Chapter 982 (1/2)

Within the Dungeon, time flowed onward without pause while Randidly immersed himself in training.

It had now been four months since Randidly had entered into the Dungeon. In the areas of Skill usage, image integrity, and Skill Level, Randidly experienced rather constant improvements. Although he hadn’t had much actual combat with any sort of opponents that could be considered a true challenge for him, he still hadn’t hit the wall of plateauing in his growth.

Which, Randidly reflected, spoke to how many difficult challenges he had fought through in the last several months without having time to really internalize the lessons he had gathered from those conflicts.

Every time Randidly’s focus was drifting away from the task at hand, Aegiant’s cruel smile would appear in his mind. Or a cold fist of ice would grip his heart as Randidly thought about Donnyton attempting to fight against the Calamity with their shallow images. Or jagged daggers of fear would slide between Randidly’s ribs as he thought about Octavius warning of individuals from the Nexus watching him or Lyra knowing what had occurred with Shal in the strange trial after the Second Calamity.

The constant state of half-anxiety was slowly settling, but for now, those emotions were his frequent companion.

Those thoughts would force Randidly to push himself even further, testing the edges of his Willpower. He endured, he overcame, he absorbed, he accepted. Time flowed past and Randidly tirelessly refined himself. Soon, these moments occurred much less frequently.

The only real change that occurred in the last month originated from the mollusks. After Randidly had given them a watch, they became altogether obsessed with time and its keeping. Now most well to do mollusks had figured out how to produce their own relatively primitive clockwork timepieces. Several strutted around with a barely functioning watch attached to their shells as a strange display of status.

The time pieces they produced were almost comically bad. But they were working with bits of shell and small amounts of scrap metal that Randidly had donated to them, so it wasn’t strange that they were having difficulties creating something that would stand the test of time.

The watch that Randidly had given them was hung from the leader mollusk’s house. Which, given the population boom after Randidly stopped forging for a few days, had now become a rather towering building.

At first Randidly had a headache as he considered expanding the pool even further, but the mollusks turned out to be happy enough to do all the work themselves if Randidly gave them ‘tools’. So Randidly took all the failed Levelable Engravings and any other scrap metal he possessed and made a large pile next to the mollusk’s pool.

They dutifully crawled out, would grab anything that they needed, then pull it back into the pool at a painfully slow speed.

Still, Randidly wasn’t there most of the time, so he spared himself the torture of watching the relatively inept creatures struggling to move a chunk of burned metal that was often two times their size. Rather casually, Randidly went one night with Acri and cut the bracers down to more manageable sizes.

What watching the queer mollusks did do was finally wake Randidly up to how strangely warped his sense of time was getting. After all, Randidly had initially been preparing for a Judgement that should descend upon him within a month’s time. Yet he used the Dungeon to trade a few days into a year without much difficulty.

As his sense of urgency slowly left him, Randidly wondered why the System made such an invention as Dungeons.

Of course, most people couldn’t have done what Randidly was doing. Without their own personal supply of Aether, they were exposing themselves to a huge risk by staying in a Dungeon longer than a month or two. Randidly was already at double that limit. With the dense Aether of the Dungeon, most people’s bodies would rely less and less on the Aether connection with the Village.

Then, when they left the Dungeon, the weakened connection would be abruptly forced to handle an increased amount of Aether to support the individual. That demand on the withered connection was the source of Aether Sickness, and why most people had to carefully consider how much time they should remain in a Dungeon.

Randidly didn’t have this problem. And it was with some amusement that he realized that if he had brought a group of people into the Dungeon with him, his constant explosion of Aether would have exacerbated the problem of Aether Sickness immensely. With the current density of Aether in the Dungeon, perhaps normal individuals could only stay within the Dungeon for a week or two before their connection to the Village began to atrophy to a dangerous point.

But Randidly quickly discovered a much more insidious and dangerous problem of the time dilation, one that he couldn’t avoid: perspective shifts.

After all, Randidly had been driven to train because of two looming threats that would arrive in relatively short order. He had also had to deal with the mental turmoil of being struck by a casual glance while some powerful being locked onto the scent of the Creature. Lyra’s offer weighed heavily on his mind. Those things reminded Randidly of his own inadequacy and mortality.

Yet four months had passed and nothing bad had happened in this warped swirl of time. Although Randidly still was doing a good job of maintaining his mental edge at the moment, likely due to Shal’s brutal training early in his System experience, he could feel some part of himself relaxing.

At least while he was in the Dungeon, Randidly felt… safe.

It had taken Randidly this long to realize what the feeling was because he hadn’t felt that way for so long. But within the Dungeon, as his Riders basically burned down the surrounding jungle for materials, Randidly had no real sense of tension. He was free to grow as he wished without external threat.