The Lone Wanderer

Chapter 617 – Reverse

Percy’s idea was simple enough, on paper at least. After studying Micky’s attempts at shapeshifting and expanding his senses, Percy wanted to see whether he could use that knowledge to push his own Sovereign’s Eye further – and possibly grant a similar power to his hosts and familiars.

He would have loved to work on this sooner, but he’d instead chosen to single-mindedly pursue his artificial advancement. For the past few years, he’d hoped that his clones would find other ways to boost Kassorith’s chances in the tournament so that he wouldn’t have to waste precious time worrying about that.

Unfortunately, the only thing that Percy had to show for his patience was a pile of red powder. The substance was admittedly quite useful – doubly so for a Thess’kalan who might be able to absorb it into both his scales and bones – but it wouldn’t be enough by itself.

Kassorith would have to compete against people capable of fighting two grades above their own. Since Percy had to deploy a clone to the Vault soon, he had no choice but to revisit the project that he’d previously placed on hold.

The first thing he did was merge his constellation with Micky’s after receiving his friend’s permission. They generally tried not to resort to that more often than necessary, but succeeding in this endeavour would benefit both of them, and cooperating would hopefully save a lot of time.

Of the five techniques that Micky had developed while fighting against Lord Parnassus, Percy was most interested in the fourth: Fuzzy World. It had allowed the Huehuan to use an omnidirectional form of Soul Vision that Percy wanted to replicate.

Closing his eyes, he fell into silent meditation for several days, taking only the absolute necessary breaks to eat, relieve himself, and send out clones to Ruby Heart. Over time, he learned to tap into his friend’s experiences in an attempt to access a form of Soul Vision that didn’t require his eyes.

In theory, Percy had spent more time than Micky as a disembodied soul or inhabiting all sorts of exotic bodies, but the Huehuan’s experience in that department was arguably of a higher quality. After all, the former crow knew what it was like to interact with souls at a physical level thanks to his Soul Predator mutation, and even rebuild his destroyed body out of ice.

Thankfully, Percy and Micky shared a single soul and mind – albeit an intentionally partitioned one – so they had full access to each other’s abilities. About ten days later, Percy managed to register the presence of nearby souls even with his eyes closed.

Technically, this omnidirectional Soul Vision was no different than his clones’ ability to sense souls while navigating the space between worlds. However, tapping into this spectral sight from within a physical vessel appeared to massively weaken it. Where Percy’s clones could spot souls entire solar systems away, he and Micky were limited to just a few hundred – maybe a couple thousand – metres.

‘It doesn’t matter. It’s good enough as a starting point,’ Percy consoled himself.

Allowing Mana Sense and his domain to fuse into his new vision, Percy watched his surroundings twist into a chaotic blur of colours, essentially recreating Micky’s Fourth Toast. Much like he and his friend had previously concluded, it was vastly inferior to his own mutated sight in many important ways – which was precisely one of the things that he was hoping to address soon – but it did offer some advantages of its own.

Opening his eyes, Percy paid close attention to both flavours of his integrated senses. One spanned the entire room but contained very few accurate details. The other was extremely clear but was limited to his line of sight. At the corners of his vision, the well-defined images blurred rapidly as they transitioned to madness.

Percy was immediately assaulted by a throbbing headache that would have certainly brought him to his knees if he hadn’t been sitting already, his brain clearly not equipped to handle so much conflicting information at once.

‘Ugh… I hope the strain is just an artifact of how imperfectly I’m wielding my senses, and not something that will remain a problem even after I fix them…’

He wasn’t sure which one it was, but he didn’t linger on that. For now, his priority was to merge and resolve the two streams of information. As for how he was going to do that?

Well, Percy had learned a lot about the way in which his eyes were wired to his brain when he first acquired his Mimicry trait. He knew that his clones and familiars didn’t possess the same mutated eyeballs as him, and he doubted that he could recover a lost facet of a modified Decree, but he might not have to do that.

If he was right, his eyes were the least important part of Ea’s Gift. The way in which the Decree had integrated itself into his Status and had connected his senses to his mind were hopefully at the core of the mutation, and those things might prove to be more transferable than the eyes themselves.

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Closing his eyes to get rid of the headache, Percy concentrated on the tiny flows of blood, mana, and willpower feeding into his mutation. Over the years, he’d asked his clones to use their own copies of the Mimicry trait to study how their hosts’ sensory organs were wired, so he was intimately familiar with the peculiarities of his own body.

He pushed a trickle of mana out of the primary pathways that he used with his boosting art and into a secondary set of tiny channels that branched outwards. The larger pathways that he had cleared and tempered as a teenager permeated his entire body, but they didn’t pass through every cubic millimetre of flesh.

