The Lone Wanderer

Chapter 613 – Milestone

‘I’m ready,’ Micky said.

Nodding, Percy willed the constellations in their shared mindscape to blend into a single figure, their minds melding as two separate accounts of the past couple of weeks came sharply into focus.

Pushing all thoughts of Lady Semjana or brewing Gloomy Dawn aside, the Lone Wanderer concentrated on Percy and Micky’s most recent attempts at elevating Internal Magiscript to the next level.

Leaving the elemental body in a meditative position inside his bedroom, he focused on the human body’s first core – where he hoped to achieve one of his most ambitious milestones to date.

Taking control of the organ’s contents, he promptly shaped the phantom mana into a relatively basic enchantment that consisted of only a handful of runes. The simplest seals were essentially a combination of self-repair enchantments and structural integrity enchantments – things that Percy had incorporated into his equipment years ago – held together with sealing runes.

The sealing runes were there to give the unit cell substance and connect everything, the structural integrity enchantments were there to strengthen the material, and the self-repairs were there to maintain it.

Percy had considered using Reinforcement or his Phantomspun Silk instead, but he knew that producing the intricate materials inside his core would be a tall order, and shrinking the runes to the desired size would only make it even harder. Even if he could somehow succeed, Percy wanted the new spell to work with every affinity – not just his own – otherwise his familiars and aspects wouldn’t be able to use it.

Willing the unruly substance into shape, he soon created an enchantment that spanned the entire vertical cross-section of his core. It was attached to the organ only through a single spot at the top of the unit cell, preventing the structure from spinning around in more than a single axis.

Percy forced the remaining mana away from the delicate symbols to avoid ruining his efforts. Condensing them into multiple rings that tightly hugged the walls of his core, he used these unavoidable flows of mana to keep the rotation of the enchantment stable as he visualized the spinning symbols in his head.

In mere seconds, the enchantment was complete.

Willing the unit cell to activate, he felt a solid object settle inside his core. With the seal in place, he no longer had to spend any effort to maintain the runes. Letting go of both the anchor at the top of the unit cell and the ring-shaped flows around it, he watched the structure spin on its own for several minutes before coming to a halt.

Creating a single solid seal wasn’t that difficult. Percy and Micky had managed this very shortly after their return from the Vault, nearly seven years ago. Since then, they had spent most of their time tackling three other problems that had to be overcome before they could complete their project.

The first two had been easy enough to solve.

One was the complexity of the unit cells. Obviously, Percy and Micky wanted to include dozens of different runes into the spell, so they had to be able to draw a much more complex enchantment inside their core. This was what they had spent most of the past decade working on, but it was luckily something that could be solved through sheer time and effort.

The second problem was designing the enchantment itself. A single unit cell floating in the middle of their cores wouldn’t cut it. It would take up too much space, while also inhibiting the flow of their mana. While a seal like that was technically solid, it would easily crumble once they started exerting themselves, and there was no way it would allow the organ to endure the necessary pressure to contain mana of the next grade.

Thanks to his experience as an alchemist, Percy had decided to treat his core like a spherical cauldron, using the compression principle to elevate his mana to Green. To accomplish that, he would need to coat the entire interior of the organ with a thin, enchanted layer of sealed mana – almost like a second core, slightly smaller than the first, hugging the crystalline walls of the organ tightly.

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This way, the outer layer would support the inner one and vice versa, making the structure more resilient without reducing his core’s capacity much, nor inhibiting its mana flow.

Luckily, Percy and Micky didn’t have to experiment with the exact structure of the enchantment inside their cores – they could easily create a model of the sphere outside, test and fine-tune it extensively, and then finally implement the perfected version inside their body once they were happy with its effect.

That was all well and good, but the third and final problem had proven much more difficult to solve.

In order to fit hundreds of unit cells inside their cores, they needed each to be no larger than a grain of sand. Furthermore, each of those grains had to contain dozens of runes, meaning that Percy and Micky needed to greatly shrink down the symbols.

This was obviously a serious issue, because their only means of drawing the enchantments required them to use the organ’s entire cross-section, which had a fixed size. If they tried to create anything smaller than that, they would lose all the contact points with their core that supported the delicate structure – not to mention how much harder it would be to control their mana with such finesse.

Percy had spent countless hours agonizing over this problem before eventually coming up with an idea that he thought might work. This was what he had devoted the past couple of years working on, while Micky had focused on expanding the complexity of their unit cells. Today, they felt confident enough to put everything they had learned into practice.

Shattering the solid seal inside his sternum, he started over, quickly moulding his mana into an identical copy of the previous unit cell. However, he didn’t rush to activate the runes this time, not wanting the substance to solidify before it reached the desired size.

Once the symbols were stable, he carefully pulled a thin tendril of mana from one of the spinning rings, steering its flow by a perfect ninety degrees and allowing it to coil around the unit cell to thicken its boundary.

Tracing the elaborate circumference of the enchantment, he forged what could only be described as a three-dimensional frame, pulling it away from the unit cell and towards one of the walls opposite the group of runes.

The strange shell retained the same general shape as the enchantment, but it shrank along with the cross-section of the organ. Had Percy used a single rune, the new structure would have resembled a conoid. As things stood, it looked more like a collection of hollow conoids fused together.

The intricate object wasn’t static – it was still spinning inside Percy’s core with the same rate as before. The unit cell in the middle was held together by his Scribing trait and countless hours of practice, as the outer shell was preserved by its thickness and relative simplicity.

Eventually, the second face of the structure reached a surface area smaller than a square millimetre, causing Percy to pause. The next step was the most crucial one, and had to be completed in an instant, lest he gave the enchantment a chance to collapse.

After making sure that the smaller face of the structure was perfectly parallel to the first and had the exact same outline, he willed the runes to pass through the narrowing tunnel.

Loosening his hold over his mana slightly, Percy allowed the shrinking runes to shed their excess mana while maintaining enough control to preserve their shape. Thankfully, his spectral trait helped greatly with that.

The moment the unit cell touched the opposite wall of his core, Percy willed all the runes to activate, forcing the enchantment to solidify.

This wasn’t the first time he’d reached this step. Sadly, the minuscule object had rolled down the spherical surface during his previous attempt, as there had been nothing to keep it attached to the wall of his core.

This was why Percy had included an adhesive rune into the unit cell this time, ensuring that the enchantment remained attached to the organ. The tiny seal could still be peeled off or destroyed easily so long as there was only one copy inside Percy’s core.

For the enchantment to truly come into effect, Percy would need to construct hundreds of these grain-sized unit cells, link them side by side, and completely coat the interior of his core.

Even worse, the seal that he had just created was nothing more than a vastly simplified version of the one he eventually wanted to use. Creating even one of the more intricate copies would take practice, and carefully filling his core up with them without destroying the previous ones would be a challenge.

Despite that, his lips couldn’t help but part into a grin as his Status notified him of his success.

[Congratulations! Your spell has evolved: Spectral Art: Internal Magiscript – Masterful -> Spectral Art: Internal Seal-Crafting – Masterful!]