Through the misty expanse of Pine’s corpse, Randidly followed the two spectral guides up toward the maelstrom of light and the confrontation against an Eternity waiting for him there. Yet the corners of Randidly’s mouth turned down by degrees. Even if these two and the innumerable phantoms following behind Randidly were welcoming, it quickly became clear that the corpse of Pine was not.

The group rushed upward and Randidly felt his body pierce through some invisible boundary. It barely had any resistance to him— he passed through without any effort. But just experiencing the barrier made him understand the specters’ earlier comments, about the importance of already setting aside his physical body.

Randidly’s eyes narrowed as he looked upward: a lot of space hung above. This place… is like the Visage of Obsession. Ten severings, to isolate and reach a completely focused state. But in this case, the severings are boundaries… that limit the horrifying might of Pine.

So his rotten flesh doesn’t simply crush the Nexus.

Waiting on the other side of the first barrier was significance almost double as dense as the initial area of Pine. But the real horrifying addition was the sense of torn and shredded Nether waiting beyond the first barrier. In sympathy for this wounded energy, despite the two’s recent reconnection, the broken bond between Randidly and Shal ached.

The barbed significance ripped at Randidly’s skin, but he gritted his teeth and shoved his way forward. His momentum sent ripples of energy outward, which rebounded off the wide seething sea and crashed back against him. The mist stirred and swirled. But relying on the powerful and evolved Stats he had accumulated, Randidly broke his way through this wild energy. Each impact washed over his body and a small portion of that energy was channeled through to his Nether Core.

The faster his Nether Core spun, the more valuable translucent Nether he produced. And as the refinement process strengthened, small glittering notes of color began to appear within the flow of his Nether. If nothing else, the pressure of Pine’s corpse would assist his own steady evolution.

Also as he forced his way forward, his three images stirred and stretched in preparation for the more dangerous trials to come. They each honed in on their individual notes of emotional resonance while Randidly braved the significance with just his flesh. The steady determination of Yggdrasil, the inexhaustible craving of the Songstress of Absence, and the vicious unwillingness of the Dread Homunculus all empowered his movements.

The Dread Homunculus showed an especially powerful reaction to the waves of dense significance that crashed against him. Part of its energy continued to be directed toward applying pressure to Shal’s burning stubbornness, held in its hand for safekeeping. Yet also the image achieved a greater and greater resonance with all the assembled damned and departed souls that flowed upward in his shadow, using Randidly as the edge of the blade to ascend through Pine’s corpse.

First came the sensation and weight of those small souls, all imitating Randidly’s motion a bit after the fact. With his potent of the Privilege of a Half-Shallah, Randidly made a hundred, a thousand, five-hundred thousand small adjustments to the ordering of souls. A pattern began to emerge in their undulating train. Even then, innumerable more followed after him in a growing train of insubstantial fury.

He could feel them all stirring, his emotions percolating down through their bodies. The empathy between each overlapping shade increased. The Dread Homunculus cracked its neck, its expression becoming increasingly serious. Because the higher they climbed, the longer the flood of souls stretched, steadily thickening, lengthening so the base remained at the bottom of Pine’s corpse. More and more flooded to support their rise.

Randidly Ghosthound dragged up the train of souls and crashed through the second dividing barrier of Pine.

Again, the significance in the air sharply increased. The wild winds of memory cut and slashed at Randidly. But with the energy he had gathered, with the Dread Homunculus’s rising power, he burst right through the barrier. Randidly clenched his fists and accelerated forward. The damned leaked their anticipatory glee and rushed behind him.

Just ahead of Randidly, Ezekiel raised a thin arm and pointed. “Be careful. Laplace’s poison spreads, even here.”

His emerald eyes flicked sideways, to a visible whirlpool hanging in the significance. Randidly’s fine senses could parse apart the torn and shredded sense of history here, first probably damaged in the absorption by Pine and then further scrambled by Laplace.

Randidly stretched his arms wide; now was the time to begin accumulating the direction for his Penance. He snapped the fingers of his right hand and a small bone needle appeared there. “The Second Authority: Hollow Needle.”

His left hand guided the extracted thread through into the hollow center of Nyx’s needle. Then he blurred sideways and appeared directly in front of the temporal distortion. As he neared it, he felt all the souls behind him sinking deeper into their wild resentment, their skeletal eyes burning red with hatred at this attack on the proper order of their universe. Yet Randidly kept their power isolated, wanting to proceed further and allow the ordering amongst the damned to increase before he unleashed them.

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Instead, as he stood in front of the distortion and Laplace’s vicious power reached out to grasp onto him, Yggdrasil manifested inside of Pine’s corpse. The massive World Tree shoved aside the dense significance of his place and sunk its roots deep into the present. Laplace’s power lashed against Randidly but he gritted his teeth and used the leverage of the roots to resist it directly.

Time slashed against the Yyrflesh Vessel of Yggdrasil, but could not damage the reinforced roots.

