Chapter 1391 (2/2)
The last element was the metal. He had to dip into the Kharon’s inventory, but Randidly liked the look of a new metal they had discovered in the borderlands. It was a dark red-orange color and people called it Rust Steel. After rummaging around, Randidly had about a dumpster full of the raw ore.
Breathing deeply in, Randidly filled up his lungs. Then he slowly released that air. His heartbeat began to quicken. His mind was blank. Time slipped past. Clouds drifted overhead.
After cracking his knuckles, Randidly began the smelting process. At this point, he began to participate in something of a ritual. In terms of creating metals, Randidly was very confident. Already his image spread to fill the surrounding air. This corner of the Earth was isolated from foreign Aether and images.
Once his heart was pounding and his physical body was at his peak, Randidly conjured the left arm of the Grim Chimera and slashed open his right wrist. Yggdrasil’s branches wrapped around his body, feeding life into his limbs. The image burned with power, concentrated in a very small space around him. Emerald blood oozed out of the cut into the barrel.
For five minutes Randidly bled himself with his life-giving blood. Due to his own healing properties, he had to rip his wrist open again every thirty seconds or so in order to fill the small barrel up. Then he allowed the wound to heal and pressed his eyes closed. Although Randidly tightened his muscles to keep his heart rate high, the image of Yggdrasil behind him slowly withered and vanished.
Instead, the horrible hunger of the Stillborn Phoenix shrieked its want. That image seized the surrounding space. Randidly thought about Theodora Greyman and every life lost because he hadn’t killed her the first time that he met her. Some part of him knew that he didn’t want to get into the habit of deciding the life and death of another human being, but at that moment he let all the dark emotions in his heart run rampant.
More than any other ingredient in the mixture, the two quenching liquids needed to have powerful images. So he completely immersed himself.
This time when he bled, the blood was such a dark red that it almost looked black. It flowed much more slowly out of his arm too, requiring twenty minutes to gather enough into the small barrel. Rather than bleeding, it seemed like sludge was oozing from his wound.
After his arm had healed again, Randidly sat down to let his heart rate fall to normal levels. He also slowly banished the pointless blaming, regret, and hatred that the Stillborn Phoenix allowed to fester. Only when he had returned to a balanced state did Randidly turn to the issue of the actual smelting.
Because while the improvements to Ignition Essence definitely resolved the issues with the image that Randidly had been struggling with, it took away all the actual fire. Well, almost all the actual fire.
Congratulations! Your Skill Hallucination of the Bloodless Heart (T) has grown to Level 233!
With his control over gravity, Randidly pulled one of the heavy chunks of Rust Steel ore to float in front of him. Then he purposefully activated Stigma of the Stillborn Phoenix. It was a Skill that made his Skills slightly more effective in exchange for increasing his sensitivity, specifically to pain. But the point of this activation was to immerse himself in the searing agony that the Skill could inflict on him.
Then Randidly opened his eyes. Revelation energy swirled around his body, sharpening his vision. Cool and composed, Randidly reached his right hand out toward the piece of ore in front of him and shared some of that painful heat.
Because the Stillborn Phoenix’s dream is to be a true phoenix. It wishes to be reborn. It has taken steps to achieve that transformation. It has always been chasing those attributes that belong to the phoenix. Even if it cannot truly become that mythic beast… it has not stood idle.
Randidly’s left eye darkened and became pure black. The surrounding light began to bleed and warp. The metal began to shiver and melt as the image unleashed a scalding wave of heat. The terrible friction of the fabric of reality rotation and rubbing against itself radiated outward. The release of heat produced by a ray of light as it was torn in half and devoured pounded the metal.
Satisfied, Randidly turned to the bones. Unfortunately, his almost pagan altar of bones was not long for this world. He quickly smashed to pieces with Hallucination of the Bloodless heart. The vast, cosmic forces of a black hole quickly smote the bones, filling the surrounding air with a cloud of dust and debris.
Feeling rather shocked with how effective that had been, Randidly rapidly flooded his body with more Revelation energy. In that way, he was able to use his gravity manipulation to pick the particles out of the air and carefully gather them back into one pile to be used for the smelting.
Congratulations! Your Skill Revelation of the Atramentous Threshold (T) has grown to Level 280!
Congratulations! Your Skill Hallucination of the Bloodless Heart (T) has grown to Level 234!
Randidly released another breath. He pulled more and more heavy pieces of ore into the air. Each was the size of a bowling ball and probably weighed as much as Randidly himself; the Rust Steel ore chunks were incredibly dense. Chunk by chunk they began to warp and melt beneath the onslaught of heat from Randidly’s image. Randidly’s lip curled upward as he noticed the stones beneath him were beginning to glow a dull red from the ambient heat.
And I’ve only just started. Once again, I’m a walking ecological disaster…
Still, before Randidly was completely swept up in the smelting, he glanced around. It would have been a more difficult fight, but Randidly had sorta been hoping Kaan Swacc would make a move first. Now that it became clear that they would need to lure him out…
Randidly clicked his tongue in annoyance. Then he focused himself fully on the task, with absolute faith that Neveah would protect him from any surprise attacks.