Chapter 863 – Five (Patreon)

The cyclone spat the yeti, clad in spiritual blood, above the clouds and into a clear sky. Sunlight glinted off the sentry’s battered exterior. It marked a pleasant break from the hellish environment that they had suffered through over the past few days, though it only lasted for a handful of seconds before gravity took over.

A wave of relief rushed over Percy as he read the notification. He could do without the hassle of challenging the cyclone a second time. Legba’s Decree might save his life one day, so it was nice that he wouldn’t have to delay its acquisition.

As eager as he was to examine his prize more carefully, he first had to stabilize his host. The poor yeti was still in freefall, accelerating toward the ground a few hundred metres away from the cyclone.

Borrowing a final trickle of spiritual blood from Micky, Percy restored the sentry’s appearance in case the natives were watching them. Once he looked like a Polarian demigod again, he used his domains to slow his host’s descent and landed gently on the snow.

‘Should we try activating the new Decree?’ Micky asked, the excitement in his voice matching Percy’s.

‘I don’t think we need to do anything,’ Nephthys pointed out in disbelief as their Status swallowed the seed of the new Decree on its own.

[Overlapping functionality detected. Calibrating Phoebe’s Decree.]

‘That’s new.’ Percy frowned. ‘Every other time, Phoebe’s Decree had left the others alone until I manually activated them. This is the first time it’s devoured another Decree without being prompted. It seems to be growing bolder…’

‘Do you think it’s becoming sentient?’ the Huehuan asked.

‘Maybe.’ Percy shrugged, not daring to rule out that possibility.

The thought of having some independent entity develop sentience inside his head was quite unsettling, but it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Percy’s Status had saved him from Baphomet’s mind control, so he was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt until he talked to Phoebe about it. Perhaps his latest acquisition would also help the titaness with her own project.

Unlike when they had acquired Ningirima’s Decree, the notification had said nothing about Percy’s Status remaining partially unavailable during the assimilation. Consuming other mental-type Decrees had clearly become almost effortless by now, so they might not even need to return to Remior to access the new features. Keeping the clone’s mind synchronized with the main body’s had likely helped.

But Percy wasn’t in a rush to play with his new toy. He’d waited decades to claim it, so he could wait a bit longer. He had to deal with the natives and his host first.

After making his way back to the gate, Percy thanked the guards once more for their help, while internally apologizing to them for whatever trouble his deception might bring them in the next couple of weeks.

He took off towards the north pole, planning to return the yeti to its home and compensate it generously for its assistance. Only when clouds were rushing past and the landscape was shifting far beneath his borrowed body did he turn his attention to his upgraded Decree.

He tried to open his Status, and was instantly greeted with another round of notifications that confirmed his earlier suspicions.

[Calibration complete.]

[Congratulations! Your mutation has evolved: Saint’s Eye -> God’s Eye!]

‘God’s Eye… such an ambitious name!’ Micky exclaimed with a mental chuckle.

‘If it does what I think it does, it’s quite fitting,’ Percy argued while studying the changes to his sensory domain.

The first thing he noticed was that his new mutation had affected more than his current clone. His main body, the clone possessing his familiar, and all the others had experienced similar changes at the exact same time.

The range of Percy’s senses had increased by around thirty percent, but the biggest change was that everything looked slightly different through his Mana Sense.

Percy had been capable of identifying a person’s affinity for a very long time, simply by scanning their cores. However, he could now spot additional minute details that had previously eluded him.

‘There seem to be three distinct “textures” coexisting within my soul core,’ he realized.

It reminded Percy of when he had first studied pre-casting using Micky’s ice affinity and learned how to tweak the ratio of water, air, and ice mana within the composite element. Except that soul mana couldn’t be broken down into simpler elements.

Were those textures the auxiliary concepts present within his mana? One of them did seem to be overpowering the other two. Was that the Blessing of Permanence?

Paying closer attention to his other cores, Percy spotted a pattern. Each of his rare or special affinities consisted of three distinct textures, while Micky’s and Nephthys’ composite elements consisted of nine. The cores that contained blessings were clearly unbalanced, with one auxiliary concept dominating the rest. Meanwhile, the beast cores contained dozens of textures, though all but three were extremely faint.

‘What about foundational concepts? Do they not have a unique texture of their own?’

Perhaps comprehending a foundational concept was simply equivalent to lesser mastery of each of its auxiliary concepts. It was impossible to create fire mana that wasn’t hot, unless one intentionally withheld the concept of Heat from the element. Doing so would require complete mastery of that concept – just as supercharging the flames to make them even hotter would.

Percy kept studying his mana, soon discovering a bunch of other things.

Each of his unstable affinity fusions seemed to contain a set of three textures for each elemental component. Phantom and dream mana consisted of six textures each, drawn from different combinations of the pure, soul, and mind affinities.

Percy’s memory amethyst contained nine different concepts like Micky’s ice mana, but their structure was less organized. He could tell that his tri-elemental fusion contained three unrelated sets of concepts, while the Huehuan’s ice mana exhibited a stricter hierarchy. The three auxiliary concepts of the ice affinity seemed to envelop and dominate the other six, which belonged to the common elements.

