“You hoed the Western field…”

Randidly was lying sprawled in the grass while he gave his glove a break to cool. The words made him look over at the long-eared figure of Nrorce who ambled over toward him with mild eyes. Randidly tilted his head to the side, not really understanding what the goblin had said; he had so busy continuing his experiments with Nether that it took a few seconds for the words to reach him. “What?”

Nrorce had his small arms behind his back, his mouth steadily stretching into a scowl aimed at Randidly. “The! WESTERN! Field! I told you to work on the Eastern one! Are you deaf as well as poor?!?”

The goblin picked up Randidly’s discarded hoe and arched his body back. His javelin release was perfect, flinging the weapon at such speeds toward Randidly that it whistled through the air. Feeling slightly awkward, Randidly allowed the wooden tool to bounce off his chest and land in the dirt. His cheeks flushed. Did I really…?

“Ah… well… I just wanted to be thorough. I’ll head over to the Eastern field now…” Randidly coughed and pushed himself to his feet. The Engraved metal plates in his gloves were still steaming, but the worst of the heat had already dissipated. If he hadn’t been so fixated on Nether, he likely would have already moved around through the fields without even realizing his mistake. He might have even finished before Nrorce had noticed that anything was wrong.

Randidly suppressed the desire to display an aggrieved expression. Sometimes… I suppose I can get a bit distracted…

Suddenly, Neveah was there and chuckling. Sometimes?

“One more thing,” Nrorce was still scowling, but most of the antagonism left his face when Randidly got to his feet. He reached up and tugged on his ears. “That girl had to go; there was some attack in the Nexus. She has to deal with the fallout. And considering that you haven’t even don't the initial work I asked of you… hmph. Work hard, youth.”

“An attack?” That sharpened Randidly’s attention. “Was it the Nether King? Did he return to the Nexus?”

“What? Oh, the girl mentioned you are affiliated with the military.” Nrorce shook his head. “No, it wasn’t the Nether this time. They claim its the work of rebel organizations that hate the Nexus. The sort of fools that think they can change the world with destabilization and chaos. But this time they hit one of the bigger factions in the Nexus, the Swacc Family. Kicked up a real hornet’s nest. Heh, they probably won’t live long enough to regret that choice.”

As Nrorce grumbled to himself and waddled back toward his house, Randidly stared after the goblin with several emotions warring across his features. But finally, he displayed a wide grin and chuckled. Despite his earlier mistake, he was suddenly feeling quite refreshed. Oh? I guess I’m not the only one to seek trouble with the Swacc Family? Heh, hopefully, this keeps them too busy to send more assassins after me…

With his steps quite a bit bouncier, Randidly proceeded to the Eastern field and finally finished the original task given to him by the goblin chef. He took his time to work the land, partially because he was toying with Nether and partially to keep his gloves from becoming dangerously heated again. All in all, it was a very good day for Randidly.

The smell of the soil, the warmth of the sun, the feeling of dirt between his toes, the calls of the pheasants, the rumbles of the bears, the scents of vegetables… the entire environment felt stable and relaxing.

Randidly let out a sigh as the sun began to set, looking out across the hills. Maybe it’s a good thing that I forgot my money today. This… when everything is over, I think I’d want something like this.

As the blue sky shifted toward pink and mauve and navy, Randidly sat at the edge of the field and inspected the refined Nether Array beneath the farm. His tail continued to draw small Nether Arrays in the air, trying to capture the principles he was able to identify through his earlier epiphany. His impressions were gradually being refined through experimentation.

Congratulations! Your Skill Right Hand of the Nether Polymath (M) has grown to Level 247!

Even with a concrete example in front of him, the process was slow going. Randidly’s experience with normal physics seemed to mislead him as often as it helped. But the mental challenge was fulfilling. More and more, Randidly could envision the shape he would use to incorporate more worlds into his Alpha Cosmos. One step at a time, he was closing in on his goal.

When night had fully arrived and dominated the sky, Nrorce found Randidly again. The goblin tsk’d immediately; his eyes took in Randidly’s sitting position Randidly could practically hear the goblin inwardly complain about how lazy Randidly was. Maybe the goblin just had something against him sitting on the ground, lest he contaminate his plants with his humanoid sweat. But the goblin held his tongue about the display and instead asked a question. “Do you know anything about Engraving?”

That perked Randidly up. “Yes, actually. I would say I’m pretty good.”

“Peh. Youths always boast,” Nrorce shook his head. Then he turned away and waved for Randidly to follow. So he hopped to his feet and proceeded after the goblin toward the central house.

