Chapter 1613 (1/2)
Congratulations! Your Skill Stigma of the Stillborn Phoenix (L) has grown to Level 318!
Congratulations! Your Skill Aether Detection has grown to Level 245!
Congratulations! Your Skill Ruin is Inevitable, Yet this Too Shall Pass (T) has grown to Level 305!
Congratulations! Your Skill Aether Inoculation (M) has grown to Level 179!
Congratulations! Your Skill Left Hand of the Nether Herald (M) has grown to Level 243!
Congratulations! Your Skill Nether Sensation (L) has grown to Level 403!
Randidly coughed and blinked as he was spat out by the Path completion and found himself collapsed on the Nether Pinion. His vision swam and every part of him ached as though he had been ambushed by thugs with baseball bats while he was unconscious. His jaw seemed to have somehow wrenched itself permanently shut from extended clenching. His hands were trembling.
Yet as he overcame the nausea and settled back toward normalcy, Randidly’s first response was to chuckle. His eyes were blank and sightless from the mental overload of the last few minutes, but he still looked up at the sky and grinned. “Last time I encountered an individual so titanic as that, my Class was hollowed out and my Skills were ripped to shreds from the impact. But this time… I survived with only a few flesh wounds.
“It’s proof. Proof that I’ll catch up eventually. Be warned, Nexus. I’m fucking coming for you.”
Despite the progress, his moment of victorious relish was soon interrupted by another batch of bloody coughs that wracked his body for a full minute. He had definitely survived and endured those three words without any permanent damage to his Soulspace, but that was because most of the damage was soaked up by his body. And his body was more than powerful enough to recover, but the lingering damage was a little sprinkle of reality on his dreams.
If that speaker had wanted to do anything more intensive than talking, Randidly still would have fallen short. The truth was simultaneously liberating and demeaning.
So Randidly sat for a while with his elbows on his knees and he simply breathed as his body stabilized itself. His Uncommon Metabolism did its job with enthusiasm. His shattered arm knitted back together. His popped organs steadily regenerated and reassimilated into his bodily systems. His heart-healing blood through his person while his bone marrow rapidly produced additional liters to make up what he had left within the Path.
And when his body had reached a completely functional state, Randidly leaned back and cracked his neck. He looked up at the grinding clash of Nether and Aether above and considered what he had witnessed within the Path.
His first impression was just that there was too much information; he might not has received Stats, but what he witnessed was extremely valuable. So Randidly broadly divided the insights and took them one at a time. First, and perhaps most importantly, he thought about the source of that terrible voice.
Remembering those tumbling limbs within the abyss, Randidly couldn’t help but suppress a shiver. It hadn’t hit him at the time, but the ambient significance it produced would have crushed him like a tin can, had he not obtained a Nether Core. Some powerful being capable of wielding both Aether and Nether, and therefore intimately connected to the Shallah, had asked Randidly to come locate it. His initial thoughts were that the pieces Randidly had witnessed revealed the culprit; he may very well have just been contacted by Pine, the unstable son of Yystrix and Elhume.
Yet at the same time, Randidly couldn’t forget the chilling emptiness that he witnessed within the floating eye of Pine he had seen. Although he had observed what was likely Pine’s body… he truly hoped that the force that had contacted him was not that being. If that hollow and emotionless gaze had locked onto him…
But it made the most sense because Randidly had gone into the shaft in the past…
Randidly shook his head helplessly. No use worrying about it now. Plus, this is a longer-term issue. To reach the base of the shaft… I would first need to understand the defenses that the Nexus has left there to protect its secret.
Hah… I’ll need to talk to Edraine about this…Could it be that this being is also aware of that investigation? Damnit, there are too many uncertainties about this...
Despite the fact that the glimpse of the ‘Shallah’ was tainted by a remarkably bitter prospect of sneaking down into the shaft, Randidly was still quite interested in the other large chunk of information he had captured inside the Path Completion vision: the progression of the two energies.
Randidly had already condensed his own drops of liquid Aether and Nether bubbles, but he also learned a lot from witnessing their evolution to their third stages. Both the crystalized Aether and the grey chrysanthemum were incredibly sophisticated. It wasn’t just a matter of raw power, but both required the proper preparations and precision in order to create.
It could be said that where the second stage required an accumulation of power, the third stage was all about the manipulation.
Yet as he remembered his visions, Randidly began to frown. More than the way the energy can be used… what might be most unfortunate is the way that Path portrayed the uses of the energies...