The Lone Wanderer

Chapter 583 – Encroachment

Using his Wild Art, Percy watched the first group of cancerous projections emerge inside the oversized container, most of them concentrated near the exterior of the cauldron that his mutated eyes had an easier time observing.

Pouring his willpower into the spherical vessel, he allowed it to spread evenly across its volume, rapidly covering his previous blind spots. Almost immediately, he felt two separate channels of information flow into his mind.

The first was coming directly from his eyes. It was far more detailed than the other, encompassing the temperature gradient of the liquid, the different grades of the ingredients captured by his innate Mana Sense, as well as their affinities that he could recognize through his regular vision.

The second channel was barebones by comparison, as it only informed him of the physical locations, shapes, and sizes of the solid lumps – much like a three-dimensional sense of touch. However, his domain covered the entire cauldron – not just its exterior.

It was like two kingdoms splitting the liquid world into an inner globe and an outer spherical shell – the first one bland and monochrome, the other rich with more colours than the average person could even fathom.

At the boundary between the two kingdoms, a third, thinner layer existed, its contents populated largely through inference. There, Percy’s Wild Art reigned supreme. Taking advantage of both streams of concrete information, his brain tried to passively fill in the gaps in his knowledge.

Fuelled by the virtuous feedback loop between Percy’s mutation, his Status, and the spell, the colourful region slowly encroached upon the monochrome kingdom, imparting new information into the very depths of the cauldron that were supported solely through deductions and calculations rather than direct observation. Those deductions then rippled back outwards, allowing even the projections in the outskirts of the coloured kingdom to grow more accurate.

Every now and then, Percy made a mistake, or a part of his concoction followed a route that didn’t conform to his predictions, forcing him to discard many of his guesses and assumptions. Whenever that happened, the monochrome region snapped back with a vengeance, its volume expanding as the outer shell lost some of its colour.

Like a pair of competing armies, the two territories fought a constant tug of war of colour and knowledge, the boundary oscillating back and forth with every new development in the concoction.

A few minutes later, Percy was done pacifying the beast mana.

Seeing as his Status had yet to register the upgrade, he twisted the lid off his cauldron, tossing the redirection ingredients in before beginning the second step of his brew.

In the first few weeks following Paracelsus’s advice, Percy had struggled to incorporate his domain into his concoctions, though he had slowly improved since. The trick had been to take things one step at a time.

Percy had stopped trying to actively manipulate the ingredients with his willpower, using it only as a way to sense the contents of his cauldron. It wasn’t until two months later that he’d felt confident enough to move on.

The next thing he’d tried had been to stir the liquid with his domain, only attempting to compress the ingredients a couple of weeks after that, and finally to cool them down or heat them up by the third month.

He’d also discovered that manipulating the ingredients with his willpower wasn’t as simple as he’d imagined. Apparently, it was still easier to use the enchantments on his cauldron whenever he could, because pouring mana into a rune took less effort than to manually induce a precise current of physical force with his domain.

Consequently, Percy had been forced to navigate a delicate balance between relying on his cauldron’s runes for most actions and reserving his willpower for only a select few spots in the very depths of the concoction that were harder for the enchantments to affect.

‘This might be it,’ he thought, holding his breath as the colourful kingdom advanced deeper into the cauldron than any prior attempt.

Sorcerer’s Guidance did more than provide Percy with information. It allowed him to eliminate multiple potential lumps at once, gently steering the entire brewing session toward a more desirable path – hence the spell’s name.

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Meanwhile, his current method was a lot more aggressive. Equipped with far more information about the concoction – be it in the exterior, the interior, or even in the future – as well as many additional tools at his disposal, Percy attacked the cancerous masses by the dozens, methodically eliminating entire groups of them with unprecedented ease. Years of experience informed his actions, always pushing him toward the most effective choices as he brute-forced his way to the end of the brewing session.

He couldn’t be certain, but he felt that redirecting the royal jelly had taken less than five minutes. If he was right, it meant that he had just surpassed his fastest brewing time. Even so, Phoebe’s Decree remained silent, prompting him to move on to the next step: the first round of deattunement.

