Chapter 1698 (2/2)
“Oh yea. Don’t pass out.” Nrorce grimaced. “I won’t bother dragging you out of here. I doubt you’d die, but… who knows?”
Randidly rolled his eyes behind the grouchy goblin’s back and continued deeper. It wasn’t that the Aether here was particularly dense… but the ambient energy was abundant. His Grim Intuition prickled; it was the equivalent of seeing a live wire sparking on the other side of the room.
When they finally came out into a large underground warehouse, the source of the energy was obvious. Energy crackled and hissed from a complex and messy network of Engravings.
“Eh, so just clean up, or whatever.” Nrorce waved his hand airily. And that was all the instruction that Randidly received.
But he was in no state to respond; he was too busy trying to process what he was seeing.
What this room was supposed to be was clear: this place housed all the harvest ingredients from Nrorce’s farm until they were brought into the kitchen. A ten-meter high ceiling and embedded sunstones provided abundant illumination for the area. So far, this was the only building on this planet that had a roof that was comfortable for Randidly. There was even remnants of a pretty thorough classification system. There were markings on the ground that outlined different areas, some for meats, others for vegetables and fruits, etc. All around, there were tall palettes and barrels and boxes containing foodstuffs.
It was a well-stocked warehouse. However, the closer Randidly looked, the more horrified he became.
Some of the boxes of turnips near him were so old that half had turned rotten and the other half had started attempting to grow on the decaying matter of its brethren, pushing sprouts out through the sides of the boxing. Some of the preservation Engravings had clearly gone bad in some areas, and rather than clean out the material and apply a new Engraving, someone had just slapped another Engraving right on top of the previous one. Sparks hissed intermittently upward from those points as the energies of the two Engravings conflicted.
Randidly looked around and realized this wasn’t an aberration; whoever had ‘cleaned up’ previously seemed to take great pleasure and layering conflicting Engravings on top of each other. The air practically buzzed with the energy released by the inefficient Engravings.
Over by the meat section, one of the massive ice lockers was clearly broken down, releasing horrible waves of rancid meat smell. Another had cracked open, somehow allowing the Engraving to tap into energies from surrounding Engravings that were made too close, and ice spread out to cover the surface of the ice locker and the surrounding floor.
There were places that the conflicting Engravings created such severe energy discharge that holes had been burnt through the floor, into a cave system beneath. And when Randidly’s Grim Intuition discovered that, he quickly realized that millions of Level 95 Absolute Darkness Ants were swarming beneath this warehouse through tight tunnels. Very quickly, he could notice the signs that much of the food in the back half of the warehouse had been stolen or bore bite marks.
Even more aggravating was the fact that it appeared Nrorce had also noticed and simply not done anything about it; most of the recent harvests were stacked haphazardly near the entrance that they had just used, clearly indicating that the rest of the warehouse wasn’t worth using anymore. The goblin seemed ready to abandon it because cleaning up would be a hassle
Randidly’s eyes reddened; he was deeply, deeply offended by everything that he saw. He didn’t really consider himself to be a neat-freak, but he did have strong faith in the power of hard work and training as a foundation for everything else. For this farm, this warehouse was the foundation.
And everything here is fucking rotten….!
Randidly’s fingers twitched. His images stirred unconsciously within him, and rapidly the temperature of his gloves rose as they struggled to suppress his rising Skills. But ultimately, out of respect for Nrorce’s desire to keep all of his foodstuffs from being contaminated with an image, Randidly forced down his anger.
Once again, Neveah’s awareness was drawn over by Randidly’s emotional turmoil. Huh? What’s this… oh. Oh no.
“Right?” Randidly muttered. Nearby, some weird semi-liquid substance was dripping out of a very, very old palette of apples. His pupils dilated as he saw indeterminate brown stains on the floor in quite a few places.
Okay, we can fix this. You clean out the trash, I’ll start using your senses to examine the Engravings here. We… might need to just rip out everything and start over, honestly. But it’s sorta an interesting problem… especially without being able to add an image to any of the Engravings…
Randidly cracked his knuckles and prepared to walk over to one of the holes and descend to deal with the ant problem, but then he paused. I mean… I appreciate your help. But… you really don’t need to put so much attention toward this. I’m just trying to pay back a debt.
Maybe that’s all it seems like… but I just like seeing this side of you. Neveah responded. This is human Randidly.Or post-human, but whatever.
Randidly clicked his tongue in embarrassment but had nothing to say to that. But really, he didn’t have to. Their emotions flowed freely between the Soulbound companions. So instead, he just focused on the task at hand.