Chapter 1654 (1/2)

Time receded, revealing itself for the illusion that it had always been. Pain was the constant, but that, too, rose and fell intermittently. What remained was steady the constant Struggle. The Struggle was the labor to live that would never cease. Through inscrutable lines of Nether, the destructive forces of Elhume strike were stripped of their dangerously infectious emotional component and fed through to Randidly’s body.

His person was the battleground of the Struggle.

Parts of Randidly were constantly fracturing or tearing, resulting in a mix of bodily fluids spraying up out of his wounds and drenching the ground around him. A huge gash ripped apart through his side and smashed into his hipbone. The flesh and cartilage of Randidly’s throat was crunched together into a fist-sized ball. His eyes swelled and popped. In the wake of those agonizing waves, he would take the damaged pieces and rapidly attempt to remake himself.

His neck healed well enough to raise his head and his eyes regenerated in only a few seconds. Through a hazy gaze, he saw the bright runes of the Nether Ritual shining through a small puddle of blood, but then he closed his eyes to focus his attention on the rising stack of problems plaguing him.

Congratulations! Your Skill Grit of the Ascendant Bane (T) has grown to Level 408!

The most surprising realization was that the only reason Randidly had any hope of successfully enduring this attempt was due to his monstrously high Health and Health Regeneration. These had been passively rising as he inflated his Stat, but the Attributes weren’t relevant in most of his previous confrontations.

Well, perhaps that wasn’t true. The true staying power Randidly possessed was due to his body holding two planets; most of the force he endured needed to expend a planet cracking amount of force to even wound him. And wound him it did.

His body was taking the brunt of the damage, but he felt a few tweaks of guilt because Expira and the Alpha Cosmos were probably feeling some of this. Then he banished those thoughts; right now, surviving was the most important thing.

Randidly laid back on the ground, feeling his chest collapse and his ribcage fracture. His organs were spun and pureed within his torso. His back spasmed and twisted as his vertebrae were smashed together until they cracked. The invasive burst of force hit him in unpredictable and random ways; the only consistent note was that they started at the level of his skin and tore into his flesh.

Congratulations! Your Skill Chimeric Impunity (M) has grown to Level368!

Each of Randidly’s three images flared to life, assisting his high Attributes in keeping himself alive. Yggdrasil was the nurse, carefully using life energy to stitch Randidly’s sundered flesh back into a pretty realistic semblance of a body. The Stillborn Phoenix howled and pulled at the disparate pieces, using its hunger to hold everything together in a living whole. In addition, the Egg of Depression devoured any fragments of dangerous emotions managed to make it through the surface layer of his Nether Ritual.

As for the Grim Chimera… the Grim Chimera remade the body of Randidly Ghosthound, piece by piece. It had assumed the role of the make-shift architect that designed his resistance.

Waves of pain splashed against Randidly’s consciousness, keeping most of the details fuzzy. But when his flesh was left torn and broken, it was the poignant vision of the Grim Chimera that guided the pieces back together. Every healed muscle and regenerated bone was shaped with the Grim Chimera’s determination to survive.

Congratulations! Your Skill Grit of the Ascendant Bane (T) has grown to Level 409!

Congratulations! Your Skill the Emerald Sap of Yggdrasil (L) has grown to Level 299!

Congratulations! Your Skill Chimeric Impunity (M) has grown to Level 369!

Congratulations! Your Skill Chimeric Impunity (M) has grown to Level 370!

Gradually, some part of Randidly’s perception was numbed. Grim Intuition turned a blind eye to first the outside world, then to the slew of notifications that his physical damage earned him.

Each iteration was a small step forward. Randidly’s cells had been empowered to contain his Stats when he had torn his body in the ambush by Lay’mel and the Swacc Family, but he was still had rebuilt in the shape of a human.

Now, with the Grim Chimera at the helm, that constraint was thrown out the window.

This time, with the fury of Elhume repeatedly burning away his flesh and organs, the design of his being started to take advantage of the vastly superior foundation of his new cells. He didn’t have enough attention to think about it; he just threw himself into fueling his images. But even without guidance, those images accumulated insights.

And as he started to gain momentum in his changes, Randidly made the conscious choice to stop shunting so much of the force he endured from Elhume onto his inner worlds. By adjusting his Domain Skill, he began minimizing the reverberations that those innocent people would be forced to face.

Right after he made this executive decision, he began to regret it. But then his consciousness began to lose some of its coherence.

The pain was all Randidly knew, the only sensation that existed outside of the Struggle. But Randidly didn’t try to rid himself of the pain, because it was an efficient signal of the growing problems of a body torn to pieces. By paying attention to the greatest sources of the pain, he continued to prolong the Struggle with small successes. No one battle could win him the war, because the state of Struggle had grown into something eternal. But Randidly could at least seize the opportunity to stay in this permanence with his own hands.

Steadily, as the images continually expended their energy to heal and remake him, Randidly grew weary. His focus became blurred. The original sharp stabs of pain became vague impressions. Rather than continuing to stubbornly meet his grievous wounds in the same manner, be began to adjust his response to account for his diminishing acuity.

He utilized Ripple of Amenonuhoko to guide Yggdrasil’s lines of life energy when he was sewing himself back together. The life aura that trailed in Yggdrasil’s wake meant that his healing efforts didn’t need to be as targeted, and the natural energy began to accumulate within his person. Just this adjustment alone stopped his downward mental spiral dead in its tracks.

Randidly used the flames of the March of Ruin in Valor to add a cauterizing element to his images and could then just burn some of his wounds closed. Again and again, the variant radiation of Elhume attempted to shatter Randidly’s body, but he could utilize brief spurts of Nether Weight to turn aside the final straw that would truly break his resistance and ravage his inner worlds once more.

With this brief respite, his images furiously healed his shell in preparation for the next wave of radiation. The Struggle persisted indefinitely.