Chapter 839 – Remior’s golden century – Containment facilities (Patreon)

Jalad was the first to bow deeply, followed by the announcer. The people in the audience took a couple of seconds longer to register what had happened, but a small number of spectators eventually caught on. They stood up and inclined their heads, prompting those next to them to follow suit until the ripples spread across the entire stadium.

Percy sighed internally. He still hadn’t grown used to this treatment, despite how long it had been going on.

The people he encountered in the streets were more likely to wave or ask for a photo, because he’d made it abundantly clear over the years that he preferred everyone to act casually around him. However, they simply refused to do that whenever he appeared in any official capacity.

Only a minority had treated him so respectfully right after the end of the war, since there had been plenty who had harboured resentment or who had seen no point in excessive decorum.

Things had changed as everyone watched their world transform before their very eyes – as they realized what Percy was turning Remior into. With every passing year, more people had started paying their respects, until it had become unthinkable for anyone to remain seated upon his appearance.

Well… except for a certain group of rather rude people who were chuckling at his expense and whispering among themselves in the VIP section.

‘Now which one of us is showing off?’ Micky teased through their connection.

Percy ignored him.

“The spectral trait,” he whispered to Jalad, not bothering to use his willpower that time. “Do you want it or not?”

The regional champion tensed up upon being reminded that Percy had just made him an offer. “I-It would be an honour,” he stammered as he lifted his gaze.

Percy nodded, pointing his index finger at the Violet, activating his bloodline, and shooting a thin grey needle into the man’s body with a single motion. By the time the people in the audience started raising their heads, the wisp had already stitched itself firmly within Jalad’s soul.

Percy had greatly streamlined the process after having possessed millions of creatures of all shapes and sizes.

His hosts still needed to be sufficiently injured to attract his clones, but Percy could bypass that requirement at close range by shooting the wisps with enough power to stab into his targets. Due to having to work with children, he’d also studied various ways of damaging and mending souls to figure out how to possess his hosts as painlessly and efficiently as possible.

Feeding three droplets of dream mana into the cord, Percy felt a new mental partition form inside his head as Jalad’s senses came into focus. He didn’t need to use Dream Resonance to grant the man his spectral trait because the clone was perfectly capable of using Fiend Bestowal by himself. However, Percy would recover the small loss of pink mana in less than an hour anyway, so he saw no reason to be overly frugal.

At the same time, Percy sent a mental command into his rWatch and received a pair of pings back to confirm that the restrictions in the nearest containment facility had loosened.

The people in the audience watched with bated breaths as Percy spilled copious amounts of grey mana from Jalad’s stitches to lure the fiend out of its container.

Summoning the cosmic pests from outer space was time-consuming, so Percy had been forced to get somewhat creative with the operation. Whenever his fiend reserves ran low, he spent several days attracting fiends of a certain type to Remior and compensated his host with a silver reward for their patience.

Each person could only lure a single variety of fiend that they were compatible with, but Percy persisted until he collected hundreds of spares and guided them into various containment facilities around the continent for future use. He trapped the creatures inside giant containers covered in enchantments drawn with soul mana and maintained with ambient mana.

Whenever he wanted to grant somebody else a trait, Percy would signal the facilities to weaken the enchantments slightly.

Most of the fiends remained trapped, because escaping through even the weakened suppression field was unpleasant for them, but the fiends which were compatible with Percy’s host were motivated by the attractive force to push through the barrier.

As soon as the first creature slipped out, the detection enchantments would kick in to restore the suppression field to its previous level and prevent any other fiends from escaping.

If there weren’t any fiends of the right type on Remior, Percy would have to summon them from outer space again, but that happened less than one percent of the time, since he made sure to stock up generously whenever he was forced to.

‘Here it comes,’ Percy thought as a fist-sized silver comet shot into the stadium and slammed into Jalad’s soul, eliciting gasps and exclamations from the audience. While everyone above a certain age had experienced the effect of Percy’s bloodline first-hand, very few had witnessed a fiend’s absorption due to how much rarer the reward was.

Percy pinched the ethereal creature with his willpower and examined its struggling body within his host’s soul. It looked like a ladybug crossed with a rose, its hemispherical body covered in lots of overlapping flakes. Each sheet was thin and curved, its edges razor sharp. Had either Percy or Jalad been weaker, the fiend’s bladed protrusions would have easily sliced into their souls.

“An Aichmyros,” Percy announced, mostly for the audience’s entertainment, since Jalad would receive his answers soon enough. After remembering that most people weren’t as familiar with the subject, he added, “It grants the Cutting trait. It improves one’s proficiency in severing things.”

Percy had given every single fiend to multiple people over the years, so he could identify them and the traits they granted at a glance. He’d even played around with many traits and made a list of people who possessed traits that he might wish to borrow in the future.

Thanks to Dream Resonance, Percy could theoretically wield over thirty additional traits by possessing soul affinity users who had the Blessing of Permanence. Each of Percy’s clones would benefit from the others’ traits due to their instincts being shared through the main body, though the hosts wouldn’t have access to each other’s traits – only their own and Percy’s.

As tempting as it was to stack them up, Percy didn’t think that it was worth tying up his cords just for that, unless he needed the traits for some difficult project.

Turning his attention back to Jalad, Percy ground the unfortunate Aichmyros down and forcefully applied the foundational concept of his affinity to the silver particles. He scattered them across the Violet’s soul while ensuring that they never touched his own wisp.

Like Zoris had speculated, mastering Advanced Soul Control had been sufficient to grant spectral traits to other people, so Percy had invented Fiend Bestowal shortly after the war. The process had grown even faster and smoother after he had comprehended the actual concept a few decades later.

‘Lucky bastard. Cutting is such a great match for his metal affinity. I could have also used this one.’ Percy clicked his tongue upon completing the absorption and retrieving his wisp from Jalad’s body. ‘And he didn’t even feel a thing.’

Assimilating one’s first fiend was always painless, because the lingering instincts within the traits only began tearing at each other when there were at least two traits coexisting in a person’s soul. Consequently, Percy always felt a little envious of his hosts whenever he granted them their trait, as he couldn’t help but compare their smooth acquisition to the sheer agony that he and his fellow aspects had suffered during their sixth absorption.

Percy and his friends had always intended to undergo the procedure, though they had delayed the absorption for a couple of years before finally summoning the courage to proceed.

Fortunately, the Command trait hadn’t lashed out like its siblings. It had even helped Percy by dulling the reaction of the other five traits slightly, though the absorption had still hurt more than Mimicry’s.

After barely making it through the operation without passing out, Percy and the others were confident that they would need to borrow some sort of external assistance to remain awake during a hypothetical seventh absorption, if they ever unlocked another slot.

Unaware of Percy’s inner musings, the regional champion thanked him with another deep bow as the audience applauded the spectacle and the announcer used his rWatch to deduct the silver rewards from Jalad’s balance.

Percy gestured at the champion to indicate that it wasn’t a big deal, before waving at the excited crowd on the way back to the VIP section.

‘At least, Topography turned out pretty useful,’ he thought, the corners of his lips curling up. ‘Worth every last spasm.’