Chapter 840 – Remior’s golden century – Cosmic survey (Patreon)

While Percy’s main body was busy attending tournaments, granting spectral traits and spending time with his friends, another project was progressing inside his head. It wasn’t a new project, but one that had been unfolding uninterrupted for decades.

Constellations of various shapes, colours and sizes floated next to one another at the very heart of his mindscape. The largest among them were a replica of Percy’s human body fashioned out of grey stars, an equally massive crow shining with a pale light, and a ruby-coloured wasp.

The rest of the structures were much smaller and shone with all sorts of other hues: pink, orange, midnight blue, indigo, and even mixtures of the colours of the larger constellations. Their shapes varied from humans, crows, and wasps to the exotic visages of alien creatures that Percy’s soul clones currently possessed or Micky’s spiritual blood had mimicked.

The Heavenly Tapestry was no longer a static collection of expressionless constellations floating apart from one another and gazing into the void without purpose. After a century spent growing accustomed to their shared existence, the Lone Wanderer’s colourful fragments had moved closer together, facing and interacting with one another in various ways.

The giant crow was teasing and laughing at the human as their main bodies bickered back in the VIP section of the stadium.

An orange copy of Percy was sitting on the giant wasp’s head and explaining something while pointing at an indigo bug. The corresponding mind clone was helping Nephthys manage the artificial hive.

A pink bat-like creature was gliding above the larger constellations, surrounded by a flock of similar animals composed of midnight blue stars, while the soul clone it represented was leading a group of fifty sentries to scan the surface of a greater spring called Sunidorr.

The rest of the constellations were arranged in similar ways, interlocking in vibrant scenes and vaguely retelling stories that were currently unfolding in a dozen different places around the universe.

Whenever a part of the Lone Wanderer appeared, vanished, or assumed a new role, the magical structures shifted within the crimson sphere of Supercharged Cognition like blobs of paint inside a dynamic, three-dimensional piece of art.

However, the changes to Heavenly Tapestry were just a visual representation of how accustomed Percy and his fellow aspects had grown to each other. The project they’d invested most of their cords and resources to over the past century was something else entirely.

Outside the dazzling sphere, an ocean of stars stretched as far as the eye could see, representing the colossal pool of memories that Percy and his soulmates hadn’t bothered to segregate. Those memories were either less important to the aspects’ individual identities or contained knowledge that was beneficial to everyone.

In the past, those stars had been scattered around the mindscape randomly. Percy could have just as easily turned them into droplets of water and poured them all into a shared reservoir, as their appearance hadn’t served any symbolic purpose.

If one were to examine them closely today, they might notice that the scattered memories no longer appeared like simple dots, but had been reshaped into smooth ellipses, spinning pinwheels with variable numbers of spiral arms, and other irregular forms.

The shapes hadn’t been picked at random either. Each structure represented a galaxy – a real galaxy – which existed somewhere in the universe!

Even the relative locations and distances between the objects had been modelled after the real galaxies as closely as possible, though there were plenty of inaccuracies and even entire missing sections that were being corrected every single day.

For a very long time, Percy’s clones had only been able to navigate the cosmos in a handful of ways. They could revisit Huehue and neighbouring places by taking advantage of Micky’s lingering connection to the planet, yet they couldn’t possess anything on Amenthes because the demonic infestation had already driven every living creature to extinction.

They could use Metatron’s Decree to open a portal to the Vault, but Percy had decided to stay away from the artificial world for a few centuries to make his Blue grade appear slightly more normal – or figure out how to protect himself from a greedy titan.

Percy’s marks were reliable and lasted for a very long time, though they could only be used to return to places that he had already visited.

Finally, karmic compasses could allow Percy to easily send a clone to an interesting destination that he had never been to, but other factions didn’t always trade information in that manner, as it wasn’t always convenient to craft such artifacts.

Even before the end of the civil war, Percy had realized the importance of restructuring the way he planned his adventures, so that he could avoid missing valuable opportunities. There had been times when the people his sentries had been spying on had mentioned the coordinates of an interesting planet or revealed partial maps of their cosmic neighbourhood – valuable information that Percy had been unable to make use of.

While space and time were greatly distorted inside the soul plane, they still followed a certain logic; otherwise Ludwick’s Compass would have been unable to reconstruct the routes that Percy’s clones had travelled.

Percy’s first goal had been to figure out where his marked planets were located in relation to one another. Was Huehue in the same general direction as Marador Prime or Gallimus? Was any of the greater springs he had found close enough to Melodia to risk the Elemental Source being discovered in the near future? Was there a major faction in the same galaxy as Remior?

