The notification projection fuzzed at its edges as the glowing light the Nether King used to speak pulsed with meaning. Seemingly, unleashing the hidden message threatened to destabilize the fragile Aether that held the Path together. As Randidly rapidly tried to corral the Nether flows that animated the message, he could almost hear a woman’s scream of pure frustration in the back of his mind.

However, even as Randidly focused on the framework, he didn’t miss that a new connection flickered to life from his Nether Core. It was a thread of pure bonding, stretching out from Randidly into the universe… and probably leading to the Nether King, wherever he may be.

You might not even remember when you freed me. I was stuck inside a recursive script at the edge of an ancient battlefield; without even my knowing, my energies were channeled back through to the beginning of my ‘attempt’ to break out, in an endless loop. Its an insidious method that finally ended any meaningful struggle in the war between Aether and Nether, during the Nexus’s Second Cohort. Once any Nether being is afflicted in this way, they cannot escape without outside assistance. The greatest warriors of the Nether race became powerless when isolated.

And I bring up Solomon Rex because he is the one who created that method.

He’s also the one who orchestrated the initial offensive against Nether. Of all the different powers within the Nexus, he is the one who knows Nether the best. But that is only because he spent every waking moment trying to undermine that energy and eradicate it. If you encounter Rex, he will undoubtedly be friendly. But be warned- he will never be able to see past the fact you possess a Nether Core.

The light from the message grew increasingly bright and now Randidly definitely heard a woman cursing quietly. He smelled ash. But he was too busy trying to make out the remainder of the message to pay much attention. The Path projection continued to tear at the edges as it struggled to convey the recording. Honestly, Randidly had no idea how this was even possible.

Had the Nether King left this directly in Randidly’s person, in the form of a Path? Or did he somehow rig the light orb to flow through their Nether connection when a certain Nether-based prerequisite was obtained?

Anyway, as I said previously, you might not even be Randidly Ghosthound. However, I hope he receives this message. If you are aware of his existence, please pass it on. He possesses the first genuine Nether Core I have seen in the Nexus.

I have one last gift, traveler, for having made it to this point.

My time stuck in Rex’s recursive trap wasn’t fruitless; being exposed to the smooth transition of Nether gave me quite the insight into how the energy might be used. It has given me the power and confidence to move freely in the Nexus, opposing Elhume and making strides toward establishing a new safe haven for Nether beings.

There are no endings or beginnings, Randidly Ghosthound, not truly. Where we are in the story just depends on your own perspective. We are both already dead and not yet born. Such freedom is the greatest gift the universe gives us.

Congratulations! +200 Free Stats! Your Nether Core begins to writhe and seethe! You feel your energies being purified by a unique flow! You feel your flames of Nether Weight becoming slightly more effective. Please continue to study the changes in your Nether to trigger an astounding evolution.

In the end, the reward barely held Randidly’s attention for a few spare seconds where he acknowledged a shift within himself. Because he immediately felt a small seed of meaning pass between that connection that appeared between himself and what Randidly assumed to be the Nether King. Its sedate approach seemed slow, but then it was there, twirling innocently in his Soulspace.

His usually rock-solid handling of Nether was slightly shaky as he surrounded that seed with some flames of Nether Weight for an added layer of security. Before he even attempted to open whatever the Nether King had sent, Randidly seriously considered the manifested connection and whether he should sever it.

“But could I even cut through this?” Randidly whispered to himself. His eyes went unfocused. Because his insight into Nether informed him that it was theoretically possible to eradicate their connection, but it would carry a steep cost.

And the reason the cost would be so high was that the connection had been there for a long time, probably since Randidly had casually messed with the Nether on the frontlines and led to a cascading reaction that freed the Nether King. His unfocused eyes made everything blurry, but then his awareness spread out and patiently mapped what he could feel with his Nether senses. He moved through all the millions and billions of connections he made to the people of Expira and those he encountered in the Nexus. To his chagrin, he visualized them in a dark space… with veins of blue connecting everything.

The vein between himself and the Nether King was small but a deep and pure azure. With its form revealed to him, Randidly saw a thousand other small tributary veins that passed through that area and had made slight, inexplicable adjustments that he had noted in his previous experiments but hadn’t considered before.

In retrospect, this connection had been present in Randidly’s Nether ecosystem for a long time. It had been affecting him for a long time, in subtle ways he hadn’t considered because he hadn’t been aware of it. The cost to remove it was high because the connection was not shallow. Its foundation was firmly within his Nether flows.

Randidly’s eyes glittered as he continued to stare sightlessly forward. His eyelids slid down until he looked forward with half-closed eyes. Because suddenly he had an epiphany. If one connection affected him before he could witness it, others probably did too.

He waited to touch the packet of meaning and instead followed this moment of clarity. Randidly just looked at that mess of connections and waited. What he attempted was to see by inference, through his entire, already byzantine, network of Nether connections. He could feel his mind churning, all his powerful mental capacities trying to grapple with a problem that dwarfed him. Steam practically began hissing out of his ears.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

But gradually, he could witness it. How his mess of connections was just one small piece of the whole Nether System that he operated under. That these things were layered on top of each other and affected one another without exactly acknowledging each other, but also without ever being independent.

The imagined Nether-scape wasn’t black at all; it was a sea of blue. No empty space remained when all the connections were laid bare. Randidly’s eyes grew red and bloodshot as he struggle to hold onto the impression. It was a solid, almost congealed, mass of connection and memory. It was all of existence, viewed on a peculiar dimension which made all of Randidly’s problems and struggles seem small and meaningless.

There was so much out there that he didn’t understand.

