his Willpower and squared his shoulders. He produced his Fatepiece and let the pyramid float in the water in front of him. His eyes went to that cool blue third middle layer, where he now toiled. He activated it and heat permeated through his skin and did its best to boil his insides. However, at this point, the heat was almost pleasant.

A little like slipping into a too-hot tub of water, as your body struggled to keep up, but you knew it wouldn’t kill you.

Congratulations! Your Skill Marred Yet Reliable Foundation of Yggdrasil (T) has grown to Level 702!

A grin stretched across Randidly’s face. That’s one immediate benefit of this new emotional affect. It resonates will all my related Skills. So suddenly, the marred and reliable foundation has this royal pride to it, that makes it even simpler to ignore lighter forms of damage and persist. The light radiation… has almost finished being a threat to me.

Of course, beyond the light, Entropy quietly waited for Randidly to walk within its purview. And even in the face of a domineering pride, Entropy could steal everything.

Randidly’s shoulders curled inward. He still felt the burn from the light radiation, but the heat that relaxed his muscles quickly vanished. What remained was a horrible chill, as though he had been filleted and the cuts of his meat packed with an impossibly frigid ice. It was Claudette, blooming in his chest, sucking away light and color and sensation. It was Clarent without a song, only the inevitably of succumbing.

He sucked in a breath through his teeth. His Nether Core whirled. His heart pounded with all its force. All three of his images, the ascendant Yggdrasil in the lead, resonated with their defiance against this inevitability of loss before the natural wounds of existence. His images refused to be drained and empty. They refused to cease churning out energy.

Randidly lay at the bottom of the ocean, water churning around him, as he fought against the entropy. His muscles flexed and tightened, desperate for any small advantage. Yet the creeping chill was relentless in its advance.

Congratulations! Your Fatepiece the Hierarchy of Burden has grown to Level 52!

Randidly had a rather sour expression on his face when he deactivated the Fatepiece. From its other applications, the increase in Yggdrasil’s power is actually quite significant. Yet before Entropy, the change is very small. I guess that just goes to show you that while I took a very necessary step forward, I haven’t completely narrowed the gap between my image and the powerful figures in the Nexus. More refinement is necessary.

For a brief moment, his mind went to Wick, broken and split into several spliced personalities. He wondered what had happened to him. But of course, the time that had passed was only for him. For Wick, perhaps only a few hours had gone by.

Soon, he came to his body and began to move. Randidly swam to the surface of the choppy tropical waters and then used the backstroke to carry him back toward the beach. He spoke up to the grey clouds, “But if he truly gave up… he has had enough time to take his own life. Or the other selves could take the main life, finally separating themselves from… whatever that was.”

Sloshing up to the beach, Randidly casually waved a hand at the many training individuals on the sand who stopped and bowed when he surfaced from the water. He shook himself to dislodge the worst of the dampness, but of course, the constant downpour just soaked him again. He reached up and squeezed out his lengthening hair as he began striding back toward the volcano, but his eyes caught on a certain individual.

Charlotte Wick trained on the beach, red electromagnetic crackling across her limbs. Likely she was deeply occupied with her own training; she wasn’t one of the individuals who noticed his arrival. But how could Randidly miss the shifts in her image? How could those notes not pull his attention?

She had received his personal training, based on Yggdrasil. Her Primal Force had evolved into a boundless and wild being. And now the scent of blood and bone had been injected into that same old form, warping it into something close to a shambling chimera.

The image resembled corpses clumsily stitched together than any sort of spring-fueled animal animus.

Randidly swayed. He felt a response from his Resonant Fangs of Extinction Domain as he looked at Charlotte. And through the connection between them, there was no way that he could miss Charlotte’s attempts to forcefully keep Helen alive in her own image.

Yet ultimately, Randidly turned away from this ailing student. At least right now, based on the simmering emotional pot the bear-woman kept in her chest, she wasn’t ready to open up about what she was going through. Her pain would lash out, ready than prepare itself to be healed. Randidly knew that stage. He knew the long, blank stares into the middle distance of memory and the way your heart felt like it was crumpled trash.

He knew the tightness that she probably felt in her chest all too well.

“Those wings…” Randidly spoke softly to himself, feeling from afar how lopsided the joints were and the blood seeping out of the spot where they attached to the back. He grimaced in distaste and shook his head. The image with all its elements was currently in an ugly duckling form. But if Charlotte managed to mix the two, combining life and death-

Well, Randidly knew from first-hand experience how effective that could be. His Soulskill had gone through several revisions of that process.

As he ascended to the mountain, the reply from Tatiana came. Yes, actually, there will be a tournament soon. I’m surprised you remembered. It was supposed to be this month, but its been pushed back by the trial.

The trial? He responded as he settled back into this place.

Annie made quite a fuss last week, Tatiana sent back. Hamstrung a passenger jet above the Orchard. Painted the whole sky white and knocked the plane out of the sky. It crashed into one of their larger skyscrapers.