Chapter 2288

Chapter 2288

After a brief period of total exhausted oblivion, the pieces of Randidly drifted back together to form a coherent self.

He floated up through the whole of his being, touching onto every brick that had raised him up from that immature kid stuck in the Dungeon to the powerhouse he had become today. He his awareness became fingers dragged across the shape of him, felt the altered and enhanced anchors of his stats, moved up through the tactile surfaces of his body and felt the way his images had forever altered his form.

His veins had more in common with plants than animals. His skin under the Dread Homunculus could pass for a high-tech carbon composite and survive ludicrous amounts of force or heat. And the Stillborn Phoenix... there were now depths within Randidly’s body that didn’t seem possible at all, vast spaces and deep emptiness, hinting at the fact a whole Alpha Cosmos had been tucked within him.

He realigned gradually, more and more of his consciousness recovering from the struggle that had drained him to the last drop.

In his semi-trance state, Randidly drifted toward his Fateset. Even now, he didn’t lose the thread of his purpose. Because now he finally had the shapes and experience to heal the damage done to the core of the Fateset. The effort had exhausted him, but Randidly had pulled out all of his Fatepieces over those desperate forty-ish seconds of defense.

He had tried to hide the Pearl spatially, by pushing it through an opening of the Alchemist’s Passport. He had attempted a similar subterfuge with the Dreamcatcher of the Long Night, tricking the force of time into assaulting a memory, rather than the real thing. He had stripped superfluous thoughts away with the Visage of Obsession and had taken in as many details of time as his overloaded brain could stand with the Codex Hexahedron. In a moment of desperation, he had even activated the Hierarchy of Burden to its heights, wreathing his body in the dangerous forces that were generated by the creation of a universe.

None of his Fatepieces could keep out the subtle flows of time. One by one, they had all failed.

Do you see? Randidly spoke softly to his Fatepieces, those damaged by Deganawidah and then seared clean by the strange working Bleak Sky had shown. Impossibility... was never the point. It was all for them, to protect the people of the Alpha Cosmos, to give them a space to grow without fear of being harvested like wheat. To break the rules was never the point; yet some times, we just have no other option.

Gradually, they shifted into a new alignment. Randidly observed them for a while, or tried to. His attention came and went, sharp sometimes and softened fluttering like a silk veil. His recovery was gradual, picking up only a little as he felt Nether once more beginning to circulate through his body in significant quantities. In those few moments of actual coherence, Randidly shifted slightly and looked for the notes of times flow.

He could feel it still, just barely, mostly when he wasn’t looking. Mostly when he metaphorically leaned the slightest bit in the direction it came, and he felt marginally supported. He couldn’t help but feel a wry sense of glee.

What an unexpected consequence, allowing me to just barely sense time, Randidly mused. His thoughts briefly sharpened into knives. Now, I wonder how I’m going to leverage this...

Then the coherence faded; he still had quite a bit more healing to do. Especially for his overtaxed brain.

While Randidly floated, he also noted the presence of Deganawidah’s imperative lingering in his Fateset. He watched it carefully, but he could sense that the tenor of its presence amongst his Fateset had changed. As he observed during the most demanding portion of the creation of the Pearl, it wasn’t fair to call it an imperative. What it did was make Randidly aware of the impossibility present in reality. His image and significance power could accomplish a lot, but there were also barriers that existed beyond his limits.

For now, it lingered. It became a central pillar around which the meaning of his other Fatepieces could gather and anchor themselves. Randidly couldn’t decide whether this would end up being a good thing or a bad one. It just became one more element in the construction of his truth.

After a few more minutes, Randidly felt his eyelids stirring. Not that all of his weariness had been healed, but the worst was gone; he would be able to function normally and his obsessively pragmatic images now pushed him back to wakefulness. He floated up, rising through the unconscious thoughts and popping back into his body.

With a groan, he sat up. He sat at the bottom of a crater of broken stone, the glittering physical remnants of the pearl pummeled to the point all that remained was powder. Most of the ambient energy in the chamber had vanished, either seeping out of the broken walls or absorbed into the working. The Prophet had vanished, but Neveah, the Patron of the Deep, and Padraic hunched over the clay body of humanity in the center of the room, not even noticing his return to consciousness.

His lip quirked up. “What did I expect? This is the homecoming a failure receives.”

He meant it as a joke, but the words drew fresh blood from his wounded and disappointed ego. Gritting his teeth, he pushed himself up and rubbed the bridge of his nose. If this new Stat Deity’s Ruthless Cerebral Scope was doing anything, Randidly certainly didn’t feel it. He had a headache like a trumpeting troop of elephants were practicing line dancing across his cerebral cortex.

Still, the continued lack of response from the three remaining companions made Randidly force his mind to refocus. When he fixated on them, he did finally feel a little bit of extra mental force brought to bear. Neveah had done an excellent job of filling in when he had gone unconscious (Randidly made a mental note that it was quite the oversight that he had expected to expend himself almost totally to create the Pearl and then help assemble humanity), gathering up all the scraps of power and meaning and fitting them together into the body. Yet even he could see there would be problems with just a glance.

Even broken and shattered, the bits of perfection were too powerful to be housed in the framework Elhume had made for humanity.

“Don’t be a fool,” Neveah snapped.

“My reserves are boundless! My overflowing lust for life can be used to cushion the body, preventing further degradation-” The Patron of the Deep announced with a dramatic flourish.

Padraic just squatted and sweated. “We really need to do something now.”

With a light step, Randidly ghosted forward and appeared at Neveah’s side. He touched her lightly on the shoulder. “Here, I can handle this.”

The look of pure relief on Neveah’s face, as anxiety melted into trust, nearly broke his heart. He looked away quickly, having difficulty meeting such trusting eyes after he had thrown everything he had into the Pearl and failed.

Yet this, Randidly could handle. He reached out and tapped a finger against the clay chest of humanity. The body cracked open faster than Padraic and the Patron of the Deep could heal it, meaning it looked like several mouths were opening and then closing across its surface, every moment. The power of broken perfection stalked back and forth through the body, lashing out at the internal framework Elhume had created.

It was a close thing. The power was just barely too much to handle. To counteract that, Neveah and the Patron of the Deep had obviously expended a lot of effort to try to strengthen the foundations. However, that didn’t give an outlet to all this listless power. Which meant more and more tension would be built up inside humanity.

Obviously, this was not ideal. Randidly smiled because already he knew the solution.

Rather than strengthening the foundation, he pulled out tiny breezes of Nether and began to very purposefully erode key portions of the anchors. He didn’t damage or alter the shape or the meaning of humanity but began to just barely undermine the twelve Nexus Stats.