The Lone Wanderer

Chapter 591 – Skin (1)

While the human body was studying the Mimicry trait in the Alchemists’ Guild, Micky kept himself busy repairing his humble hut in Bogside town and reapplying the enchantments on the ceiling.

He could have obviously built a much bigger residence if he’d wanted, but his priority had been for the building to resemble his and Nesha’s old place as much as possible – while being a little more functional than the decrepit wooden hut.

He wasn’t planning to stay in the town much longer, so he’d embarked on this project purely for sentimental reasons – and to surprise his girlfriend in case they ever decided to move back here. Hopefully, Phoebe would help him separate his minds before that happened.

By the time he was ready to join the experiments, his counterpart had already granted him a preliminary understanding of their new ability. This was largely why he didn’t even bother to get himself a mirror – Mimicry made him deeply aware of his appearance without him having to gaze at his reflection.

It even allowed him to tell the colour of body parts that he couldn’t directly look at. He wasn’t sure how exactly that was possible. Perhaps, he could infer certain details about himself by associating faint feelings about his posture that one wouldn’t notice normally, subtle sensations on his skin, and his existing knowledge about his body and clothes.

Before trying to do anything new with his trait, he decided to study how it affected his previous capabilities. Taking a few deep breaths, he pushed his boosting art to its limit, absorbing enough ambient mana to cycle through his regular forms.

Skipping only the giant crow – it was too large for the small hut and too similar to its smaller variant anyway – he spent some time switching between human, Huehuan and bird, taking everything in.

‘It’s a little faster and more effortless but the improvement is barely noticeable,’ he concluded.

He shrugged. He hadn’t expected much, because his default forms had already felt as natural as breathing, trait or no trait. If anything, the fact that he had improved at all was testament to how well Mimicry would synergize with his mutation.

Next, he moved on to other shapes.

This wasn’t his first attempt to transform into something different. Right after his fusion with Percy, he had hypothesized that he shouldn’t be limited to just a handful of forms. Humans, Huehuans and crows were already as biologically different as they could be, so he didn’t see any reason why he wouldn’t be able to turn into, say, a dog or a sapient from a different race.

Over the past year, he’d even put some time aside to play around with his mutation, trying to expand his options. His efforts hadn’t been entirely useless, though his success had been limited to just a subset of his previous hosts.

It wasn’t like he couldn’t recall the appearance of other creatures, but seeing was different from feeling, and his hosts’ bodies were the only ones that he had personally inhabited.

To effectively change into a new shape, Micky required a deep understanding of its mechanical aspects: its body structure, the range of motion of its joints, the way the muscles were distributed, and so on. While his elemental body eliminated the need for many biological functions such as breathing or digesting food, he was still restricted by certain physical realities.

Even transforming to his previous hosts was far harder than his own shapes, and not all the creatures that he had possessed were equal, as certain groups felt much more alien than others.

For instance, Micky had a relatively easy time turning into animals native to Remior. After all, they shared certain physiological traits with humans and crows, so the beasts that he had possessed inside the Thirsty Valley had been among his first successes.

Starry Wasps were also rather easy, albeit for an entirely different reason. Despite being native to the same planet, they were admittedly way too different from mammals or birds, as they had exoskeletons rather than bones – among a myriad of other differences. However, Micky had possessed hundreds of thousands of magical wasps of various grades in the past.

Another group that he’d had some success transforming into were sapients. Those from other planets could easily have entirely different internal organs from humans or Huehuans, but Micky had learned a long time ago that sapient creatures often evolved in similar directions.

It wasn’t difficult to figure out why.

Bipedals with a humanoid shape had spare limbs to handle tools and cast spells with. Opposable thumbs made it even easier to hold said tools, and front-facing eyes helped with reading and various other tasks. These traits weren’t universal – Metatron was a sapient pentapus, after all – but Micky didn’t think that it was a coincidence that most of his intelligent hosts had shared similar shapes.

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Beasts from other worlds were by far the hardest to replicate, whether or not he had possessed them in the past. Their physiology was entirely different from the creatures of Remior, and they didn’t even have the similarities that sapients tended to share to anchor Micky’s efforts.

Suffice to say, he had never managed to transform into the floating cat or the frozen lizard – and not for a lack of trying.

That said, shapeshifting into any of his past hosts – even the easier ones – had still been a time consuming and imperfect process. Despite having spent several hours fine-tuning Enki’s or Leo’s appearance, Micky hadn’t been confident that he could fool other Atlanteans or Felmarans.

