Randidly sat in a reality of his own making, anchored by the ambient Nether in his body. Aether and Nether mirrored each other. The Aether surrounded him, light and full of color and shapes. The Nether was within him, a dense ball of swirling significance. Between them were several subtle connections that stabilized the construction.

So long as Randidly maintained both, those horrible, insular outcomes he had seen during the end of the Glimpse of the Shallah Path should not come to past. He remained in balance.

His senses shifted to examine his ‘physical’ surroundings. His legs were crossed beneath him and he simply savored the sounds and scents of the nearby flora and fauna. Brightly colored birds cawed at one another and flapped between the low branches of the surrounding trees. Insects buzzed around lavender and orange flowers that spread their petals for the rare rays of sunlight that made it through the canopy onto the undergrowth. Emotionless beetles continued their trek across the plant matter, looking for a tasty leaf.

Randidly leaned back against a root as thick as a tree trunk that arced out of the ground for a few meters before digging back into the soil for nutrients. He breathed in and as he did so, the entire area breathed in with him. The thin threads between Aether and Nether hummed with life.

Randidly sat in the depths of his Yggdrasil image, steadily gathering his attention and Willpower for what was to follow.

He had probably been within the Yggdrasil image for almost two weeks straight. His existence here strained the image, but also strengthened it. Those ethereal connections gradually gained substance. He has spent many of those days walking through the lengths of this biome that sat around the base of the world tree, sharpening the various details until he could not tell this place from reality.

And the training was effective. As Randidly improved the tiny details, he could feel the core subtly changing. But in comparison to the other Skillsets… Randidly had to admit that his Yggdrasil one, the oldest and most stable, was a little lackluster in execution. Not that he wished to judge things based on the System’s evaluation, but the difference had most clearly been seen by the various Rarities of his Skills.

Absolute Grasp of Yggdrasil was Transcendent and the Inscrutable Mien and Impacable Price were Mythic, but the rest of the Skills of Yggdrasil sat at Legendary, where they had been since Randidly originally created the Skillset. Those Skills had very rarely shifted from the first tree imagery.

Mostly because the shape of Yggdrasil hadn’t been altered; that was part of its staying power. But in terms of significance, Yggdrasil had grown taller and taller in Randidly’s heart.

He had tried urging Yggdrasil to higher and more powerful realms through meaning, but Randidly quickly realized that the stable and slow growth of that particular image wasn’t suited to the same sort of sudden evolutions of the Grim Chimera or the transformations of the Stillborn Phoenix. It literally just needed time to grow.

Of course, the environment mattered in determining what form that growth would take. And his Yggdrasil Skill had experienced much since it had been initially formed; it had accumulated quite a bit of energy in its core. So Randidly had first walked through the periphery, sharpening the details.

He could not directly force Yggdrasil to change, but he could apply pressure by wholistically improving the environment. Unfortunately, this task turned out to be incredibly demanding, due to the scope that Yggdrasil had recently experienced.

Randidly couldn’t help but chuckle wryly, even as he leaned against the warm root behind him. The slow process of Yggdrasil growing was partially his own fault. When he had realized in the past several months how creating an entire environment could be part of an image, he had ruthlessly expanded the scope of Yggdrasil. It was, after all, a World Tree, so Randidly had been steadily sharpening and improving the edges until this image was truly an entity that warped the surface of an entire world.

All the plants and animals only existed due to the abundant life energy the World Tree released. And Randidly had to think long and hard about how such an existence would warp the surrounding animal life.

Yggdrasil itself was what Randidly actually wanted to improve now, and was the central pillar of that entire environment. If he directed his attention toward the center, then all those details on the edges became weights that held the World Tree back. Instead of letting that setback bother him, Randidly continued to work to push those details up in clarity and potency.

Suddenly, the central portion of Yggdrasil was the one holding everything else back. And with all those sharpened details lifting up his image, Randidly moved in to finally cause a shift.

Randidly reached up and rubbed the bridge of his nose, allowing all of his focus to relax for a few seconds. Then he steadily gathered himself, bringing everything back together. The noises in the surroundings echoed and cut. The light and warmth of the sun was near searing on the back of Randidly’s neck. The surroundings pulsed with power.

Congratulations! Your Skill Conviction of the Celestial Cataclysm (T) has grown to Level 441!

It was a matter of ‘pressure’. Randidly flared the details he had enhanced gradually, starting from the edges and working his way in toward the trunk of the World Tree. This tension was what Randidly needed to accelerate the growth of his image. Or rather than accelerate, what he needed to do was convince the image to mobilize the significant stores of life energy that it had gathered over the last several years toward change.

If Randidly moved too quickly and left a flaw in the process, the pressure would dissipate through the flaw and it wouldn’t even reach Yggdrasil. If he moved too slowly, Yggdrasil’s impressive root structure would diffuse the energy that Randidly gathered and pumped into its trunk.

Pushing himself to tighten his grip at the right speed was a long and complicated process. But with the insights Randidly gathered from the two image memories had been stuck between, he slowly raised the ambient power of his image. Even if the progress with the method was slow, Randidly raised the charge in the air until his Yggdrasil image was crackling with potential energy.

Randidly pressed both of his hands against the grassy ground as he released a breath. The details throughout his surroundings flared to life and pressed toward the central region of his image. The huge roots of the World Tree began to glimmer with power as Randidly’s Willpower surged along them. Strange symbols flared and danced, raising inward from every direction.

A wave of golden light gathered across the surface of the world until it crashed up against the massive trunk of Yggdrasil. The huge monolith creaked and groaned underneath that tide of surging golden energy. Gradually, more and more Engravings along the surface of the trunks bark were illuminated.