A new battle commenced as another pair of coloured and colourless kingdoms formed inside the cauldron. Both regions were far smaller than before, since Percy had fewer ingredients to work with.

The amount that Nephthys and her mother sent him every day wasn’t nearly enough to fill up the cauldron to begin with, which was why he generally waited a couple of days to amass enough ingredients before commencing a brewing session. The extra doses that he had accumulated over the past few months had given him enough leeway to manage his time more effectively.

That said, the losses that he had inevitably incurred during the previous alchemic steps had reduced the liquid’s volume to the point that it didn’t even fill up three-quarters of the cauldron.

The good news was that this played in Percy’s favour. The smaller battlefield allowed him to peer deeper into the concoction. The synergistic effects of his developing spell caused the coloured region to advance farther and farther toward the centre of the container, threatening to fully annex its monochrome counterpart with every violent wave.

It also seemed to finally push the Wild Art past some invisible threshold, his Status notifying him of his success.

[Congratulations! Your spell has evolved: Wild Art: Sorcerer’s Guidance – Refined -> Wild Art: Sovereign’s Encroachment – Masterful!]

The faintest hint of a smile formed on Percy’s lips, though he didn’t let himself get too distracted, as the brewing session was still ongoing. Even so, he couldn’t help but spare a sliver of his attention to think about the upgrade.

‘Finally! The Wild Art has basically caught up to my eyes,’ he thought with glee. He would probably need to find another Decree and get his Status to evolve again if he wanted to find inspiration to elevate the spell a third time.

On another note, he was a little surprised that his Wild Art had jumped straight to Masterful. Especially since it had previously evolved to Refined in a single step. Usually, his spells got stuck on at least one of the two tiers for an additional upgrade.

Then again, Sovereign’s Encroachment was the culmination of not only Percy’s alchemic principles, magiscript and mutation, but also the equivalent of a Violet’s domain. Viewed from that angle, anything below Masterful wouldn’t have made sense.

Regardless, he shoved those thoughts to the back of his mind for now, focusing on completing his brew. As happy as he was about his accomplishment, there was no reason to waste a perfectly good batch of royal jelly.

Following the spell upgrade, he found it even easier to force the colourful region deeper into the cauldron, though he still failed to cover its entire volume. Perhaps he could have done that with a smaller tool, but he preferred to use cauldrons at the very edge of his capabilities, so that he would constantly push himself to improve.

Along with the expansion of the coloured region, his predictions of the future also grew more accurate, though they still weren’t as reliable as the shadows that Greater Foresight produced in combat. Consequently, Percy had no choice but to keep addressing multiple solid lumps at once, directing the entire concoction toward more favourable outcomes instead of getting hung up on any individual projection.

Soon, he completed the first round of deattunement, the liquid stabilizing into a batch of potentially drinkable elixir – albeit without the benefits of the crystallized mana that would later elevate it into Gloomy Dawn.

Percy could have paused here as the elixirs could be stored for later, but he opted to complete the entire recipe, partly because he needed to replenish his dwindling stash, and partly to get used to the Masterful spell.

Two more alchemic steps later, he felt that he had grown even faster, and that he had ended up with a few extra drops of Gloomy Dawn, though the difference was negligible. Obviously, it would take a few more days for him to reach his new limit.

Shrugging, he went back to work.

It took his brewing yield a little longer to stabilize than he would have liked, because he couldn’t focus exclusively on alchemy. He could only devote his nights to it, as his days were spent on his lessons, the magical formation and the knockoff cauldrons.

Not letting his eagerness get the better of him, Percy fell back into his routine, slowly progressing toward multiple goals. It wasn’t until two weeks later that his brewing yield stopped climbing at around sixty-four percent.

The improvement was admittedly modest, but he wasn’t deterred.

He knew that Phoebe had to be grinning from ear to ear if she was still spying on him, because he had just surpassed her highest yield as a mortal. At this rate, he might genuinely cross seventy percent by the time he became a god, eventually competing with the very best to master the mysterious concept of alchemy.

‘For now, I can strike another task off my checklist,’ he thought.

He could start spending his nights on the cauldrons. The mana-gathering array and his alchemy course were almost finished too. However, the next development came not from his projects on Remior, but from the last of his clones in the Vault.