Chapter 1561 (2/2)

His metaphor about witnessing the body of a car was more apt than he had realized.

The resulting energy flows might be layered, but that just meant that the core was correspondingly complex. Randidly’s eyes slowly blinked and then closed. He could see Neshamah’s smug smile as she noticed his intense examination of her Nether. Then, with that snapshot of energy as his guide, he began to work those flows of energy backward to discover what was at the core.

Gradually, the complexity began to unravel.

But after a few seconds, Randidly opened his eyes with a growl. Of course, he couldn’t manage to completely deduce her core. At least not yet. But Randidly didn’t stay annoyed for long. He turned and looked at the markings on the wall next to him. The desperate scrawlings of the doppelganger still made Randidly slightly bitter about his heavy-handed actions. As he ran his fingers across the markings, he could feel how long the doppelganger had worked to make these Engravings. That effort and time became inertia that continued to push Nether through them, even though the original creator had died.

Randidly wondered if these would naturally give birth to some version of a Nether beast, as an immense amount of time passed and those flows were naturally allowed to deepen. Because what seemed to have happened was that the doppelganger had planted the seeds of significance in the base Engravings.

Randidly touched the twisted tree, the brilliant sun, and the perfect human body on the wall each in turn. They represented degeneration, abundance, and contentment or fulfillment. The significance spoke for itself. And Randidly wasn’t entirely sure that he was interpreting the nested meaning of the etchings correctly, but he could vaguely sense its shape.

Randidly could feel the deep significance held by the doppelganger toward each of these ethereal concepts, despite the fact that its life had been short and twisted. Each was a large part of his experience.

Well, god knows how long it existed down here… Randidly frowned at the wall. Time is stretching even further, but it’s tough to know the state of the outside world…. Hehehe, if it wasn’t so inconvenient to escape this place, it truly would be a great area for training…

Then Randidly gritted his teeth as a long-nagging thought surfaced in his mind. “How the hell did Velio Dunn know I would be in the Web…?”

It was a question that plagued him, but he forced down his curiosity and returned to the creation of a Nether Class. There seemed to be a trick to mobilizing Nether instead of Mana to form the base of the Engraving, but Randidly had rather quickly picked up the knack. Still, he held his finger wreathed in black energy aloft without scratching against the bone. His mind continued to whirr.

Rather than the process, what now made Randidly hesitate was the goal.

Architecture of the Primordial Ways was the Engraving Skill he had created in the past, and now it would become the ultimate weapon toward the establishment of a powerful Nether Class. Yet that didn’t mean it would be a simple process.

Because Engraving was a tool that Randidly had always wielded with a goal in mind. Or more accurately, Randidly’s Engraving was always some means to accomplish a goal. He Engraved to create an arm, to empower a Skill, to suppress his physical abilities with an array, etc. Meanwhile, the process of immortalizing his own significance was not a means of creating a Nether Class, although it could be viewed as such. Rather, it was truly the pursuit of self-actualization.

Just the thought of such self-examination gave him a headache.

But Randidly sensed that proceeding without some care and thought would inevitably taint the final product. He could not view this as a way to discover a Nether Class. He truly needs to clear his mind and reflect on the significance of each of his images. Rather than their shape, Randidly needed to pinpoint what each meant to him.

Thinking shallowly about himself, the results of his significance examination were quite simple. Yggdrasil was his first image and the one that spurred his growth. The Grim Chimera was the image that allowed him to adapt to any circumstance. And the Stillborn Phoenix was the most recent, and the phoenix that represented the difficulty of Randidly’s dream.

Randidly began to chuckle. “Will it really be that easy, I wonder…? Significance, huh… what a loaded word…”

Humming to himself, Randidly pushed himself to the side away from the doppelganger’s pictures. While drifting through the overly thick air, he casually unleashed a burst of Nether to deflect some emotions that were heading up from below toward his previous position. But then Randidly swore quietly and grimaced as those emotions managed to shatter his Nether defense and ripped large chunks of flesh from his body. As the muscle, fat, and skin tumbled through the air, they began to wriggle slowly.

Learning from his previous mistake, Randidly’s left eye immediately darkened. Light in the surrounding area bent inward and was absorbed. Then the egg of depression shrieked and unleashed a wave of force; those pieces of flesh were crushed to naught. With a deafening clap.

Congratulations! Your Skill Hallucination of the Bloodless Heart (T) has grown to Level 301!

Sensing Randidly,’s decisive movements to destroy his flesh, the flow of emotions curled up and regarded him as though they possessed intelligence. It was a curious cobra, regarding prey that continued to struggle despite its previous attack. In its stillness, Randidly felt a lurking threat.

Yet before Randidly could lash out with a more concentrated blast of Nether, Randidly looked sharply upward. A powerful image shot downward. His expression soon turned horrendous. “Are you fucking serious…?”

A metal spike radiating a waning image slammed into the boundary between below and above 50% Nether content, sending a wave of force through the surrounding space.