Chapter 1353 (2/2)

His influence had been naturally creeping outward as his Nether Nebula adapted to the change. He had reeled his Nether energy back into his body, but there was only so much he could do without completely dismantling his Nether at this point. Which was something that he was willing to do if he had more time, but…

Doing it now would be effectively throwing all the work I’ve done on deepening my Nether into the trash. The sun sank entirely below the horizon. The stars gradually made themselves known in the vast sea of space ago. Randidly slowly opened his eyes. It always comes back to time, huh…? I hope after this I’ll have plenty of time for a long break…

Almost immediately, Randidly chuckled. Who was he kidding? He was a man who had accepted in himself the habit of running directly toward danger. The future likely wouldn’t be any easier than it was now.

Because some part of Randidly wondered whether he would be able to survive in his current state during an extended stay of peace. It was easy with the presence of a threat to find the will continue to work hard. But with any stretch of peace… the last stretch of peace that Randidly had taken resulted in him exterminating the people of Ki-Kunot.

Shaking that thought away before it could take root, Randidly sucked in a breath of cool night air and turned to the task at hand: refining his image of the Stillborn Phoenix.

With a little bit of concentration, his consciousness sank to the core of his Soulspace and found the related image; the black egg now seemed to be ringed in a faint, milky light that disappeared when you looked at it too directly. It wasn’t a conscious change that Randidly had made to the image, but he liked the effect of it. He supposed it was a result of pop culture’s strange depiction of light under the influence of black holes.

Although pop culture was based upon real images taken from black holes, so it should be at least slightly accurate...

Of course, there was a point where light could not escape the grasp of a black hole. The event horizon. But before that, it began to… unravel the light and pull it in different directions. The light congealed and flowed, as though the event horizon melted it. For several minutes, Randidly tried to make his image of that light to be as bleak and forlorn as he could muster.

The runny, liquid light congealed like blood, to Randidly’s eyes, before it was devoured.

Then Randidly returned his focus to the core of himself and began to sink into those emotions that animated the egg of his Stillborn Phoenix, that was, of course, anything but a phoenix. That was the reason Randidly took such great care in making sure his new image was finely tuned. He didn’t want any dangerous mistakes to happen in the future based on a contradictory image.

Because while his image was a lie, it wasn’t a contradiction. Randidly’s image was a black hole. It was a star that had run out of fuel and collapsed inward on itself. Yet this was a star that had an obsession with being reborn and once more spreading light and energy across the star system around it.

The sad truth was that any life that a star supported during its original existence would surely be annihilated by its rocky transition into a black hole. Those precious lives the star had nurtured had been betrayed in a fundamental way. For those lives, it was too late.

Still, the star was an ignorant object; so it prayed to become a phoenix. Even now, rapidly absorbing ambient images and emotions present in the surroundings to become part of that singularity at its core, it continued to hope that this was just a transition stage. It hoped that after gathering a sufficient amount of mass and image power, it could be reborn.

Randidly decidedly kept himself from considering the transformation process too deeply for now. Doing so would bring his image more power, but both choices about how such a transformation would end came with costs that Randidly couldn’t yet decide between. So he sank into those howling emotions and acted as a stabilizer of sorts to the maelstrom of negativity that howled at the center of the Stillborn Phoenix.

Not that he attempted to slow the rotation in the core. If anything, he provided additional acceleration. What he did was create a broader sense of structure to the way the emotions were interacting with each other. With a deft hand from his work on Classes, Randidly easily wove a grand pattern to the emotions. The fierce violence with which the flows passed only a hair’s breadth from each other released waves of powerful ambient energy that became additional gravity to force more from the surroundings to fall into the endless maw.

By the end of the tuning, Randidly was gritting his teeth; truly, it was taxing to work too deeply with the Stillborn Phoenix. What he was essentially doing was digging up a mine during his work on the image. For every second of work it took him to dig down and improve the effectiveness of the image, it would take him another second of effort to extricate himself from that depth afterward.

Congratulations! Your Skill Visualization (R) has grown to Level 275!

Not a problem for the moment, but something to keep my eye on… Randidly thought as he considered the notification that popped up in front of him. Then he nodded. Really, it was more than time for him to spend all of the PP that he had been slowly accumulating over the last several days.

Even if it was pushing him toward the brink in terms of mental strain, the training against Illym and now Kaan Swacc’s projection was showing dividends. He had earned himself 992 PP that he could now spend.

Humming to himself, Randidly opened his Path menu.