After warning Devick of the meddling from the Cerulean girl, Randidly returned back to the farm. He paused at the edge and looked back toward the city. Despite his curiosity about what would happen at Elhume’s meeting, he felt confident remaining here. Significance continued to pool above Malloon, specifically at the location where Mae Myrna and the Patron of Feathers were staying for their training.

With false cheer in her voice, Mae had informed Randidly they would come to visit when they had the chance. Also, she extended an invitation for him to come into the city and join them. However, returning seemed like a pointless risk while the area near Westrisser’s capitol building was undergoing repairs. Better let any lingering aggression bleed off for a few more days.

Which also prevented Randidly from making any headway on figuring out what weird methods Westrisser had used to draw the ire of Wyndaos, but he wasn’t in a rush to ferret out that truth. Plus, he assumed the answers would come out on their own, eventually.

He had warned Devick because he had felt the tingle of malicious intent in the puppeteering, although he wouldn’t mention that to her; despite the relative naivete of the current Devick, it was hard to predict how she would react if she knew the princess of Cerulean City plotted against her. Randidly hadn’t met the daughter of the soon-to-arrive Fatia Cerulean himself, but just sensing the bundle of cruelty and power within their most ornate viewing box taught him all he needed to know.

Perhaps, she was to him what he was to Westrisser and Bleak Sky. Didn’t seem like a genuine threat, but strong enough she would be a real headache to kill.

For now, while whatever is the next important event in the memory is building in Malloon, I need to take advantage of the chance to improve myself. Randidly released a slow breath. He headed back to his room and began his meditation. These old monsters… whatever plans Bleak Sky, Westrisser, and the Cult of the Savior are concocting, I’ll need to be able to survive in the area around the dangerous events. Or, at the very least, I need to master my own abilities enough to support Elhume and his group.

So in the three days since the clash against Westrisser, Randidly had thrown himself fully into sharpening the knives at his disposal. In the mornings he refined and utilized a brutalizing Nether Ritual designed to hone his physical body. Sulfur and Acri enjoyed the tingling strain as he moved through spear strikes. Sweat beaded across his brow and dripped down off the tip of his nose as he thrust and swept and spun and settled.

Even now, will all of his Stats steadily creeping up toward two thousand, he didn’t think this was the limit of his body. With eyes grimly forward, he tightened his grip on Acri’s shaft and thrust again. The weight of the spot on his left palm tingled, but he ignored it. Having shattered the shackles of the System, with an inner source of energy that would not run out, he wanted to see what lay at the end of this Path.

There was an unfortunate interruption in that process at the end of the first morning, apparently the Nether Ritual released a low hum that resonated with an underground aquifer, hollowed out the surrounding ground and created a sinkhole, and then collapsed half of the farm into a massive cavern. However, Randidly felt relatively sure the new foundational Engraving he built around the Nether Ritual would contain the radiation.

It did irk him to have destroyed the farm for a second time. But Randidly tried not to dwell on that too much.

In the afternoons, he settled into a mostly meditative state to think about refining his images and also purifying the emotional sea he had inherited from the Alpha Cosmos. While he had claimed those emotions for his own, they still possessed lingering traces of the individuals who had spawned those violent emotions. Small variances prevented a cohesive emotional force from being forged, which made hitting and holding the correct emotional notes a fraught business.

For several hours, he sat and breathed and tried to capture the different aspects of his images, drawn in vehement emotions. Protectiveness and steady growth for Yggdrasil. Fear of misunderstanding and overwhelming desire to surpass limitations from the Stillborn Phoenix. A wild desire to survive and a rather straightforward rankling at even the slightest hint of outside influence.

During this time, he also spent a little bit of attention looking over the three Arakis Beasts and Bogart. The results were mixed. The demon-looking young man at least thoroughly embraced Randidly’s demands of constant physical exertion to hone the edge, but he still remained insultingly naive in his fighting methods.

Randidly couldn’t be bothered to fight with Bogart himself any longer. Instead, he controlled root avatars to thrash him. In a rare breakthrough, Randidly realized that if he varied the size and shape of the root avatar’s bodies, Bogart could adjust his fighting style along simplistic lines to counter it. I.E., if Randidly made the root avatar tall and thick, as though it was well muscled, Bogart would choose to dodge rather than block the large blows. Smaller and quicker root avatars he began to tread carefully around, respecting their speed and underhanded tactics with a more defensive mindset.

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Yet if Randidly switched up their tactics away from the stereotype of their body, Bogart collapsed. He supposed it was a small victory, to find a way to teach this young man, but how different the demon proved to be from himself seeded frustration in his chest.

