Chapter 976 (1/2)

After six hours of pouring through the ground with Infinite Fingers of Yggdrasil, Randidly had cleared out an area that was roughly the size of a city block and was divided into three sections. Lit by emerald fire, his base seemed the perfect lair for an evil demon to plot its terrible plan to destroy the world.

The first section was a wide-open training ground that was about half of the total area of the underground base. This would be the room that Randidly would spend most of his time, training his spear Skills and images. While building this area, Randidly sighed sorrowfully that he hadn’t thought to pick up the Skill that let the Squaders of Donnyton reinforce the ground. It would have been invaluable in strengthening the floor enough to resist the Grim Chimera.

The second section was a very rudimentary room for forging. It was so basic that most of the elites from Erickson Steel would likely feel stifled by the lack of equipment. But for Randidly, this seemed like the perfect amount to truly force himself to get his hands dirty in the forging process.

Some larger pieces of equipment, such as the vacuum chamber and the different sized ingot molds, were brought in Randidly’s interspatial ring. But ultimately, Randidly wanted to shift his style of forging away from the very finicky style that most of the people in Erickson Steel currently had. Hopefully, his time forging here would give him a better idea of the process he wanted.

Above all, most of the saved space came from the fact Randidly didn’t bring any sort of heating equipment. After all, he didn’t need a typical furnace; Ignition of the Emerald Essence would provide plenty of heat to his forging.

The final section, and the smallest, contained a small kitchen and hot springs that Randidly had created after he discovered a source of water rather close to the bottom of his base. Honestly, most of the time he had spent preparing his base had been Randidly struggling to not flood his newly formed abode after he stumbled onto an extremely frigid underground river.

After that, it was simply a matter of diverting an appropriate amount of fluid upwards, installing runes so that one pool would be extremely hot while the other was left extremely cold, and finally arrange for the water to filter back down and be gradually replaced by fresh water.

Feeling quite pleased with himself, Randidly treated himself to a brief soak in the scalding water of the manmade hot springs. Taking a deep breath, Randidly readily inhaled the thick steam that wafted upward from the heated water. For the first time in a while, Randidly felt himself slowly relaxing.

The whole experience was rather enjoyable until he noticed that floating corpse of some sort of mollusk right in front of him. For several seconds, Randidly just stared at it. More than anything else, he was shocked that it somehow managed to sneak into his base without him noticing. Randidly had kept a pretty constant buffer of Aether around the edge of the dome above-

With a sense of trepidation, Randidly got out of the scalding pool and looked over at the pool he left at the original frigid temperature. Sure enough, there were three mollusks within, cautiously exploring their new environment.

Randidly sighed. I guess it was foolish not to think about filtering any living creatures that were within the underground river… but at least they are only at Level 6. Won’t be a problem to clear them out later. Still, they might be an interesting food source. No harm in letting them develop in the cold pool…

After carefully installing a runic filter in the passage that led to the scalding pool, Randidly returned to his training hall and began to work. No need to walk toward his hot tub one day and find that it had become a salty mollusk stew.

The first thing Randidly did was sit down and inspected his Class for any lingering damage after it had been slowly nurtured by energy from his Soulskill over the past day.

During a fraction of time that seemed pitifully small, Randidly had briefly been on the receiving end of attention from a dangerous being peering out from the depths of a vast crystal. Like a bug unknowingly in the way of a car, Randidly’s Class was savaged while that being turned its attention to the connection that the Creature had maintained with Randidly.

Perhaps the most fearsome detail of this interaction was that Randidly had no idea whether it would recur. At any moment, the focus of that being might come back to him. Had that being found the Creature? Would it remember that it used Randidly as a stepping stone to find the Creature? Would that being feel compelled to return its focus to Randidly for any reason?

To silence him, perhaps?

And if that being couldn’t find the Creature in a short amount of time, would it return to Randidly to dig out every bit of value it could gain from him?

Randidly had been frantically throwing off Aether since the damage to his Class had occurred, slowly wiping away the lingering chunks of Aether that had remained afterward as Neveah had recommended. Whereas Randidly’s Aether shared quite a few traits with liquids, the extremely calcified Aether left by that being possessed the tenacity of a fossilized cockroach.

Even now, operating at a volume of Aether that left Randidly extremely worried he would fall into that mindless cycle of energy release, Randidly had removed only one-tenth of the remnants clinging to him. The only good news was that the rate of destruction was speeding up as more and more of the hardened Aether was washed away. Those exposed flaws could be used to accelerate the process.

When Randidly entered into the Dungeon, he had seriously considered slowing down the rate at which he was producing Aether. But for two reasons, Randidly ultimately decided to keep on his current pace. First, he didn’t know if the Aether remnants he was trying to wash away would recover if he let up the pressure. And Randidly had no intention of finding out.