Chapter 858 – Fourteenth (1) (Patreon)

Percy was experienced enough with soul magic in general and his own bloodline in particular to tell that everything was going well within the seed.

His wisp had initially been easy to distinguish from the silver souls of the seed and the Yaksha due to the darker grey hue granted by his blessing and the bright markings engraved onto its surface due to his mutation. However, it had only taken the three souls a couple of minutes to merge into a seamless new entity that had expanded to fill the entirety of its jade-like body. Perhaps the nascent Elemental Source of the life affinity was simply better at adapting to new conditions than even the average beast, or maybe it was the Yaksha’s soul that had created the perfect bridge between the clone and its new body.

Still, Percy hadn’t received any notifications. The seed was more than healthy enough to sprout, and Percy could sense its eagerness to do precisely that, though it didn’t take a genius to figure out what the problem was.

He sent out another clone toward the alien planet with the intention of possessing his new familiar. He also fed three droplets of dream mana into each cord, so that he would be able to sense what was happening more clearly. The seed itself wasn’t conscious enough to communicate, so Percy would need something stronger than the standard connection to understand what it was experiencing and assist it accordingly.

‘There they are... thirteen powerful wills, suppressing its growth from the outside,’ he thought with a frown.

He couldn’t pinpoint their exact directions, nor estimate the distance separating them from his familiar, because the connection between the saplings didn’t seem to be physical, or even spiritual. Was it karmic? Conceptual? Something else?

Either way, the familiar’s older siblings refused to yield even a centimetre to the new plant. Percy wasn’t sure whether any of them was sentient, but each oozed confidence that it was the true heir of the World Tree and seemed offended by the very notion of sharing its position with another.

‘Do you think we’ll have to destroy one of them before we can even begin?’ Micky asked. ‘I suppose the seed should be fine for thousands of years like this. It already survived for way longer than that before we found it, and its current soul is even more robust. Maybe we should just close the pit and leave the familiar hidden there until we can make room for it to grow.’

‘Screw that!’ Percy spat. ‘We’ll seal the pit once the second clone arrives, but we’re not delaying anything. We’ve been planning this for way too long to remain stuck with an inert seed buried in the middle of nowhere.’

‘How do we even fight an invisible suppression that we don’t fully understand?’ Nephthys wondered.

Percy shrugged. ‘The suppression is not absolute. Remember that one faction has already succeeded in overcoming it. I’m sure that the other twelve saplings wanted to snatch up all the free real estate when Zath’maan’s tree got destroyed, yet the people of that faction managed to replace it with their own sapling.’

‘That’s an assumption,’ Micky reminded him. ‘We still don’t know if that’s what happened. They might have simply stolen the entire tree. Even if you’re right, there’s a big difference between replacing one of the thirteen saplings and creating a fourteenth. We’re trying to break through what could very well be a hard limit.’

‘Maybe,’ Percy admitted. ‘But we won’t know for sure unless we push harder. Let’s wait for the second clone to reach the seed first. We’ll clearly need all the help we can get.’

The trip only lasted a few hours through the soul plane, though they felt like years to the Lone Wanderer’s aspects. That said, they hadn’t wasted their time. They’d discussed various strategies they could attempt, and Percy had even convinced Micky to return to one of their main research facilities in Bogside City, so that he could transfer Clear mana of any affinity to the seed if necessary.

When the clone finally arrived, Percy coated the wisp with phantom mana to prevent it from adhering too strongly to the seed, before wrapping the clone’s soul around the familiar’s.

Perhaps allowing the clone and the familiar to merge completely, thus turning the plant directly into an aspect, would give it the push it needed to overcome the suppression. However, Percy would rather exhaust every other option before resorting to that. Even if he was willing to permanently invite the new sapling into his soul, he knew that giving it some time to discover and develop its own abilities before fusing with it would benefit them all.

The clone slid across the surface of the seed’s soul, coiling its ethereal cord around the familiar’s and upgrading Dream Resonance to Dream Harmony. Once the new connection was ready, Percy briefly considered getting rid of the rabbit clone standing watch outside the pit, since the latter didn’t provide much further value, but ultimately decided to keep it around until they figured out what to do with the seed. It wasn’t like they urgently needed to free the cord up.

Using his domains, he pushed the dirt into the hole again, burying the seed. The familiar’s magical body shuddered with unmistakable joy as it felt the moist ground pressing on it from above, clearly appreciating the new conditions. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough for it to germinate.

