The Lone Wanderer

Chapter 590 – Mimicry

Percy stood in front of a large mirror in his bedroom, examining himself. Orin had already left upon confirming that he was fine, so Percy had decided to finally study his new trait in earnest. Honestly, he wasn’t exactly in the mood to do that, as he was still quite rattled by the unpleasant experience of acquiring Mimicry, but that was all the more reason to distract himself with something fun.

Before focusing on the trait, he pulled up his entire Status, taking a moment to marvel at all the recent changes.

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The Lone Wanderer

Aspects:

[Percival][Mictlantecuhtli]Mana cores:

[Mana core 1P – Yellow – Soul][Mana core 2P – Yellow – Pure][Mana core 1M – Green – Beast][Mana core 2M – Yellow – Ice]Domain:

[Dead Winter – Empowered]Bloodline:

[Clone] – Create a copy of yourself. Effect varies by affinity.Blessing:

[Blessing of Permanence] –Enhance the durability of your soul.Mutations:

[Sovereign’s Eye] –Draws from the cumulative knowledge listed in the Status to enhance one’s vision, allowing them to discern details previously unseen.[Greater Thess’kalan Physique] – Greatly enhances one’s physical strength and the toughness of their body. Greatly enhances one’s resistance to high or low temperatures and sharpens their thermal sense. Greatly enhances one’s resistance to toxins.[Dead Winter Elemental] –Uses ice mana to regenerate, shapeshift and sustain one’s body. Allows every part of one’s body to interact with souls.Spectral traits:

[Weaving] – Boosts one’s proclivity in manipulating one-dimensional structures.[Insomnia] – Eliminates the need for sleep.[Scribing] – Boosts one’s proclivity in expressing meaning onto any written medium.[Mimicry] – Boosts one’s awareness of their physical appearance, as well as their ability to maintain or modify it.Mindsets:

[Ludwick’s Compass] – Set mental checkpoints anywhere in the world. Instinctively track their location as you move away.Spells:

[Spectral Art: Parasitic Connection – Refined][Spectral Art: Internal Magiscript – Masterful][Spectral Art: Cauldron of a Myriad Screams – Masterful][Spectral Art: Instantaneous Formation – Masterful][Wild Art: Sovereign’s Encroachment – Masterful][Hybrid Art: Core Bestowal – Masterful][Ultimate Art: Symphony of a Dead Winter – Extreme]Alchemic principles:

[Extraction] – Separate and condense an ingredient’s essence.[Pacification] – Delay an ingredient’s activation rate.[Redirection] – Adjust an ingredient’s effect.[Deattunement] – Prevent multiple conflicting ingredients from reacting with one another.[Bonding] – Enrich an ingredient with crystallized pure mana.[Restructuring] – Alter an ingredient's phase.[Scaling] – Brew a greater volume of ingredients at once.[Compression] – Elevate an ingredient to the next grade.[Consolidation] – Infuse multiple similar ingredients into a concoction while eliminating the redundant alchemic steps.Decrees:

[Phoebe’s Decree] – Grants access to your Status.[Iapetus’s Decree] – Grants a bloodline.[Moirais’ Decree] – Grants a second mana core.[Metatron’s Decree] – Open a one-way portal to the Vault of Magic at will.[Ea’s Decree (Modified)] – Augments and enhances your Status. Grants the Sovereign’s Eye.[Obatala’s Decree (Modified)] – Augments and enhances your Status. Allows you to effortlessly deploy your domain in its strongest state.___

As was customary by now, Percy’s page had once again grown longer than the last time he read it. Even after all these years, he was still amazed by the wide assortment of strange abilities that he’d developed or otherwise acquired during his travels.

Leaving his new trait aside, the most recent additions had been those related to alchemy: the consolidation principle, his improved cauldron, and his twice-evolved Wild Art. The upgrades had occurred in quick succession, each having contributed to him registering the others, catalysed by external stimuli like his need to brew royal jelly into elixirs or pass his alchemical skills to his students.

Ludwick’s Compass and Internal Magiscript were less recent. Percy had worked on both after acquiring them – improving his understanding of the former while increasing the number of runes he could handle simultaneously with the latter – though his Status had yet to reward his efforts with another upgrade.

‘All in due time,’ he thought, shifting his attention back to the task at hand.

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[Mimicry] – Boosts one’s awareness of their physical appearance, as well as their ability to maintain or modify it.___

Reading the description again, he couldn’t help but frown.

‘Is this even useful to the average person?’

It sure seemed like a dud. Luckily, his situation was a bit different, because his elemental body could theoretically transform into any shape he wanted – something that he had admittedly underutilized due to how difficult it was. Hopefully, Mimicry would synergize extremely well with his Dead Winter Elemental mutation.

In fact, Percy had already noticed the trait’s supernatural influence during his brief chat with Elaine earlier, and he had plenty of ideas on how he could potentially leverage it.

‘First things first… let’s see if there’s anything my human body can gain from it.’

Scanning his reflection from head to toe, he allowed the fiend’s influence to permeate his mind, helping him absorb all the tiny details in his appearance that he normally overlooked.

He felt folds forming on his skin as he creased his forehead in contemplation, as well as his slit pupils narrowing slightly as he examined himself. Tiny beads of sweat spilled out of his pores, gathering into larger ones or rolling along the short hairs across his body.

