Chapter 833 – Remior’s golden century – Memory amethyst (Patreon)

rWatches and smart clothes had both become widely popular – at least among those wealthy enough to afford them – though Percy’s versions of the technologies were a little special.

Regular enchanted wristbands were fashioned out of dimensional marble, which allowed them to serve a range of useful purposes – from spatial storage and real-time communication around the planet, to remotely controlling other technologies like flying vehicles, smart clothes, or home appliances.

The quality and price of the devices varied widely, depending on factors such as the amount of pure dimensional marble used to create them, the versions of the enchantments drawn on them, and the skill of the enchanter. At the lowest end, rWatches could only store about as much stuff as the old spatial amulets that the noble Houses used to own, and support simple audio calls. The most expensive models contained several cubic metres of internal storage and could support high-quality video calls or even three-dimensional holograms.

A select few individuals like Nesha – experts in magiscript who possessed both a space affinity and a second element that could be fused with it into a solid material like her dimensional alloy – could craft even better, personalized versions of the devices. Those could be fuelled, repaired, or modified using only their owner’s mana.

Percy’s rWatch, on the other hand, was perhaps the only one on Remior that didn’t involve the space affinity at all.

He could reproduce every function except spatial storage using mind mana, and he didn’t need the extra storage in the first place. The seal that Metatron had sold him was far superior to anything on Remior, both in capacity and in its convenient ability to be stored within his soul and passed to his clones through the ethereal cords.

In fact, Percy had realized after his fusion with Nephthys that he no longer needed to physically send the seal to his clones or fellow aspects. Perhaps he had his rearranged mindsets to thank for that, or it might have been the concepts that he had inherited from Nephthys, but his connection to the other parts of his soul had grown strong enough for them to access the contents of the seal directly through the cords.

That allowed Percy to keep the entire seal safely within his main body at all times, and thus avoid even the momentary risk of losing a piece during transportation. It also spared him from inefficiently dividing the seal’s capacity, and granted his clones and fellow aspects the convenience of being able to access the seal’s contents simultaneously. Finally, they could transfer large volumes of corporeal mana between them without significant losses or having to attach soul mana and go through the cords.

In any case, Percy had deliberately crafted his rWatch out of a different material to avoid interference between its enchantments and those of the spatial seal. That way, he could store the magical wristband inside the seal whenever necessary, and even keep a couple of spares, just like the rest of his equipment.

Deciding on the right material for the job had given him a headache for years, until he’d discovered one of his most interesting affinity fusions to date: a combination of pure and mind mana that he’d named “memory amethyst”.

Percy had repeatedly failed to discover any new combinations of soul and mind mana outside of the pink droplets. He’d also failed to replace soul mana with phantom mana in that particular fusion, or find more applications for dream mana besides enriching his cords and awakening Nephthys’ subjects, which had prompted him to turn his attention to his other pair of cores.

For a long time, pure and mind mana had also refused to merge.

The breakthrough had happened during a rare stroke of inspiration – possibly thanks to the Divine Spark mutation, though it was hard to be sure. On a whim, Percy had tried to crystallize an unsuccessful mixture of pure and mind mana. The two resources had finally bonded as the mixture solidified into a purple sphere.

Not long after that, Percy had realized that phantom mana could also be crystallized alongside mind mana in the same way, creating his first fusion of all three of his affinities: a variant of memory amethyst that sported a greyish purple hue and could be turned incorporeal or invisible at will.

He hadn’t bothered to give the second version a different name, though it was what he had eventually used for his rWatch.

Memory amethyst behaved almost identically to crystallized pure or phantom mana. The only difference was that the process of crystallization seemed to convert the mind mana within the mixture into information, allowing Percy to customize the internal structure of the crystal at a microscopic level without weakening the material in the slightest.

That property would have been useless to the average person, but not to an enchanter as skilled as Percy.

With the help of his cognitive prowess and Scribing trait, he was able to imbue the crystals with extremely complex but ridiculously small internal enchantments at the moment of their creation, registering the Tri-Elemental Crystallography spell.

The best part about the Masterful Spectral Art was that the enchantments were so small that they remained intact within individual grains even after Percy shattered the crystals into powder and combined it with other materials to spin his magical silk.

Incorporating the greyish purple powder into the strands wasn’t the only improvement that Percy had made to the fabric. With Micky’s help, he’d developed a bunch of other interesting materials and eventually even more advanced forms of silk, though the details about the Huehuan’s personal progress were a story for another time.

Through Percy and Micky’s joint contributions, Tri-Elemental Crystallography became Hepta-Elemental Fibrography, which had actually been an Ultimate Art, because any cooperation with Micky involved his mutations and Percy’s bloodline, on top of their spectral traits, though Phoebe’s Decree had only granted the spell a Masterful designation. Hepta-Elemental Fibrography had allowed Percy and his fellow aspect to enchant the very particles that made up the silk and add an extra layer of runes to their formations.

Then, there was the smart clothes technology.

