Randidly returned from the Alpha Cosmos feeling quite a bit lighter, having left the lion’s share of the sketches he had made for Kharon Academy. Honestly, the amount of weight paper could reach always surprised him. Partially the trip had been a way to make sure he didn’t let the Kharon Academy project distract him for the next few days, partially it was a baited hook to pull Wendy into assisting with the plans, but it was also an expression of how important education was. This was a huge undertaking that would shape the future of Kharon.

Randidly was confident of a lot of things, but figuring out how to guide and encourage growth was not one of them. So he unashamedly asked for help, contacting Wendy, Lucretia, and also the various members of his pantheon.

When he returned to his island, Neveah quickly joined him and immediately noticed the second thing that he had left within the Alpha Cosmos. “What happened to your arm? Finally break down on you?”

Randidly glanced rather helplessly at the stump of his left arm. Seeing the empty void was still oddly unsettling. Because just recently, he had felt the presence of an arm.

It looked pretty bad, too. The flesh of his shoulder was scarred from the powerful energies, and shoddy workmanship, of the previous Aether Engraving he had used to bond the metallic limb to his body in the past. “Wendy pointed out that it might be helpful to take a look at the way the arm failed. Where the wear and tear appeared, and all that. That way we can protect against it in the future.”

“Is there any point? Won’t the strain keep rising with your capabilities anyway?” Neveah asked. “You grow strong very quickly.”

Randidly tilted his head to the side as he looked at Neveah, but then he sighed. “You are right, but it won’t take much time for Wendy to examine the limb and figure out which areas need to be reinforced. In the meantime, I’ll make the metal.”

“With one arm,” Neveah pursed her lips.

Rolling his eyes, Randidly focused. After a split second, a spectral human limb appeared connected to his body. For a few seconds, it wavered as Randidly rapidly zeroed in on the image that he wanted. Details gradually came into focus as he strengthened the image: this was the true ghost of his arm.

As if to demonstrate its capabilities to Neveah, Randidly waved the limb wildly then crouched down so that he could raise the spectral fist up and smash it against the ground. His knuckles slammed into the dirt. Nothing happened.

Because Randidly wasn’t very practiced with that image, it was also hard to interpret the sensory information that his fake limb was sending him. The effect was a bit less dramatic than he had imagined it. Should have just used the Grim Chimera’s arm… but the point was to demonstrate my mastery of images… also, Neveah knows I’ll be utilizing Hallucination of the Bloodless Heart...

Neveah didn’t even comment on his imagined arm or the ghostly punch. Instead, she focused on business, which Randidly appreciated. ”What’s our timeline look like?”

“Ideally? Let’s aim for four days from today,” Randidly said, thinking of the planned betrayal Theodora Greyman had ordered against King Phirun. “But honestly, the attack could come any minute. Even if I don’t like to admit it, having only one arm does weaken me. Kaan Swacc might see that weakness and attack.”

“Are you saying that now to bait him into attacking?” Neveah teased.

Randidly grinned in response. “It’s worth a shot.”

Mentally, neither shared the sense of jovial bravado that they displayed. There was simply too much they didn’t know about the way Kaan Swacc operated, even if he had been cut off from support from the Xyrt Brigade. Plus, he formerly had enough clout to be named Special Investigator. He was not a foe who would go down easily, even if he was operating alone.

Still, the two were bonded implicitly. They understood the danger of their current situation. A moment of eye contact contained a complex array of emotions and desires. They both then turned away, intent on their own business.

Randidly had also made some quiet inquiries and it seemed that Lyra hadn’t been seen in Donnyton for the past several weeks. Which was just one more piece of his past that made up the fragmenting tapestry that was Earth.

Before Randidly focused on the forging, he went and checked the report that Tatiana had dutifully left on the edge of his island. Randidly’s mouth twisted into a smirk when he went to retrieve the report and found it waiting inside of a small mailbox that Tatiana must have installed today. It was just a painted emerald can on top of a wooden base, but at some point, she had ordered an artisan to carve that base in the likeness of a tree. The detail was rough, but Randidly appreciated the gesture.

Shaking his head, Randidly began to peruse the report. As he read through the paper, his expression became increasingly clouded.

With the emergence of the Runic Tablet, relations in New Earth were predictably becoming strained. Tatiana went on to describe the controversies in detail, but Randidly mostly skimmed through it. In fact, Tatiana was slightly optimistic about the current state of affairs. Mostly because Zone 1 was locked in the impeachment controversy.

But President Greyman is going to do her best to screw the pooch on that… Randidly’s eyes sharpened. Still, one task a time.

While Kharon continued its slow trot into the New Earth Zones, Randidly’s island landed in the relatively tame area of the borderlands. His island rested against the side of dusty mountain in the highlands. Aside from monsters, there was nothing but scrub trees and stone in every direction. In order to avoid damaging his island, Randidly hopped down as he prepared to smelt the metal for his arm. He brought with him a table, an anvil, and two small, empty barrels.

Randidly looked around at his tools. Then he looked at the raw materials. Taking the bones out of his interspatial ring, Randidly dumped probably one thousand pounds of bones onto the ground. But what was most impressive was that all of the bones truly were from monsters over Level 75. Acri certainly had expensive taste. Throwing them all onto the ground created a towering mound that would make any elephant graveyard proud.

