Randidly stared for a full second at the spider, unable to understand why the core significance of the memory formed into this creature. Its small body possessed eight long legs, but he couldn’t stop looking at the central portion of its body, where the icy exterior revealed a small pulsing brain. And two slender antennae stuck out, stretching directly up from the nerve center.

The small spider swept its antenna back and forth, observing the waves of dark energy exploding around it. A truly impressive amount of significance and emotion swirled around its body.

Yet every second of confusion was one less Randidly spent pouring shape and vitality into the Nether Ritual. Elhume tugged in short intervals, annihilating more of the potential from the edges of the memory. So Randidly put aside his curiosity and the sense he was missing some vital element, to truly accomplish the goal of making the memory real, and returned to the fundamental work.

His Nether Core revved. His emotional force wove its way through his silent prayers, his wishes humming with such kinetic energy they seared the interior of his chest with their presence. He pushed and pushed the circles into their rotation, rolling along the edge of the larger ritual space.

His breaths veered toward panting as he drew the Nether Ritual out of the ground, into a pyre of significance around his body. As he continued to fixate on the spider, he understood one source of his discomfort: he wouldn’t be able to do this on his own.

So he looked to the sky, hoping that if he provided enough charge to a moment, a miracle might spark.

By now, the energy visibly crackled out through the air, even more domineering than the tattered remnants of Randidly’s storm sweeping the sand around his body. A towering pillar of darkness exploded from his position, releasing sweeping waves of meaning that seemed to poison the darkening sky as day prepared to transition into night.

Randidly could feel the resonance between the memories growing. More significance from farther away flowed around the mild impediment of Deganawidah and his army and happily threw itself into the Nether Ritual. A whole network of little ant burrows, coming under the ground and weaving themselves into the grand transformation.

When Randidly looked with the eyes of the Dread Homunculus, he saw an army of dead walking with stuttered steps, choosing now to become laborers to raise the edifice repudiating the concept of possible. He carefully examined the flow of significance and began picking small alterations to make to the Nether Ritual, based on the conflicts he had with Deganawidah.

The patterns he wove were simple and replicable. They became a solid bedrock that would be extremely difficult to disentangle. He might have been thoroughly slapped around on both occasions by the Nether Monster, but that didn’t mean that Randidly wasn’t learning.

Congratulations! Your Skill Right Hand of the Nether Polymath (M) has grown to Level 993!

Congratulations! Your Skill Right Hand of the Nether Polymath (M) has grown to Level 994!

The four cores rolling along the edge of the Ritual began to glow with a blue-grey light. Their flickering edges reminded Randidly of Nether Princes. The detail of the central spider’s legs grew so sharp your eyes would bleed running along their meticulous edges.

Randidly glanced away to the distant edge of the memory and saw the shifting bubble; about ten percent of the memory had been lost by now. Considering the folded and abridged nature of space within the memory Nexus, he felt a new current of fury running through his emotional sea. He checked it as best he could and continued to stoke the flames of revolution. The Nether curdled the air, creating rippling pockets of space and generating the grey muck of inert energy where it corrupted nearby Aether.

And thousands of individuals, several of them quite powerful, just watched him raise his monolithic Nether Ritual. No one attempted to stop him. His Fateset howled in joy. The Alchemist’s hands curled into vindictive fists, waiting for any to try and intervene.

Randidly pressed his lips together as he viewed the Nether Ritual he had built. He had built a tower of darkness reaching up toward the sky, to a height that its energies began to waft up and visible affect the radiation released by the memory Pine. He had all the momentum and the core wish in the Nether Ritual, the prayer offered, was the purest and most refined he had ever encountered. The addition of so many souls and lives from the memory meant that it possessed depth

A part of him felt like a fool, gathering so many elements and now finding himself unsure of how to proceed. He shoved that voice back down in his chest and spread his arms wide. He looked for a weapon, some other element he could grasp and turn against the apathy of his enemies.

The imperative of the impossible seemed to whisper condolences, but it loomed above him, timeless in its denial.

Randidly’s eyes widened as the last spice he needed revealed itself to him. We just need to deepen the significance so— alright Nether Core, I know this is going to be a bit difficult. And Songstress, can you hold the two Aether constructs in alignment if I take away a bit of your support?

When the Songstress squeezed Randidly on the shoulder in support, he almost immediately did something objectively foolish. Worst of all, this wasn’t even the first time today that he had tried this.

“First Authority: Seize,” Randidly whispered, his intent emerald gaze locked onto the flow of time.

His Nether Core wheezed like a too-old motor vehicle asked for more miles. He felt a shiver run through him, down through his body and accumulated significance, burrowing through to the cornerstone of his Nether Core, housed in the deepest room of Kharon Academy in the Alpha Cosmos. And as the strain slowed down his rotation, Randidly felt several hands pressed against his metaphysical back, pushing him forward. All those who had survived the trials of the labyrinth and Scrawled their marks in the core area sustained him when his own reserves were at their lowest.