‘Interesting. The difference between stable and unstable affinity fusions seems to be that unstable elements don’t have any concepts specific to them,’ Percy mused.

‘Percy… this is massive!’ Nephthys exclaimed upon coming to terms with their new ability. ‘Even as a deity, I wasn’t able to perceive the concepts within my mana with such clarity. I know that the mutation is called “God’s Eye”, but I promise you that every Concept mage in the universe would lose their mind if they learned about this power.’

Percy nodded, his grin widening back on Remior.

This was precisely why he had targeted this particular Decree in the first place. Every other mental-type Decree he’d added to his Status had upgraded his ocular mutation and granted him the means to perceive all sorts of new things, so he had predicted that something similar would happen with this one.

Being able to directly perceive the presence and relative intensity of a concept didn’t automatically boost Percy’s comprehension of it, but studying how the strange textures changed within his mana as he worked on his Elemental Control spells should greatly accelerate his training. It might even help him make heads or tails of the missing auxiliary concept of the pure affinity or the concepts of the beast affinity that nobody seemed to comprehend without visiting its Elemental Source.

‘Not just that… This might allow me to identify which concepts a god has mastered simply by glancing at their mana or internal world. It will also help my Greater Foresight spell remain relevant while fighting deities,’ Percy speculated.

As he examined his various cores and pieces of equipment to further explore the nature of his Conceptual Sight, Percy spotted a few textures that he struggled to identify.

‘Weird… this one doesn’t seem to be tied to any specific affinity. All nine cores in our main bodies, along with their mana networks, contain a little bit of it, while our clones don’t,’ he said, drawing Micky’s and Nephthys’ attention to the oddity.

‘That is indeed strange,’ the wasp acknowledged. ‘What’s the connective tissue?’

‘My bloodline?’ Percy wondered.

‘That doesn’t sound right,’ Micky argued. ‘If this concept had anything to do with your bloodline, why would Nephthys and I have it but not your soul clones? Try using Circulation with one of our beast hosts.’

Percy raised an eyebrow, doing as his friend instructed using the yeti’s body. As soon as the flow of beast mana intensified within the creature’s veins, the same strange texture appeared within it, though it was fainter than in his main body.

Percy deactivated the external component of the Carnival for a couple of seconds and watched the mysterious concept’s intensity within his mana drop to the same level as the yeti’s.

‘An external concept…!’ Percy gasped. ‘That has to be what this is!’

‘Is this how our deities managed to fend off Rhaziel’s people?’ the Huehuan asked. ‘Does our boosting art lead to the comprehension of an external concept?’

‘That would certainly answer a few questions.’ Percy nodded.

He’d long hypothesized that the Dance worked differently for deities than it did for mortals. After all, gods didn’t possess mana cores and channels, so they wouldn’t be able to use the boosting art in its normal form.

Rhaziel’s people had also struggled to steal the technique from Micky’s ancestors until the Huehuans were betrayed by their own. Percy had found it strange that Micky’s people had managed to keep the technique secret for so long, considering how easily Machaon and the Great Houses had stolen it from Percy. Perhaps the external concept was a lot harder for an enemy deity to reverse-engineer without having studied the underlying spell.

‘Percy, try examining our willpower with this new sense,’ Nephthys suggested.

Percy gathered both of his domains around the yeti’s body, stacking and concentrating them in a thin layer outside Micky’s spiritual blood. Then, he scanned the result with his Conceptual Sight, finding yet another nascent texture trying to form.

‘This must be the concept of Willpower that Obatala spoke about,’ the wasp said. ‘If you look at it carefully, we seem to be about as close to comprehending that one as we are the external concept of Micky’s people.’

‘Guys, there’s more!’ the Huehuan said. ‘They’re far less pronounced than the other two, but there’s a hint of a distinct texture that’s only present in our enchantments, and another that only exists within our Cradles.’

‘The first one must be the same concept that Metatron has mastered,’ Percy guessed. ‘But what’s the second one about? Does our boosting art lead to not just one, but two external concepts?’

Thinking of something, he pulled a cauldron out of his spatial seal and began brewing some Gloomy Dawn while scanning the concoction with his Conceptual Sight. Yet another strange texture appeared within the spherical vessel, though it was even fainter than the two that Micky had spotted.

Percy chuckled at the insanity of it all.

All this time, he had collected and studied various techniques from all over the universe, doing everything he could to grow stronger. His efforts had been rewarded with combat strength that few mortals could dream of, though Percy had often wondered how much of it he would be able to retain after his ascension.

While he fully intended to infuse multiple elements into his internal world and more than make up for the losses, Percy had worried that some of the work he’d put into his Ultimate Arts would eventually go to waste. Evidently, even Percy himself had failed to appreciate the absurdity of the path he’d been walking on.

Without even realizing it, he’d been working on as many as five external concepts all along!