Chapter 2048

Chapter 2048

Emotions washed through Randidly in tightly packed waves, so he couldn’t even react to the arrival of the first one before the next was upon him. He stood in that suspended dream of his father’s old apartment, rapidly trying to stabilize his thoughts.

The Grey Creature, a proxy for his apparently disastrous relationship with his mother which now served as a rallying point for all the dangerous and free radical significance of the entire Alpha Cosmos, possessed an emotional affect that seethed and stormed. The destructive power it contained Randidly wanted to sew into his current attack patterns for an even more overwhelming offensive.

Yet that was not what he now experienced.

The emotion settling over him as he spread out his senses through the Alpha Cosmos and searched for Ezekiel Ghosthound felt quite different from that exuberant and vengeful energy. This emotion was dark, heavy, and vaguely wet. It settled across him like a moldy blanket, chill and suffocating.

In a daze, Randidly walked over to the bland couch and sat down. He shouldn’t be this thrown. He barely had any association with Ezekiel, not in the last few years. Randidly could look at the Nether connections between the two of them, suddenly appearing almost to visibly wilt and dim, were thin and relatively minor. This emotional response felt unreasonable.

“So why...” Randidly released a hissing breath. He raised his arms and wrapped them around his shoulders.

With a sudden gleam, a small glowing chestnut appeared in the middle of the room. Ezekiel’s voice, echoing from so far away, spoke again, without any more acknowledgment of the end of his life. “Here’s the memory I have to give you. It’s from the day we met, your mother and I. I bet we told you some cute story about how it went down... but it wasn’t like that at all. Your mother was very, very strong, Randidly. She just... was always fighting against something bigger than herself. She didn’t have much energy leftover, at least when she had to do something alone. Like raising you. Or like trying to love me.”

“H-hey, wait, I have something to say to you.” Randidly’s head snapped up. He ignored the floating memory and swept the room with a piercing stare. The blinds were in their perpetually slanted state, so light filtered into the room with a decidedly blue tinge. That wet emotion tightened around his body, sticking to his skin and dripping down his throat.

There was no answer. Randidly’s eyes began to blaze. “Hey.

“I’m fucking talking to you.

“Are you really just...

“Just like when I was alive, huh? You ship off when you got tired of dealing-”

Randidly sniffed loudly, interrupting his speech. He could feel it in the air; whatever remnant of Ezekiel had been here, it had slipped away after delivering that last message. Truly, the echo had fulfilled its promised role and moved on.

Biting his lip, Randidly leaned forward and stared at the mildly offensive carpet. That was what Ezekiel was always like; he left when he was ready, leaving with not a communication but more of a proclamation, his decision so firmly made he had no willingness to consider any alternatives. He felt concern for other people, but it stemmed from a profoundly selfish place. As far as Randidly could tell, it honestly wouldn’t occur to his father that someone would want to speak to him. Would want some closure on their own terms.

The apartment was very silent. In reality, it had been in a rather crappy neighborhood next to the highway so the windows often rattled with the passage of heavy eighteen-wheelers hauling freight. Yet this was just a dream.

Everything felt fake and frozen around him.

Randidly, tears forming in the corners of his eyes, began to chuckle. Although honestly... maybe I’m a little like that too. Sometimes I just make my decision and leave. And the people who I leave behind-

He released a shuddering breath. He felt incredibly frustrated, stifled in this familiar and uncomfortable room with its horrible, unnatural silence. Yet the longer he sat there, the more the wet emotion seeped across all of Randidly. More and more of his emotional affect, his images, the flow of his significance... all of it became thoroughly dyed by a quiet and listless grief.

Congratulations! Your Fatepiece the Hierarchy of Burden has grown to Level 80!

Randidly pressed his hands against the stone ground with enough force that the material cracked. His knuckles were white. Yet he moved almost on autopilot, looking up at the Hierarchy of Burden floating in the air in front of him. The ivory layer was completely sparkling. So his attention moved to the top layer, the largest, the silver layer.

He pushed himself forward.

Congratulations! Your Fatepiece the Hierarchy of Burden has grown to Level 81!

Randidly shuddered. He felt dizzy and blood spurted from his ears. After another swaying moment, blood also began to dribble from his tear ducts and ears. His mouth tasted like copper, but again he didn’t flinch. Even in the face of the new pressures, the blank resolve held up.

The feeling was difficult to describe, but Randidly’s entire person had become a hammer. When entering the silver layer, the Randidly hammer had struck what he believed to have been a flat plane keeping him out of another universe. Perhaps this was the last rind of the space, the barrier that would allow him to break out of a separate space and back into the main universe. Or, theoretically, shatter his way out of the main universe and create his own separate space.

Yet at the moment of impact, as that pane of glass cracked and fractured, Randidly became abruptly aware that what he wasn’t striking was one single barrier, but infinite barriers all bisecting the single point. Each was arranged at a slightly adjusted angle from the flat plane he had meant to strike so that the point of impact became a node and flat plateaus forming edges along every possible universe became radials around the impact.

With the damaged space as its core, the surrounding space became infinitely dense with the looming presence of infinite universes, their possibilities seeping through the flaw and pressing against Randidly. His Stat-assisted mind sputtered and flickered, reaching the verge of failure. A horrible friction was created by the presence of so many possibilities, rushing around him. His Nether Core whined and strained, trying to function while being so pressured. His eyes began to bulge. More blood spurted out of his nose.

Yet his mouth twisted into a smile. Thin rivulets of blood dribbled down past his lips and stained his teeth. If you think possibilities would stop me...

His new image physicalization form came down across his body. His eyes and mouth were filled with darkness, but from that darkness, some purple-black revelation energy began to glimmer. Thick, emerald wings spread out from his back and caught the friction of the flaws in the edge of this universe. The Grey Creature raised its head and howled. Its blank, darkness-filled eyes opened and stared into the folding perspectives of the world.

Congratulations! Your Skill Revelations of the Atramentous Threshold (T) has grown to Level 899!

Congratulations! Your Skill the Grey Creature Glimpses Providence (P) has grown to Level 912!

With that same stoic countenance, Randidly forced his way forward. His mind burned and sagged under the onslaught of the different universes he could glimpse through the fracture he had made. His steps prying open that flaw and allowed more and more universes, as numerous as molecules in drops of water in an ocean, to inundate him.

Congratulations! Your Fatepiece the Hierarchy of Burden has grown to Level 82!

And yet, weeping blood, Randidly persisted. The pain, the numbness...

Randidly threw himself into it, wanting to briefly grieve his father in peace, without the chaotic interference of his thoughts. Effort washed everything away. Somehow, so long as he continued to push-

...

Congratulations! Your Fatepiece the Hierarchy of Burden has grown to Level 90!

His hands trembled. For the proud and solitary Ezekiel Ghosthound, he would not stop until he stopped aching.