In the end, Randidly might be the figurehead, but he wasn’t alone in his quest to build a better future. And that eased some of the mental strain against him.

Randidly raised his head, almost completely obscured now in the middle of a pyre of significance raging toward the sky. Time pulsed, increasing the strain, but he endured it. He had learned a lot from his previous attempts. This time, he didn’t necessarily need to stop time but channel it. He bent the pulse as it flowed through him and drew it straight down the middle of the Nether Ritual.

Once he had it in place, he began pulling the flow of time rapidly with the significance he could spare. A strange tingle suffused the surrounding air, potent enough that Randidly felt it on his skin. His whole body felt strange and foreign as he acted as a waypoint on the altered path of time. The whole of the memory slowed around him, albeit not as much as he suspected.

Time ran counter to the significance of the Nether Ritual and its power exploded. About halfway up the display of raw Nether potency and the memory desire, a haloed distortion formed as time and craving ran in opposite directions. As he had discovered time and time again, it was the locations of friction that became the most vital. Each second that halo became more sharply negative. It grew larger and more expansive at its edges and squeezed itself in the middle, tightening around the Nether Ritual.

Congratulations! Your Skill Marred Yet Reliable Foundation of Yggdrasil (T) has grown to Level 1003!

Randidly felt a shiver run through him as different portions of his body experienced time at different rates. It felt a bit like being grabbed and pulled in several directions at once, with variable amounts of force. But compared to the struggle of standing against time, simply repurposing and redirecting it was a relief; he would be able to withstand this for as long as he needed.

His Nether Core herded time into the flow he wanted. The air around Randidly began to open and close with little void mouths, too much energy forced into one moment and the fabric of space destabilizing as a result. Randidly ignored it, believing such manifestations to just be par for the course. The significance of the ritual deepened, borrowing the power of time to swell into a profound and irresistible force. The halo tightened as it strangled off that roaring river of the damned and desperate into a single point.

In the core area of the Nether Ritual, the ice spider stirred. Climbing the slender, shadowy beanstalk of destiny, it ascended toward that inflection point.

Randidly gritted his teeth and emptied every pocket of emotional force he could muster. All his hopes, all the desperate desires, the wild designs of his Fateset, his dissatisfaction and hope, all of it gushed out of him and into the Nether Ritual. The energy darkened and thickened, gathering into clumped boils that swelled along the pyre and then popped, releasing jagged hunks of refined significance.

Time might flow down, but the Nether rose up in an endless spring, tapping into deeper and deeper cravings of the memory every second. Randidly watched those strange hunks of solidified Nether rise up through the pyre until they became caught at the choke point caused by the halo. They drifted, slowly developing their own rotation.

The swelling pustules came faster. Pieces tumbled in the energy and rose until a veritable asteroid belt of harsh significance became the interior edge of the halo.

The spider climbed, its legs clicking against the nonexistent. Sweat dripped down Randidly’s face. Elhume tugged again, invalidating almost twenty percent of the memory.

Already, Randidly understood what he moved toward with this massive display: a shape. The Nether equivalent of the Pinnacle. A single look at the broken edges building blocks made Randidly understand how riddled with cracks the result would be. His doubts tried to slither into his resolve, slowing the outflow of energy and weakening the result.

Yggdrasil breathed, in and out. Energy from the distorted and invalidated Aether rushed through him, invigorating him for a moment and then rushed out just as quickly, drawn away to the Songstress of Absence and leaving him with only a trickle.

“Show me what’s possible,” Randidly whispered to the small ice spider tapping its way up the Nether Ritual. Very deliberately, he closed his eyes and ignored his doubts. He unclenched his fingers from around the result he desired. He ignored the gloomy presence of the imperative and the calculations of the Moiraes. “I’m giving you everything I can. The rest is up to you.”

The spider climbed until its body twisted and shrank, pulled into the strange energy singularity created by the halo. A pulse blasted out through the Nether Ritual, polluting and twisting the careful flows that Randidly created. His heart fluttered as he felt something old and dark in the core of the spider, an emotion long forced into a suppressed state now given license to manifest in the world.

The accumulation of Nether Rock accelerated, the bottom portion of the Nether Ritual bubbled and spatting out the jagged particulate it seemed Randidly had opened up a portal to rock-hell. At the top, the asteroid belt began to shiver and soak inward, vanishing into the singularity.

Congratulations! Your Skill Yearnings of the Nether Heir (P) has grown to Level 1180!

The significance became rocks, the rocks shot up to the singularity, the singularity devoured them all, and finally the spider entirely disappeared into the core of the singularity, squeezed in by the halo.

A few seconds later, a world-shaking explosion smashed Randidly’s head into the ground. For the second time that day, a huge impact cratered him down while throwing up ridges in the surrounding space. His dizziness was equally caused by mental strain and physical impact.

When he looked up, a massive black spider towered over Homewell, rage and madness radiating out from its piecemeal form. Remnant bits of shadow energy drifted out from the monstrous shape.

It’s two antennae flicked back and forth, searching for a target.