Randidly blinked and came back to the physical world. He began coughing and hacked out a bit of blood. He looked down in surprise but then realized crusted blood had been oozing out of his ears for several minutes. He groaned and stood, his Nether Core still tingling from the shift in capabilities due to the quickly forgotten Path completion. He hadn’t earned any Skill or received a benefit for this new train of thought, but getting a glimpse of that alternate understanding, even just briefly, really opened his eyes.

Stretching his jaw, Randidly forced himself to stand. He leapt off the top of the volcano, sailing through the drizzling air, and then crashed into the ocean. As he sank to the bottom, he turned himself over the Penance; he was starting to run dry on stored up time.

When he came back to himself, his mind had recovered from its brief strain and he felt his Nether felt almost frigid as it flowed through him. Suddenly, the energy added a counterweight to the immense heat that his body produced just by operating at such a high level.

Randidly examined his inner world, chiding himself a while for accepting that small seed from the Nether King and becoming distracted from it. It didn’t seem to be a threat, he could feel the positive intentions through the message, but it was sloppy to take that at face value. Just like the Nether King outed a secret prejudice that Solomon Rex might have against any individual with ties to Nether, didn’t the Nether King have similar lingering emotions toward someone who used Aether?

A storm drifted in from the deeper sea as Randidly clambered back on top of his volcano. The powerful Nether system he maintained around the island dismantled this other tropical storm and incorporated it into its normal operations, turning up the precipitation from a drizzle to a downpour. He liked the sensation of walking up the stone path, his feet wet and muddy. He stopped right below the lip, still outside of the eye of the storm.

Randidly closed his eyes and allowed rain to spatter against his body and run down his long limbs for several minutes. His tail flicked back and forth. The sensation was pure, driving everything else from his mind for that extended break.

Then Randidly took that last step and left the rain. His bare feet left wet footprints on the stone as he returned to the edge of the volcano and sat down cross-legged. He rolled his shoulders, activating a bit of his metabolism. His skin heated to the point that soon all of the water had evaporated.

After consulting briefly with Neveah, Randidly raised his fingers and began to draw several complex Engravings around his body. His Mana hung in the air, buzzing with the potency and meaning of the restrictions he laid down. Then he also created a Nether Array, imbuing his heartfelt wish that nothing go wrong into the working.

He sat and stared at the seed. His awareness reached out and brushed it. It unfolded slowly, popping open from a small bit of meaning to become a simple diagram of Nether flowing in a way that resembled a circular maze.

Randidly didn’t let his guard down, even as the pattern continued to curl in and flow into itself for several minutes without change. At about a half-hour, Randidly moved his focus away from the arrangement itself and looked at the Engraving and Nether Ritual he had created to isolate the seed; neither had any signs of tampering or unexpected damage from exposure.

Only then did Randidly frown and look at the pattern. A thorough examination didn’t take long. It was a simple closed-system organic flow. Nether passed endlessly through a series of similar-looking loops. Occasionally, Nether broke off and created unexpected patterns, forcing the whole of the system to adjust the new shift. However, there was only so much energy in it at a time, thereby limiting the amount of variety it could achieve.

Randidly chewed on his lip, watching the Nether patterns in constant motion. The branching pathways did demonstrate the Nether King’s awe-inspiring combination of spontaneity and simplicity, but Randidly felt bewildered by the fact that the Nether King believed he was doing a favor for Randidly by showing him this. He might not have come up with exactly the same sort of arrangement, but it wasn’t so complex-

Caught by a sudden thought, Randidly paused. He went back over the last few lines of the Nether Kings message. He reached up and rubbed his chin. If it’s not about the pattern itself… its about time? Not the way it changes, but-

Randidly cracked his knuckles against the vaguely warm ground. The Nether King had said that they were simultaneously already dead and not yet born. As though time didn’t truly exist; that all creation occurred simultaneously.

The idea was a strange one and he wasn’t sure exactly how such an insight could help Nether. But it did make sense that the Nether King would come to that sort of conclusion if he had been stuck inside of some labyrinthine recursive trap.

If Randidly hadn’t had that weird flash of insight about Nether earlier, he probably wouldn’t have been able to reach the right state to understand the Nether King’s message. Or at the very least, he would have needed several weeks of aggravating conclusion in order to stumble across the right mixture of focus and vague waiting.

Yet Randidly had seen Nether in a different way. His understanding was sore from being challenged, but it was game for more. He looked intently at the pattern for several seconds, letting his mind wander. He knew pure timelessness would be hard to grasp- so he started small. And eventually, in the way that was sometimes possible, he convinced himself that the Nether was flowing backward.

The inverted made him blink and then laugh. This is it. This is why there are so many times I can’t quite get Nether to behave the way I want. Connections aren’t unilateral things; Nether is flowing in both directions simultaneously.

He released a breath and leaned back to try and change his outlook on a larger scale.

He looked at the sky. In his chest, his Nether Core whirled. But Randidly distanced himself from that impression. For as long as he had the Nether Core, he always believed that it spun and released Nether that could then be applied to other tasks. But what if that wasn’t the case. Randidly’s lids sank downward as his consciousness began to hum with effort.

The mental gymnastic reminded him of those drawings of 3D cubes on 2D surfaces, where the right focus could pull out one corner of the shape and make it seem entirely different. The process was similar, but Randidly had to ignore the whole of the way he had trained his mind in the past year in order to reasonably ask the ‘what if?’ he needed.

Gradually, all the Nether connections quieted. He pulled away from the Nether Ritual he had placed in Expira’s core. He closed his eyes to the way that every single life in the Alpha Cosmos had some small connection to him. He ignored his more developed and important Nether connections.

Eventually, Randidly looked simply at his Nether Core. It spun, but he managed to glaze over his eyes until all he saw was the rotation.

What if? Randidly wondered. Instead of exhaling, the Nether Core inhaled?