Chapter 1291 (2/2)

Out loud, Randidly admitted, “No, you’re right. The process has taken longer than I thought it would. I had to consult with Neveah to figure out some of the details for the Engraving that I wanted to make. But I promise that I’ll have the floor prepared and installed tonight before midnight. At that point, you will be free to put whatever flair you want in the ballroom.”

Wolfram glanced up at the sky meaningfully. The two were standing in one of Kharon’s parks, surrounded at a distance of twenty meters by the mulling forms of people who had meetings with Wolfram and then quite a few others that just seemed to be trying their best not to gawk over at Randidly himself who was standing there.

Because if Wolfram truly meant to meet with all of the gathered people, Randidly felt quite a bit of sympathy for the ogre.

It was noon. Randidly did some mental calculating on his own pace of tile creation and grimaced. He wouldn’t be able to start the finishing touches on the Engraving until some of his mental energy recovered. Aether and Nether needed to be woven together to achieve the effect Randidly wanted, and the process was extremely exhausting. Even now, he had something of a headache, which was why he agreed to meet Wolfram in the sun-drenched park.

Being out in nature helped slowly calm Randidly back down to his base state. The warmth on his skin was rejuvenating.

“...well, a large portion will be finished by midnight,” Randidly elaborated as he scratched his head. “Your people should be able to begin work then anyway on a significant portion of the main ballroom.”

“By your leave,” Wolfram bowed and then turned slightly away from Randidly and gestured for whomever individual with which he had his next meeting to approach him. The man in question saw Randidly standing there casually and looked with wide eyes at this unexpected chance. After a frozen moment, he quickly made up his mind and stroud purposefully forward with his eyes locked on Randidly.

Shaking his head, Randidly activated Chimerica Avoidance to the limit and then took a step forward. Space itself seemed to part for him as he crossed his way through the crowd, out of the park, and off of Kharon itself.

Congratulations! Your Skill Chimeric Avoidance (L) has grown to Level 237!

Continuing to move quickly, Randidly blazed a trail quickly through the mountain range which had been renamed the Nordawns in honor of the homeworld of the ogres. On his journey, Randidly didn’t make any effort to avoid the ogres that were settling the area, but he saw very few communities of ogres setting up buildings as he skirted the highest of the Nordawns and headed West. For whatever reason, most of the population had made a beeline for the tallest peak and were slowly carving that epic mountain into a veritable city.

Still, Randidly had only come out of Kharon to work because of space; no matter what image reverberations he produced, no one would get wind of what he was up to until he finished working on the floor material.

It only took Randidly about twenty minutes to arrive at his work zone he had casually made yesterday. From the way that Randidly didn’t encounter any monsters at all in the last minute or so of travel before arriving, it seemed that his images that were still dissipating in the air above the quiet mountain served as a powerful deterrent.

Randidly landed next to the quarry he had created and then hopped down to the pit below. There, laying out where he had left them, were about eighty of the two hundred tiles he needed to make in order to cover enough of the flooring to satisfy Tatiana’s demands. The tiles themselves were black and sparkling, with notes of emerald hidden in their depths. Because of the presence of Nether in the Engraving, the lines of Mana couldn’t be seen; they simply looked like plain black tiles. An unadorned and mundane series of black tiles.

They were stacked up like obsidian plates in four piles that reached the height of Randidly’s waist. Just these had taken him three days of concentrated effort to make, although most of that effort was researching and experimenting with the Engraving to get the right effect. The actual Engraving had been done in two hours this morning: exhausting but manageable.

With a small smile on his face, Randidly reached out and placed a finger against the top tile of one of the piles. A ripple of light spread out from the spot that Randidly’s finger touched, quickly running through all of the touching tiles. It was difficult to see exactly what was going on because the tiles were stacked on top of each other, but a rich supernova of light seemed to seep out from the pile on which Randidly had placed his finger while the others remained inert.

Chuckling, Randidly withdrew his finger. Seems like these are going to work. Still gonna take a bit of time before I recover the mental energy I need to finish the job, so in the meantime…

After cracking his neck, Randidly created himself a root chair with Absolute Grasp of Yggdrasil and then settled down. His time thinking about Ignition Essence over the past few days had been not as productive as Randidly had hoped, so now he focused on a different, more established image to refine this time: Yggdrasil.

In a very relaxed way, Randidly allowed his image of the World Tree to spread out from his body. The golden roots sank into the surrounding ground. The trunk swelled and darkened as it reached toward the sky. Emerald leaves sprouted and waved lightly in an imaginary wind. The whole valley soon began to pulse with the ambient life that Yggdrasil possessed.

But Randidly didn’t focus on the life. No, he let his attention wander to the dark spaces in Yggdrasil. To the quiet cracks underneath the groaning branches. To the deep shadows and the many-limbed creature that skittered through Yggdrasil’s boughs. It opened its mouth and breathed silently, greedily absorbing the wild energies of the air.

All things have a price.

Congratulations! Your Skill the Implacable Price of Exodus (M) has grown to Level 207!

…

Congratulations! Your Skill the Implacable Price of Exodus (M) has grown to Level 219!