All living creatures possessed a set of smaller channels that were responsible for delivering mana to less important body parts – like for example a random patch of skin on Percy’s elbow. These secondary channels were several times narrower, so they didn’t need to be cleared or tempered. One could access them automatically by merely willing mana to flow through them.

On the flipside, these pathways were too small to affect a mage’s mana capacity or regeneration like what was possible through the Dance. Thankfully, Percy wasn’t trying to improve his boosting art today – he just wanted to copy the same connections that passively linked his brain and eyes to other sensory organs.

Starting with his skin, he pushed faint trickles of phantom mana, willpower and blood – where applicable – to the surface of his body and soul. Little by little, he covered every square millimetre with the same cycling flows that his Mimicry trait had allowed him to identify and study.

At first, he was worried that it would take a lot of effort to actively maintain all of these minuscule connections. To his great shock, he quickly discovered that every new set of wires automatically snapped into place, almost as if his Decree had been waiting for him to do this all along.

As soon as the skin on his rear and legs was done, the patch of ground beneath him came into focus, the chaotic swirl of colours in that spot settling into a well-defined image that he could somehow see clearly, even with his eyes closed.

Emboldened by his success, Percy methodically linked more regions of his skin, before moving to his ears, nose, and tongue. Every time a new set of connections fell into place, his surroundings grew clearer.

Not all of his senses behaved in the same manner, however. His sense of touch appeared to grant him more information about his immediate surroundings, but the details declined in quality as they moved away from his body.

His ears didn’t seem to do anything at first. It was only a few seconds later that something happened when a droplet of water landed on a piece of protruding crystal a few dozen metres away with a crisp ting. The whole area around it bloomed into a clear but short-lived image that rippled outwards like a gentle wave.

When Percy linked his nose and tongue, he gained an instinctive understanding of various faint chemicals lingering in his cavern. For example, he could practically taste the spot where the Starry Worker had stood while absorbing the red powder over a week earlier, or the patch of minerals where he had sat while brewing the most recent batch of Gloomy Dawn about a month before that.

Different body parts appeared to interface with his magical senses in unique ways, though they all had something in common. Whenever a pair of clear images touched, they instantly reinforced one another, doubling or even tripling in size and lasting longer before decaying.

As a consequence of Percy’s sense of touch constantly surrounding his body, a thin bubble formed around him that never shrank beneath a certain minimum thickness – about fifty centimetres away from his skin.

Instead, it kept expanding like an amorphous pile of goo as additional bubbles caused by sounds and scents came into contact with it, slowly increasing Percy’s reach. Sadly, it never managed to grow past a couple of metres away from his body before shrinking again.

At least not until he finally opened his eyes.

The moment his enhanced sight joined his other four senses, everything changed. A vast, conical area directly in front of him instantly came into focus, but that was just the start.

The defined images within his line of sight came into contact with other patches of well-understood information captured by his other senses. This caused all the associated bubbles to bloom like vibrant flowers.

Percy’s headache returned, but it was more bearable than before, suggesting that it might not be much of a problem once he found a way to resolve the chaotic images and truly consolidate his senses.

In a flash of inspiration, Percy sharply jerked his head to his left, letting his gaze brush over a large section of the cavern. To his great joy, the spot that he had previously looked at didn’t immediately collapse. Instead, the clear images persisted for several seconds even without him glancing at them directly as his other senses picked up the slack and helped him keep the information into focus for a little longer.

‘This is promising, but it’s still too messy to be useful. I’ll need another source of information if I want to make some real progress…’

Percy did have something in mind that he could use, but he had no idea how exactly he was meant to accomplish that. In theory, his domain should be more than enough to fix the problem, since he could scan the whole cavern with it – almost like an expansive, three-dimensional sense of touch.

The problem was that he had no idea how to add flows of mana or blood to his willpower to connect it to his Status like his sensory organs. Percy closed his eyes again to put an end to the annoying headache as he pondered over the issue.

‘I might not need to connect my domain to my Status completely. I just need to somehow take the tactile information it provides me into consideration – sort of like what I do with my Sovereign’s Encroachment spell while brewing.’

Whenever Percy used his Wild Art, he typically started by peering through the exterior of his cauldron with his eyes, generating a colourful spherical shell in the boundary of his concoction where he had a pretty good idea of what alchemical reactions were taking place.

He then allowed his domain to seep deeper into the cauldron, producing a monochrome inner region at its core, where information was scarcer but no less useful. Finally, he methodically pushed the colourful layer inwards through inference, taking advantage of his understanding of various affinities and alchemical reagents to fill in the gaps in his senses.

‘So, what if I do the same thing in reverse?’