Chapter 820 – Calm before the storm (2) (Patreon)

Two years after his familiar’s evolution to Violet, Percy’s third core finally caught up with the rest.

[Congratulations! Your mana core has advanced: Yellow -> Green!]

The organ’s contribution to his physical strength and lifespan reached its apex, compensating him for some of the losses he had incurred to obtain it.

As Percy had speculated, balancing out his three cores in conjunction with his enhanced physique allowed him to directly generate Green mana even if the internal pressure inside his cores dropped to nothing.

Unfortunately, his artificial promotions still cannibalized Circulation’s benefits and prevented him from attempting an additional compression to Blue. However, he at least wouldn’t have to worry about his grade dropping even if he emptied out his cores and channels. He could presumably still revert the promotions if he manually deactivated his seals, but it would be very difficult for any external influence to disturb his enchantments against his will.

Micky would have a much tougher time balancing his affinities out as a beast, but his mutation was even stronger than Percy’s, so the requirements for his mana to remain compressed might relax in a similar way when his third core caught up to his second. The same should apply to Nephthys if she ever became an aspect.

Percy’s promotion also granted him additional slots for soul and mind clones, raising each capacity to twelve and opening the door for a potential seventh aspect, though he wasn’t planning to ever tie up all of his cords like that. His mind mana output obviously tripled as well, improving the active component of Supercharged Cognition by a proportional amount and extending the radius of his sensory domain to seventeen kilometres without even taking the sentries into account.

His brewing yield unfortunately remained unchanged, once again hammering home the fact that he was well into diminishing returns. That could only be expected, considering that he was only a handful of percentage points away from Phoebe’s peak performance and no more than twenty percentage points away from the most skilled alchemists in the universe. Every single step Percy took from that point on would likely require multiple promotions, upgrades to his Saint’s Eye, or newly mastered alchemic principles.

Thanks to years of continuous practice and Percy’s third core having caught up, his dream mana output increased by a factor of six, allowing him to generate thirty-six droplets per day. He finally had enough of the pink resource to not only permanently enrich all of his cords, but to also use the full power of Nephthys’ army every ten days.

In addition to sparring regularly with Micky, practicing with Nephthys whenever he accumulated enough dream mana, and splitting much of his free time between alchemy, magiscript, and mindset creation, Percy started to work seriously on mastering his affinities.

The combination of the Divine Spark mutation and excessive brainpower helped Percy and Micky register several Elemental Control spells during the following years.

[Congratulations! You have mastered a new spell: Basic Pure Control – Refined!]

[Congratulations! You have mastered a new spell: Basic Air Control – Refined!]

[Congratulations! You have mastered a new spell: Basic Ice Control – Refined!]

[Congratulations! You have mastered a new spell: Basic Mind Control – Refined!]

[Congratulations! You have mastered a new spell: Basic Gravity Control – Refined!]

They could have probably upgraded one of the spells to the Masterful tier if they hadn’t split their time and mental resources between so many affinities, but a slight improvement across the board would boost their overall capabilities more than hyper-focusing on a single mana type.

Besides, Percy had another method to accelerate his training.

Sending a soul clone enriched by dream mana back to Melodia, he possessed Doh and asked him and Sol to accompany him to the Mirror Lake for another three years to combine the influence of the Spectral Broodmother with the other effects.

The results were as impressive as he had hoped.

[Congratulations! Your spell has evolved: Basic Soul Control – Refined -> Advanced Soul Control – Masterful!]

Zoris hypothesised that Percy’s nascent comprehension of the concept might be sufficient to grant spectral traits even to hosts without the soul affinity, but they decided to postpone those experiments until the war was over.

Speaking of people with spectral traits, Percy obviously compensated the Melodians generously for snatching two of their leaders during their reconstruction efforts.

The last time he had visited, he’d only gifted the Green-borns with enough elixirs to advance once and his friends with enough doses to advance twice. This time, he took advantage of his ability to send his spatial seal back and forth to deliver enough elixirs for all ninety thousand of Sol’s people.

That might sound like a lot, but Melodia’s population was negligible compared to other factions, and each dose of elixir could be used for a hundred cleansing sessions when diluted. Twice as many, in fact, thanks to the Cascading Cracks technique that Percy had already taught them.

Consequently, he only supplied the equivalent of four hundred and fifty people with regular elixirs, which was about the size of a single noble House on Remior. The hive could absolutely sustain such expenditure indefinitely, allowing Percy to stop worrying that his friends were being held back by a lack of resources.

The diluted elixirs were half as effective as the undiluted ones and six times less effective than Aurora Dew, but they worked ten times faster than manual core cleansing. Every Melodian would be able to advance twice in just over a century, vastly accelerating their progress until Percy found a permanent source of stable beast mana for them.

Percy had chosen to spend most of his time possessing Doh instead of Sol to grant him a pair of Cradles as well. That way, he’d made the Green-born even stronger and expanded his influence on the budding civilization. He’d even upgraded Sol and Doh to Gloomy Dawn now that he could spare enough, so that they would reach their third natural promotions within the next century and maintain their lead over their compatriots.

Doh, in particular, would become a demigod with both cores, bringing him only a single step away from divinity. It was admittedly a step that stumped most demigods in the universe – especially since Percy couldn’t lend his mental resources or the influence of his familiar’s mutation to his hosts. However, the Green-born did have unrestricted access to the Elemental Source of his affinity, so he stood a real chance of becoming his world’s first deity.