Percy had been “abusing” his self-repair enchantments to duplicate his equipment since creating his Spiritforged Effigy. Later, he had realized that he could use controlled self-repair enchantments to create “checkpoints” while crafting a complex piece of equipment. Whenever he completed a section of the design without making any mistakes, he could flick the controls off and on to update the “template” stored within the self-repairs, thus securing the changes he wanted to keep. If he made a mistake, he could just send mana into the self-repair enchantments to revert the object to its previous checkpoint and reject the unwanted changes.

During his travels, Percy had encountered many greater springs that had taken the same idea a step further, using multiple control runes to store several independent templates within a single piece of equipment.

The most popular application had been in fashion, as it allowed pieces of clothing to switch between multiple configurations. Fabrics that contained mundane materials as well as mana couldn’t be modified too much. Most people on Remior were limited to minor changes, like tweaking the colour of their clothes or slightly lengthening their sleeves, and had to regularly “feed” them additional fabric if they overused the feature.

It was a different story for those like Percy and Nesha who could create enchanted equipment entirely out of their own mana.

The next major breakthrough had been the discovery that the templates didn’t even have to be stored within the equipment itself. Percy didn’t actually need to keep using his trick of flicking the controls off and on while crafting his equipment. He could just prepare the blueprints directly inside his mindscape, feed them into his rWatch, and pass them on to his equipment through the wristband.

That insight had allowed him to merge Hepta-Elemental Fibrography, Memory Rune Watch, and Cauldron of a Myriad Screams into Hepta-Woven Arsenal, a spell that was still listed in his Status to this day. Percy was pretty sure that lots of other spells like his Adaptive Arsenal, Phantomwoven Cloak, and Replicating Soul Harvester would also have fused into Hepta-Woven Arsenal if they hadn’t already become parts of his other Ultimate Arts.

In fact, considering how many high-tier Masterful spells, spectral traits, mindsets, mana types, affinity fusions, and other insights had gone into Hepta-Woven Arsenal, Percy was convinced that it was more complex than both of his Extreme spells. The only reason it was still classified as a Masterful spell was that it wasn’t quite strong enough to bridge the gap between the Colour and Concept realms by itself, though it probably wasn’t that far off.

Regardless of what Phoebe’s Decree thought, Percy didn’t think the value of being able to instantly change the shape, enchantments, and even composition of his equipment could be overstated, as the applications of the new spell went far beyond the cosmetic.

One problem that he and Micky had run into while redesigning their equipment had been the latter’s size. In his giant Huehuan form, Micky was around two hundred metres tall and had four arms. While using the full power of the Symphony, Percy and Micky could jointly create a construct that was many times larger still.

Creating equipment for a body that was multiple kilometres tall was naturally quite inconvenient.

They had considered making the silk thousands of times thicker so that they wouldn’t have to produce such enormous lengths of it, but that would just waste the opportunity to take advantage of the construct’s size to cram in even more enchantments and weave an even tighter fabric. Not to mention that they would still need to keep their minds fused for months, weaving clothes and forging weapons for every size they needed. The whole process would have to be repeated whenever Micky’s beast core advanced or their fused construct grew larger.

After preparing the equipment, they would theoretically be able to store the template into the controlled self-repairs and discard most of the material, since they could recreate the whole thing out of just a “tiny fragment”. Unfortunately, said fragment wouldn’t actually be all that small, and would take up a lot of space in their spatial seal.

And that was just for the inferior version made from thicker silk.

Ideally, Percy and Micky had wanted to weave the oversized robes out of a greater length of regular silk. The problem was that the total length of silk would have to increase billions of times to keep the robes proportionally thick, and the two of them would never manage to weave all of that into the equipment by hand.

The Hepta-Woven Arsenal spell had solved all of that!

With it, Percy and Micky were able to create intricate templates within their mindscape countless times faster, using all sorts of mental tricks to accelerate the process. It was much easier to copy, simplify, lengthen, or otherwise modify various sections if they didn’t have to manually spin every single strand.

Once the final blueprint was ready, they just had to feed it into the rWatch along with enough mana, and wait for intricate, three-kilometre-tall robes and weapons containing a dozen layers of enchantments to flawlessly weave themselves!

Stacking too many layers of enchantments produced diminishing returns, so the resulting set of robes was only marginally better than one woven out of thicker strands. Still, there was no reason to give up on a free boost when they finally had a reliable method of claiming it – especially when it could offset some of the losses from scaling the equipment up so severely.

Besides finally allowing them to design equipment for bodies of any shape or size, their new spell gave them the option of modifying the enchantments on the spot. If they were fighting against a powerful fire mage, they might wish to lean into cooling and ice resonance enchantments. Against a gravity user, more structural integrity enchantments might serve them better, while a Cardinal Devil would call for more purification runes.

Percy and Micky had already stored all sorts of templates inside their mindscape, covering a wide assortment of possibilities in combat, alchemy, or other areas, but could always create even more on the spot if the situation called for it.