Randidly earned a few extra PP without even thinking about it. He was so deep in the Nether patterns that he didn’t even recognize the significance of the notification at first. He just continued, following the insights to new understanding.
It was only after, when he floated back down to himself with a sense of exhaustion and satisfaction, that he looked again at the notifications in front of him and began to grin. His skin tingled against the cool air.
Congratulations! Your Skill Motif of the Hungry Deep (P) has grown to Level 904!
His awareness filtered down to a huge, turning alignment. His Soulskill was a fisherman, having let the net drift down into the sea of the Alpha Cosmos and lay for so long that the denizens had forgotten about it. Then, as soon as that final PP was earned, the Soulskill shifted into readiness. Adrenaline flooded through his body.
At any moment, it could reel in that tithe he was owed, flooding his body with taxed PP.
Yet the reason that Randidly’s eyes dilated and his vision went hazy was the significance. His Nether Core whirled with power, humming with the possibilities of the moment, of the branching futures available to him as soon as he spent the PP and fully triggered the Tithe. Yet suddenly that resonance had a larger platform, through the Nether Ritual he had created within Expira.
His Soulskill hummed a potent tune and the Nether Ritual began to sing.
Randidly could feel the weight of it, as though he really stood on the shifting boat and gripped the rough rope connecting with the haul. He tugged lightly, standing in this moment of tense potential, feeling that in addition to PP, there was something extra that would come along with this Tithe.
Something significant.
Adding Nether to the Alpha Cosmos, even if its nowhere near 50%, is paying dividends. Randidly grinned as he sensed the vital presence of Nether significance coming with the tithe. The sun peaked over the horizon, the first rays of the day providing rare illumination to the storm cloaked island. Beams of light reflected off the drops. Only when the light came sideways, right across the horizon at dawn, did sunlight reach the toiling trainees.
His mind spun. After all, what exactly were Path Points? Functionally, they provided the ability to advance through Paths, earning more Stats and Skills. They were the fertilizer that the System provided liberally, a reward for drinking more deeply from its addictive nectar and growing in power.
But practically, PP represented commodified bits of raw image. Pieces so small that a thousand of them couldn’t make anything potent. A million thrown in Randidly’s face might not even make them sneeze. Without a consciousness, these bits were nearly harmless. The best they could do is create a Level 1 Skill in its weakest form. But once that had been planted in someone’s individual Aether, they could begin to grow. Those small chunks of image provided the foundation.
From that foundation, all sorts of weapons could be honed.
What could the Nether equivalent do, added to the already deep currents around his Nether Core?
Randidly raised his hand, watching the elongated shadows his fingers cast in the fresh orange-juice light. Just like PP formed the foundation for the Aether side, he could feel the equivalent from Nether lurking below. He chewed his lip softly, not yet spending the PP and just sensing the resonance between his own Nether Core and the grand Nether Ritual. Likely, he had been absorbing such benefits through every PP Tithe up to this point. Just the combination of increased fineness of awareness and the growing presence of Nether in the Alpha Cosmos meant that this would be a more meaningful boost.
“Alright then,” The sun continued to rise, but that movement took it past the gorgeous dawn corridor. A stained sky could be seen through the eye of the storm above, but once more Randidly sat in shadow. The constant drizzle fell around the island, a curtain drawn against the outside world. “Let’s get started. Time to take a Tithe.”
He wouldn’t be able to finish it, but Randidly began by ignoring the other Path options and pouring his PP into Stat Evolution IV Path. Before anything else, Randidly wanted to try and find an evolution for his Endurance.
As expected, after he poured five thousand of the required ten thousand PP into that Path, his body stiffened and a notification popped up in front of him. Even the storm he created with churning Nether seemed to weaken before the sudden current that ran through the Alpha Cosmos.
Congratulations! You have reached Level 160,000 with your Soulskill, Figure of the Alpha Cosmos! Calculating gains…
Congratulations! You have received a Tithe! You have received 298,111 PP and #()!@$#*( 3()#(__#*@(*^^!
Calculating difference… Next Tithe set at Level 600,000!
Randidly gasped. Perhaps if not for the hellish physical training he had endured for the last year, he would have collapsed directly as the process began. That resonance and song between his Nether Core and the Nether Ritual rose to a deafening volume. And then he felt the flood of image fragments surging toward him, yanked into his body by his dutiful Soulskill. His eyes caught the almost three hundred thousand PP that he earned, unable to really understand how he could spend that much PP.
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But really, the PP was not the reason for his discomfort. It was that horrifying flood of Nether fragments that shuddered through his muscles and veins, embedding themselves in his body, before the surging wave finally crashed into his brain and obliterated any conscious thought for several minutes. It seemed as though the whole solar system, all of those suddenly connected planets within the Alpha Cosmos, exhaled directly into his capillaries and pores.
Every small opening became a conduit.
