Chapter 470 (2/2)

The why was very fuzzy, but Randidly could clearly sense how she wished to strike back at the System while keeping her own involvement a secret.

When he couldn’t figure out what the memories meant the first time, Randidly watched them again, and again. He had a fast-forward function, effectively, and when he reached the end, he could restart the flood, but that was it.

The first things he began noticing as he went through the memories over and over again, Neveah peering over his metaphysical shoulder, were the insights into Aether Manipulation. Multiple times Randidly could see the Creature as she shaped Aether to accomplish oddly specific tasks. Unlike his assumptions. She relied heavily on trial and error, but she seemed to possess an unerring intuition in regards to Aether, and after a few tries, she would create the desired result.

These he filed away for study later, because it would greatly benefit his own Skills. For now, however, that information was less valuable.

The next arc that he began to notice was his own. He could sense that the Creature he faced was but a single of thousands of incarnations spread throughout the Cohort to experiment. He could feel how the Creature moved through every part of his growth, providing him with Skills to overcome obstacles, and then acting as a constant obstacle that drove him beyond his limits.

It was somewhat sickening, feeling the Creature’s amusement as he struggled against her, and her sparks of delight when he succeeded. He felt her curiosity towards him and what he was doing, but his slow growth, within values that were normal for the System in her opinion, made her conclude he wouldn’t be a weapon she could use.

Strangely, the Creature was thankful for Randidly’s actions in a lot of ways, as it had formed the idea of putting a Village in a Dungeon in a failed Zone through his antics. That information she had even felt important enough to spread it to her other incarnations, should their own attempts fail. For that one successful outcome, she deemed Randidly to be… useful.

Randidly shivered everytime he passed through that memory.

The one bright note of satisfaction for Randidly during the stream of memories was the moment when the Creature realized what he had done, sneaking Tellumurite into the soul of her incarnation. It quickly grew blurry from there, but she felt true fear, a deep dread at that moment.

Such was the strength of emotion that the more Randidly felt that memory, the more his amusement waned. It made him remember that the Creature was a sadistic sociopath, but beyond her, there was something even more monstrous: the System itself. The Creature would not be this way if not molded by the System, although he wasn’t sure of the exact nature of how that had happened.

As these memories were just from the incarnation watching Randidly, there was no way to know. But there was more information here.

Specifically, the Creature was oddly fascinated by the human's Classes. Not in an impressed way, but in an almost dumbfounded way. Most races, she knew from her previous memories in her true body, had very little difference among the Classes that they had access to, much in the way Shal’s world was primarily variations on Spearmen.

There were certainly those that had Classes relating to different weapons, or elements, but there were generally only a dozen or so archetypes, and then variations on those.

Humans, on the other hand, seemed to delight in having different, unique, Classes, even when they were relatively less powerful than the archetypes. Of course, there were 1% of Classes that were so absurdly powerful that it likely made up for it, but the Creature found this variety to be exceedingly strange.

She speculated it had something to do with the innate creativity of humans, and how their culture before the System seemed obsessed with arbitrary definitions and making things up. But she also could see how it was the result of something much more deeply secreted away. It was likely caused by the same thing that allowed Randidly to subtly warp the System around him, changing the rules in new and interesting ways.

Either way, from her communications with other incarnations, the human Zones had yielded 5 positive results already. This was incomparable to most worlds, where she could waste her time and find nothing.

These communications with other incarnations were often the messiest memories and required repeated careful study, but the deeper Randidly went, the worse his mood became. Because it was clear that there were humans that had capitulated to the Creature, and submitted themselves to her experimentation.

It was a somewhat sobering realization. Although they wouldn’t know that Randidly had defeated this incarnation perhaps, the others knew of him, and they might have their own perfected tools, ready to fight against him to sacrifice the Earth for her greater cause.

Closing his eyes to the memories for a second, Randidly sighed. He had pulled up a bit of the weeds, but if he wanted to keep his Earth safe, he would need to go after the entire root system. And that would mean killing more humans, those foolish enough to sell their species out to a fickle god.