Chapter 1160 (1/2)

After she fell asleep, Vualla woke in the vast darkness once more. It was a living thing, a sea of leeches that sucked away all her warmth and also seemed to study her vigilantly for any signs of life. That was the new thing that Vualla sensed lurking in the darkness around her, a spark of consciousness.

It wasn’t the only new thing. They only danced at the edges of her perception, but Vualla was quite sure that there were Aether constructs floating around in the darkness. Yet it seemed that they were quite shy, because every time Vualla waited for them to appear, they froze underneath her attention.

So all she really had was the cold thirst of the darkness to distract herself. Yet Vualla couldn’t really be bothered to marshall up much of a fight. Even if she hadn’t been being slowly drained of her vitality, she was far too exhausted to try and resist the weight of the darkness around her. Sleep hadn’t been a leisure activity, it had been because she was completely spent.

Even at her best, Vualla could barely hold her own against this curious space. So now she just allowed it to do its vampiric work.

Because immediately prior to Vualla collapsing, her camp had endured another exceedingly sharp Nether attack. Once more, Vualla had moved forward to fight against the Nether Gatekeeper that was threatening Terith’s camp. Although she hadn’t been selected as the interim-Commander, she was the strongest individual remaining in the camp.

Her role was to fight the Nether Gatekeeper. And she had faced down one before in an ambush mission and found it in herself to defeat another in the prior large confrontation. It was with confidence that she had proceeded toward her foe. Every day had seen an improvement in her abilities to control her energy and image.

Even without Cail’s training, Vualla was growing.

To her shock, the fight had been brutal. Exceedingly brutal. Vualla had been very near to losing. Some part of her believed that this Nether Gatekeeper might have been stronger than the one that she had defeated previously, but the other half of Vualla just worried that her previous victory had been a fluke.

Her confidence was shaken. But it was not destroyed. Because Vualla had ultimately won.

Still, it meant that she laid almost helplessly in the darkness and allowed it to siphon away her warmth. Yet an extremely peculiar thing happened as she simply opened herself up into the darkness. Although the warmth in her chest faded, although she felt insecure and worried… the emotions that she carried weren’t extinguished by this place.

If anything… the truth was that the darkness drew out all of Vualla’s fears and insecurities and made her face them directly. And honestly… Vualla felt pretty good about it. Twice now she had won. So what if it was hard? Hadn’t her entire life been hard?

Hadn’t reaching this amount of strength been her goal since she was a little girl? Had she truly expected it to become easier at this point? No. This was only the beginning.

“I can do this,” she whispered.

The darkness watched her silently. The strange Aether constructs continued to drift around her.

*****

Line by careful line, Randidly engraved his image of the Akashic Records into the trunk of Yggdrasil.

The brilliant arrays for energy absorption that Vualal had taught him were an integral part of it, as Randidly planned out the large shape of the aggregated runes to have a grander meaning outside of the truths they contained. But that still left him with the rather daunting task of imagining the minutia of the thing that described everything. It was a test of both detail but also breadth. This needed to be large.

Existence had no true edge. So Randidly had to approximate that.

That was his first goal. He expanded the world tree. A size where a world really could fit on a branch. Then he simply let his mind unfocus as his hand worked. Bit by bit, he would cross the vast ridges of rutted bark to scrawl individual sigils across the whole of the image. It was a distance that was unthinkable for a physical body to endure. But as it was just image work, Randidly continued to push himself.

His fingers gleamed with Aether and Mana as he smoothly built the Akashic Records up, line by line.

His strategy was a bit unusual, but it was an unusual problem. Obviously Randidly didn’t know everything. So how could his image contain the record of everything?

He settled on something close to random chance; Instead of trying to put meaning into what he was doing, Randidly simply followed the shapes. He drew shapes randomly, then found patterns in the shapes he had created and continued them. They multiplied.

Soon, grand, looping patterns began to emerge. Randidly didn’t even need to pursue them once his mind touched upon them; after enough time, habit would bring them back. Time moved forward with different shapes but the same patterns or different patterns with the same shapes. And when Randidly finished one branch of Yggdrasil, he looked up and saw thousands of branching arms that still needed to be covered.

With a sigh, Randidly removed himself from his image. Doing such detail work actually went pretty quickly, as the mental world didn’t need to adhere very strictly to a normal time frame. Yet it was still exhausting because Randidly’s consciousness had to move through each and every motion of carving.