Because unlike the small image fragments he received as PP, the Nether came in an unrefined form. He was briefly drowned beneath a million small memories that had been swept up in the tithe. A billion moments, forgotten by the original owners, left to sink into the general unconscious of Expira.
And eventually delivered, all at once to Randidly. In the end, he made a relatively pour container to hold them.
His mind, honed into a well-oiled machine at handling disparate and complex patterns by his experiences being plugged into the Nether Ritual, collapsed within three seconds. His own consciousness was certainly unassailable, in terms of mental toughness and his experiences fighting off Yystrix. But the sheer breadth of information sloshing around inside of his brain meant that his own thoughts couldn’t be found.
For a while, he floated amongst the sensations. The small private moments. A man leaning his head back against plaster, the rest of the room washed in shadow. A shriek of delight from a young boy, splashing across a puddle. A scared woman leaning against the window, watching a shambling refugee group walk right outside of her farmhouse.
Notifications flashed in front of him; the process boosted his Nether Core’s Connections, Scope, and Influence. However, they vanished as more and more moments came in to replace them. His head already pounded, but he felt the moments turning darker and darker.
Violence. The desperation led a frogperson to punch in a window and swipe an expensive-looking necklace from a display case. An ogre who had his ancestors insulted, driven into a blood rage at a bar. The feeling of fist crunching cartilage. Blood dripping and pooling on a wooden floor.
Fear. The sort that clogged judgment and dirtied goodness in all its forms. That unconscious uncertainty that life acted on YOU, not the other way around. That the whims of fate were cruel and fickle.
The feeling of being a victim. Of failing, no matter what you tried. Of there always being someone better.
The entire Alpha Cosmos passed through Randidly, leaving gleaming remnants in him as it flowed. Time lost meaning as he lived a thousand fractured lives in a million separate forms. He simply existed; to describe the experience in more detail would have been insufficient to capture it.
Eventually, the barrage began to slow. Or rather than the impressions slowing, their arrival became light and fleeting. They practically evaporated before he could truly feel them. Randidly felt like a massive tree, with a thousand birds landing, picking mites off between their feathers with sharp beaks, then alighting before he could even identify their species or song.
His leaves rustled constantly, the only sign of their fleeting presence. And gradually, the rustling began to die down. He opened his eyes.
Randidly found himself laying, looking up at the circle of blue sky. Groaning, he leaned forward and sat up. His head spun a bit, but the thickening flow of Nether through his body helped ground him. The tide receded, leaving his own consciousness polished and strong. However, he could feel the subtle changes of Nether in his person, even before he started coping with the massive dump of PP.
He flexed his hands. A new impulse rose in his body, rising from his still buzzing cells. He felt the capability that he had suddenly gained and wanted to exercise it. His Nether Core whirled, simultaneously unhinged and possessing the most potent force it had ever experienced. His chest expanded with a deep breath and the clouds over the island began to seethe.
The training individuals shivered as the Nether content in the air began to rise. Randidly’s eyes glittered. He generally kept the influx of Nether into Expira’s atmosphere mild, but now he no longer held back. All the force that was usually contained in his body exploded out to fill the sky.
The patterns branched and spun together, carrying vast quantities of Nether. Such was the immensity of the flow that the midmorning sky became stained by it; darkness crept outward from the storm, like a horrid pall of oblivion that wafted up from the island. His Nether Core accelerated, taking the storm with it on a desperate dance. Randidly’s delicate senses reached out and began to guide the patterns, overlapping them at the edges, creating a dense network of smaller patterns that became a larger pattern.
Flames of Nether Weight flickered to light across his body. And as the next wave of Nether pumped out of him and into the air, it carried those hints of fire into the air. Grey flames rose into gushing plumes of monochrome fire that rushed through the storm, setting everything ablaze. The constant drizzle began to spit and hiss, not evaporated by impacted and dispersed by the force of the Nether running through the air.
Randidly began to laugh, pressing those patterns together. Power coursed in his veins and with an impossible acuity, Randidly began making adjustments to the pattern. An instinctive intuition that he had been seeking for so long for Nether now existed within him.
Depth and history. Randidly’s eyes flashed as he guided Nether into the perfect environment. He conducted the separate lines toward a crescendo. Those things have no intrinsic meaning. There are no connections for the disparate moments that have now washed through my body. Yet somehow… simply having all that extra experience makes working with Nether that much easier.
Nether rushed through the air, churning more tightly toward the center. Clouds were pulled by the currents and covered the eye of the storm. Hissing points of friction were created in those spots where two flows ran in the opposite direction. Force crackled in the air, sending unusually large waves crashing against the beaches and causing the densely tied vegetal entity to shivering.
Nether came together, tightening to a sharp point in the sky above the volcano. And then, as though from the void, Randidly snapped his fingers and summoned retribution.
Congratulations! New record detected: Your Synechdochence has been set to 112%!
…
Congratulations! New record detected: Your Synechdochence has been set to 127%!
The sky rumbled and cracked, the air nearly collapsing against the synergized force of Randidly’s Nether Core.