To fill the time until Vualla could be safely contacted through the Nether Ritual, Randidly walked to the finally completed home that had been constructed for him in the center of his island. He had considered putting the island into his Alpha Cosmos and taking it with him, but ultimately didn't feel like it was worth the effort. Plus, Neveah seemed to have been quite taken with the idea of Randidly's home and had spent several hours touring the place and speculating about an Engraving she could make for the house.

Randidly walked to the front of the house and put his hands on his hips. To be sure, the newly completed domicile of the Ghosthound was quite impressive, even if it isn’t anything like what he would have built for himself. But considering his long line of wooden shacks that generally served as his homes, he could understand why the decision hadn’t been left to him.

The house was a massive beast that hunkered to the ground, appearing squat with its three vaulted floors only because the house stretched left and right for almost fifty meters in each direction and made the height seem insignificant. The exterior felt heavy due to the gleaming black marble that was used to form the bones of the building. In the silver light of the moonlight spirits that spiraled constantly around the building, the marble gleamed playfully, generating the incorrect impression that the house itself was alive.

Two pillars flanked the main doors to the building, stretching up past the limits of the first floor and reaching the apex of the second. Above the pillars was a, relatively, small balcony that overlooked the area in front of the house. Randidly glanced around. If he wanted the balcony to worth a damn, he would need to do a bit of landscaping on the area in front of his house. Right now it was just pitted and rutted dirt with the tracks of the machinery that had stacked the expensive materials of his home on top of each other.

Of course, landscaping was an area in which Randidly felt significant confidence. With a wave of his hand, Absolute Grasp of Yggdrasil caused small microbes in the soil to swell up to small bean-sized growths of organic matter, then explode further until they were krakens sculpted of roots and vines. These plant krakens rapidly leveled the surrounding ground with their tentacles and then ground up the larger stones and spare materials that had been left behind. Everything became a part of the soil to enrich future plants that would grow there.

Randidly even used the sharp thorns that adorned his vines to sheer down extra steel beams and scattered the shavings within the mass of dirt. With the System, basically everything has some value. The plants that grow here might be weird, but that’s just a part my legacy. No need to worry too much about the details.

Considering how this place would likely be treated in the future, Randidly also decided to dig a deep trench extending outward from the front of his home. Later, he would fill it with water to make his home resemble a national landmark. As he did so, he idly wondered if Tatina would hire groundskeepers for the place and later curse him for making the water feature so large.

Ultimately, Randidly decided to shorten the length of the pool.

He released a powerful pulse of Yggdrasil’s image to encourage growth in the front area after his plant krakens began to smolder and scatter to ashes, then walked to the heavy wooden doors to enter his home. Randidly paused and ran his fingers lightly over the wood. It was a good material, even now radiating an intense spiritual energy. Although the effect was minor compared to his base regeneration, it was easier to recover Mana while near to this door. This was an area of particular interest to Neveah. It would very easily accept a powerful Engraving.

From the intermittent messages that he received from her, she was having difficulty keeping the Engraving self-contained, keeping the effect as potent as she wanted, while also not quickly reducing the door to splinters due to the relevant softness of the material.

Randidly had told her that the door wasn’t an important issue, but Neveah had stubbornly insisted that the door was basically the mouth to his house. And having quality teeth had a direct effect on the ease with which you moved through life.

Considering the few times Randidly had seen Neveah show her teeth in her natural form, he decided to let go of the issue. Besides, it seemed to be helping shake the funk that had hung over Neveah since the fight against Kaan Swacc.

But when he pushed open the doors into his house, he couldn’t get the image of a beast’s mouth out of his mind. The doors opened into a large hall, made interesting only by the intricate mixture of jade, marble, and blood steel that formed mesmerizing patterns along the floor. At the far end of the hall was a massive staircase that curled both to the left and right and took a walker up to the second floor.

But Randidly ignored the upper floors for now and simply walked through the two wings of the ground floor, pushing open smaller mimics of the massive front door and revealing the empty spaces within. Perhaps because of the image he possessed when he walked into the house, Randidly couldn’t help but feel like he was walking through the inner organs of a preserved beast long after it had died.

The rooms were empty, dry, and sterile. All of the byproducts and fuels of actual life had long ago disappeared from this place. It was a mummified corpse, and at this point, it was impossible to tell what sort of beast this had originally been.

One thing that disturbed him became increasingly apparent. Although many moonlight spirits gathered around the outside, none had come within the walls of his house. The house was gorgeous, the paneling expensive and well made, but Randidly was not satisfied with this.

As Randidly pushed open doors to empty rooms over and over again, he gradually could understand why it had been such a big issue to Neveah to add an Engraving to the home. This place was for me, but right now it is the furthest thing away from being mine. So while Neveah works on an Engraving…

Randidly ascended to the third floor, finding yet another long hallway that spread to his left and right without any variance. Every fourth room was a bathroom and several had small passages between the non-committal spaces. Thoughtfully, he chewed on his lip. Then, in a decision he made in a split second without thinking about the consequences, Randidly body shuddered and once more transformed into the physicalized version of his images. His joints cracked as his arms and legs extended outward. The muscles of his legs and torso trembled and swelled. Heatwaves wafted off of him as his heart raced and brought scalding blood to his newly transformed body.

His left eye was shrouded in shadow. His veins gleamed golden. His hair lightened toward emerald green.

Then, in a natural expansion of his images, Randidly roared. The vicious teeth of the Grim Chimera were barred toward the ceiling without restraint. The third floor around him shuddered and then was torn to pieces. Bits of wood and steel and stone were blasted to bits and exploded outward. The two lower floors shuddered but thankfully held.