So far, Randidly had completed a full revamp of the Yggdrasil image, going through and sharpening every detail of the lively World Tree and the lush forest surrounding it. His first image hadn’t changed all that much in form, but already the emotional notes were harmonizing easier with the image. The feeling made a wolfish smile cross his face. When he reached this level with all three images, he truly would break through to a new tier of power.

Despite Bogart’s slow progress, his training was not even the most aggravating portion of the day. No, after image refinement came the exploration of his new Fatepiece, the Codex Hexahedron.

Congratulations! Your Fatepiece the Codex Hexahedron has grown to Level 13!

“No, I fucking get it’s a Zhixu Fruit,” Randidly growled as the cube’s disparate cubes allowed the fruit to drop out of its pulsing light. “I even understand the sugar content. I wish you could just tell me how I can grow one.”

The Codex pulsed, as though the Fatepiece understood his question and responded to it. The cubes separated slightly and then pulled back together twice in quick succession.

Click. Click.

Randidly eyed it suspiciously, wary of other movements. “...did you just talk back to me?”

Congratulations! Your Fatepiece the Codex Hexadhedron has grown to Level 14!

Under his glare, the Fatepiece remained inert. Yet at the same time, the sudden Level up from the Fatepiece spoke for itself. Randidly groaned and tried not to think too deeply about it. For now, he could only scan relatively small physical objects or uncomplicated portions of larger ones. He had tried scanning Nether Rituals, Engravings, and activated Skills, but all he received in exchange were lingering headaches and scattered impressions too large to fit in his head. He couldn’t even imagine how much this thing needed to grow before it could be used to scan the base construction of Skills and provide information.

But so long as it can, it should be able to scrap some useful information. Randidly rubbed his jaw as he allowed the boring, biological explanation for the preying mantis’s Zhixu Fruit to fade from his mind. Getting a forceful bump to Ghosthound’s Proficiency through the Reaching a Mille Paths is one thing, but I’d rather be able to achieve those insights for free, without spending five thousand PP at a time. Besides, the first bits of insight are probably easier than the last. If I can figure out the base stuff on my own, I’ll get more valuable information later on.

In the evenings, he cooked. Sometimes for just himself and Bogart, but the Patron of the Deep had somehow sniffed out the fact Randidly was cooking, bringing Demetrius and Jotem along as ‘escorts’.

Randidly smiled through the meals, allowing some inner part of him to relax in the process of making, even if ancillary conversation was swiftly devoured by the Patron of the Deep’s ego.

Then, as night fell and the dinner guests departed, Randidly called out and summoned Neveah to work on another strength he had allowed to go unimproved for far too long. They called it the energy games, a slightly tongue-in-cheek moniker that Neveah used to smooth over Randidly’s feathers when she absolutely crushed him five times in a row on the first night.

“Really, Randidly,” Neveah did her best not to gloat, but her cheeks kept twitching with the repressed smile. “It’s just a game. Is there any reason to take it so personally?”

The game was rather simple. They would set a desired result and then compete to more successfully accomplish it using different methods. Sometimes they chose antagonistic goals, drag the boulder across your line, while sometimes they selected more general tasks, like generating as much cold as you could with only a minute to set up.

After the final loss, Randidly had regarded his smug Soulbound companion with all the sourness of a squirrel with lemons in both cheeks. “If we were both competing in Engraving patterns, I would get you absolutely bludgeoning me over and over again. But you Engrave while I create a Nether Ritual. How the hell do you keep winning?”

Neveah clicked her tongue. “I almost hesitate to say this, because you’ve never been very good at letting go. But you’ve pretty much abandoned Engraving to a lesser degree and understanding Aether. Meanwhile, I don’t have your… natural deftness with Nether, but I’ve been following your discoveries rather closely. I understand both sides, while you really only get one.”

“Still-” Randidly growled, but Neveah held up a hand.

“Let me demonstrate. Our first task involved the boulder, yes? No time limit, just fueled with raw power. You considered it a tug of war; you crafted the Nether Ritual to counter me, to overcome my force. It was an elegant Nether Ritual, beyond a doubt. However, did you ever pause and look at my Engraving?”

In a few quick strokes, Neveah sketched it out. After looking at the Engraving, really understanding its purpose, his expression worsened. “... this was designed to push, and lightly.”

“You crafted a prayer to overcome me,” Some of that smugness flickered across Neveah’s face. “So I let you. In the temperature challenge, most of my Engraving was designed to prevent yours from functioning; only a small portion would affect the temperature. All the other energy games were similar. I didn’t try for the task, I could predict how you would approach the problem and countered that. Because I understood the way both Aether and Nether works.”

“And so…” Randidly reached up and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I study.”

“You study,” Neveah confirmed. “At least with me, but… there is a reason your most problematic emotional core was exhaustion.”