The Lone Wanderer

Chapter 618 – Pond

Percy’s heart skipped a beat as he felt that he was onto something. The problem with applying his Sovereign’s Encroachment in this situation was that his cauldron was a relatively small and finite object, whereas the cavern he was currently sitting in was many times larger, and the universe beyond its crystalline walls was infinite.

However, he wasn’t one to give up without a fight.

Opening his eyes again, he ignored the rush of pain pounding his skull to focus on the task at hand. Slowly sweeping his gaze from left to right and back again, he crammed as much information into his mind as it could handle at once.

Whenever one of his other senses picked up something new, he tried to shift his eyes towards it to artificially cause many of the clear regions to merge and reinforce one another, gradually causing the chaotic colours in the cavern to sharpen. At the same time, he spread his domain evenly throughout the room, using his Wild Art to push the bubbles of information outwards.

Initially, his efforts seemed to do something, but the results left much to be desired. He couldn’t focus on all the colourful regions at once, and it took a lot of effort to grow each of them by a meagre ten percent. Even worse, the bubbles instantly shrank again the moment he stopped paying attention.

Gritting his teeth, he approached the problem more strategically. Instead of picking the bubbles at random, he selected those which were already close to their neighbours and carefully directed their expansion towards one another.

The moment a pair connected, their natural growth relieved some of the pressure on Percy’s mind, allowing him to concentrate on a different region. The bubbles still decayed over time, but they did so more slowly right after a collision, giving him a chance to make progress.

Starting with the sweeping cone in front of him, Percy connected as many bubbles as he could into his vision, gradually covering about two thirds of the cavern. Knowing that his efforts would go to waste if he stopped, and feeling that he was on the verge of some kind of breakthrough, he kept going.

Connecting to the patches of space behind his back proved significantly harder, however. Percy wasn’t planning to stand up and start spinning around like a lunatic. Besides, he already had his hands full trying to keep the region in front of him from falling apart.

Consequently, it took him a couple of hours to increase his field of view to cover about three quarters of the cavern, and several more to reach eighty percent. Alas, going any further than that wasn’t going to be easy.

After the clear region had grown past a certain size, it had started to collapse faster than Percy could maintain it. Random patches of space broke into chaotic blobs of swirling colours again, leaving him no choice but to stop trying to expand and start repairing the damage.

After going back and forth a few times without much success, he realized that he had reached his current limit.

No matter how diligently he maintained and cultivated the bubbles, he couldn’t cover more than eighty percent of the cavern at once. It was a pity, because Percy was certain that something interesting was going to happen if he reached the end. He could feel some kind of obstruction at the edge of his consciousness.

‘Should I ask Nephthys to find me a slightly smaller cavern?’ he wondered.

The amount of information his brain could process at once was strongly correlated with the size of the room he was in, but there was no reason to stick with the cavern that he had happened to start in.

Percy estimated that a room that was about twenty percent smaller would allow him to practically skip all the effort and cheat his way to the end with his current capabilities.

‘No. That feels wrong, somehow…’ he thought, shaking his head.

He wasn’t sure how to explain it, but he could tell that the size of his current cavern was more or less perfect for what he was trying to do – even though he had no idea whatexactly that was.

If he had to compare this feeling to something, it was like he was blowing his nose and was on the verge of clearing it. He just needed to exert a certain amount of pressure to accomplish that.

If he switched to a smaller room, he would be able to cover it with his senses fairly easily, but that wasn’t the point. It wasn’t so much about the cavern as it was about pushing himself past a certain threshold, so lowering the difficulty wouldn’t help him in any way.

Left with no other option, he went back to work, fighting through his headache to push the bubbles outwards and into one another again. After a few minutes, he reclaimed about eighty percent of the cavern, before commencing the arduous grind to further expand his limit.

If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

He kept at it for several hours without making any noticeable progress before eventually having to stop when his head was about to burst. After resting for a couple of hours and cleansing his cores, he began his training anew.

Percy – and Micky, who had remained fused with him throughout his madness – continued to work for days, and then weeks. They took several breaks, both for their own sanity and to tend to their responsibilities. Micky still had to help Nesha with her intel-gathering work every now and then, and Percy had to restock their supply of Gloomy Dawn.

Still, most of their time was spent on this new project.

By the second day, they felt like they had improved slightly, covering eighty-one percent of the cavern. By the fourth, they increased that to eighty-two. About two weeks after embarking on this impossible mission, Percy was sure that they had covered eighty-five percent of the room.

