Chapter 847 – Remior’s golden century – A flea’s flea (Patreon)

Percy had known even before finding the seeds on Zath’maan that they wouldn’t meet his requirements. Doubling the lifespan of everyone on Remior would be a great help for his people, but even the leaves of a first-generation sapling could no longer affect him. A Red-born who had activated the Void Decree would need an even more potent resource to survive until the end of the Colour realm.

He had only been able to think of a single being in the universe who would be both willing and able to lead him to what he needed, and he had luckily remained in touch with that very being during the past century.

Percy had kept a clone in Sol’s body, working alongside her and Doh to comprehend the concepts of the soul affinity next to the Spectral Broodmother. He’d initially considered continuing to possess Doh instead, since the Green-born had been closer to becoming a demigod and had already reached Clear by the end of the century. However, Percy had already given Doh his Cradles, and hadn’t wanted to ignore his oldest friend on the planet just because of her slightly lower birth-grade.

Sol would reach the Clear grade soon enough, and her traits were more useful to Percy. Beacon and Command didn’t really affect him, but Clarity and Multitasking worked like weaker versions of his mindsets that synergized well with his abilities. Having access to both had accelerated his other projects on Remior and across the universe.

The influence of the traits was small enough that Percy wouldn’t have tied up a cord just for that, but having access to an Elemental Source had been more than enough reason to keep possessing Sol.

A few decades into their training, the female Melodian had mastered the equivalent of the Advanced Soul Control spell, though she didn’t possess a mental-type Decree to register it. Even a full century of training hadn’t been enough for her to comprehend her foundational concept. She could draw on the myriapede’s help, in addition to her traits and Percy’s Divine Spark mutation, but she didn’t have access to Percy’s mental resources. Doh was even further behind, though he was probably progressing much faster than the average demigod.

Meanwhile, Percy had already upgraded the Masterful spell to the foundational concept, but had remained in the Mirror Lake because he still needed to comprehend the concept of Permanence. He hadn’t decided whether to stay for the other two auxiliary concepts afterwards.

Zoris had claimed that it was generally a waste of time for a mortal to comprehend auxiliary concepts that they didn’t have blessings for, because they could do that much faster after attaining divinity. However, other mortals couldn’t stack as many advantages as Percy to accelerate their training. He wouldn’t try to comprehend everything before forging his internal world, but it might not hurt to keep practicing long enough to help Sol and Doh comprehend their own concepts while borrowing their traits.

Regardless of his reasons for staying there, he’d had plenty of opportunities to talk to the myriapede.

The creature had repeatedly refused to reveal the locations of any other Elemental Sources, claiming that it would have felt like a betrayal of its kin, even if it had just led Percy to a non-sapient Source. However, the Spectral Broodmother had agreed after some pestering to guide Percy to the place that he had desperately needed to visit: the site of the original World Tree’s destruction. The colossal plant had already been killed and chopped up into pieces, so it wasn’t like Percy could make the situation any worse.

The myriapede had impressed a faint sense of the location onto the fragment of its body that it had infused into Percy’s soul while granting him the Command trait. The result had been even weaker than Micky’s or Nephthys’ connection to their home worlds, and far less enduring. Left alone, the feeling would likely have faded within seconds.

Thankfully, the Broodmother had kept refreshing the impression in the wisp possessing Sol while a second clone had travelled through the soul plane, with Dream Resonance keeping both clones synchronized with Percy’s body.

The impromptu navigation system hadn’t been perfect, but Percy hadn’t gone into that mission entirely blind either. The scattered clues he’d collected during his cosmic survey had already narrowed the search to a couple of possible galactic clusters. None of the people he had spied on had explicitly pointed him to his destination, but they had mentioned various battlefields where the peak factions had fought in the past, regions that were more closely monitored, and other such clues. Cross-referencing that information with the direction provided by the myriapede had allowed him to single out the most likely location with a reasonable level of confidence.

The bigger problem had been finding something to possess once he arrived. The World Tree had died a very long time ago. The rampaging Ancient that had housed the plant had been destroyed too, along with the creatures that had lived on its surface.