Randidly’s emotional sea boiled, remembering the loss he had suffered from his first encounter with Laplace. Powerful emotions reinforced the image of Yggdrasil until it blazed with light. The vicissitudes of time could only weaken and recede. The canopy of leaves rustled slightly as these two powers clashed… but the grip held.

Randidly’s long fingers left behind afterimages as he rapidly inserted the Hollow Needle into the temporal wound and stitched all the proper portions back together. After only a second, after Laplace’s lingering touch sputtered and faded, Randidly kicked off the air and once more followed Ezekiel and Commandant Wick in the ascent.

Still, Randidly grimaced. I’ve improved, but this is simply a small remnant wound left by Laplace’s power. Just being able to resist this… doesn’t mean anything. Truly, an Eternity is a frightful existence…

Almost as though he sensed Randidly’s thoughts, Commandant Wick glanced over his shoulder at him. “Consider yourself blessed that this area has already been cleared out by that ugly bastard. Heh, if it was you alone, trying to climb through the defenses of Pine… we would have crushed you to dust.”

Ezekiel hissed, but judging from the keening in Randidly’s ears, the noise wasn’t just an expression of emotion. Randidly’s father spoke in the strange language of the dead. Commandant Wick’s lip twitched, but he turned away without saying anything further.

Randidly felt curious, but didn’t pry about the short exchange. Looking up, the maelstrom of light above their heads had begun to flicker. He felt a deep sense of foreboding; what would happen if Laplace found and dominated the entirety of Pine’s corpse before Randidly arrived?

Would it act as a conduit and strengthen his Samsara? Would Randidly still be able to force this Eternity out of the Nexus once it had sunk its teeth into the deceased soul of the universe?

He accelerated forward, drawing power from the weight of the dead supporting him. He could hear their keening whispers now, as they marshaled more and more of their number into a marching army. The Dread Homunculus’s eyes had settled into a half-closed state as the image maintained their formation. Randidly felt more and more of his overwhelming amount of mental energy flowing to corralling this vast potential.

By the time they caught up to Laplace, he wondered how much momentum he would have built up.

Like this, Randidly punched through the third barrier. This too easily parted before him, his sacrifice of shedding his body still enough to have earned him passage this deep into Pine’s corpse. Beyond the third barrier, another temporal distortion waited. Randidly used his rapid movements to again sew the wound back together.

He felt a little bit of tinkling from his Nether Core. Not only did the significance continue to refine itself into a translucent energy studded with bits of color, but now he felt like within the rotating Nether Core, a little bit of something extra existed. It sounded like a nickel lost in a washing machine, clanging around during the intense rotation. But rather than being annoying, the noise was clear and soothing like an immaculate wind chime.

To Randidly’s surprise, there was no temporal distortions waiting beyond the fourth barrier. He focused his energy and streamlined his presence to resist the increasingly ferocious storm of significance that ravaged him, but continued upward. His attention went to the Dread Homunculus. The tower of the dead rose and supported him.

They advanced in unison, their bodies slightly superimposed on those in front of them, with the ranks behind supporting them. Randidly did not need to breathe any longer, and in that horrible stillness in his chest cavity, he found a unifying sense of disgust for this invader leaking up from the deceased clinging to him.

The power of the dead flowed through him, but so did their emotions.

Randidly combed and refined the emotions, carefully allowing a portion to flow into his emotional sea. Right now, the emotions of the dead had already accumulated into a dense specter hanging over his head. In terms of volume, in just the minute or so of leading the charge of the dead, just as much emotion from the dead pressed against him than he had absorbed from the Alpha Cosmos in the last ten years.

And the amount of emotion from the dead increased exponentially every second. The space inside of Pine stretched out in every direction, vast and almost unending. In this place, there was an almost limitless supply of dead from which to draw.

Pine devoured the extra significance of those who had died since the beginning of the Nexus. Or, more accurately, since he had been ‘slain’ at the end of the Second Cohort through the widespread use of Fatia Cerulean’s Grand Fate method. His Alpha Cosmos hadn’t existed for a fraction of as long, or cover an area even 1% as large as the entire Nexus.

But this emotional power… that’s the intensity of an entire universe. If I cannot handle this, how can I stand in front of an Eternity? Randidly’s eyes blazed. The Songstress of Absence quivered and then moved forward. She began to sing a scything song, cutting through all the raw emotion that flowed into him. The dangerous obsessions and associations from all these dead, the loved ones they missed, the enemies that lived and thrived while they suffered, the dreams buried with a bouquet of resentment under the cruel realities of the Nexus, those were taken away and devoured.

The raw, pure determination and violence of two thousand years' worth of corpses ran rampant through Randidly’s veins. His powerful Stats held this power at bay, but a weaker individual might directly rupture from the searing heat of all these emotions.

He crashed through the fifth barrier, finally feeling some genuine resistance; from this point forward, advancing would be harder than just forcing his way through with Primordial Nether Juju. And as though to prove this impression, Randidly looked around in the next section and saw almost twenty temporal distortions buzz sawing their way through Pine’s significance.

Randidly grinned. “Alright, let’s get in some practice.”