The Legend of Randidly Ghosthound

The first month of escaping from the combined political wrath of the Shelly Kingdom, the relentless pursuit spearheaded by Lady Vualla, was exhausting but ultimately within their capabilities for Raymund and DiOrtho. Using less traveled roads and small towns, they crossed from the Shelly Kingdom to the Southern Portion of the Armgrast Empire. Periodically, Overseer Helen would manifest in front of them and give them some task, usually within the next few days.

So the recruits had dragged the princess to a grand lake, across the vast Southern Desert, and to the top of the Lone Peak that sat deep within the holy land of the Armgrast Empire. During that time, the constant reliance on their overwhelming physical abilities caused them to become slightly cocky; compared to the average individual within this world, the recruits were unstoppable.

Their speed gave them a headstart that seemed insurmountable. Any time they were spotted, they could leave the pursuit in the dust. As long as they shook off any tails by the time that Lady Vualla arrived, they would be fine.

Continued success built their confidence, even as they grew steadily more familiar with the capabilities of their bodies.

Yet such confidence was, as it always had to be, fatal. A few days into the second month of their escapades, Raymund and DiOrtho walked into a trap. And the jaws of that trap was the Imperial Prince of the Armgrast Empire, a lion-headed young man who release image reverberations that quickly grabbed the recruits’ attention. The lion-man led with a roar and followed up with legitimate power that neither could underestimate.

Even if they had access to their own images and Skills, Raymund was unsure if they would be able to overcome this man. In that confrontation, their pride was thoroughly shattered.

Without their images, the two of them could only rely on their physical strength to endure the Prince’s attacks while steadily fleeing. Because behind the prince, the specter of their true foe was lurking. Yet as though the Prince knew exactly what was on their mind, he doggedly pursued the two of them, unleashing attack after attack.

Even with a physique that Raymund had considered to be near unrivaled, DiOrtho bones had been shattered and his head had been so battered that he was slightly dazed from a concussion. But they managed to escape, barely, fleeing through a dried-up river bed to the West.

Raymund had the princess over his shoulder and glanced behind him at DiOrtho’s hobbling form. He couldn’t help but grimace. We are going farther away from Overseer Helen’s next mission, but we still have two days. As long as we lay low for several hours, DiOrtho should recover his vigor. And after that…

He rushed around a bend in the dusty riverbed and then skidded to a halt. In front of him, Lady Vualla cracked her knuckles.

“No more hesitation, Raymund,” The woman said sweetly. Her azure hair swayed as she began to walk forward toward the Foxman. “Show me the limits of your potential. Otherwise… I’ll bury you both, right here.”

*****

It’s about time.

To the constant itch of irritation, action became the cooling balm that allowed him to finally, silently, exhale. Randidly released the emotional tether and began to drift downward once more. Without his eyes fooling him, Randidly had a much better sense of the way that the significance below was warping his perception of space; as his annoyance parted, clarity returned. He could feel the way he accelerated downward, quickly picking enough speed to cross vast amounts of space.

The sensation was almost wondrous. The deeper he traveled, the more mysterious the Nexus became.

So it’s true. The same distance that would have gotten me five more percent of Nether content in the air up above… barely reaches a single percentage point down here… Randidly reflected with a frown. His senses spread outward, straining to touch the edges of this place.

His Nether Nebula whirled at full speed to resist the pull of the significance below, but his experiments with Engraving to prepare a Nether Core were starting to bear some fruit. Although there wasn’t a physical core in the Nebula, Randidly could imitate the principles well enough at this point. It gave him a little extra advantage at maintaining his own independence, even without being able to generate any Virtue of his own.

He liked to think that, had he not already proceeded so deeply down toward that horrifying significance, he would now have been able to escape, but it was difficult to tell whether there was any change at all. He simply didn’t have enough information. At the very least, it weakened the draw from below, which was still significant progress.

A few Nether Beasts lingered in the surrounding area and sensed Randidly’s descent, but he was able to easily dispatch them when they aggressively charged toward him. The Grim Chimera ripped them to pieces and the Stillborn Phoenix greedily drank down their ambient energy. Meanwhile, his senses were strained to keep measuring the Nether content in the air. At the cusp of 71%, Randidly slowed and seized his emotional tether once more.

Only a little at a time. Randidly reassured himself. Then he ‘looked’ around.

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

Continued sightless exposure to the subtle mixture of Nether and emotions refined his detection abilities even further. The sensations in the murky darkness deepened, providing a strange sense of liberation from the flat shapes that could be captured by eyes. No longer were the surroundings quite so dark. Each ambient emotion had their individual vibrancy, shape, and echo, creating a kaleidoscopic look into both the present and the past. In some strange way, everything meaningful that had occurred within the surroundings was recorded for Randidly’s senses, allowing him to glimpse the smallest portion of the history of this place.

The thick Nether that made up the air diligently recorded everything that occurred. The location possessed its own memory. Even now, Randidly floated on history.

At first, Randidly was simply intrigued by the resourcefulness of his senses, but then he realized that looking at the ways emotion had behaved in the past was still quite useful to him in the present. Although he couldn't discern why this would be the case, there were areas that were frequently warped by powerful emotions and others that hardly seemed to have been touched in the last ten years.

Which at least gave him places along the bone wall where he wouldn’t be disturbed as frequently in his Engraving. Following this discovery, Randidly shifted his positioning.

