Congratulations! Your Skill the Glittering Leaves of Yggdrasil has grown to 324!

Humming to himself, Randidly cracked his knuckles and stood. After another two days of allowing his Nether Core and images to nurture his frayed, the last dregs of exhaustion had been cleared away. His emerald eyes were clear and sharp.

Randidly Ghosthound was back to his peak state.

But that thought caused him to grimace and shake his head. Well… theoretically peak state. If I were to be attacked right now...

Twisting around, Randidly considered his newly acquired tail. Just like an aloof cat, the tail flicked back and forth without paying any mind to Randidly’s observation. Compared to the size of his body, the tail was rather oversized. At two meters in length, there was enough length of tail to wrap the fluffy and strangely alien extension of himself three times around his waist and still have some to spare.

There was an unexpected benefit; the fur of his new tail was extremely soft. Randidly found it rather relaxing to sit and run his fingers along the tail while he thought. Plus, the tail was rather elastic in its shape and size. The same muscles that allowed him to manipulate it were extremely malleable. Once Randidly put his whole attention to it, he gradually learned to adjust the minute muscles along the tail’s length so that it could contract and stretch to a more manageable size.

The process wasn’t exactly quick, but the current Randidly had a monstrously high Fidelity of the Ascendant Moirae. Even acclimating to a new limb couldn’t slow him down for long.

Once successful, he differentiated between two forms of the tail: the condensed one and the battle-mode. While the tail was condensed, it shortened to a little over a meter and squeezed itself to a much more manageable thickness. That tail allowed Randidly to basically walk and talk as he did before, with his dense tail wrapped tightly around his stomach. His balance was still slightly off-kilter, but his powerful musculature could compensate at everyday speeds.

The battle mode stretched the tail to its full two-meter length and had all of the fur bristling, making it seem like he had a lithe green club whipping back and forth behind his body. Randidly even spent some time experimenting with his image physicalizations and was rather impressed with the result. When he manifested the Grim Chimera, the thick and formerly soft hair along his tail hardened and merged together to form dark green cartilage plates along the length of the swollen tail, calling to Randidly’s mind the image of a mecha dinosaur.

Then he would release it and the tail would meekly reassume its mild-mannered alter ego of a massive cat’s tail. While fully extended, Randidly also became rather proficient at picking up glasses and drinking from them with solely his tail.

Occasionally he was overzealous and crushed the unlucky cup, but that was simply the price of progress.

The real problem was the balance changes that the extended tail brought to his person; fighting right now would definitely be a haphazard affair. His altered bone structure made him lean forward aggressively so his center of gravity had shifted. The change allowed Randidly to focus more of his energy on explosive dodges and attacks, rather than blocks, but some of his prior habits would need to be retrained before he held much confidence in his fighting capabilities.

Equally important to Randidly as restoring his fighting capability was the Grim Chimera image itself, which was on the cusp of an evolution. The bright and tinkling bits of images that the Grim Chimera had absorbed had merged together into a dense nucleus and now only needed to be activated with the proper focus.

However, when Randidly examined that nucleus, his emotional senses had noticed something unfortunate. Because much of the impetus for this evolution occurred during that vicious Struggle against the shockwave of Elhume’s attack, the emotional notes within the evolution were entirely dark, desperate, and vicious. Quite like Vualla’s image during the worst of the Xyrt Brigade’s training methods, all the soft and cautious portions of the Grim Chimera had vanished. What remained was pure utility.

A brutal, beautiful utility that was an efficient solution in certain situations. But the resulting image would be a single-purpose tool.

For the same reasons that he had helped Vualla heal from those changes, Randidly intended to pause the evolution for a couple of weeks and rectify this emotional imbalance. He even had a few ideas about how to handle this situation: it was finally time to pay his debts to the Nemesai and others that he promised to protect their home planets. Without the Engraving Guild tracker, he could be much freer in his movements without worrying about ambushes from Velio Dunn. Hopefully, those positive actions would mollify some of the starkness of the Grim Chimera.

Plus, I promised that Nether Gatekeeper that I would help its kind within the Shaft… bah, that’s a bit more complicated, with everyone still ruffled about the conflict with the Nether King… And I wonder how that being is doing on the Path to the Pinnacle? The Frost Matriarch seemed to hint that traversing that Path directly could take a year or two… Randidly reached and scratched his head. Then he shook himself, his now shorter hair bouncing around and then settling back into place around his jaw.

Helen had agreed to cut his hair but recommended that he leave some of the length. Apparently, it ‘framed his face good enough to look at’. Feeling rather helpless about Helen’s frequent longing glances at his tail, Randidly had simply allowed her to do as she wanted in order to return to his solitude as quickly as possible.

And by solitude, Randidly had thrown himself after that haircut into the process of learning to keep his tail under wraps.

A knock at the door shook Randidly from his musing. He cracked his shoulders and raised his voice. “Yes?”

“It’s Seeker Thunder Wing,” The voice announced. Then, as though this was explanation enough, the Pinnacle Seeker pushed open the door and walked into Randidly’s chambers carrying several dusty tomes in his arms.

Randidly’s mouth twitched as he saw the reverence with which he treated those texts. You history fanatic… why didn’t you just store those within an interspatial device?

