To Randidly’s surprise, losing his sight was much less bothersome than losing his voice had been, although he used his eyes much more while he had been here. But it turned out that the information gathered with his eyes had been superfluous.

Plus, whatever had occurred at the 15th Level of his Fatepiece lingered. Some of that horrible emotional exhaustion had been forced away, leaving his remaining personality and Willpower streamlined. The sensation of clarity was certainly intoxicating.

And so I start to drink more deeply from the poisoned well of obsession, Randidly thought wryly.

As he had noted previously when he still had eyes to witness it, the murky darkness above and below him resembled each other to the point of being interchangeable. Yet now his blind senses could comb through the surroundings in minute detail. The air was thick and coarse, like unwashed wool. It felt itchy against his skin, and also strangely damp.

Into the void where his sight had been stepped his growing emotional acuity, leaving the shaft dyed with constantly bleeding tints.

The way emotions manifested wasn’t the same as colors, not exactly, but the vibrancy and ‘heat’ of these passing emotions, and Randidly’s own images, gradually soaked the surroundings in a new sort of awareness. The resonances and collisions became part and parcel to his newfound existence.

Which didn’t even address the biggest benefit; without Randidly’s eyes, his Grim Intuition began working much more diligently to interpret the sensations that filtered up through the Nether. To his shock, he discovered that he could peer much more deeply down into the depths in this manner. And what he found there were hundreds of thousands of Nether Beasts, milling around in the darkness.

Sometimes they fought each other, but it was a largely inert experience that left him deeply curious.

In addition, Randidly was able to confirm that his sense of space wasn’t lying to him; the spine really was growing in diameter as he descended further. At this point, it was almost double in size as he had observed previously.

Congratulations! Your Skill Nether Sensation (L) has grown to Level 335!

Releasing a silent breath, Randidly pushed himself through the air toward the wall. Of course, there was still an area that he was worried about. He slowed himself as he neared the bone, marveling at how smooth the inside of the spine was to his Grim Intuition. Thousands of years' worth of emotion had stripped away any bumps and irregularities from the surface. With a snap of his fingers, Nether wound down from his nebula and to the tips of his fingers.

Then he began to Engrave.

Very quickly, Randidly frowned and cursed at himself mentally. Partway through his Engraving, he had forgotten the larger shape of the formation and created a glaring weakness in the flows of energy. Randidly resolved himself to pay closer attention with Nether Sensation to the shallow lines of energy running through the Engraving so he didn’t lose himself again.

So he started over.

Congratulations! Your Skill Architecture of the Primordial Ways (M) has grown to Level 312!

For a while, Randidly dragged his fingers gracefully across the bone, wearing a pattern into the difficult surface. That was part of the problem with this practice, that the substance was so reinforced that it required dense Nether to make even a shallow a mark. Yet Randidly possessed Nether at the requisite density.

His knuckles were white as he applied careful pressure during the Engraving process.

Still, halfway through this second try Randidly grimaced and ceased his efforts. He had been keeping tabs on his shallow marking along the wall by sensing the volume of Nether flowing through the small indentations, but already he realized that his vigilance wasn’t enough to avoid problems. Nether flowed through the created pathways in waves. At all times there was a low amount of Nether present throughout, but then one of the rotating ‘waves’ would push through that area, deepening the effect.

The problem was that, because of the way his senses now detected the Nether, he had made the Engraving uneven from misunderstanding his own senses. Randidly could already detect that the Nether flow he had created, before it could ever become a Nether Core, would destabilize and collapse due to a shoddy foundation.

So Randidly drifted a meter to the left and began his third blind attempt. Instead of going for anything specific, Randidly simply tried to capture the feeling in his heart when he thought about Yggdrasil. It was the World Tree, the safest source of growth in his life. If he could capture that sensation in Nether…

Congratulations! Your Skill Architecture of the Primordial Ways (M) has grown to Level 312!

The mute and blind Randidly rolled his useless eyes at the notification, which came to him like a sudden epiphany in the nighttime of his awareness. It didn’t break his concentration while Engraving, not quite, but it was certainly an unwelcome distraction. Without even bringing the satisfaction of seeing where my true Skill Level now is…

Suddenly, Randidly paused midway through his Engraving. Wait a second, how am I going to use the Visage of Obsession if I’m blind…?

Randidly was tempted to immediately pull out his Fatepiece and look at it to find out the answer that, but he smothered his curiosity for now. The Visage of Obsession would eat up his time if he would let it; better that Randidly fely like he was at the end of his current potential before he returned to the Fatepiece.

At the moment, plenty of that mental acuity remained. He was still content to continue training.

So, after an extended pause, Randidly resumed his third attempt. Of course, he quickly was forced to stop this one as well. But this time, it wasn’t due to any flaw in his Engraving; the project simply hadn’t developed long enough for those flaws to reveal themselves.

Instead, Randidly was forced to pause and turn his gaze downward to face a particularly belligerent cluster of emotions that was roaring up toward him like an out-of-control freight train. In his new senses that were plugged into the conductive Nether of this depth, it blazed up toward him like an eruption from a maroon volcano.