The grey colour and crystalline texture of his icy body would obviously give him away immediately, but that wasn’t the only problem. Even without that, he was certain that his transformations were riddled with other flaws. More importantly, they would collapse immediately if he tried to fight with them.

‘Let’s see if I can do any better now.’

Strictly speaking, Mimicry also focused on his appearance rather than the physiological aspects of his body, so he didn’t expect its influence to immediately solve the problem.

However, there was clearly a strong correlation between how something was built and how it looked, so perfecting one should help with the other. Coupled with his memories of possessing his hosts, he would hopefully have two legs supporting his efforts rather than one.

Micky decided to start with Gabe’s form. He should be one of the easiest candidates, because he had possessed him twice, and for extended periods of time. Even better, the second possession had been recent.

Sure enough, it only took him a minute or so to transform into his friend. His posture was still humanoid, but the number of digits on his hands and feet dropped to just three, and the arrangement of his internal organs changed drastically.

This was already several times faster than his previous attempts, and Micky wasn’t even remotely done. Feeling his new trait scream in protest to his imperfect transformation, he gave into his supernatural instincts, allowing the Amorphos inside his soul to direct his efforts.

The first thing he did was retract the visual aspects of his blessing, robbing his flesh of its dull grey hue. However, that was merely the beginning.

Not satisfied with the teal colour either, he began replacing the soul-freezing ice mana inside his body with regular ice, rapidly getting rid of its faint silver colour too. Before long, Micky resembled a frozen statue of his friend.

He frowned. ‘Still not good enough.’

His shape felt much closer to Gabe’s than before, but the texture and colour of his skin looked nothing like the man’s transparent flesh. A deep dissatisfaction permeated Micky’s soul as he contemplated that fact, his new trait clearly not happy with the results either.

Trying something else, he fused more soul-freezing ice, replacing every cubic centimetre of his body once again. The silver glow of the material made it even worse, but that only lasted until he willed his skin, muscles and bones to turn invisible, revealing a set of silver organs pulsing beneath.

‘Hmmm… It’s certainly an improvement, but invisible isn’t the same as transparent. Besides, the colour of my organs is all wrong.’

Another thing that made Gabe an excellent first humanoid to turn into was the fact that Micky had seen the man from the outside many times as well, during his other visits to the Vault. On top of that, his friend’s biology had made it easier to observe his inner structure than pretty much anyone else.

Grabbing hold of the properties of his fused mana, he carefully adjusted the degree by which its colour had vanished, forcing a scarce layer to manifest once again. Only, he made sure that it was still possible to see his organs through it.

‘It’s a decent imitation, I suppose, but this only works in Gabe’s case. Turning my mana partially invisible won’t work for anyone else. I need to find a better way to replicate other colours,’ he thought.

He didn’t have many options when it came to his human body, but the elemental one was far more malleable. What he wanted to do had to be possible, somehow…

Pondering over the problem for a few minutes, he came up with a couple of ideas.

The simplest one would be to mix paint of various colours into his mana and let his trait handle the rest. It should work, but Micky would rather find a way that didn’t involve storing a dozen buckets of paint inside his spatial seal and having to replenish them frequently.

He instead went with the second, more ambitious, option, reforging himself once again while paying closer attention to the internal structure of the ice. Getting rid of any microscopic impurities in the material, he ensured that his new body was far less cloudy than before, allowing light to pass through it freely like glass.

His lips parted into a grin. He knew that he wouldn’t have been able to exert such fine control over his transformation if not for the trait’s influence, and he gladly welcomed its assistance.

The end-result was an alternative way to construct a semi-transparent body. It looked a little better than the half-invisible version, though it hadn’t solved the issue. Not yet, at least. Thankfully, this was just the precursor to something even more interesting.

Reforging his body for the umpteenth time, Micky forced the pristine ice crystals inside his flesh to grow in a certain manner. As soon as he was done, he lifted his glass-like arm, nodding with satisfaction as he watched the subtle silver glow of his mana split into six other colours by the time it reached his crystalline skin.

Like a prism, he could force his body to disperse light as it flowed through it, meaning that he now had all the ingredients necessary to perfect his optical illusions. Of course, his understanding of the subject was rather limited, and carefully controlling the hue of every square centimetre of his body was a massive undertaking, but Micky now possessed the perfect trait to take care of the logistics.

‘I guess Nesha can afford to wait a couple more weeks as I work on this. Hopefully, Phoebe will contact me by then too…’ he thought, diving into his new project.