“Ah, I’m glad to see you recovered,” Seeker Thunder Wing said politely, but Randidly rolled his eyes; the other man didn’t even look at him as he was saying, just produced a table and began to gently lay out the various tomes he had dragged along with him. “Since there are no problems, we can immediately study the Hierarchy of Burden; truly, it is a wonder of the universe that you obtained it as a Fate. But after seeing your efforts in defending against Elhume… I believe I understand. Your physical body is incredibly powerful, perhaps even reaching the standard of the Second Cohort. But ahem, ahem, small talk aside, some explanations are in order...”

Seeing that Seeker Thunder Wing’s face was becoming increasingly lively, Randidly didn’t even say anything; he simply allowed the man to continue to bubble with excitement. His only contribution to the rising tide of momentum was conjuring his layered-pyramid Fatepiece and the black stylus that went along with it. Randidly set both on the table while he continued to listen.

“As I stated previously, the Hierarchies were created in order to handle all of the ambient drag attracted by powerful images and concentrated Aether, before the Nexus became a closed system,” Seeker Thunder Wing opened one of his large books and flicked quickly through the pages. “Specifically, the Hierarchy of Burden was created to handle the problem of destroyed space; the lingering wounds had to be addressed so image users wouldn’t tear a hole in the universe and throw themselves into the void every time they attacked.”

Seeker Thunder Wing pointed at Randidly’s Fatepiece. “Each layer of this device corresponds to a different force that needs to be removed or massaged in order to heal space. The usage is rather simple; you use the black stylus to inscribe your consent to bear the Burden, one layer at a time. When you are able to completely handle the burden, as determined by the Hierarchy, you can proceed on to the next layer. In addition, you need not bear all the layers yourself. In fact, I would recommend you didn’t. Even with your powerful body, it would be nearly impossible. Accord to the records, the different steps… interact in complex ways when applied to one individual. The full Hierarchy of Burden was considered a sadistic and ineffective means of torture, insofar as the prisoner was universally rendered unable to speak in the aftermath.”

Randidly nodded slowly at that. He still wasn’t great at relying on allies, but his journey to this point had definitively demonstrated that a single individual’s power was limited, even at the top of the Nexus. “So I can make use of my subordinates, huh?”

“Exactly.” The Seeker snapped his fingers and grinned wolfishly. His expression combined with his tight leather vest to make Seeker Thunder Wing look nothing like the source of historical knowledge that he currently was. He was just an aging punk singer. “But obviously, those substitute individuals will also need to be able to earn the approval of the Hierarchy before you can proceed to a different layer. Now, let’s talk about the different forces of the drag.”

Seeker Thunder Wing pointed to the top of the pyramid, which was red. “This layer is the electromagnetic forces. Having space pressed up against destroyed space results in a powerful boundary of inverse energy being pressed up against space; discharge is created naturally by the proximity. According to the records, enduring this layer is like being continually struck with bolts of galactic lightning.

“The next force is light radiation. A tear in space rapidly absorbs a dangerous amount of light,” The Pinnacle Seeker pointed to the translucent layer below the red one. “It goes on to say that this absorption here is ‘sticky’ somehow. But Records relating to this layer are more confusing. Some variations of the word heat are used to describe the sensation the bearer will receive, but the notes were made before the universal translation apparatus was installed in the Nexus. Therefore meaning can be a bit more ambiguous. So I would approach this layer cautiously.”

Then Seeker Thunder Wing pointed to the middle layer, the sapphire layer. “This layer is much more straightforward. This force is entropy. Those holes in space suck away energy so quickly that a normal flesh being will be dried and frozen before they even realize what’s happening. You can expect the same for yourself, with hopefully less deadly results.”

“The fourth layer is rather straightforward; here you prevent spatial collapse. Your body will be required to endure physical force. Quite like the way you handled Elhume’s attack.” Seeker Thunder Wing’s finger dropped to the ivory layer near the bottom.

Then he finally pointed at the silver base. “Again, this layer… is relatively mysterious. Here you handle ‘spatial anomalies’. But whereas there were a few bits of description for the light radiation layer, this one was completely blank. Apparently, the original historians believed that the term spatial anomalies would be enough… or they wanted to prevent the casual reader from being able to use the Hierarchy. No matter what source I checked, they were universally bereft of explanation.”

Randidly rubbed his chin as he looked at the layered pyramid. It gleamed in the low light filtering through the window from the tundra outside. “Can you choose the layers in whatever order you wish to do them?”

Seeker Thunder Wing shook his head. “Unfortunately not. You need to start from the base and work your way upward. Something about the way the forces interact to create the drag. It’s like peeling an onion; you need to get some forces out of the way before you can safely address others.”

That made Randidly raise his eyebrows. “So I need to start with the mysterious ‘spatial anomalies’?”

Seeker Thunder Wing laughed. “Ha! No. I thought you knew.” He reached over to the table and grabbed Randidly’s Fatepiece. Then he picked it up and set it back down so it was balanced on the tip of the pyramid. The Fate Piece remained there, perfectly balanced. “You start from the bottom. And the size of each layer… is a rough approximation of how difficult it will be each time to earn the approval of the Hierarchy.”