Seriously? Randidly flicked this wrist to banish the lingering Nether from his fingers and then raised his hand. The veins across his arms began to glow golden. There was no longer any accompanying sound, but Randidly could feel the overwhelming vibrations in every inch of his body as Yggdrasil’s leaves rustled behind him. Can’t you see I’m fucking busy?!?!

Randidly’s hand tightened into a claw. Although he couldn’t see it, an overwhelming aura of holiness blazed from his fingers. Ripples spread out through the Nether-rich air before Randidly even unleashed the Skill. Then he barred his teeth and smashed his claw downward in a vicious strike to meet the landslide of emotions.

Congratulations! Your Skill the Inscrutable Mien of Genesis (M) has grown to Level 301!

There was an awkward sense of weightlessness to Randidly’s strike, as the Skill blazed with bright power enough to send his skin tingling… but when it smashed into the wild emotions, there wasn’t any feedback or noise. His ears could only catch the mournful howls of emotions flowing upward through the spine around him.

There were no crashes, no booms.

Still, his Nether Sensation painted a much more satisfying picture. Like a nuclear weapon detonating in a forest, the initial blast destroyed the structure of the emotional torrent and the heat of Randidly’s Skill incinerated the remaining troublesome survivors. A huge ripple blasted downward in its wake, leaving Randidly completely unharmed.

Of course, Nether Beasts immediately turned their gazes upward due to that ripple. By the dozen, they sniffed at the foreign image and used their Virtue to resist the pull of the significance below. They came with mild curiosity up due to their instincts, but as soon as they were within a hundred meters of Randidly, they seemed to recognize him as some existential threat.

From the murky darkness, the Nether Beasts began to accelerate upward.

Randidly grinned widely. Although he could no longer see them, they seemed to dance across his exposed skin due to the conducive Nether. The thick and damp air of this place pressed against him as though to smother him, but he thrived under that pressure. In fact, the sensation possessed such high fidelity that Randidly made the decision to reach up and rip away the remains of his cotton shirt and leather armor he had been wearing. His bare chest rose and fell in the darkness as he prepared to receive these ‘guests’. He breathed deeply, pulling at their Virtue as he did so.

Congratulations! Your Skill Cursed Appetite of a Wraith (L) has grown to Level 355!

The Grim Chimera was the ultimate thief, stealing even their valuable Virtue from right under their noses. Those small strands congregated rapidly in his chest and filled him with a buzzing sense of lightness.

Unfortunately, just as soon as he absorbed the Virtue, the energy destabilized without a physical medium and fell to simply be more typical Nether. That caused Randidly to frown, but he simply whirled his Nether Nebula faster and condensed the Grim Chimera more fully around him. The Nether Beasts roared in challenge and charged upward. While maintaining his emotional tether holding him in place, Randidly began lashing out and slaughtering them.

The Grim Chimera pierced through the wild emotions of this place and totally bisected unsuspecting Nether Beasts. Very quickly they realized the threat this image presented, but the Grim Chimera’s speed and adaptability meant that it could easily avoid the Nether Beast’s unsophisticated counter-attacks. Truly, it was an apex hunter at this depth.

If he wanted a true challenge from the Nether Beasts, he would need to head deeper.

Occasionally Randidly’s strikes wouldn’t quite kill a Nether Beast and then its Virtue would transform its body and become powerful Stature. These Nether Beasts possessed a much higher base potential than those he first encountered, meaning the transformation significantly narrowed the gap between their powers.

But in this time in the depths of the Nexus, the Grim Chimera hadn’t been idle. It silently cackled, delighted that these Beasts thought themselves sufficient to challenge it. Its glee and determination bled outward from Randidly’s body, staining the surrounding air.

Congratulations! Your Skill Man is Proud, But the Chimera Takes (L) has grown to Level 303!

Despite his initial joy, the sensation of the battle was strange. Randidly felt like a plague bearer, or even like a lonely personification of death. The roaring Nether Beasts charged upward… and then he, without any discernible noise, silenced them. In his Nether senses, the initially bright cores and barriers around the Nether Beasts glowed as they charged upward, filled with self-righteous fury. Yet beneath his touch, they began to flicker and dim, like summer fireflies before the inevitable chill of fall.

Gradually, the chorus of attacking Nether Beasts fell silent, leaving Randidly floating above that mass of dimming life. And his senses were all tied together in one larger, hyper sense now, so there was no way to close his eyes to the situation in front of him. He simply floated there, observing the way everything around him went dark and silent.

Rather than a fight… he had simply extinguished them.

For almost an hour, Randidly paused in his training and simply watched the cessation of the observable phenomenon below him. Gradually, the turbulent emotions pushed upward again, bringing some variety to his vigil. But still…

The mental acuity could do nothing to help with the black edges of his own soul. As always, the stronger he got, the more poisonous he began to his environment...

In a dark mood, Randidly returned to the spine and began to continue his Engraving.