Chapter 720 (2/2)

So Randidly ignored the desperate part of himself and did something that was extremely difficult for himself.

He lay in the impression in the ground of an old stone and just looked up into the blank eyes with eyes wide open. Basically, he did nothing.

The first time Randidly did it, Randidly stopped his strange half-meditation half-image training as soon as he was full on Stamina. Then he pushed himself into a sitting position in one go.

What Randidly didn’t foresee was that sitting might not normally require Stamina if he had something to lean against, in his haste to get himself upright he had misplaced his center of gravity. So within a few minutes, he had slowly slumped over and fell right back to his starting position.

With a wry smile, Randidly patiently wriggled until he was looking at the ceiling once more. Then he checked his Absolute Timing Skill.

Almost exactly 24 hours since he had awoken. Well, he had no concrete plans, but it was a start.

Manifesting the Crown of Cataclysm and Gloom above himself, Randidly calmly looked upwards. It was stifling, but the blackness also had the benefit of being a completely blank slate. In the air above himself, Randidly could practice his images endlessly. When he began, it was hard to notice, but the longer he spent in an almost dreaming state with his images, the more detailed they became.

The sensation of the cool stone beneath him faded away. All that mattered were those images above him. When they were placed against the stark background of the heavy liquid darkness Randidly was suspended in, it was easy to see the flaws that kept them from holding any substance under the light of day.

Time began to slide past. Randidly was careful to continue to make experiments with the capabilities with his Skills, but it became increasingly clear that almost none of his Mana based Skills would have any tangible effect on the situation he was bound by. Although he could make small conjuring when he wanted long enough to save up a thousand Mana, how could that break him out of here?

No, most of Randidly’s hopes began to move toward refining his images into usable forms, with one notable exception.

Although it was extremely slow, it was still possible to use Mana Engraving.

When he discovered this, Randidly experimented for hours. It was possible to slowly fill in Mana Engraving Runes while using a miniscule amount of Mana. It likely increased the time it would take Randidly to complete something, but that was in an ideal scenario. What quickly became clear was that even with the most relaxed Mana expenditure he could manage, his pool would slowly decrease while Engraving. He couldn’t lower the expenditure to the level of the Regeneration he had in this place, which would have been ideal.

Therefore, Randidly needed to wait increasingly long periods of time to allow Mana to build up.

In terms of what to do with his Engravings, Randidly wasn’t sure, but he had some ideas. During his time working on energy transfer for the drones he had created, Randidly had invented a lot of failed runes to function as energy sinks. One of the earliest ones was the simple act of drawing a rune and then drawing the inverse of the rune, which would them devour the initial rune’s power. It ended up being useless as an energy sink because it would basically just invalidate the other room, but that was exactly his goal in this case.

So Randidly’s time began to be split into three sections. First, he would relax and refine the reality of his images. Then he would use his Aether Perception, and sometimes Manipulation if he needed a better picture, to forcefully view the runes that made up the boundary of the room. Finally, he would practice Mana Engraving under the Mana and Stamina restrictions he faced in this room. Mostly, this meant he had to memorize every facet of this island. That way, he would be able to take the optimal movements while Engraving.

Three days blurred, becoming stuck in the routine of work.

But in the middle of one of Randidly’s Engraving, his eyes snapped open.

The overlay System functions as something of a whistleblower, right? Both for myself, and for the underlying System. It’s the portion that recognizes what I’m doing with the base System and labels me a Heretic for the unusual outcomes. Therefore… since I'm already at Heretic 29... before I break out … It's time to reforge my Class without any prying eyes…

In the darkness, Randidly’s emerald eyes glowed. A dull metal crown hung above his head, catching the nearly invisible light of the energy burning at his core.