Having only spent three years to upgrade Basic Soul Control, Percy felt that he could comprehend the foundational concept of his original affinity in under a century. With his current means, he could station a long-term clone in Doh’s body and ask him to practice alongside him at the Mirror Lake for a few decades after the war ended.

Percy’s other affinities wouldn’t progress nearly as fast unless he found their Elemental Sources, but he should still be able to master them dozens or even hundreds of times faster than other mortals.

Outside of his relatively safe and uneventful trip to Melodia, Percy had thought long and hard about what to do with the rest of his empowered soul clones. His butchered lifespan wouldn’t fix itself, and he couldn’t keep postponing his trip to Mithril indefinitely. However, he decided to slowly gather information about the greater springs before making any big moves.

The idea was to possess random critters on every important destination that he already had access to – Tenefyre, Mithril, and the Void Hand’s planets. He was going to spend years or even decades mapping those worlds out and spying on the natives to develop a comprehensive understanding of the resources they possessed and the risks he would have to take to acquire them.

At the same time, he hoped to slowly expand his repertoire of karmic compasses and marks until he knew the location of every greater spring in the universe. There were only a few hundred such factions, and their whereabouts were technically public knowledge – even if Percy wasn’t currently privy to them.

He just had to keep infiltrating and patiently spying on the natives of those worlds until he happened upon the right conversation or karmic compass to borrow. With every new greater spring he located, he would have an additional place to spy on with a long-term soul clone, which should accelerate his ability to gather intel.

This project was currently limited by the maximum number of Micky’s sentries, the size of their individual sensory domains, and Percy’s excess brainpower, but he expected all of those variables to keep growing over time.

Naturally, Percy had continued visiting Gallimus and attending the auction every single year, steadily accumulating karmic compasses from the Sapphire Pavilion as well. Most of them pointed toward barren worlds or lesser springs, but he did purchase a compass pointing to a greater spring called Kappul in his sixth auction, giving him yet another lead.

Locating all eight hundred-odd greater springs – or at least a respectable fraction of them – would take decades or even centuries, but Percy understood the importance of slowing down and doing things more carefully. He’d advanced at a breakneck pace over the past fifty or so years, but his eventual lifespan could already be measured in tens of millennia, and the stakes were too high to keep going as recklessly as he had.

That said, Micky’s spiritual blood might be needed to win the civil war on Remior, so Percy didn’t begin his infiltration missions just yet. He was, however, a lot more confident in travelling to lesser springs. He deployed most of his soul clones to random adventures in the hopes of stumbling upon something valuable and even sent one to the faction with the sound affinity heritage.

It was a planet occupied by a tribe of bipedal hedgehogs that he never bothered to learn the name of. Locating a sect specializing in sound magic wasn’t very difficult, as the natives who had inherited their ancestral element apparently took a lot of pride in preserving and passing their knowledge to future generations.

Percy wasn’t planning to develop any specialized sound attacks, because he didn’t see much of a benefit to leaning too hard on a third composite affinity. Certainly not one that would require him, Micky, and Nephthys to work together just to produce the slightest trickle of mana. He only wanted to grow proficient enough in fusing and handling the element so that he could try merging it with ice and acid in the future.

To that end, he had a couple of soul clones possess sound users on Remior, studied how the sentient hedgehogs wielded their magic in case they knew of any useful tips and tricks that weren’t popular back home, and tried to reproduce their efforts using the soul-rending air and soul-zapping lightning mana he borrowed from his friends.

There were many hoops that he had to go through, but also many advantages that helped him progress several times faster than anyone else could have. After three weeks, he managed to generate the first sliver of soul-piercing sound mana inside his own body.

The fused resource was no less deadly than the other composite elements when shaped into an attack, but it thankfully wasn’t nearly as harmful by default, so he didn’t need any new resistances to wield it.

Two years of experiments later, he finally received an encouraging notification.

[Congratulations! You have mastered a new spell: Basic Sound Control – Refined!]

Producing the element was still troublesome, as it involved asking Micky and Nephthys to break their own affinities down, attach Percy’s soul mana to the components, and channel the result back to him. Not having access to regular sound mana only complicated things further, but the fact that his Status had acknowledged his efforts was proof that he could comprehend the concept even with these limitations.

Percy estimated that he would have to bring all six of the relevant Control spells – Air, Water, Lightning, Ice, Acid, and Sound – to Masterful before he could begin working on his first calamity affinity. This was another project that would likely require several decades and would only be completed after the war, but Percy knew that he couldn’t delay this indefinitely either, because the piece of Ishkuria’s internal world inside his seal would expire in a few centuries.

About a decade after Micky acquired his third core, or about fourteen years after Percy acquired his own, the Huehuan advanced once more.

[Congratulations! Your mana core has advanced: Yellow -> Green!]

At that point, everyone was starting to wonder whether their enemies had given up on the Fungal Spire. It had been close to sixteen years since the battle in the Whistling Woods, and the Great Houses should have finished recruiting the rest of the noble families and spreading the full version of the Dance to everybody.

Alas, Percy and his allies weren’t so lucky. Eight months after Micky’s most recent advancement, the largest army that Remior had ever seen appeared on the horizon, marching toward the battle that would determine the fate of their entire world.