His frame wasn’t entirely static either, despite his efforts to stand still. His chest rose and fell slowly with every breath, his whole body pulsing even more subtly – yet more frequently – with every heartbeat.

Interestingly enough, his hyper-awareness extended beyond his flesh.

Percy keenly registered the way in which his Cloak shifted with his slightest movement, the tightly woven strands of magical silk bending and wrinkling, mostly near his joints. He even identified a few spots where the grey fabric had started to fray.

It hadn’t been that long since he’d last poured phantom mana into the self-repair enchantments to maintain the construct, but all his thrashing about during the fiend’s absorption must have caused some invisible damage to accumulate.

‘I suppose my clothes are also a part of my appearance,’ he reasoned. ‘Still, this is relatively useless. I wonder if there’s anything more interesting I can do with it.’

Coming up with a few ideas, he concentrated on his eyes again, trying to feel not only the shape and colour of his irises and pupils, but also the various factors affecting them.

Nearly imperceptible streams of phantom mana and willpower constantly flowed through his mutated eyes, fuelling their innate Mana Sense, Soul Vision, and even his ability to perceive domains.

However, that wasn’t everything. There were two additional inputs that simultaneously felt natural and out of place. The first was his blood flow – which he probably shared with every living thing with eyes. Even so, he couldn’t help but think that more blood rushed into his eyes than normal.

It was strange that he could tell, because he hadn’t possessed the Mimicry trait before acquiring his mutation, meaning that he didn’t have anything to compare his current situation to.

‘I guess the increased blood flow is a part of how my Greater Thess’kalan Physique supports my innate thermal vision.’

The second mysterious flow was linked directly to his brain. This was another feature that he probably shared with any living creature that possessed eyes, but Percy knew that his Sovereign’s Eye was more deeply connected to his mind than most people’s due to the way in which it interacted with his Status.

‘That still doesn’t explain what any of this has to do with my appearance or the new trait.’ He frowned. ‘Unless…’

Wanting to try something, he reached into the flow of phantom mana, cutting it off entirely. Almost immediately, his passive Mana Sense and Soul Vision deactivated for the first time since he obtained them in Bogside town. At the same time, the grey light that had dominated his irises after his fusion with Micky faded away to reveal a deep crimson colour, unsettlingly similar to Kassorith’s eyes.

‘Huh… This should be what my eyes would have looked like if not for the other features being more prevalent.’

Emboldened by his success, Percy spent the next few minutes experimenting with his eyes some more. He couldn’t stop the blood flow entirely because they needed it to function, but restricting it slightly removed the red hue as well, reverting his irises to their original, magicless, grey colour.

Reducing or cutting off all the other flows made his slit pupils return to normal, essentially suppressing his ocular mutation entirely. Allowing pure mana to feed into his eyes while preventing just the soul mana from contributing gave them a pale colour like the Atlanteans’.

This was merely the beginning of his tests, however.

Percy quickly discovered that he could withdraw the influence of his blessing from his eyes even more easily than he could from his mana or soul, brightening their dull grey hue and causing them to return to their previous teal colour.

He could even control the extent to which these factors contributed, mixing the colours to shades of pink, deep blue, silver and pretty much anything in between. Even better, he realized that he could achieve all of those surface-level modifications without tampering with the flows too much, essentially allowing him to control the appearance of his eyes without sacrificing any of his magical senses.

Moving on to other body parts, he found that he could control how his other mutation affected him as well. If he focused on his skin, he was able to make it up to a few shades paler, or even introduce a faint scale-like pattern.

He was also strangely aware of how quickly his hair and nails were growing. He was more limited in the way he controlled that – it wasn’t like he could shave and regrow his beard in an instant – but he might be able to accelerate or decelerate the process notably if he focused on it for multiple days.

His ability to modify his appearance extended to less obvious things like his posture, or even the properties of his clothes – albeit within reason. Much like his eyes, he found that he could freely change the colour of his Cloak to pretty much any shade bounded between cyan, silver or grey.

Furthermore, he could fold, stretch, twist, or crunch up any section to make the construct look like an entirely different set of clothes. The fact that he could selectively turn parts of it invisible also helped with the disguise.

All things considered, his new capabilities weren’t without limits. For instance, Percy couldn’t change the colour of his eyes or clothes into something completely unrelated to his mana types – like yellow or green.

Mimicry – much like his other traits – didn’t directly affect the physical world. It merely allowed him to accomplish something that had technically been entirely possible before – if impractical without his new instincts.

‘Well… it’s not the worst trait to have… but isn’t it a little too late for this sort of ability?’ he asked himself, feeling somewhat disappointed.

Mimicry might have been handier a few years ago while Percy had been on the run. A few minor cosmetic changes wouldn’t help him hide his identity given how famous he was now, nor did he need to disguise himself nowadays.

More importantly, it didn’t seem like controlling how often he needed a haircut would make him or his hosts any stronger – which was the main thing he wanted out of his traits.

‘It is what it is. Maybe I’ll find more ways to use it in the future.’ He sighed, though his wry smile eventually morphed into a proper grin. ‘The good news is that my other body should benefit a lot more from the trait.’