Chapter 751 (1/2)

In the darkness, Randidly smiled.

During the time in his Soulskill, he had left behind this place. The strangeness was gone, luckily, the sense of dissolution of self. But now he was even more aware of the crushing restrictions on his Stamina and Mana usage. It was completely maddening. Yet, even so, Randidly smiled.

In the darkness, his fingers traced the tall plants growing out of his homemade farm. They felt like silk and gold. His hands were trembling. He was so excited that he lost track of his Stamina and his arm physically collapsed on top of one of his plants as he was left without any energy to speak of.

But this just improved his mood further. His gaze turned toward the ceiling. It was time to leave.

According to his Absolute Timing Skill, it had been twenty days and two hours since Randidly had come here. He wondered when his jailers would check on him next. His original thoughts were around now, which meant he had to hurry. But Randidly also wondered what was going on with the under 25 tournament. He had felt the arrival of messages but had no way to check them. It was outside of his understanding of the System to determine where they were kept.

As Randidly recovered his Stamina, he began to harvest the plants. With only his touch, they seemed to be some oversized variety of scallions. There was a firm stalk that extended about an arm’s reach above the ground, and then beyond that, it was leafy and soft.

Randidly wondered what was the edible part of this “super grain” even as he knew it didn’t matter.

Examining the produce filled him with a deep sense of satisfaction that he hadn’t felt in a long time, but Randidly knew he couldn’t let that emotion distract them. He needed to begin work immediately. Without any knowledge of timing, he could only assume the worse. Without an efficient transition to his next phase of the plan, he would be in deep shit.

Luckily for him, the Sharpness image was relatively easy for him to reproduce. In the pitch black room, the plants were quickly felled and then much more slowly gathered. If Randidly had thought that moving his arm depleted Stamina quickly, he had never even considered how quickly the very necessary task of moving the plants would deplete his Stamina.

In order to conserve energy, Randidly used his Sharpness image liberally. After about a half hour, he had several hundred meter long thin strips of plant. The fibers of the plants were strong enough to stand straight but also possessed enough flexibility to move in the wind.

Randidly considered the problem in front of him for a few minutes, savoring the darkness. Sometimes, it felt like he was at the deep bottom of one of the sea trenches on Earth. Overwhelmed by the pressure and kept in complete darkness, he wondered what sort of being he was these days. After all, a lot had changed for him while he was in here, had it not? His ability to form images… his understandings about his Soulskill…

Randidly shook his head. That stuff could wait until later. Instead, he began to plan how to create his light.

After careful consideration of his supplies and limitations, Randidly decided to try making a torch by weaving the thin fibers. If he made the weave tight enough, the light would hopefully last for a longer amount of time. It might not be an important consideration now, but Randidly knew that it might sometime come down to keeping the cave lit for a longer period of time. Although it might seem overly cautious, rationing now seemed just prudent.

So Randidly wove. To make the weave tight required extra Stamina to tighten, but Randidly was growing more in tune with his own body in order to lower Stamina exertions. Where before, movements were wholistic things, Randidly was slowly breaking them down now into pieces. When each small thing cost a tenth of his Stamina pool, it wasn’t enough just to do some tasks one part at a time. Some things couldn’t be separated. So creating a more efficient exertion was critical.

The darkness felt cold pressed against Randidly’s skin, but it was a familiar chill. It sharpened Randidly’s mind. As his hands continued to move, he considered his plans going forward.

Once he had a light, begin work on the rough counter to this room that Randidly had figured out. If the initial stages are successful, draw the outline such that the rune isn’t operative, but could be completed under very short notice. Make any final necessary preparations. Break out.

Beyond that… Randidly felt helpless. His goal leaving the tournament was to find Shal and also help solve the problem of the Second Calamity that Tellus was facing. Part of the second goal was to figure out the process so Randidly could help Earth succeed where Tellus had not. Partially that was accomplished, but Randidly sensed there was one further trick to the whole production.

Still, the whole reason that Randidly had gotten put in this situation was that he had faced a Propagator, one of the true powers of Tellus, and been beaten. It had been close, but Randidly had caught it by surprise in many ways. His Skills gave him so much flexibility that it hadn’t been able to recover in the short time that Randidly had tried to target it.

But would that happen again?

Sure, Randidly had improved while in the darkness, but…

“It’s like I’m being born again,” Randidly muttered quietly. “But when I walk out of the darkness… what will I find…?”

After recovering the Stamina he had wasted by speaking, Randidly continued to weave. With the thick darkness wrapping around his skin, his thoughts rolled forward without end. The space in front of him shivered and began to fill with the images that he was thinking of. This deep darkness was an empty world asking to be filled. Randidly could not help but oblige.

Even aside from the problems he had relating to accomplishing his plans, Randidly had two very large and related problems. The first was the instability in his Class that he had discovered. Because the upper level of the System, the one that so often reported his happenings and raised his Heretic Level, was not present here, Randidly had thought to address the problem. If possible.