Chapter 1568 (1/2)

To Randidly’s surprise, losing his sight was much less bothersome than losing his voice had been, although he used his eyes much more while he had been here. But it turned out that the information gathered with his eyes had been superfluous.

Plus, whatever had occurred at the 15th Level of his Fatepiece lingered. Some of that horrible emotional exhaustion had been forced away, leaving his remaining personality and Willpower streamlined. The sensation of clarity was certainly intoxicating.

And so I start to drink more deeply from the poisoned well of obsession, Randidly thought wryly.

As he had noted previously when he still had eyes to witness it, the murky darkness above and below him resembled each other to the point of being interchangeable. Yet now his blind senses could comb through the surroundings in minute detail. The air was thick and coarse, like unwashed wool. It felt itchy against his skin, and also strangely damp.

Into the void where his sight had been stepped his growing emotional acuity, leaving the shaft dyed with constantly bleeding tints.

The way emotions manifested wasn’t the same as colors, not exactly, but the vibrancy and ‘heat’ of these passing emotions, and Randidly’s own images, gradually soaked the surroundings in a new sort of awareness. The resonances and collisions became part and parcel to his newfound existence.

Which didn’t even address the biggest benefit; without Randidly’s eyes, his Grim Intuition began working much more diligently to interpret the sensations that filtered up through the Nether. To his shock, he discovered that he could peer much more deeply down into the depths in this manner. And what he found there were hundreds of thousands of Nether Beasts, milling around in the darkness.

Sometimes they fought each other, but it was a largely inert experience that left him deeply curious.

In addition, Randidly was able to confirm that his sense of space wasn’t lying to him; the spine really was growing in diameter as he descended further. At this point, it was almost double in size as he had observed previously.

Congratulations! Your Skill Nether Sensation (L) has grown to Level 335!

Releasing a silent breath, Randidly pushed himself through the air toward the wall. Of course, there was still an area that he was worried about. He slowed himself as he neared the bone, marveling at how smooth the inside of the spine was to his Grim Intuition. Thousands of years' worth of emotion had stripped away any bumps and irregularities from the surface. With a snap of his fingers, Nether wound down from his nebula and to the tips of his fingers.

Then he began to Engrave.

Very quickly, Randidly frowned and cursed at himself mentally. Partway through his Engraving, he had forgotten the larger shape of the formation and created a glaring weakness in the flows of energy. Randidly resolved himself to pay closer attention with Nether Sensation to the shallow lines of energy running through the Engraving so he didn’t lose himself again.

So he started over.

Congratulations! Your Skill Architecture of the Primordial Ways (M) has grown to Level 312!

For a while, Randidly dragged his fingers gracefully across the bone, wearing a pattern into the difficult surface. That was part of the problem with this practice, that the substance was so reinforced that it required dense Nether to make even a shallow a mark. Yet Randidly possessed Nether at the requisite density.

His knuckles were white as he applied careful pressure during the Engraving process.

Still, halfway through this second try Randidly grimaced and ceased his efforts. He had been keeping tabs on his shallow marking along the wall by sensing the volume of Nether flowing through the small indentations, but already he realized that his vigilance wasn’t enough to avoid problems. Nether flowed through the created pathways in waves. At all times there was a low amount of Nether present throughout, but then one of the rotating ‘waves’ would push through that area, deepening the effect.

The problem was that, because of the way his senses now detected the Nether, he had made the Engraving uneven from misunderstanding his own senses. Randidly could already detect that the Nether flow he had created, before it could ever become a Nether Core, would destabilize and collapse due to a shoddy foundation.

So Randidly drifted a meter to the left and began his third blind attempt. Instead of going for anything specific, Randidly simply tried to capture the feeling in his heart when he thought about Yggdrasil. It was the World Tree, the safest source of growth in his life. If he could capture that sensation in Nether…

Congratulations! Your Skill Architecture of the Primordial Ways (M) has grown to Level 312!

The mute and blind Randidly rolled his useless eyes at the notification, which came to him like a sudden epiphany in the nighttime of his awareness. It didn’t break his concentration while Engraving, not quite, but it was certainly an unwelcome distraction. Without even bringing the satisfaction of seeing where my true Skill Level now is…

Suddenly, Randidly paused midway through his Engraving. Wait a second, how am I going to use the Visage of Obsession if I’m blind…?

Randidly was tempted to immediately pull out his Fatepiece and look at it to find out the answer that, but he smothered his curiosity for now. The Visage of Obsession would eat up his time if he would let it; better that Randidly fely like he was at the end of his current potential before he returned to the Fatepiece.

At the moment, plenty of that mental acuity remained. He was still content to continue training.