The Lone Wanderer

Chapter 594 – Constellations (2)

Land and sky crumbled into colourful shards that rapidly faded away, leaving behind a void scarcely dotted with tiny stars.

Unlike earlier, Micky didn’t fall this time, floating in the same spot with Phoebe by his side. As the master of this realm, he could freely control everything – including gravity – at least so long as he understood the power he wielded. Besides, there wasn’t anything left to fall towards.

Bringing the glowing particles closer, he focused on one that shone in a deep blue colour. Micky didn’t move a centimetre, nor did the star change in any way, yet the mere act of concentrating on it caused a scene to play out in his mind.

He was in Enki’s body, swimming inside the cold depths of Atlantis. The intense pressure of the alien ocean was a little disorienting as it had been decades since the last time he’d experienced it, though the boy’s flesh had luckily evolved to handle it without issue.

The eruption of the nearby volcano cast an ominous red glow interspaced with twisting shadows across the pale corals that decorated the seabed. Tiny crustaceans and strange fish scurried about to hide or escape from larger predators.

More importantly, Micky felt that he could easily force the flow of time to slow down or accelerate if he wanted. He could also skip ahead, rewind or even pause the memory entirely. Of course, he did nothing of the sort, opting to withdraw his attention from the blue star and move on to another.

The second dot shone in a crimson light, leading Micky back into Nephthys’s Sanctuary. However, he didn’t stay there long either, seeing no reason to waste time now that he had a better grasp on the changes in his mindscape.

“Excellent thinking,” Phoebe praised. “This will make everything easier. Most mind affinity users structure their mindscapes in a similar manner.”

He nodded. His memories were certainly more compact and accessible than before. Admittedly, the place had lost some of its previous charm, though the starry sky he was currently inhabiting wasn’t necessarily less beautiful than the frozen wasteland.

“Now what?” he asked, eager to take the next step.

“Start by separating the stars into three groups,” the titaness instructed, before elaborating. “Gather the ones that you only want Percy or Micky to have access to, as well as those you don’t mind sharing.”

Micky raised an eyebrow. He wasn’t surprised by the task that the goddess had given him, since he understood how it was relevant to their goal, but he quickly found an issue with her instructions.

“How? Do you expect me to sift through my entire life, one memory at a time? There are thousands of them!”

Phoebe shook her head. “Always remember that you’re in complete control of this place. Just focus on the reasons for which you want Percy or Micky to have exclusive access to certain memories.”

Heeding her advice, Micky started by focusing on his intimate memories with Nesha. Those were naturally the first ones on the chopping block, as he really had no business remembering them. The sooner he forgot them, the sooner Percy would be able to regain some semblance of privacy and resume his relationship with his girlfriend.

Several stars grew brighter in response, separating them from the rest. With a wave of his hands, Micky gathered them all to one place, pushing the others aside.

That said, his work was still incomplete. Nesha was Micky’s friend – not just Percy’s girlfriend. He didn’t want to completely forget her or the time they had spent training together and discussing magic.

Filtering out the innocent parts required a lot of additional queries – it mainly involved Micky associating certain emotions, sounds, or images and figuring out which stars reacted or didn’t – but he eventually felt happy with the results.

“Honestly, there aren’t even that many memories…” he muttered as he realized that the stars he had cherry picked were only a tiny fraction of the total.

Then again, it wasn’t that strange. Percy hadn’t had much alone time with Nesha. Most of it had happened in Bogside town, where they had only lived for a couple of years, and they hadn’t even gotten together until several months in. Afterwards, they’d been too preoccupied with other matters to spend quality time together.

“Is this going to be enough to split us up?” he asked, turning to Phoebe.

She chuckled. “Not even close. You’ll need to locate a few other categories of stars. The first are your formative memories – those from your childhood or other important events. Ideally, you don’t want to share them.”

Micky raised an eyebrow. “But I don’t mind Percy remembering my mother and sister’s death, nor do I care if Micky recalls my childhood in the mansion.”

“That’s fine,” the goddess replied with a shrug. “Just duplicate the stars, and we’ll tweak the copies later. The memories will be intact, but the emotions associated with them will be muted and feel less important. That way, you’ll remember those events like an outsider rather than a participant.”

Micky nodded begrudgingly. He’d suspected that separating his memories wouldn’t be entirely without cost, but this was something he could stomach.

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Locating the right memories was both easier and harder than expected. Micky and Percy hadn’t even met each other during their original childhoods, so the corresponding stars were relatively easy to spot. However, there were several times more of these memories than the ones that Percy had shared with Nesha.

To make matters worse, Micky had essentially lived through a second childhood, having spent years growing up again as an amnesiac crow. There were also certain other memories that he felt were at the core of his identity – such as his decades-long captivity in the coliseum or under Acton’s thumb. Traumatic as they were, he knew that they had shaped him into who he was.

By comparison, Percy hadn’t experienced that many tragedies – other than the loss of his parents perhaps, though he’d been too young to remember it well. In hindsight, Archibald had done a great job sheltering him from Remior’s horrors before he awakened his bloodline.

However, many of his early off-world adventures had sparked awe and wonder in his youthful mind, so he figured that it would be a good idea to keep at least some of those to himself.

