Randidly arrived at the edge of the fifty-ninth floor and found a peony bush. Here the air moved softly, almost as though it couldn’t bear to disturb the plant.

The petals were curling pink feathers, undulating with the soft wind of the layer. He looked around to be sure, then refocused on the peony bush; the space around it expanded and contracted just like the edge of the lower layers. An invisible lung functioned, breathing here.

There was no wind. Only a gateway.

With a small frown on his face, Randidly reached out and touched the edge of the space. He examined the sensation of pressing up against the boundary, both employing his sharp senses and inwardly marveling at the increase in fidelity he experienced after absorbing so much emotional force into himself. But for now, he did not dwell on his gains from embracing his self-hatred. He simply used them.

Based on what Eloise had said of the coming layers, he would have time enough to do that later.

It took a few experiments, but Randidly found out how to proceed through this bush. He envisioned himself sinking into the distorted space and exactly that began to happen. He willed it into existence, his body being absorbed by the breaths around the peonies. Functionally, Randidly began to shrink. When he first noticed this, he was so shocked by the shift that he lost his focus and snapped back to this layer. But on his subsequent attempt, he did not worry about the process. He leaned into the spatial divide and was changed by it. His limbs shortened, his weight vanished, the substance of his body being rewritten into a smaller scale.

The impressions of his bare feet in the dirt became large enough to serve as tiny-Randidly’s grave.

Soon, the pink peonies had become giant explosions in the sky above him, the stocks as thick as skyscrapers. Tiny Randidly stomped his bare feet, making even more minute graves for unfortunate, ant-like versions of himself. The grains of dirt felt large beneath his feet. Then he began to walk up onto the peony bush stone, which had become a sprawling mountain range. He soon found a threshold of golden light, hidden underneath the foliage, and passed through to the next layer.

The sixtieth layer felt much, much smaller than those he had grown used to. Here, too, there were several warehouses full of supplies. Some ancient-looking metal apparatus sat on a low plain, gathering dust. Randidly quickly located what could only be the exit back to the Nexus, but kept going. The Nether presence in the air continued to grow.

A few times, Randidly pulled out his Alchemist's Passport and probed at the space of the layer. However, a heavy barrier he couldn’t quite understand blocked him from simply burrowing through to his target location. He could have used the Hierarchy of Burden to rip a path, but he wanted to figure out why before fighting his way forward. So he walked.

His senses tingled and he felt a small amount of tugging on his Nether Core, but it took him a while to realize it was happening. Then he stopped and laughed. This is... almost exactly the opposite of the shaft. The flow of significance pushes people away; you need to have a strong will or quite a bit of Nether density to ignore the flow around you. Otherwise, you could walk forever without ever nearing the next layer. You need a certain sort of momentum to proceed. I suppose Willpower would suffice-

But for someone who possesses a solid Nether Core- Once he understood the way this place functioned, Randidly stepped while concentrating on emphasizing the significance of the action. As he had expected, space blurred. He 'sank' through the flows of this place, arriving at the next golden threshold.

Like this, Randidly rapidly climbed through the sixty-first through sixty-ninth layers. Each looked the same, a blank, almost endless expanse. The repulsion from the higher layers increased as he climbed, but it was never close to keeping Randidly away. As he moved, his certainty steadily increased; the rejection he passed through was some sort of man-made defense. Whatever had been done with the upper layers was not accidental.

Randidly stepped out onto the seventieth floor and looked around. At least this confirms that Eloise wasn' trying to mislead me. This sort of vista... really takes me back.

In front of him, a bit of rugged stone terrain stretched forward until it sharply dropped off into nothingness. Above and in front yawned darkness, in almost the exact same way that the frontlines were shaped with that harsh, wound-like gouging. He also noted the layer wasn't empty. Three individuals sat cross-legged right in front of the edge.

Two had their eyes closed and had their attention turned inward, but the third was an old man with intense eyes who simply stared out into the darkness. Randidly stood for almost five minutes, watching. The old man never looked away. He seemed more statue than flesh.

Randidly felt strangely creeped out by the unwavering focus out into the darkness, but he didn't let it bother him. He walked down next to the other three sitting individuals, earning glances from the two individuals who had been resting with closed eyes. But as he sat down next to them to rest a bit, they returned to their previous stillness.

The old man spoke, still not looking away. "If you wish, I will tell you what I know, before you attempt to cross. It is the least I can do, for one whose path has been so rough."

That earned a long glance from Randidly. A smile tugged at the corner of the man's mouth. "Young men are always the same. You always only see the Path forward, without acknowledging the danger. But I believe you should be warned, before you doom yourself, seeking an illusion of the past."

