The Lone Wanderer

Chapter 620 – Preparing for the tournament

As expected, the range of Percy’s enhanced senses proved downright massive when not constrained by the narrow caverns and tunnels of the underground hive.

He was easily able to scan everything within two kilometres of his body, though the bubble of information around him still wasn’t perfectly spherical, nor was it uniform. After all, each of his senses worked somewhat differently from the rest.

While his upgraded mutation was a lot better at merging and consolidating the information, Percy could still ultimately see things much farther than he could hear them. He naturally had no trouble observing the colossal figure of the Fungal Spire looming overhead, yet it was impossible to listen to the countless wasps buzzing atop the giant mushrooms that were located dozens of kilometres away.

Combining his senses had merely smoothened and reinforced them. His enhanced sight now had a wider field of view than before, and gradually tapered off into regular vision as objects moved farther away from him.

The good news was that he no longer had to deal with blurry images or headaches. His brain – or his Status… or probably both – could now eliminate redundant information, overlay the inputs of multiple sensory organs, and interpolate additional details between them, ensuring that Percy’s new vision was always better than the sum of its parts.

‘It almost feels like a second domain,’ he realized.

It stretched farther than his willpower, and Percy could concentrate on a direction or object of his choosing to slightly reshape the three-dimensional bubble as necessary. However, he understood that this fake domain didn’t exist in the real world, nor did it contain any willpower. It was all happening inside his head, which was probably why his Status hadn’t recognized or registered it as a proper domain.

Most notably, after the connections to his brain had reshuffled themselves, Percy no longer needed to use his actual domain to activate his new ability. That said, suppressing his willpower or asking Micky to pull all of it to Twilight City limited the space he could observe to a single kilometre – about the same as Nephthys. While the Ruby Princess lacked Percy’s specialized eyeballs, her higher grade somewhat made up for that.

All things considered, being able to scan everything within a kilometre wasn’t bad, but it was still a notable reduction. Halving the radius of the three-dimensional model translated to an eightfold decrease in volume.

‘At least this isn’t going to be a problem in the tournament,’

he consoled himself.Kassorith didn’t have Percy’s unique eyes either, but he was a Blue with a domain of his own – albeit a weaker one than the Lone Wanderer’s. If Percy and the Thess’kalan both deployed their willpower at the same time, the combined range of their senses should provide them with a huge advantage in the competition.

‘It’ll have to do.’ He shrugged.

Between the Sage’s Eye, the Ruby Bones, and Percy’s improvements in magiscript, his host would be notably stronger than he had been in the previous tournament. Assuming that Metatron hadn’t allowed the Thess’kalan to laze around over the past decade, they should be more than powerful enough to make the top sixteen… or eight… or whatever the titan had said they would need to qualify for the Void Decree.

Happy as he was with his preparations, Percy was tempted to spend a few more days to test some additional facets of his mutation.

He wanted to see whether it would have any impact on his brewing yield. Even if it didn’t, it would at least allow Micky to perform alchemy at the same level as him. The Huehuan already had access to all of Percy’s knowledge about the subject, but he had previously been held back by his subpar vision – which was no longer a problem.

Additionally, Percy wanted to check whether he could pass his fellow aspect some of his other mutations. Micky could practically shapeshift into anything he wanted – including beasts with unique bodies – so there was no reason why he wouldn’t be able to replicate Percy’s Greater Thess’kalan Physique or Ruby Bones, even without consuming the necessary resources.

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In fact, doing so should be even easier than it had been to reproduce the Sage’s Eye, since there was no Decree involved.

With access to unlimited red powder, Percy and Micky would be able to experiment to their heart’s content, studying how mutations tended to manifest in a person’s body. Doing so might provide Percy with valuable clues on how he could tap into the dormant potential of his human lineage.

He sighed. ‘Sadly, this isn’t the time for any of that.’

Neither alchemy nor Micky’s mutations would help Kassorith, so there was no point holding the clone back any longer. Leaving the tournament aside, Percy’s artificial advancement would play a much bigger role in his fight against Machaon, meaning that he should still prioritize that above everything else.

Having made his mind up, Percy decided to leave one clone in Nephthys’s body to train with her like he had previously planned, and to send a second clone to the Vault. He kept the third slot available for now, knowing that he would need it to possess the Thess’kalan.

Fortunately, Percy had already completed dozens of round trips to Ruby Heart over the past six months, so he didn’t need to return there in the near future. Once he was done setting Kassorith up, he could have the third clone resume searching for greater springs.

With that out of the way, Percy sought out Freddy to inquire about House Avalon’s situation. He soon learned that Archibald had already received the previous shipment of red powder and written back to Percy with his findings.

Apparently, the material synergized with the Clone bloodline as well as Percy had hoped, allowing life affinity users to freely pass their reinforced skeleton to any new minions they created, without having to consume additional resources.

That got Percy quite excited, as it might allow his relatives to essentially generate the material by themselves. In theory, they would merely have to absorb enough for a single person and then sacrifice a couple of clones to make up for it.

Sadly, his grandfather had already considered that, though his experiments had revealed how impractical Percy’s idea was. Extracting and absorbing powder that had already bonded into another’s skeleton had turned out to be extremely inefficient.

Percy hadn’t managed to quantify the process while eating beasts on Ruby Heart, but Archibald had learned that he would have to sacrifice hundreds of clones to generate as much of the material as he had consumed to acquire the mutation. Even for a Violet, it would take several months of constant work to produce and replace enough clones. Percy’s weaker relatives would need even longer than that, meaning that it wasn’t worth it.

Another possibility would be to feed a handful of powder to a Starry Drone and wait for the creature to evolve a couple of times before grinding its much-larger carapace, but the process was similarly inefficient. Archibald had estimated that it would take at least a Green wasp to break even.

Waiting for several years and feeding the bug a tremendous amount of mana to extract a mere handful of red powder just wasn’t worth it. Not when Percy could bring over a thousand tons of the darn thing in a single day from Ruby Heart.

‘I suppose that the giant eels weren’t nearly as good at recycling the material as I thought,’ he concluded, amending his understanding of the quasi-divine beasts’ biology slightly.

In hindsight, this was probably one of the reasons why eating other animals had seemed so ineffective compared to simply diving deeper into the red regions. This was likely an intended property of the material, in fact.

After all, the eels didn’t want the powder to spread too widely, nor for their prey to have a second reliable path to reinforcing their scales, lest they stopped falling into their trap.

In any case, it was arguably a good thing that the resource couldn’t propagate across Remior without Percy’s direct involvement. As annoying as it was to have to personally import every single grain, it gave him leverage.

With that in mind, Percy filled dozens of spatial amulets up with the material, asking Freddy to get it delivered to his family. He wanted every life affinity user in his House to acquire the mutation as soon as possible, in addition to a few of the stronger mages with other affinities – like Galahad and Elaine.

Percy also added a lot of extra powder and wrote a letter to his grandfather, asking him to handle negotiations with other families that might want it.

Admittedly, buying the nobles’ loyalty wasn’t his preferred way of forging new alliances. In his view, anyone with integrity would have already joined forces with House Avalon of their own volition after everything that Percy had done for their world.

At the same time, he understood how his poor reputation from before Nephthys’s creation might have caused some people to hesitate, and he urgently needed as many allies as he could get, so he couldn’t afford to be too picky.

Once the plump vendor assured him that he would take care of everything, Percy and Micky retreated to their respective abodes – be they magical caverns located several kilometres below the surface, or mundane buildings in a quiet district – to resume working on Internal Seal-Crafting.

By the time the clone granted them the Void Decree and their new cores, they would hopefully have the means to instantly promote them to the next grade.