Chapter 979 (2/2)

Like that silly fellow, Randidly thought, casting his gaze down through the ground toward Sulfur, who was in the thick of the thunderous rumbling. Even from here, Randidly could sense the pleasure it felt from absorbing so much ambient kinetic energy. If nothing else, both his armor and weapon were exceedingly predictable.

Randidly closed his eyes again. When he had been faced with the choice, and because he had a year in a Dungeon to work on his basics, Randidly had ultimately decided to not abandon familiarity. Because him being inept at that method right now was not a good enough reason for him to abandon a Path that might make him stronger.

Some things took more work than others. That was just life.

For a while, it was really rough. Randidly attempted to bring a tall tree down to the training area for him to examine as an aid. Unfortunately, it didn’t go so well without Mana constantly keeping it healthy. When that method failed, he ordered the Riders to surround a particular tree with Ignition of the Emerald Essence torches and then hoped it would grow into something that looked like a World Tree.

Afterward, Randidly went to the surface to investigate and seek a concrete image from it.

Of course, this weakened his image even further. The more Randidly focused on regular trees, the more that Randidly hadn’t been able to find out how the image of timelessness of that stone monolith could be injected into a tree.

It was going so poorly that, for the first time, his World Tree image had shrunk.

Faced with the fact that Randidly might have earlier made a mistake, Randidly had ceased his other training and thought about this issue for an entire night. A second night of absolute stillness while surrounded by darkness to assess his failure to improve. He swam through the image, pondering what he was doing wrong. And then he had an epiphany.

It isn’t that I should make my image like these trees… the image is already there and was already heading in the right direction. No… it’s that these real, concrete trees… are trying to become something akin to the world tree. They are not my aspirations, they are aspiring to be the same thing I want my image to be…

So Randidly watched trees. He watched them grow. He looked at their branches, their leaves, their bark. He used his powerful senses to trace the routes their roots carved through the ground. When that wasn’t enough, Randidly had a whole jungle that he submerged in Aether. As part of his daily training, he let his Perception spread and cover the whole of the jungle.

Even the smallest vein on a falling leaf was carefully scrutinized. With his high Intelligence, Focus, and Perception, he practically buzzed with the flood of tree-related-data flowing into him.

When one tree wasn’t enough, he looked at a hundred. When a hundred wasn’t enough, Randidly looked at ten thousand.

Slowly, Randidly’s knowledge of vegetation as a whole grew. Randidly could always use his Skills to control it, but now Randidly simply observed the way trees grew when he didn’t interfere at all. By watching the independent instincts of ten thousand trees, Randidly could sense the edge of what the trees were truly attempting to be.

That was his World Tree. The Platonic Ideal beyond the mortal world.

As these general principles of the efficient distribution of roots, the reasons for leaf size and shape, the idea thickness of bark all filtered through Randidly, his image no longer shrunk. Now, it only grew heavier.

It grew more familiar.

Randidly inhaled and then exhaled. Beneath his seated form, the moss and surrounding flowers shivered in pleasure. As Randidly was continuing to throw off vast quantities of Aether, his breath was like a blast of airborne fertilizer for them. They wiggled in delight, as though the sun had given them each a sweet lemon candy.

Then he cracked his neck and stood. The phantom image of a vast tree rising above an ancient forest that had filled the training area dispersed. What was left was just the rumbling moss and flowers.

Randidly released a breath. “Probably about time to work on spear moves…”

Below him, Randidly ceased exercising his formidable Control. Ten thousand roots holding one thousand forging hammers paused in their constant labor. There was a few clangs and then silence. Influence of the Molten Core, which had been whirling constantly below to move the bits of partially smelted metal to all the right places paused and drifted toward the ground. The superheated metal of the core slowly cooled, still humming with reverberations from the deafening cacophony of a few seconds ago.

After stacking up the hammers next to the anvils Randidly had made earlier, the vines that had held them slithered back into the ground. The rustling noise of roots faded to silence, leaving not a single sound in the lower Level. Currently, there was only mass waiting there.

Rising above the anvils were four piles.

Two were rough and haphazard. Thousands of corpses had their flesh burned away to leave only the bones and now stood like the dreadful warning within a lair of a dragon. Next to that was a thick mound of ores of different varieties.

The other two piles were gleaming and neat. One was made of copper ingots while the other was steel. These four piles took up almost one-third of the area within the second level, which was ten times the size of the first. So about six of the football field-sized training areas were filled with ingots neatly stacked to the height of three meters.

Randidly scratched his head as he walked outside. “Gonna need to find another big ore vein to keep up this production… and I feel like Influence of the Molten Core is close to changing somehow too… just a bit more…”

Then Randidly patted his stomach. “Huh, well I can practice spear Skills later. Maybe spend a bit of time working on my Cooking Skill…?”

Mumbling to himself, Randidly yawned and wandered outside.