‘Alright... let’s start throwing things at it until something sticks,’ Percy said, receiving no objection from his soulmates.

He began by transferring a mixture of mundane fertilizers through the seal, pouring them into the soil around the seed. He’d already tested those chemicals on multiple third-generation saplings. He could produce as many of those as he wanted by replanting small pieces harvested from Remior’s second-generation trees, so it hadn’t been too difficult to compare various substances until he found some that worked better on the plants.

Of course, a first-generation sapling didn’t necessarily require the same nutrients as its lesser relatives, and Percy had previously lacked the ability to receive direct feedback from the plants. That was why he had prepared multiple fertilizers and was trying them out one by one and in smaller doses on his familiar.

After settling on a mixture that the seed seemed to devour more enthusiastically, Percy began playing around with the temperature and moisture of the soil. Using his Merciful Spring domain, he could easily generate small amounts of water mana within the dirt. He couldn’t produce fire mana, since neither of his fellow aspects possessed the affinity, but he could replicate the effects of his heating enchantments to a lesser extent without having to draw them.

Percy also kept channelling phantom mana through the cord, trying to capitalize on the greatest advantage that the seed had over its siblings: the vibrant soul that Percy had spent decades reinforcing with spiritual blood, before supplementing it with two other potent wills.

‘It’s working!’ Micky exclaimed. ‘I think there’s something trying to crawl out of our ass!’

Nephthys metaphorically rolled her eyes through their connection. ‘Leaving aside the crass terminology, you’re right. If I’m not mistaken, that part of the seed is called a radicle, and it’s supposed to develop into the sapling’s first roots. But it’s not making it very far into the soil...’

The seed’s nascent root had only managed to dig about three metres into the ground. That might sound like a lot, but the seed measured nearly forty metres from tip to tip, making the growth downright negligible. It felt like a regular plant trying to take root inside a block of concrete, except that Percy had already ensured that the soil surrounding his familiar was soft and moist. The interference was purely magical, and external.

‘Nephthys, keep the temperature and nutrient input constant,’ Percy instructed. ‘Micky, start sending small amounts of Clear mana through the seal, but don’t mix too many types just yet. We need to make sure that the seed likes them, and that they won’t react aggressively with one another.’

‘What affinities should I start with?’ the Huehuan asked.

‘Cycle through mud, earth, water and air for now. Maybe trace amounts of light. And soul, in case its higher grade makes it a better tonic than my own phantom mana.’

‘What about life?’

‘We’ve already poured a lot of that into the soil. We can add more if it runs out, but there’s no need for it yet.’

Micky heeded Percy’s instructions, quickly discovering that the seed currently lacked the ability to absorb any form of light or air mana. The Clear soul mana was indeed slightly more effective at reinforcing the familiar’s soul, but the difference was small enough that the group decided to stick with Percy’s phantom mana. He could channel that into the seed internally, thus preventing it from interfering with the other types.

Mud and water helped a lot more, however. After figuring out the optimal ratio, the Huehuan began maintaining a thin film of the two mana types around the seed.

The trio’s efforts allowed the radicle to quadruple in length, though each additional centimetre of growth felt significantly harder than the previous one. Worse still, Percy was almost sure that the other saplings would force the organic tendril to retract into the seed the moment he and his friends stopped feeding it nutrients and mana.

‘Percy, I don’t think this is going to work,’ Micky said. ‘If we keep this up until we exhaust our mud and water mana reserves, we might double the radicle’s length, but we’ll never get the familiar to grow into anything self-sustaining. And the other trees will just ruin all our hard work.’

‘Hey, who do you think you’re talking to?’ Percy asked, almost offended by his fellow aspect’s doubt. ‘Need I remind you that I’m the universe’s resident expert in reviving dead things? And this one isn’t even dead!’

Despite saying that, Percy was racking all his minds to come up with a solution. They didn’t really need the sapling to grow to full size in one go. It just had to grow large enough that the other thirteen plants wouldn’t be able to stuff it back into its seed – however large it needed to be.

But the Huehuan had raised a good point. Their current approach was just flushing their Clear mana down the toilet. Percy was more than happy to trade not just his mud and water reservoirs, but even the entire facility’s worth of divine mana in exchange for a World Tree familiar, but at this rate, he’d end up with neither.

‘What about time mana?’ Nephthys suggested, causing Percy to raise an eyebrow.