If nothing had survived, Percy would have needed to find a host in the nearest inhabited solar system and cover the remaining distance physically, using a spaceship or his own magic. Depending on how far away that was, the journey could have taken centuries or millennia.

Still, this had been his best lead, so he’d had no choice but to follow it.

Against all odds, he’d eventually felt a pull on his soul from something close to where the Broodmother had pointed him. Possibly within the same solar system, though pinpointing the physical location of his wisps with that much accuracy remained difficult, even with his Star Atlas.

The attraction had been so weak that he’d nearly missed it.

Its source had been a tiny Brown creature, with a soul so fragile that even its impending death had barely registered. Percy had never tried possessing anything that small before, but he hadn’t had much of a choice, since there hadn’t been anything else in the area – just more creatures of presumably the same species.

He had torn chunks off his wisp until there had barely been anything left, suffering through a lot of pain and disorientation to shrink his clone as much as possible. He had then compressed the remainder even further, trying to squeeze himself within the creature’s spectral wounds, his every move threatening to crush his host’s soul.

The good news was that Percy no longer needed to equip his soul clones with fragments of his spatial seal, as he could access the contents of the storage device directly through the cord. The seal was somewhat malleable due to being embedded within Percy’s soul, but it would never have fit within the creature’s tiny frame.

Upon stabilizing his host’s condition, Percy had tried to make sense of his surroundings. Calling the creature’s senses poor would have been an understatement, but unfolding his Merciful Spring domain had given him a good read of his situation.

He had possessed some kind of alien worm, probably about half as long as his pinkie. The creature had apparently lived within cracks in a piece of magical wood with the same jade-like texture as the World Tree saplings – which had been excellent news for Percy. It had been proof that he’d arrived exactly where he’d needed to be.

However, the worm’s home had been far darker than the saplings Percy had seen, and almost entirely devoid of life. Tiny pockets of life mana had lingered on, scattered across the material, with creatures like Percy’s host apparently surviving by travelling from pocket to pocket and consuming the mana.

It had been difficult to reconcile the decrepit state of the material with the enormous tree that had once bathed the entire surface of its planet in its radiance.

Then again, it was beyond impressive that so many scraps of vitality had persisted within the World Tree’s dead wood for hundreds of thousands of years after its demise, and that they could still sustain an entire ecosystem of tiny organisms.

Perhaps Percy should have expected nothing less from the Source of the life affinity.

Sending soul-freezing ice mana and spiritual blood had required almost as much care as entering his host had. A careless surge could have frozen the creature’s fragile soul solid. Percy had taken his sweet time, drawing what he’d needed in small amounts using both his cord and spatial seal, while protecting the worm’s body with both of his domains.

He’d also had to regularly feed the creature some phantom mana to keep it from starving, as he had inadvertently robbed it of the ability to live off the pockets of life mana in its surroundings. The Moirais’ Decree had kept absorbing the green traces long before the worm’s body could. Thankfully, the creature had still been a beast, despite its pathetic size, so its first core and body hadn’t been very picky.

Eventually, Percy had managed to form his first sentry. Phasing the construct out of his wooden prison, he had scanned the area even more thoroughly, getting a better feel for where he had landed.

The piece of wood had felt downright colossal due to his host’s size and relative immobility, but it had actually only been a few hundred metres across. Far larger than most mundane plants, yet hardly worth mentioning compared to the towering Tree whose trunk had pierced through the clouds in the vision.

A mere splinter of its bark had been the worm’s entire world.

It had been lodged in a patch of hardened dirt at the bottom of a colossal crater. The crater had resembled a sphere with its upper third missing. The diameter at its widest cross-section and the height of the surrounding ridges easily approached two thousand kilometres.

The sight had made Percy shudder, because he’d instantly understood what the crater really was. He’d never forget the sight of the World Tree growing out of the rampaging Ancient’s eye socket like a tiny weed. Nor would he forget the sight of the three-headed monstrosity’s body shattering into pieces under the merciless assault of the peak factions.

That had been where Percy had found himself: within the body of a tiny worm, crawling in the heart of a forgotten splinter of bark, buried inside a fragment of a Celestial’s skull, drifting in the void.