They didn’t actually enter the dwelling but proceeded into a tunnel a few meters to the side of the house. Nrorce heaved open a heavy iron door and led Randidly down into darkness. The goblin closed the door behind them, activating another Engraving array on the doors to seal them off from the outside world. But as they proceeded deeper, Randidly began to stiffen. And not even just because he had to hunch over so his head didn’t scrape the ceiling; The air was thick with an unpleasant scent. But more important…

Randidly frowned. “This… the ambient energy down here…”

“Oh yea. Don’t pass out.” Nrorce grimaced. “I won’t bother dragging you out of here. I doubt you’d die, but… who knows?”

Randidly rolled his eyes behind the grouchy goblin’s back and continued deeper. It wasn’t that the Aether here was particularly dense… but the ambient energy was abundant. His Grim Intuition prickled; it was the equivalent of seeing a live wire sparking on the other side of the room.

When they finally came out into a large underground warehouse, the source of the energy was obvious. Energy crackled and hissed from a complex and messy network of Engravings.

“Eh, so just clean up, or whatever.” Nrorce waved his hand airily. And that was all the instruction that Randidly received.

But he was in no state to respond; he was too busy trying to process what he was seeing.

What this room was supposed to be was clear: this place housed all the harvest ingredients from Nrorce’s farm until they were brought into the kitchen. A ten-meter high ceiling and embedded sunstones provided abundant illumination for the area. So far, this was the only building on this planet that had a roof that was comfortable for Randidly. There was even remnants of a pretty thorough classification system. There were markings on the ground that outlined different areas, some for meats, others for vegetables and fruits, etc. All around, there were tall palettes and barrels and boxes containing foodstuffs.

It was a well-stocked warehouse. However, the closer Randidly looked, the more horrified he became.

Some of the boxes of turnips near him were so old that half had turned rotten and the other half had started attempting to grow on the decaying matter of its brethren, pushing sprouts out through the sides of the boxing. Some of the preservation Engravings had clearly gone bad in some areas, and rather than clean out the material and apply a new Engraving, someone had just slapped another Engraving right on top of the previous one. Sparks hissed intermittently upward from those points as the energies of the two Engravings conflicted.

Randidly looked around and realized this wasn’t an aberration; whoever had ‘cleaned up’ previously seemed to take great pleasure and layering conflicting Engravings on top of each other. The air practically buzzed with the energy released by the inefficient Engravings.

Over by the meat section, one of the massive ice lockers was clearly broken down, releasing horrible waves of rancid meat smell. Another had cracked open, somehow allowing the Engraving to tap into energies from surrounding Engravings that were made too close, and ice spread out to cover the surface of the ice locker and the surrounding floor.

There were places that the conflicting Engravings created such severe energy discharge that holes had been burnt through the floor, into a cave system beneath. And when Randidly’s Grim Intuition discovered that, he quickly realized that millions of Level 95 Absolute Darkness Ants were swarming beneath this warehouse through tight tunnels. Very quickly, he could notice the signs that much of the food in the back half of the warehouse had been stolen or bore bite marks.

Even more aggravating was the fact that it appeared Nrorce had also noticed and simply not done anything about it; most of the recent harvests were stacked haphazardly near the entrance that they had just used, clearly indicating that the rest of the warehouse wasn’t worth using anymore. The goblin seemed ready to abandon it because cleaning up would be a hassle

Randidly’s eyes reddened; he was deeply, deeply offended by everything that he saw. He didn’t really consider himself to be a neat-freak, but he did have strong faith in the power of hard work and training as a foundation for everything else. For this farm, this warehouse was the foundation.

And everything here is fucking rotten….!

Randidly’s fingers twitched. His images stirred unconsciously within him, and rapidly the temperature of his gloves rose as they struggled to suppress his rising Skills. But ultimately, out of respect for Nrorce’s desire to keep all of his foodstuffs from being contaminated with an image, Randidly forced down his anger.

Once again, Neveah’s awareness was drawn over by Randidly’s emotional turmoil. Huh? What’s this… oh. Oh no.

“Right?” Randidly muttered. Nearby, some weird semi-liquid substance was dripping out of a very, very old palette of apples. His pupils dilated as he saw indeterminate brown stains on the floor in quite a few places.

Okay, we can fix this. You clean out the trash, I’ll start using your senses to examine the Engravings here. We… might need to just rip out everything and start over, honestly. But it’s sorta an interesting problem… especially without being able to add an image to any of the Engravings…

Randidly cracked his knuckles and prepared to walk over to one of the holes and descend to deal with the ant problem, but then he paused. I mean… I appreciate your help. But… you really don’t need to put so much attention toward this. I’m just trying to pay back a debt.

Maybe that’s all it seems like… but I just like seeing this side of you. Neveah responded. This is human Randidly. Or post-human, but whatever.

Randidly clicked his tongue in embarrassment but had nothing to say to that. But really, he didn’t have to. Their emotions flowed freely between the Soulbound companions. So instead, he just focused on the task at hand.