Chapter 1612 (2/2)

Randidly watched as a glittering, red-violet wind spun together to form a condensed drop of liquid Aether. Then his eyes followed that individual drop as it was merged with countless others and surrounded by complex, rotating Aether constructs. With a bright flash, those drops of Liquid Aether were merged to form condensed Aether crystals.

Randidly’s eyes glittered as he traced the Aether constructs. But just as quickly as he began studying them, his attention was pulled away.

To his left… a black wind whipped through the darkness beyond the stone path, a dervish animated with dense Nether. As Randidly watched, as had happened on his right, that Nether quickly gathered together and created a tiny grey bubble. It tumbled weightless in the air for a few seconds before traveled further down the path.

As it continued to go forward, hundreds of those grey bubbles steadily were amassed, slowly accumulating and scuttling into a precise position, until a mysterious grey chrysanthemum about the size of two fists floated there.

Randidly blinked; the resemblance of Nether to a flower was an illusion. But the edges of the tightly packed bubbles now sat in such a rigid pattern that it was very easy to simply see a chrysanthemum when you did not look closely. The edges of the pattern aligned perfectly to fool the eye on the surface, but Randidly gradually sensed that the truly sublime arrangement of this item of Nether was its complex interior intersections.

Once the chrysanthemum and the crystal floated on Randidly’s right and left, they shot forward as though they were urging him forward. Somehow, space was bent. Although they rushed alongside the Path on which Randidly was standing, he somehow also knew that they were shooting directly toward each other.

And when they collided at the end of this stone path…

Randidly’s eyes were bright as he lifted his feet to advance toward the end of this Path. Already, he had obtained quite a bit just from watching the Aether constructs condense an Aether Crystal and witnessing the formation of the grey chrysanthemum. But somehow, he knew that an even deeper secret would reveal itself when those forces impacted each other.

That would be his glimpse of the Shallah.

But just as Randidly went to take a step… something tapped lightly on his shoulder. In the isolated world of the Path, the touch was so shocking that Randidly couldn’t stop a soft “eh?” from escaping his mouth.

A chill ran down Randidly’s spine as a strange voice spoke into his ear.

COME

The word smashed against Randidly’s body with enough force that he could feel part of his intestines rupturing. He gagged out a half-liter of blood, which splattered across the stone path. The blood that hit the stone caused it to bubble and seeth, but Randidly’s whole perspective seemed to buckle underneath the pressure of that single word.

As he quickly hyperventilated and struggled to recover, Randidly’s new Uncommon Metabolism activated. Although his internal organs were smashed to smithereens, they rapidly gathered back together and began to heal. His flesh was tough; even this strange phenomenon wasn’t enough to-

Randidly was horrified to discover that he was partially frozen. But his foot was planted and he was gradually pivoting backward. Still right next to his ear, that strange voice spoke again.

FIND

The second word was even worse than the first. His entire Soulspace was set to humming from the impact. The bones of his arm near the voice shattered, with bits tearing out of his flesh and dropping onto the path to join his sizzling blood. After a split second of dizziness, Randidly snapped back to focus. He abruptly realized that he had experienced this sort of sensation before; the source was different, but this was the same damage Randidly had sustained when the attention of Elhume landed upon him.

At least this time it didn’t shatter my Class, a fiery-eyed Randidly briefly reflected. But then he threw everything he had into trying to escape.

His muscles twitched and flexed helplessly. Even his significant physical power could do nothing but help him heal. He strained as much as he could, but Randidly couldn’t escape the grip of whatever now held him. His mind rapidly ran through options to break out of this situation, but things were moving way too quickly and his eyes were pulled upward. As he turned, he saw what had lain behind him on his right.

The red-violet Aether flowed together into a body, gradually strengthening that body and fooling the universe. The image physicalizations grew increasingly overwhelming. Then that capability to fool the universe became so convincing as the related images were strengthened that gradually the body’s eyes became blank and empty.

The image had become so all-consuming that the user had been devoured. The consciousness that birthed the image had forgotten that anything else existed.

Randidly had spun almost all the way around now, so he could also see what was on the Nether side of the Path. Familiar Nether energy spun together to create a core. Then core steadily grew in size and power until it resembled a black hole, devouring any hint of significance and crushing space and time in the process. That entire side of the stone path teetered on collapse as the Nether Core demanded more and more

In comparison to the hopeful feeling that Randidly had when he had been facing forward, these images that he saw in reverse chilled him to the bone. They showed power without restraint, driven to their limits. And he didn’t miss the way that his growth more closely mirrored this reverse direction than the original visions he saw.

Yet what truly set Randidly trembling was what he saw directly forward.

No grand fusion would occur at the end of the inverse path. No, the two sides were now separated by an immense gulf, Aether turned dangerously inward while Nether was turned outward.

But within that void between two extremes, an abhorrent being floated in a few dozen pieces. A tumbling hand, a pumping heart that spurt blood into the air, a twitching toe, a head that was cut in half-

The eye on the bisected head stared directly ahead as it rolled lazily through the air. Yet as that gaze passed over him, Randidly was transfixed.

ME

The third word was like a spell; after it was said, all Randidly knew was darkness.