*****

“You thought… he was eating planets for power?” Sydney slapped her knee and threw her head back, engaging in a rich chortle. She had to set down her wineglass, lest she spilled it. Claudette glanced sideways. Of the remaining individuals seated at the dinner table, two continued to eat with gusto, seemingly uninterested in poking fun at her.

That, at least, was a small comfort.

Neveah was one of the others to look amused and leave Claudette felt oddly flustered before her beautiful, glittering eyes. So Claudette tried to explain herself. “I… well, what do you expect? The planets were just disappearing… and he was growing unusually quickly. Such practices are relatively common in the Nexus! So I think my conclusion was a reasonable one.”

The graceful Neveah took another drink of her white wine and then shrugged. “Well… I cannot deny that it is very easy to… misread some of the actions that Randidly takes. Part of that is due to his stubborn refusal to follow common social norms or explain why he is doing what he is doing… but you would be pretty safe making the assumption that he has your best interests at heart. He is… a surprisingly pure individual.”

“Pure…” Claudette repeated softly. At the bottom of her numb pool of emotions, she carefully began to review her memories of Randidly Ghosthound. Certainly, every moment of their interactions, he seemed to have something else in his field of vision. Some distant goal that he didn’t bother to explain...

Finally, the young teenager Nathan paused in his ceaseless eating to give Claudette a surreptitious sort of glance that she was very familiar with receiving from young men. Then he cleared his throat. “The Ghosthound tries to do so much that he doesn’t have much spare attention. If he offers to do something casually… sometimes you have to ask a second time, to find out if he’s just going to forget about it or whether he will show up at midnight in a few weeks and tell you in a gravelly voice ‘we have to do it now’.”

At the far end of the table, Tykes snorted and raised his head. “Pure… maybe that’s right. But you know what his biggest weakness is though? Thank you’s. That man disappears faster than a Stamina potion between a group of people without Classes when the fighting ends. He’d rather find the next foe than pause and enjoy the victory.”

“He has an aversion to relaxation,” Neveah nodded. “Sometimes I think he does it purposefully, so I worry.”

Sydney leaned forward and jabbed with her fork in the air. “And let me tell you, he’s always had no chill. But before the System came, very few people noticed or cared about all the work he did when no one was watching. He was just… intense.”

A companionable silence fell around the table as each person considered their own individual memories of the Ghosthound. From the corner of her eyes, Claudette looked from Neveah, to Sydney, to Nathan, and finally to the muscular Tykes. For the last several weeks, she had been staying with Neveah, training by day and meeting the many visitors that flowed into Neveah’s small cabin by night. Usually, their stops were brief, but Claudette was gradually finding these dinner chats were her favorite part of the day.

Earlier tonight, before Tykes and Nathan had arrived, Claudette had verbalized her worry that they weren’t training enough and that the dinners were a distraction. She could feel herself improving, but she knew it wasn’t enough in front of the old monsters with which Don Beigon was making deals. Even with extreme time dilation, she would not improve enough to make much a difference before she and Randidly needed to start her image refinement.

Neveah had laughed at her. “You sound like Randidly. And if he was right that concentrating very hard was enough to grow strong… wouldn’t he be the strongest being in the Nexus by now? Listen to your body’s needs. Feed it with more than training.”

Claudette considered wryly pointing out that Randidly almost was one of the most powerful individuals in the Nexus, but held herself back. However, the temperance was for a selfish reason; she genuinely enjoyed the dinners.

She loved the playful banter. She loved how everyone who visited treated her like a person and didn’t react at all when she told them her name. She loved the simplicity of this world, where people still fought for survival against monsters.

Claudette leaned back in her chair to say something, but before she got out the words there was the sound of footsteps and a door open. The serious, dark-haired Drake walked through the threshold. Then he walked over and planted a kiss on the crown of Sydney’s head. He and Sydney lived in the cabin on the next hill over from Neveah and often came over for dinner. The woman reached up and touched Drake’s shoulder fondly. “Still nothing out there trying to murder us?”

Drake didn’t respond, just giving Sydney a frank look that said ‘quite a bit would love to murder you’. But his expression was kind. Then he pulled a letter out of his pocket and offered it to Neveah.

Neveah clapped her hands and laughed. “Excellent! It’s been a while since I’ve heard from my penpal. You are a lucky charm, Claudette.”

Claudette smiled politely, but then couldn’t help but inquire. “You… exchange handwritten letters with someone? Why not utilize the messaging function?”

Drake took a seat at the table and began to quietly eat his portion of the roast pork with cranberry sauce. Neveah clicked her tongue and shook her head at Claudette. “You don’t have much of a sense of romance, do you? There’s just something… wistful and fulfilling about a solid medium of communication. And then if I stop hearing from him… haven’t you ever wanted some memento of previous crushes?”

“I…” At the depths of her pool, the observer quickly sank to the bottom. “I’ve never actually… had any romantic involvements. So…”

“What!” Neveah slapped the table.

Sydney leaned forward, suddenly staring at Claudette with obvious interest. “Truly? You are gorgeous. Are there different beauty standards in the Nexus? Well, we can definitely hook you up with a few eligible bachelors from Expira, if you are interested. How old are you?”

“Err…” Claudette’s eyebrows twitched. These two mean well… but they are also just as quick to pair me off as my father…

“Well, let’s probably head out for this conversation,” Nathan said, interrupting the interrogation. He released an exaggerated sigh. “Unfortunately, there is so much demand for new Classes right now. Only a little over a month before the Calamity arrives…”

“Wait…” Claudette tilted her head to the side, sure she had heard incorrectly. “What did you say?”

“The First Calamity is coming soon,” Claudette explained with a nod. For a brief moment, everyone at the table lost their air of gaiety and looked down at their food with varying amounts of worry.

Claudette’s mouth twitched. “Your planet… Randidly’s planet… hasn’t yet gone through the First Calamity…?”