That had been Randidly’s one worry; he didn’t know enough about construction to know if what he was about to do would completely invalidate all the effort and materials that had gone into making this home. But he some part of him felt a deep sense of dissatisfaction at the empty home. So he decided to fix the problem.

Before all the debris collapsed down to the surrounding space, Randidly released a light breath. Hallucination of the Bloodless Heart.

Congratulations! Your Skill Hallucination of the Bloodless Heart (T) has grown to Level 276!

All the bits of broken materials halted midair, hovering uncertainly under the pulse of gravity that Randidly released. Then he raised his metal fist and tightened it; all the materials flew rapidly back together and spun together in a small tornado of destruction. The moonlight spirits above his house had frozen at the destruction but now began to dance excitedly and fly insubstantially through the tornado. By simply smashing everything together against itself, Randidly quickly created a large ball of soil.

But this amount was far from enough. Humming to himself, Randidly opened a portal with the Philosopher’s Key to one of the random valleys in the Nordawn Mountain range where he had done his more explosive training sessions. Then he casually transported large amounts of soil and plant matter that had already subtly incorporated his images to the ruin of the third floor. That would make the process more simple.

With this, Randidly could cover the entirety of the third floor in at least a foot of soil without a problem. The cracked remnants of the walls remained at most of the edges of the third floor, keeping this soil layer from collapsing outward. These wounded structures groaned from the pressure but ultimately stayed upright.

At least its good the materials are so high quality, Randidly reflected. The increased weight from all this stuff didn’t cause the house to collapse.

Then, very deliberately, Randidly turned his attention to the trees he had brought over through the portal and targeted them with Yggdrasil. The massive phantom of the World Tree appeared in the air above Randidly. Its glittering emerald leaves rustled lightly in an invisible breeze. Golden light flashed up and down the massive, trunk, tracing the massive history of the world that was recorded across its bark.

Then Randidly sat still with his legs folded beneath him and released consistent waves of that images of varying power. There were several small trees, but already their roots dug into the dirt on the third floor and crisscrossed one another. Randidly greatly anticipated the result; the moonlight spirits gleefully floated amongst the small canopy of the trees, bringing life back to this place. He consistently pulsed the image of Yggdrasil until enough time had passed and he happily set aside the ‘renovation’ of his house and wove a Nether Ritual.

Congratulations! Your Skill Nether Ritual (A) has grown to Level 177!

A vast space separated Randidly and Vualla, but Randidly bridged that with a whispered prayer. He could distinctly feel the heat of Vualla’s body, even from this distance. In a way that was impossible to put into words, he had been subtly influenced by the places where their thoughts and bodies had touched during their interactions on the frontlines. Through the passage of time and circumstances, the typical entropy of those foreign notes had not faded in his body. If anything, they had only become more poignant. There was meaning to the fact that Randidly Ghosthound had met Vualla Mateo.

Like two celestial bodies who moved within each other’s gravitational field, their trajectories were subtly and absolutely altered by even their proximity. That shared orbit gave Randidly the material needed to form a bond between them, no matter the distance.

The first thing that Randidly felt when they connected was a burning curiosity. Sensing it was safe right now to contact her, Randidly freely reached the rest of the distance and their two minds brushed against one another. While Randidly focused on releasing more of the now slightly flagging image of Yggdrasil to heal Vualla’s image, Vualla methodically examined Randidly from top to bottom. Her inspection was extremely vigorous.

“This would go more simply if you would let me finish,” Randidly teased.

Vualla snorted mentally. “Don’t act coy with me; you are horrible at hiding your emotions. You are quite proud of your growth, aren’t you? What the hell did you do? Your images have so much more depth to them now.” Then Vualla released an exaggerated sigh. “If I hadn’t had that recent rapid improvement, maybe you would have caught up to me…”

Randidly paused in his healing and examined the images he was helping to recuperate. And all the shy satisfaction he felt dissolved into helpless amusement. Perhaps due to the rapid cycle of being ground to nothing by her training and then revitalized, Vualla’s image had experienced an immense transformation. She had always pursued absolute control of her body in order to make herself the ultimate machine of destruction, but it seemed that Vualla recently expanded the scope of her image a bit.

Before it was just her body, but now there was a growing sense of internal and external influences within her image. Around her was a persistent flow of energy. She had begun to understand how interconnected the physical objects and images were. How by bringing power along alternate avenues, the destruction that could be wrought spread even further.

Basically, she had begun to incorporate Nether principles into her use of images. The Nether wasn’t genuine, so the effect hadn’t reached its full potential, but it had given her a significant boost in power. Considering the already deep and detailed image that she had managed to receive from the brief possession from the original Vualla…

And also the fact that she had been constantly pushed to her limits by the Xyrt Brigade’s training…

Randidly bowed his head in mock surrender. “Please remember to mention me in your speech when you topple the Nexus.”

Vualla laughed in their mental connection, loud and genuine and full of pleasure. Randidly felt the warmth pass between them. But then Vualla’s mood turned more serious. “I hope I get that chance. Looks like someone else is trying to beat us to the punch.”

Sensing Randidly’s mental query, Vualla continued to communicate. “Your Nether King in the sky above Earth? It looks like the Seventh Cohort was a feint. Two days ago, it was discovered that the Nether King was active in the Sixth Cohort. By the time its presence had been discovered, at least ten planets that possessed citizenship of the Nexus had been quietly polluted and destroyed. It used the corpses of Aether beings to raise an army of twisted monsters.

“My training is being accelerated; I’ll be deployed in a month to investigate the extent of the Nether threat to the Nexus.”