In addition, Randidly discovered several locations where slight warping in the emotional history had occurred. He likely would have continued to study them, had not he been attacked by a group of Nether Beasts and witnessed the creation of such a distortion with his own eyes: they were locations where Stature had been manifested.

Even those changes were recorded within the surrounding air. Noticing this made Randidly’s expression gradually twist. Nether Beasts rushed at him, but the Grim Chimera was more than capable of slaughtering them. If one possesses an acute enough ability to read Nether… does that mean that individual could completely follow my passage here, understanding my every move…?

The thought left Randidly feeling rather sour.

After he finished off the foolish Nether Beasts, Randidly looked around with new understanding. If he looked for long enough, he almost felt like he could see ghosts lingering around in those spots, transforming before his eyes.

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

With a sigh, Randidly shook his head. Although his senses had become much more acute, they still couldn’t quite completely acclimate to the surroundings. Well, that was perhaps not true. Randidly just wasn’t quite strong enough to rip all of the secrets out of the surrounding shaft, which seemed to become more mysterious the longer he stayed here.

But he reassured himself that it was only a matter of time before he could read into the secrets of this shaft.

After he stabilized his position at his new depth and settled in a location with low emotional traffic, Randidly’s attention turned downward. With his more expansive senses, he could reach deeply into the area below him and see that the interior of the spine was, as he suspected, widening even further-

That observation caused Randidly to pause and grin maniacally. At this point, this looks less like a spine and more like a bone esophagus leading to a massive stomach… Heh, just how much of a monster was this fuck…?

Randidly set that thought to the side for now and continued with his examination. Within the wider space below, it seemed that there were even more Nether Beasts he could lure toward himself to fight. But the Nether Beast population he could observe was nearing the point where any fight that Randidly got into would quickly become tiresome; there were simply too many Nether Beasts for even him to comfortably defeat those nearby quickly enough that others wouldn’t notice and investigate.

Basically, Randidly estimated that any fighting right now would embroil him in a struggle that could last anywhere from two days to a week, just from the constant stream of nearby Nether Beasts. It would be a never-ending cascade of aggressive Nether activity. And considering the amount of image power he would likely need to use to fight off those Nether Beasts… more could very well come up from below.

More Nether Beasts, and worse. With the way their abilities were improving… he would encounter Nether Heralds soon.

And of course, that thought sent a shiver of excitement through him.

Silently shaking his head, Randidly looked even deeper into the depths. Due to the powerful emotions radiating upward from the power source below, the whole area was stained with a subtle shade of maroon. Despite his buried anticipation, he could locate no Nether Heralds below; it appeared he would need to satisfy himself with the typical Nether Beasts.

In addition… the more he peered downward, the more Randidly realized that there were some… openings in the gathering of Nether Beasts. It was so far below that he couldn’t get a clear view of what was occurring, but there were clearly spaces that the Nether Beasts avoided.

And those open spaces were gradually shifting. As though the Nether Beasts instinctively avoided some living creature…

Perhaps… some sort of apparatus connected to the powerplant below? Aether Guards…?Or even a weird life emotional life form…? Maybe I’m not the first person to detach a doppelganger… Randidly wondered. But without more evidence, he set those conjectures aside. An aggressive part of himself was intensely curious, but after descending further into the depths, he could placate his aggressive tendencies for now.

Besides, Randidly came down here with a different project in mind.

Silently breathing out through his nose, he pushed his thick Nether out of the Nebula and into the surrounding air. Although his eyes were useless in the gathering of information, his Nether Sensation could detect the strange energy his eyes released as his body became the core of a weave of Nether. The thick strands of Nether rapidly moved together, pushing back the surrounding air and building a tiny bubble of isolation.

The ambient Nether in the air resisted a little, but Randidly was able to open up a few meters of space where he could work. The bubble pushed everything else back.

Congratulations! Your Skill Nether Ritual (A) has grown to Level 201!

Congratulations! Your Skill Nether Ritual (A) has grown to Level 201!

Once the Ritual cleansed the surrounding air, Randidly folded his legs beneath him and began to meditate. He needed to observe the behavior of the Nether Ritual, as well as making sure there were no problems with the emotional tether or the Nether Beasts in the surrounding area. Keeping the surrounding Nether from interfering with the process was just the beginning.

After about an hour, Randidly allowed himself to nod slowly; this would work.

Then he straightened his body, rolled his shoulder, and flexed his fingers of his hand. He took out the Philosopher’s Key and opened a portal to basically the only location he could, currently. Before him, a threshold to his Alpha Cosmos opened, connecting this space to the secret world that was his own body.

Strangely, the plane of the portal rapidly grew fuzzy. Randidly frowned; it looked like his Nether Ritual wasn’t completely effective. Or rather, there was some filtering that he couldn’t avoid. The energy makeup of the air on the two sides of the portal was different enough that this distortion occurred when the atmospheres met. But considering the effect was relatively minor, Randidly had to consider this a success.

He reached through the portal with an open hand.

It was slightly awkward waiting there with just his hand, but his reliance on Nether Sensation meant that his vision beyond the portal was mightily reduced. He could only rely on the exposed skin of his hand detecting soundwaves to carefully construct a picture of what was occurring beyond the portal. Figures shifted, moving toward the portal.

Oddly, Randidly felt strangely nervous. When I’m alone, I don’t mind missing my senses, but it does make it awkward that I can only communicate through messages...

But very soon, a small ring was placed within his hand. Grinning, Randidly pulled his hand back, closed the portal, and scanned the ring. New schematics and several valuable metals were carefully stacked within.

It was time to reforge his left arm.

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