Chapter 1835

Chapter 1835

Gasping and with the sort of headache that he had only experienced previously from a jealous and vindictive hangover, Randidly keeled over. The soft surface of the cloud gave a small amount, but it was a surprisingly uncomfortable surface on which to pass out. Most of the shades watched him silently, a constant crowd. Only Devick’s shade spoke, while she pulled more and more Nether out of him to solidify her own body.

“As I was alone, I thought very deeply about what sort of individual I needed to imprint upon to form my child. I would be the progenitor of my race, its one hope at returning to its former power. I tried to be realistic; I didn’t believe I would ever find someone who would willingly join their soul with mine, but I still preferred if I could find a man who would be willing to be present in the life of the child.”

After a short monologue, she fell silent again. Randidly was left alone with the sound of his own panting. Gritting his teeth, he pressed himself up and shook himself. The barrier began to unravel beneath his fingers, but he thought instead about the pain he had to endure whenever he touched the ladder. Is this really just raw emotional force that impacts me every time? If she had been tortured by this previously, no wonder she doesn’t want to remember what happened.

Even now, Randidly sensed that this story did not have a happy ending. If it had, would she have locked her emotions out of her body? Despite that, he reached out and grasped the ladder, doggedly climbing toward the summit that loomed above.

This time he prepared slightly by mobilizing his own emotional force to form a resistance, but Randidly almost bit off his tongue as the torrent of force waiting above bulldozed through his tiny emotions. In a sensation remarkably similar to swallowing an entire planet, Randidly felt those angry emotions force themselves down his throat and coil inside his body.

The minute awareness revealed that the emotions that poured into his Nether Core area, where they surged along the connection of significance to Devick’s shade. After absorbing those emotions, and having the details of her face sharpened, she began to speak. Randidly shakily tried to remain conscious.

“Perhaps nine individuals out of ten would have made the obvious choice of mate; I should imprint off Elhume, the hero of our time. He was the publicly acknowledged number one expert in the Nexus and was rapidly solidifying his power base.

“There were two problems with that. First, the Elhume of the Third Cohort stood at the center of the interconnected universe. Countless gazes fixated on him. LIkely due to that, he receded from the spotlight, allowing his fledgling organizations to handle all the day to day operations, rarely showing himself to the public. Even if I wanted to, finding and imprinting on Elhume would be difficult.

“But the real issue was that I didn’t want Elhume to be the father of my child. As he was such an obvious candidate, it just seemed... boring, right? Being predictable, after having my life destroyed, seemed like the worst choice I could make. I had to be singular.

“So I began searching for someone else.”

Randidly wiped the sweat off his brow and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Then he cracked his neck. His Nether Core was trembling from the strain of conveying so much emotion through to the shade. He gave himself a few minutes, gradually building back up the thick padding of dense Nether that he used to absorb the impact.

Randidly looked over his shoulder at Devick. Her iconoclast decision filled him with an impressed sort of disbelief. “You... really aren’t someone ordinary, are you?”

For a split second, Randidly thought he saw the ghost of a smile flit across the shade’s face. As though even the strange and tragic situation couldn’t mask her joy at being acknowledged as unordinary. Then her crimson hair swung down like a loose curtain and covered her expression. She was just a shade, gradually absorbing the emotions she had once severed from herself.

Randidly raised his head and looked up at the ladder. However, the personal will it must have taken to repeatedly shave off these layers of emotion- that’s why its growing stronger with each time I seize the ladder. The emotions probably grew back like weeds. So those last few rungs with be the entire force of your grief, several times in a row-

Randidly stopped himself from thinking about it and stood. Reach out, grab, pain enough to blackout. After he collapsed, his back arched as the emotions ran their course through him as they returned to the shade.

Perhaps due to a well-mannered upbringing, but the shade waited until Randidly’s consciousness drifted back before she continued her story. “However, being sure of what you don’t want and knowing what you want are two entirely different prospects. It is fair to say that I expertly handled the former while gambling with the latter. I traveled throughout the growing cities of the Nexus, visiting and sampling the local talented males.

The bulging golden veins standing out along his forearms-

His Nether Core, barely able to contain the emotions that flowed through him and into the shade-

This time, Randidly persisted. His image physicalizations were completely manifested, but when the emotional transfer finished, he had only taken a few steps backward. He released a shaky breath and swayed.

Devick’s shade continued her narration. “At first I assumed it was my imagination. I had grown up on stories of how paranoid women could get while they had a child, usually for no other reason than their own nervousness about whether they would be good mothers. And my own emotional state in the past month had not been very balanced. I was a breeding ground for fear.

“However, as the pregnancy developed, I knew with chilling certainty that something was very wrong with my daughter. Unfortunately, I was still unwilling to face the truth. I’ll spare you the details. In the end, my daughter was born but she was empty. There was not a scrap of life within her body. She seemed to be sleeping. And I so, so desperately wanted to shake her awake.

“But my hands were powerless as I held her small shoulders.”

The strange cloud Randidly stood upon had darkened to the point it was an impenetrable black. Intermittently, it rumbled beneath his feet. The mist of the mountain summit drifted down, a tantalizing sign of how close Randidly had now come.

He raised his hand and pressed it against his chest. His heart was pounding. This should be the last one.

Congratulations! Your Skill Motif of the Hungry Deep (P) has grown to Level 327!

Once more with both hands, he seized upon the ladder. For an eternity, he could not move, burning and bucking and struggling, the funnel between an entire sea and that fragile shade behind him. His Nether Core trembled, struggling to keep up with the strain. The veins in Randidly’s eyes bulged and then popped as the pressure grew and grew. The knuckles of his fingers tightened painfully.

Eventually, Randidly’s three images stepped forward and flared their power. They formed a barrier that kept the emotional torrent at acceptable levels, letting it steadily pass through him rather than trying to withstand all of it at once. His tension rose, but his body and soul endured.

Afterward, Devick spoke. “Holding my dead and empty daughter, I stormed the base of the father. He had begun developing an isolated zone to seek the Pinnacle and would only see those who were extremely talented. He sat on the summit, waiting for applicants to pass his tests.

“In terms of talent, I’ve never met my own rival. Every grief-ridden, I was unstoppable.

“I made it to the summit. I stood before the Master of this place, the creator of the Nexus Ways and later the Grand Pattern, and begged for his help. I couldn’t understand why my ability had failed. Why my daughter had not simply died but had never lived.

“And do you know what he told me? The imprint and birth had failed because HE wasn’t alive. The perfect mate I had fixated on... was just a failed image, a byproduct of some more powerful being’s attempt to reach the Pinnacle. And he couldn’t help me, because he had been trying to figure out this problem for his own sake for his entire existence.

“Somehow, I had managed to pick one of the few men in the Nexus who wouldn’t help be produce the daughter I so desperately wanted.”