Percy’s first attempts had been crude, but his initial models of the universe had at least allowed him to avoid sending soul clones in directions that he had already searched. He’d also narrowed down the possible locations of various greater springs that he’d only uncovered partial clues about.

Whenever he had stumbled on another map or a set of coordinates, he had updated his database, pinning new locations down and correcting inaccuracies that had emerged during the translation from the soul plane to the physical plane.

Using the experience in mindset creation that he had inherited from Nephthys, Percy had tinkered with his Inverted Compass as well, slowly developing a better sense of how it tracked his movements in the soul plane and how he could use his information about the real world to guide his wisps.

It was only after absorbing his sixth fiend that Percy’s internal model had started improving by leaps and bounds.

According to Zoris, Topography was normally used for terrestrial awareness – not mapping out a three-dimensional space as vast as the entire universe. Then again, Saint Ludwick had said the same thing about his mindset, yet Percy had figured out how to repurpose it into something useful all the same.

Perhaps, that was why the two abilities had proven so compatible with one another.

Through Topography, the mental model of the cosmos, and various other insights, Percival’s Inverted Compass had evolved into Percival’s Star Atlas, allowing Percy to directly track the physical location of his clones as they travelled through the soul plane.

Every new piece of data had filled in gaps in the model, until Percy’s mindscape had started resembling something that one could see if they observed the night sky with a powerful instrument. Percy had placed the colourful sphere of his Heavenly Tapestry at Remior’s position and pinned every known location he had identified to the corresponding galaxies.

Of course, the Star Atlas was nowhere near complete.

Percy had already located thousands of lesser springs and as many as five hundred and thirty-two greater springs. He had even found a few that ranked among the top ten, including one of the Moirais’ resource worlds that he was planning to follow up on at some point. However, there were plenty of important locations that he was still missing.

For example, Percy had yet to locate any of the divine beasts’ planets, which were perhaps among the most important destinations for him to visit if he wanted Micky and Nephthys to comprehend the concepts of their first affinity.

Even if he could steal all the information about the universe from every single greater spring, there were trillions of galaxies out there, and only a fraction of them had ever been explored. There were entire sectors that nobody had found the time to set foot in, and even places that the peak factions seemed to be unable to approach – for reasons that Percy didn’t fully understand.

Perhaps there were even more powerful greater springs out there that nobody had ever made contact with, surviving remnants of the powerful civilizations that had led the previous era, or cosmic horrors that could slaughter even the strongest deities with ease.

Percy itched to sneak into those dangerous zones with his bloodline one day and seek out treasures that even the peak factions could hardly fathom, though he figured that he should probably gather everything valuable from the known universe and grow a lot stronger first. Sending his clones into a death trap that would threaten the likes of Ishkuria with his current strength would be the epitome of stupidity.

Even the most well-known galaxies were largely unexplored.

The average galaxy contained billions of stars orbited by even more planets. Most of those worlds were empty or uninteresting, so nobody had time to investigate more than a tiny fraction. Gods usually explored randomly or followed promising leads – not unlike Percy. Granted, there were millions of deities who had been gathering information for millions of years, but they had still barely scraped the surface of what was out there.

Percy wouldn’t be able to store all the information in his head anyway.

Keeping track of trillions of galaxies was already difficult, while memorizing the location of every star and planet was out of the question. His Star Atlas treated each galaxy as a single object and pinned additional information about marked planets to their relative position within it.

Despite the limitations of his mindset, Percy had collected enough information about the known universe to rival most greater springs. He’d acted on a lot of it too, which was one of the main reasons for Remior’s technological explosion over the past century.

However, he had refrained from touching any of the riskiest and most precious resources like Rings of Sacrilege, Elemental Sources, powerful Decrees, and, of course, the Focus that he was still eligible to claim from Mithril.

He’d located plenty of such valuable resources, and he could have probably even claimed some if he had really tried, but he had decided to patiently accumulate information, grow his strength, and evaluate the risks and benefits of each operation first.

A century was a negligible amount of time in the grand scheme of things, and it wasn’t like Percy had wasted it, as he’d worked just as hard as he always had on both his personal strength and Remior’s development.

That said, Percy’s magical progress was beginning to plateau, his planet was on a steady path to becoming a powerful faction, and his most important experiment was nearing its tipping point.

It was almost time to start plucking some of that juicy fruit he’d been eyeing from afar…