Obviously, Micky would still have to share any of his fights in the blood-stained arena that had let to important insights, much like Percy would need to share the adventures that had yielded valuable magical knowledge. He didn’t want Micky to end up without his magiscript skills, or Percy to lose years of honing his fighting style.

For better or worse, memories like that were generally few and far between, as Micky had faced thousands of weak opponents in the coliseum that hadn’t taught him much, and Percy had sent out hundreds of clones that had returned to Remior empty-handed.

Sorting everything out took several hours. Eventually, Micky heaved out a tired breath, feeling happy with the results. He’d even made sure to duplicate all the stars he had gathered and modify the emotional intensity of the memories, just like the titaness had suggested.

“Please tell me that we’re done,” he begged the ancient deity.

“Almost,” Phoebe replied, patting his shoulder consolingly. “The final set of stars is the smallest one by far, but arguably the most important.”

Micky tilted his head, having no idea what other memories could possibly be more important than those at the core of his personalities, or the ones that he explicitly wanted to keep private.

“There’s more than just memories here,” the goddess explained, probably guessing what he was thinking. “Haven’t you noticed that a few stars never responded to your stimuli?”

Micky creased his brow, realizing that Phoebe was right. His eyes landed on a nearby grey dot that had remained practically untouched through his endeavours. Focusing on it, he was greeted by a different – yet extremely familiar – sensation.

This time, there was no vision from his past. In fact, the senses that reached him were incomplete, though they felt more real than anything he had experienced in this place. He found himself suspended in darkness, registering nothing but the rhythmic sound of his own heartbeat. He tried to open his eyes or move, yet he quickly discovered that he couldn’t so much as twitch a muscle, nor control the flow of time.

Lifting his attention from the grey star, he returned to his mindscape.

“Was that…?”

“Percy’s sense of hearing,” Phoebe said. “If you want each of your aspects to be constrained to a single body, you’ll have to separate their senses and erect a barrier between them.”

“What if we need to share or swap bodies at some point?” Micky asked.

He wasn’t trying to be difficult. The titaness was only giving him what he’d explicitly asked for. However, he really didn’t want to completely lose the flexibility afforded to him by the Symphony. At the very least, they’d need to fully blend their minds whenever they pushed the Extreme spell to its limits.

“Don’t worry. We’ll bind your memories loosely so that it doesn’t become an issue. Just trust me for now.”

Micky nodded, withdrawing his protests once more. Gathering the stars corresponding to his senses was far easier than his memories, so it only took a couple of minutes.

Once everything was ready, the titaness lifted both hands, her palms swiftly swelling into giant red blobs that kept expanding until they were over a dozen times as tall as she was. It was only now that Micky realized where all the mind mana the titaness had poured into his head had been.

Separating the giant spheres from her body, Phoebe regenerated her missing limbs before speaking. “Use these to connect the memories. The exact manner doesn’t matter as much as your intention does, so concentrate on the way you want the new mindset to work.”

Following her instructions, Micky seized control of the crimson orbs, sending each into a different group of colourful stars. The blobs exploded, tiny droplets of mind mana bound together with thin strings scattering and seeping into the glowing dots.

The stars shuffled chaotically, whipping up two massive storms inside Micky’s mindscape. The weak-looking bands holding the stars together tensed and stretched, making him fear that they were about to start snapping, though that luckily didn’t happen.

After confirming that the constructs were strong enough to withstand the process, Micky paid closer attention to what exactly his memories where doing. At first glance, they looked like they were dancing around randomly but, on closer inspection, he realized that there was an underlying pattern to their behaviour.

Some stars – specifically those that harboured his senses or his most private memories – were trying to sink deeper into the swarm, while the rest were slowly getting pushed to the exterior.

Many of the crimson strings twisted together into thicker bands, creating smaller groups of associated memories that were connected to other large groups in the distance. Every now and then, a pair of memories briefly collided, causing a brand-new string to connect them like a freshly-spat piece of chewing gum after they parted.

At the same time, their colours began to change. Their varied hues flowed outward through the strings, trying to pollute the neighbouring stars. Groups where a certain colour was already dominant settled into some adjacent shade of that colour fairly quickly, before attempting to take over other groups.

Overall, the two swarms were changing rapidly in both shape and colour, though Micky still wasn’t sure what exactly they were trying to turn into. He hadn’t noticed any changes to himself yet, either.

The process was long and tedious, but Phoebe reassured him that it was going well, so he patiently waited for the dust to settle.

Eventually, the stars slowed down, forming a pair of well-defined constellations that sported familiar shapes. Each group had a single uniform colour – for the most part – the stars pulsing in unison as the previous conflicts appeared to have been resolved.

The first constellation was shaped like Percy, but he was made of countless grey dots linked together by even thinner strands of the same colour. The formation was downright colossal – easily a kilometre from head to toe. Across him, an equally massive crow floated in the void, though its stars shone with a blueish-green light.

The appearance of the giant structures caused something to stir inside the real Micky – or at least the projection that currently housed his consciousness. However, his Status spoke before he had the chance to examine himself.

[Congratulations! You have acquired a new mindset: Shimmering Constellations!]