Chapter 848 – Remior’s golden century – A humbling adventure (Patreon)

Percy had paused for a few minutes to absorb the strange scene, humbled by the scale of it all.

None of that had been new information per se, as he’d already known about the slumbering Ancients for years, and had even watched one of them get destroyed through the Spectral Broodmother’s memories. Still, it was one thing to watch the three-headed monstrosity fight from afar, and another to find himself smaller than a speck of dust inside the broken Celestial’s eye socket.

Decades of peace had gradually made Percy somewhat complacent. While he’d never stopped working hard to attain his goals, his rapid growth and unchallenged status on Remior had inevitably dulled his sense of weakness.

The sheer enormity of the destroyed Ancient’s remains had served as a sharp reminder that Percy still had a very long way to go. Reaching the peak of the Colour realm was nothing but the first step up a tall ladder.

But he had shaken himself out of his awe soon enough. He hadn’t gone to all the trouble of locating the dead World Tree just to sightsee.

Unfortunately, the dying splinter hadn’t met Percy’s requirements either. It had degraded so thoroughly that it was unlikely to take root even without the suppression of its thirteen siblings.

Percy needed something fresher and healthier.

The peak factions had probably looted or destroyed every sizeable chunk of the original World Tree, leaving behind only ruined splinters like the one Percy had found. They might have secured additional pieces in hidden vaults, ready to grow into replacement first-generation saplings if any of the existing trees were destroyed. But Percy knew he wouldn’t be getting his hands on those anytime soon.

His best bet had been to search the ravaged battlefield for anything buried and overlooked within the floating debris.

Providing the fragile soul clone with enough spiritual blood to form an army of sentries had been a slow and agonizing process. Percy had been forced to possess two additional worms to speed up the flow of mana and keep the mission going if one of his hosts died.

Percy had damaged his wisps so severely that they would have struggled to function by themselves, but their compromised mental faculties hadn’t mattered. Dream Resonance had allowed him to control them from his main body.

Even with three clones working together, Percy had spent several months creating enough sentries to fill Micky’s increased capacity.

Back when the Huehuan had evolved to Violet and developed the Giant Body mutation, his maximum capacity for sentries had tripled, and the maximum size of each construct had increased by the equivalent of two grades.

The number of sentries Micky could sustain seemed to depend on the grades of all three of his cores. His beast affinity contributed the most because of its higher grade, while his gravity affinity had only begun contributing once he’d developed the Giant Body and Dead Wintersteel Elemental mutations.

The maximum size of each sentry, meanwhile, apparently scaled only with the grade of his beast core. Obtaining the Giant Body mutation had boosted the constructs’ size by an additional grade, but that had been a one-time benefit. The grade of his gravity core didn’t seem to affect their size.

At the time of Percy’s search, Micky had been capable of creating up to three hundred elephant-sized sentries, thirty house-sized sentries, three sentries as big as Violet beasts, or an equivalent mix of different sizes.

Making the constructs smaller than that was still possible – and often preferable for reconnaissance – but didn’t increase Micky’s capacity by much. Shrinking them below the size of a person’s fist still severely shortened the range of their sensory domains.

With three hundred sentries at his disposal and recent upgrades extending their sensory range, Percy could have scanned the entire surface of multiple planets in a single day – which was one of the reasons he had managed to locate so many greater springs in a mere century.

However, the interior of a planet was hundreds of times larger than the thin layer Percy’s sentries usually scanned along its surface. Solid material also limited the reach of his senses, even with the Internal Sight he’d gained from upgrading his physique. And his goal hadn’t been to search a single, intact planet, but countless pieces of a fragmented Ancient scattered across an entire solar system.

After searching every patch of dirt within the Celestial’s broken head and finding nothing of note, Percy had used his willpower to carve a cube of wood from the splinter. He had then launched it out of the giant eye socket, ferrying his three hosts across the void.

Propelling the makeshift spaceship around the solar system had been tedious. With no air resistance, building up speed over time hadn’t been particularly difficult. The trouble had been the sheer distance between one piece of floating debris and the next.

Percy had spent an entire decade orbiting the local star and searching through the thick band of space occupied by the broken Ancient’s remains.

Frequent changes of course had been troublesome, but Percy’s sentries had been far more manoeuvrable than the dying home of his hosts, and he had been capable of controling the constructs from over a hundred thousand kilometres away.

Despite his advantages, he had only managed to search through a relatively thin ring of space. It encircled the star at a distance of around eighty million kilometres and measured roughly two million kilometres across in both width and height. It was only a tiny fraction of the solar system, though Percy had estimated that most of the Ancient’s pieces had remained within that region. The region’s volume was roughly a billion times that of a planet, though most of it was empty space that his sentries had simply ignored. Only solid objects had needed a closer look.

Percy had found many recognizable pieces of the Celestial’s body, such as several clawed hands, an intact head, and a few chunks of its legs and torso. However, many of the orbiting chunks of stone had been harder to identify. Some might have come from the destroyed Ancient, while others might have been ordinary asteroids, drifting through the system since before the war.

With no way to tell the fragments apart, Percy had been forced to carefully search everything in his path.

He’d found dozens of additional splinters of wood like the one his hosts had originated from, with some harbouring tiny organisms of their own. However, none had been healthy enough to grow into a new first-generation sapling.

Percy hadn’t been deterred.

Had the mission failed, he would have had to figure out how to steal one of the existing saplings from the peak factions, or look for another solution to his lifespan problem. But he’d wanted to exhaust this approach before giving up. Committing all of his sentries to the project had forced him to pause his cosmic survey for an entire decade, but that had been a small price to pay for a shot at restoring his shortened lifespan.

During his eleventh year of searching the system, it had finally happened.

He’d nearly ignored a large chunk of stone because it hadn’t looked like part of the Ancient. Yet somewhere inside it, he’d detected faint traces of spirituality and life mana. After phasing a sentry into the asteroid, he had found it. Intact, brimming with vitality, and just barely small enough to send back to Remior through the seal.

The only downside was that its soul had still been slightly dimmer than that of the Brown worms that Percy had possessed. Weak enough that injecting it with a clone had seemed impossible at that time. However, the gap had been narrow enough that a few decades of watering the object with his spiritual blood would bridge it.

Back in the present, Percy let go of the seed and allowed the cut in his palm to heal.

‘It’s looking much better than it was when I first found it,’ he thought.

He could probably force a piece of his soul into the seed on the spot, though a simple possession wouldn’t be enough for what he needed. He would have to find something else to put inside it, as well as a good place to plant it.

Thankfully, he was already working on both of those requirements.

Just as he was about to check up on the associated mental pockets, Micky spoke through their connection, sounding quite rattled. ‘Percy! Are you seeing this? Remior’s sun has turned blue all of a sudden! Everyone in East Coast City is panicking!’

‘It’s not just Remior,’ Nephthys corrected the Huehuan. ‘Check the rest of our soul clones out.’

Heeding the wasp’s advice, Percy allowed his attention to shift to the rest of his mental pockets and peer through the eyes of various creatures he had possessed across the universe. Some were located on planets with a single sun, like Remior’s, while others had multiple suns or even a starlit night sky shining over their heads.

It was the same scene everywhere.

It didn’t even make sense, because most of those stars were located several lightyears away from the eyes of Percy’s hosts. The changes in colour shouldn’t have become visible at the same time.

But there was no denying what Micky and Nephthys had reported. Seemingly ignoring the very laws of the universe, every single star across the cosmos appeared to have simultaneously turned blue in every observer’s vision!