Chapter 1496 (2/2)

“One last thing,” Octavius once more reached out and grabbed Randidly’s arm, right as he was about to jump downward. “The deeper you go in the Web, the more of that dirty Aether flows up. The density of it increases exponentially. If you go deep enough, there are even traces of Nether present. So it can also mess with your sense of time. Be careful.”

“I will be,” Randidly said with a sharp smile. But then he had leapt over the edge, narrowing stepping across two six-legged insect people who were scutting up to the armor ring. Randidly briefly angled his body at a diagonal so air resistance would naturally slide him further away from the rings before twisting mid-air and aiming his head directly down. He closed his eyes and felt the passing air on his skin.

Randidly rapidly began to accelerate downward, the bodies of the fellow Nexus citizens along the rings blurring into obscurity. He began to whip past the levels of Bray Street, one after another, shooting straight downward. Randidly couldn’t help but smile. The increased wind ruffled his hair. There was something extremely intoxicating about the natural speed generated by gravity-

But then Randidly’s smile faded. Actually, this gravity… it wasn’t coming from any enormous body of mass, was it? Either there was some artificial Engraving at the base of the Nexus that powered it, or…

Or Randidly was diving headfirst right toward an immense mass of significance that was so mind-bogglingly large that it physically pulled everything in the surroundings toward it.

With that bucket of cold reality poured over the experience, Randidly streaked past the bottommost ring and entered the Web proper. Wind whistled past him as he continued to fly steadily downward without recognizing this portion of the Web, a testament to how far they had ascended for the meeting. After about another thirty seconds, Randidly neared the portion that he had traversed with Octavius after their initial arrival. Cords across the vast space became increasingly frequent.

But as the Stillborn Phoenix enthusiastically began to absorb emotions once more, after Yggdrasil hastily moved to purify the chaotic Aether, Randidly knew this amount wasn’t enough. So he didn’t try and slow his descent at all. The Stillborn Phoenix had a large appetite. He tapped his waist twice and belt-Acri happily unfurled itself and sprung into its spear form. Randidly’s muscles steadily began to swell as he once more began supporting his image physicalizations for his other two images.

His grip tightened on his spear as he pointed it downward. His heart in his chest was thunderous as it increased the speed at which his scalding blood circulated through his body. The Grim Chimera was conjured in the air behind Randidly and barred its teeth. Man is Proud, But the Chimera Takes.

Congratulations! Your Skill Man is Proud, But the Chimera Takes (L) has grown to Level 295!

After a series of brutal confrontations with himself while still on Earth, Randidly had pushed the Levels of most of his Grim Chimera Skills up by quite a bit. And the biggest improvement was exactly with Man is Proud, But the Chimera Takes. Combined with his physical Stats, Randidly’s Skill created an enormous sonic boom that echoed in that Web as he pierced downward, sending cables in the surrounding area swaying wildly. The flimsy veil of the System’s physical limitation shattered easily around him, now that he had almost completely broken its hold.

With subtle adjustments of the angle of Acri’s blade, Randidly guided his body to slide back and forth through the interior of the Web, weaving at high speeds between the numerous cables that blocked his path. Not that the cables were very densely packed, but at the speed he was descending, he simply covered so much distance in a short amount of time that it was guaranteed that several ended up blocking his path. He rode currents of air downward, feeling slightly guilty as he blew past others using the Web as a means of transportation.

Soon, Randidly had reached the depth where they had left the Web for that small residential dome where Edraine had set up her base. He continued shooting downward without a thought. This amount of emotion still wasn’t enough.

Finally, as Octavius had warned, the prevalence of wild emotions woven through the Aether sharply increased. The Stillborn Phoenix gleefully began to suck them all into itself, making Yggdrasil struggle to filter out the System Aether. Randidly’s veins rapidly began to glow within his body as Yggdrasil surged with more and more power to keep up with the other image’s demand.

Randidly whipped Acri sideways, dispersing his momentum in a blast of air. At this point in the Web, almost all of the lanterns along the walls were dim or broken. There weren’t really any doors along the outside, either, leading to habitable locations in the Nexus. It was a realm of shadows, seething with emotion and freshly processed Aether. As Randidly drifted downward and landed against a swaying cord, he could truly feel the pull of the significance below. Even Randidly, with his prodigious self-control and Willpower, found it difficult to pull his gaze away from that seething mass the tugged his attention downward.

When he considered that the dismembered pieces to construct a child were at the core of that significance, he shivered.

Then he settled down into sitting with his legs folded beneath him while balanced on the cord. As he released a breath, he also released all the limiters he had placed on his images for the interview. Randidly’s small section of the Web shook as an absolutely towering version of Yggdrasil stretched upward. Its branches twined together and lined themselves with leafy greenery, filling the whole hollow spine of the Nexus with life.

While those leaves began to glow with emerald light and rapidly cleave the powerful emotions from the Aether, the Stillborn Phoenix distorted light around Randidly’s left eye and greedily began to feed.