The last element was the metal. He had to dip into the Kharon’s inventory, but Randidly liked the look of a new metal they had discovered in the borderlands. It was a dark red-orange color and people called it Rust Steel. After rummaging around, Randidly had about a dumpster full of the raw ore.

Breathing deeply in, Randidly filled up his lungs. Then he slowly released that air. His heartbeat began to quicken. His mind was blank. Time slipped past. Clouds drifted overhead.

After cracking his knuckles, Randidly began the smelting process. At this point, he began to participate in something of a ritual. In terms of creating metals, Randidly was very confident. Already his image spread to fill the surrounding air. This corner of the Earth was isolated from foreign Aether and images.

Once his heart was pounding and his physical body was at his peak, Randidly conjured the left arm of the Grim Chimera and slashed open his right wrist. Yggdrasil’s branches wrapped around his body, feeding life into his limbs. The image burned with power, concentrated in a very small space around him. Emerald blood oozed out of the cut into the barrel.

For five minutes Randidly bled himself with his life-giving blood. Due to his own healing properties, he had to rip his wrist open again every thirty seconds or so in order to fill the small barrel up. Then he allowed the wound to heal and pressed his eyes closed. Although Randidly tightened his muscles to keep his heart rate high, the image of Yggdrasil behind him slowly withered and vanished.

Instead, the horrible hunger of the Stillborn Phoenix shrieked its want. That image seized the surrounding space. Randidly thought about Theodora Greyman and every life lost because he hadn’t killed her the first time that he met her. Some part of him knew that he didn’t want to get into the habit of deciding the life and death of another human being, but at that moment he let all the dark emotions in his heart run rampant.

More than any other ingredient in the mixture, the two quenching liquids needed to have powerful images. So he completely immersed himself.

This time when he bled, the blood was such a dark red that it almost looked black. It flowed much more slowly out of his arm too, requiring twenty minutes to gather enough into the small barrel. Rather than bleeding, it seemed like sludge was oozing from his wound.

After his arm had healed again, Randidly sat down to let his heart rate fall to normal levels. He also slowly banished the pointless blaming, regret, and hatred that the Stillborn Phoenix allowed to fester. Only when he had returned to a balanced state did Randidly turn to the issue of the actual smelting.

Because while the improvements to Ignition Essence definitely resolved the issues with the image that Randidly had been struggling with, it took away all the actual fire. Well, almost all the actual fire.

Congratulations! Your Skill Hallucination of the Bloodless Heart (T) has grown to Level 233!

With his control over gravity, Randidly pulled one of the heavy chunks of Rust Steel ore to float in front of him. Then he purposefully activated Stigma of the Stillborn Phoenix. It was a Skill that made his Skills slightly more effective in exchange for increasing his sensitivity, specifically to pain. But the point of this activation was to immerse himself in the searing agony that the Skill could inflict on him.

Then Randidly opened his eyes. Revelation energy swirled around his body, sharpening his vision. Cool and composed, Randidly reached his right hand out toward the piece of ore in front of him and shared some of that painful heat.

Because the Stillborn Phoenix’s dream is to be a true phoenix. It wishes to be reborn. It has taken steps to achieve that transformation. It has always been chasing those attributes that belong to the phoenix. Even if it cannot truly become that mythic beast… it has not stood idle.

Randidly’s left eye darkened and became pure black. The surrounding light began to bleed and warp. The metal began to shiver and melt as the image unleashed a scalding wave of heat. The terrible friction of the fabric of reality rotation and rubbing against itself radiated outward. The release of heat produced by a ray of light as it was torn in half and devoured pounded the metal.

Satisfied, Randidly turned to the bones. Unfortunately, his almost pagan altar of bones was not long for this world. He quickly smashed to pieces with Hallucination of the Bloodless heart. The vast, cosmic forces of a black hole quickly smote the bones, filling the surrounding air with a cloud of dust and debris.

Feeling rather shocked with how effective that had been, Randidly rapidly flooded his body with more Revelation energy. In that way, he was able to use his gravity manipulation to pick the particles out of the air and carefully gather them back into one pile to be used for the smelting.

Congratulations! Your Skill Revelation of the Atramentous Threshold (T) has grown to Level 280!

Congratulations! Your Skill Hallucination of the Bloodless Heart (T) has grown to Level 234!

Randidly released another breath. He pulled more and more heavy pieces of ore into the air. Each was the size of a bowling ball and probably weighed as much as Randidly himself; the Rust Steel ore chunks were incredibly dense. Chunk by chunk they began to warp and melt beneath the onslaught of heat from Randidly’s image. Randidly’s lip curled upward as he noticed the stones beneath him were beginning to glow a dull red from the ambient heat.

And I’ve only just started. Once again, I’m a walking ecological disaster…

Still, before Randidly was completely swept up in the smelting, he glanced around. It would have been a more difficult fight, but Randidly had sorta been hoping Kaan Swacc would make a move first. Now that it became clear that they would need to lure him out…

Randidly clicked his tongue in annoyance. Then he focused himself fully on the task, with absolute faith that Neveah would protect him from any surprise attacks.