Chapter 443 (2/2)

Plus, these notifications about his Soul Skill…

Randidly left his Status screen and went to look at his Soul Skill. But when he reached for it, there was a dull sense of impact, and he was rejected. It was so strange that Randidly had to blink a few times to make sense of what was happening.

He… couldn’t intervene? Then what was the point of having his Progenitor’s influence-

Accelerating time within Soul Skill… Calculating extent of degeneration… approaching critical failure…

“This is not,” Randidly hissed, his eyes blazing, “the fucking time to self-destruct.”

But perhaps this was the plan all along, another part of Randidly whispered. He had, after all, created the Soul Skill based on the Creature’s strange weapon. Was it strange that now, as he moved against it, problems were cropping up?

The only problem was that it was triggered by PP, and not by anything else he could see. This would make it the 8th full rotation through his blessings since he had acquired the Soul Skill, and to be fair, his previous ones had lasted quite a bit shorter than this one… Perhaps Soul Skills had a version of aging, and his was approaching the end of its life.

Randidly’s eyes narrowed. And just like his previous Soul Skills, there was a… propensity towards volatility, as it approached the end. His cycle of Rot and Ash had begun to swirl so quickly that it was almost enough to tear itself apart. At the time, Randidly had to create a whole new Soul Skill, so the thing wouldn’t fall apart, taking a huge portion of his strength with it. It made sense then, that the core of his world would shift towards dangerous levels. Awakening these… Skinshifters to loose on his Soulskill.

Likely a metaphor for the Creature, moving into and through him, aiming to absorb him and his Soul Skill. Not a metaphor that Randidly appreciated.

“Lucretia, trouble,” Randidly said, taking a deep breath, then focusing on the task at hand.

It took him several seconds of silence to realize something was wrong. Only two seconds after that was Randidly swearing viciously.

“Fucking cunt-” He began, then stopped himself, clenching his teeth. “You’re in the fucking Soul Skill, aren’t you?”

Which was both intimidating, and reassuring. Reassuring that she was there, and probably wouldn’t let the volatile forces run wild, intimidating because she was out of his control, and could do things outside of his ability to discover while the time acceleration process was going on-

Growling, Randidly formed his Willpower into a spear and slammed it into the side of the force that repelled him previously. Unfortunately, there was no real feedback, just a strange ripple of dispersed force through his Soul Space. Immediately, Randidly realized what the problem was.

There wasn’t truly a barrier, he just wasn’t able to push through the difference in time. It was academically interesting, to think about what happened at the border between two separate speed flows of time, but at the moment, it wasn’t very amusing at all.

Briefly, Randidly considered using Inspire to brute force the issue, but he didn’t like the prospect of leaving himself without Mana Skills, not when he was waiting to go assault the Creature’s base. It likely wouldn’t know about his weakness, but… Randidly also didn’t fully trust the Grey Death Cultist, and he was currently gathering more of his people, to form a host of which the Raid Dungeon had never seen…

Basically, his hands were tied on that front…

Strangely, however, when he reached out to his Progenitor’s Influence, it responded to him, flowing across the time barrier and into the world. He had 901 Progenitor’s Influence at this point, from the levels and from his times investigating the state of the Soul Skill, but that seemed pitifully small. Minor Blessing was available to him, at 875 Progenitor’s Influence, but Randidly had no way of targeting it, or-

But his… abilities instantly told him that was wrong. He could target the races that he had created… and the monsters too… and even the Skinshifts, as they were considered a part of his Soul Skill, and it was still relatively stable. He could even sense them, great masses of lights signifying them. Each light a life, stretching before him.

They were, he couldn’t help but think, beautiful.