After several seconds, when the old man said nothing further, Randidly closed his own eyes. He finally took some time to sit in himself and feel the results of his emotional cleansing.

He took almost an hour to rest and measure himself. What he found was definitely a pleasant surprise. Obviously, the Grey Creature had benefited the most, its details and emotional affect growing increasingly firm and potent, but just as the other two images had for so long supported it, the Grey Creature's improvement now bled over into them. So Randidly took another two hours to hone the details of his images, sharpening their shape, purifying their emotional affect.

Still not enough to rival Wick, just with a single image, Randidly's eyes flickered. But closing the gap.

He was also aware that aside from the three remaining emotional cores he needed to face, the problem of emotional pollution would not go away. The size of the Alpha Cosmos meant that even if each person only produced a small bit of intense negativity, that added up quickly. Soon he would be polluted again and forced to clear himself out. He sent some messages to the Pantheon, seeking workarounds for the problem, but it would take a while before they could come up with anything concrete.

Finally, Randidly opened his eyes and straightened. He walked over to stand near the old man. "I'd like to hear what waits ahead in this darkness."

"A dream," The old man said slowly. He tilted his head to the side and Randidly felt some sort of strange image activating within his body. His eyes, rather than glowing, seemed to become dim and hollow. "Or perhaps it is better to say a lie. A false vision for what happened in the past. Haaaah... interesting. With you, more than any of the others, I can see quite deeply."

Randidly ignored that last part, following the old man's gaze and staring out into the darkness. "The past, then? Memories?"

"Desires, as I have said." The old man leaned forward. "Not that truth isn't present out there, but what is hidden here is the wound from a great tragedy. Left to its own devices, this wound wishes it were whole. So it has warped the past with the desire to not have come to such an end."

A unique way of reaching for the Pinnacle. Randidly mused. But he felt some excitement building in his heart. "Do you know when this dream is about?"

The old man's mouth stretched into a wide smile. "Of course not, I have not seen this place. Just that it can only be from before the Third Cohort.

Randidly nodded slowly, wondering what the Patron of Feathers required from the past to survive. But he set that aside for now and instead considered the more immediate impediment. "And this darkness? What is it?"

"A barrier," The old man said without irony.

Randidly barely resisted the urge to click his tongue in distaste at the banal answer, then felt a sort of bemusement that he had been infected by Xershi's snarky humor. Then a strange combination of guilt and loneliness struck him.

Randidly rolled his shoulders to shake that feeling off and began to study the darkness. The pressure he had endured to arrive here was generated by the force of this darkness. He could not discover the medium on which the Engravings were made, but-

It’s the movement of energy. The repulsion of significance, Randidly’s eyes widened. His perspective shifted, folded in on itself. Suddenly the darkness in front of him was a storm of wild whirlwinds, a thousand bent and twisted vicious flows that had been arranged and tied into bows. Bows that spelled out powerful, and very familiar runes. And these restrictions… I have encountered them far too often in the Sonara to mistake them. Elhume’s work. Less refined than on those main layers… but he made this thing. This dream… is his.

After studying the arrangement of energy, Randidly took a step forward so that he stood at the cusp, the sharp divide between the layer and the darkness. The old man coughed and spoke again. “I would not proceed forward, if I were you. You will die, lost in darkness forever, until your images and then your mind desert you. The layers proceed at their own pace, you see They must accept you. You must give up yourself-”

Randidly raised a foot and stuck it out into the abyss. His toes tingled from the pressure of the energies, lashing at him and seeking to force him out. Yet before the density of his Nether, the energies could only howl and fail.

Yet the old man seemed alarmed by the movement. He began to speak more quickly. “Truly, you might believe yourself powerful, but unless you have some connection to the dream, one that can guide you deeper into the darkness, you will only-”

“Thanks for the information,” Randidly glanced at the old man. Then he stepped into the abyss.

*****

For a while, the old man simply stared forward into the darkness. As always, his gaze never wavered. But a few minutes after Randidly proceeded forward, he raised his voice. “What about you? Will you follow him?”

The air behind him shimmered, parting to reveal a sweating and exhausted Xershi. The servo engines of his joints whined from forcing his way forward, relying on the remnant energies in his tattoo to make it this far.

Grinding his teeth, he stared after Randidly. “No. Sometimes, you need to admit when you are bested.”

Then he turned away. At the very least, the experience of being connected to the Ascension Pact had taught him one thing: how to control his Nether well enough to avoid the Ghosthound’s inattention.