Chapter 1093 (2/2)

Kailm gave Randidly a strange look. “Of course not, it’s incredibly dangerous to mix foreign Fates with your own. And if you do this now and eventually regain your body, there will perhaps be a conflict with your original Fate. But aren’t you here to gather power enough to live that long? Everything becomes moot if you die.

“But maybe even more importantly… do you think it’s easy to obtain a Fate powerful enough to make enough of a difference to be worth the risk of corrupting your own Fate? The System watches such things very carefully. You might not realize it, but this is a chance of a lifetime for you.”

“One which I earned by being sent to die,” Randidly muttered. Kailm shrugged.

But Kailm’s previous points did give Randidly pause. It was obvious in retrospect that this wouldn’t be a costless process. Of course, the main body didn’t possess a Fate currently, so there wouldn’t be the sort of negative reaction that Kailm spoke about. But what that made Randidly worry was that taking in a Fate now would preempt him forming his own Fate later. Which would be quite the tragedy.

Because no matter how capable this deceased woman was, Randidly refused to admit defeat to her. Their differences lay in age and experience, not in potential.

And also in how our stories will end. Randidly thought with a tinge of sadness as he looked at the plain grey blade.

Still, Randidly’s sudden unwillingness to absorb the Fate into himself put him in an extremely awkward position as Kailm had made his stance clear; Randidly would absorb the Fate or Kailm would kill him. All the while, the blade in his hand continued to exert its dangerous influence over Randidly’s hand and arm. He initially kept the blade as far away from his torso as possible, but as his arm weakened from constant exposure, it drifted closer to him.

Congratulations! Your Skill Fire Resistance has grown to Level 116!

Very quickly, Randidly had an idea. Quite like how the maker of the System had taken the principles of Nether RItuals to create Classes, Randidly had it in mind to treat this new Fate like a ‘core’ of Nether and have himself become the bubble. The problem of heat would likely continue but was debatably beneficial in the long term.

Plus, if he could learn to harness the heat it released, it certainly would do a lot to help him survive in the Great Rift by purely burning away Nether.

Besides, Randidly couldn’t deny that if the blade produced this much heat in its passive state, its activated form might be more dangerous than he wanted to deal with at the moment. Especially because he expected the protection against liquid Aether afforded by the Fate to swiftly disappear once he took any action with it, leaving him once more in the unenviable position of resisting the liquid Aether directly with his image body.

Closing his eyes, Randidly turned away from Kailm and attempted it as discretely as he could. His image for what was about to happen was sharp and clear. The burning blade would become a part of him, floating in his internal world. His will stretched out to accomplish his goal.

And of course. It didn’t work.

Taking a risk, Randidly unleashed a bit of Nether and had it circulate through him to more fully duplicate the feeling he was looking for. Then he tried again But even with the Nether strengthening the specificity of his desire, his mental grip on the slate-colored blade could not find any purchase.

...unfortunately, it looks like it would need to be in an active state to be pulled in like that. Randidly frowned at the shimmering grey surface. Not because of the power required… but because an object can’t be a core. A bubble can be anything, but the core… the core needs to be special. Vital. Connected.

Which was valuable information in its own right, but didn’t help Randidly in his current predicament.

Congratulations! Your Skill Fire Resistance has grown to Level 117!

Congratulations! Your Skill Pain Resistance has grown to Level 113!

Randidly barely kept a groan from slipping out of his lips. Then he did his best to school his face into something relatively neutral before he turned around to face Kailm. Even though it was probably pointless, Randidly refused to show any weakness in front of this powerful man who had forced him into action with an ultimatum.

Which, Randidly was aware, was sweeping under the rug the fact that he had rather thoughtlessly proceeded here in order to become more powerful in a short amount of time, knowing the risks. Likely he would have made this attempt even without Kailm’s ultimatum, he would have attempted it. Yet the fact that Kailm did force the issue made all the difference to the Grim Chimera’s pride.

Randidly even allowed what he thought was a relatively convincing smile to cross his face as he looked at Kailm. “No need to play coy. Do I really even have a choice in whether I absorb this blade? The alternative is death. The ultimate failure”

With much more weight than Randidly had expected from his flippant remark, Kailm looked at the grey blade in Randidly’s hand. “...there is always another choice. There are even many who take it.”

For several seconds, Randidly was too taken aback to speak. He looked at the blade one more time, this time looking less at its surface but more at its shape. A blade with no handle… I suppose it is fitting that the user bled herself until she died with such a Fate.But that does not mean that I will be bound by that future.

His resolve firmed, Randidly reached out with his bone spear and pressed it against the blade. His image raised its head and howled in challenge to the sleeping Fate. Ash and the tenacious craving for survival swam down around his bone spear and congregated at the tip. Then, inspired by his experience with Nether, he began to rotate those facets of his image at a high speed until they wove themselves into a deadly point.

Then be began to drag that point across the slate grey blade.