Another month after that they reached ninety percent, and two months later they barely touched ninety-five. That was when Percy was interrupted by an interesting notification.

[Congratulations! Your familiar’s mana core has advanced: Yellow -> Green!]

Percy’s head still hurt like nobody’s business, but that didn’t stop him from cracking a smile. He had forgotten how close Nephthys had been to her promotion, yet the Ruby Princess clearly hadn’t stopped diligently cleansing her second core thrice a day.

Since this was her acid affinity, the advancement wasn’t going to change her size or bring about any new mutations, but it would definitely have a major impact on her stamina consumption, further increasing her jelly output.

Not wanting to be outdone by the goddess, Percy resumed working on his project.

His progress had slowed down to a crawl after crossing the ninety-five percent mark, which caused him to seriously consider whether this was worth it. There was no doubt in his mind that something interesting would happen once he touched the finish line, but that was beside the point.

He was in a race against time to send a clone to the Vault and go back to completing his artificial advancement, so was it really a good idea to waste several months on a questionable project with unknown benefits?

Even so, he didn’t stop. Percy had already invested so many weeks in this, and he was so damn close to the end. Perhaps this was nothing more than the sunken cost fallacy, but he didn’t want to toss his previous efforts in the bin.

It was about half a year since he first started playing with his mutation when he managed to force the final unruly swirl of colours under control. The moment it all fell into place, something clicked inside Percy’s head.

For a second, he was afraid that the well-defined images in his surroundings would start falling apart again, but that didn’t happen. For the first time ever, the colours obediently remained as they were supposed to be, seemingly not daring to fall out of line.

Percy felt something warm and wet on his upper lip.

Even before wiping it, he could tell that he was bleeding quite extensively, since he could see, taste and hear the sticky trickle with his omnidirectional vision. It wasn’t just his nose either. There was a lot of blood pouring down his eyes and ears as well, making him fear that he had injured himself somehow.

However, there wasn’t the slightest hint of pain or irritation. That was when he realized that even the constant headache that had plagued him for months had subsided at some point.

Something shifted inside Percy’s head. It felt like somebody had stabbed their hand into his brain, stirring the contents of his skull around frivolously. Still, it didn’t hurt. If anything, it felt somewhat pleasant – almost as if his mind was finally stretching after having been stuck in an uncomfortable position his whole life.

The tiny flows of mana, willpower and blood that Percy had previously linked to his sensory organs came into focus. Some of the connections snapped by themselves, though that didn’t lessen his awareness of his surroundings at all, indicating that those links had been redundant.

A few connections grew stronger while others weakened, some even changing to new ratios of mana, willpower and blood. There were even a couple of flows that formed by themselves as Percy’s body was seemingly discovering new channels that he had missed before.

His domain changed too.

He wasn’t sure how. It didn’t feel any stronger, nor did he think that he could control it better. His willpower just appeared to develop some new quality that Percy didn’t fully understand, delivering information into his brain in all sorts of novel ways.

The three-dimensional image of the cavern inside his head shuddered, before exploding outwards all at once. The walls and ceiling blocked the information in most directions, though Percy keenly felt his awareness seep into the magical crystals and minerals, digging several metres into them.

Most notably, his senses were able to travel much farther through the tunnel leading out of his cavern. Percy practically saw, heard and tasted every square centimetre of the winding corridor that stretched for hundreds of metres, even though he wasn’t looking directly at its entrance.

When he did turn his head that way, he found himself seeing three times as deep into the tunnel. Closing his eyes, his vision started to decay like before, but it didn’t do so nearly as fast. Even if he blocked all of his senses, he felt like the image of the cavern would persist for several seconds before fading entirely.

Whenever he opened his eyes, or when a new sound or scent reached his ears and nose, his field of view expanded outwards again. His surroundings were no longer a patchwork of colours, however.

Everything within his range appeared well-defined. No matter which senses were feeding into the giant bubble, it seemed to advance in a rapid but uniform manner. Percy felt like he was submerged in a massive lake that was slowly evaporating away. Using his eyes and ears was like pouring buckets of water into the lake, trying to expand it.

Eventually, it settled into an equilibrium.

Percy would have to use his new ability in an open space to check how far it could actually unfold, and he would have to perform several additional tests to determine whether it could be used by his clones. Even so, he was already impressed by its potency – as was his Status.

[Congratulations! Your mutation has evolved: Sovereign’s Eye -> Sage’s Eye!]

[Congratulations! Your spell has evolved: Wild Art: Sovereign’s Encroachment – Masterful -> Wild Art: Sage’s Pond – Masterful!]