Chapter 684: – Price |
‘Do you have it too?’ Percy asked.
Like everyone had told him, he had acquired the Void Decree in an incomplete state, but it appeared to work a little differently from the Moirais’ Decree. Instead of automatically absorbing every drop of life mana that came within Percy’s reach, it had to be awakened manually.
Until it got fully repaired, the new Decree functioned like an active-type Decree that could be called upon at will, though it would hopefully not occupy one of Percy’s three slots.
‘It’s there,’ the Huehuan confirmed, much to Percy’s elation. ‘Do you think I’ll get a new mana core as well?’
‘Possibly, though there’s always a chance that the Decree will be “spent” after one of us uses it,’ Percy speculated.
It wouldn’t be the end of the world if only one of them got it, but the mere possibility of effectively acquiring two rare affinities caused Percy’s mouth to dry.
‘What about the rest of you? Did you also get it?’ he asked his familiar, the clone possessing her, as well as the other two.
‘I haven’t found a host yet, so I’m not sure,’ one of them replied.
‘Nope.’ ‘I don’t feel any different.’ ‘I’m sorry, Percy,’ the others said.
Being able to give Elaine and the others a third core would have been nice, yet he didn’t want to indiscriminately hand them out to everyone he possessed. The fact that he had given second cores to so many people was already going to bring him unwanted attention sooner or later.
If word of random people with two cores spread across the universe, the Moirai and the Void Hand might simply blame each other or think that another faction had followed in their footsteps. Learning that somebody had one-upped them, on the other hand, would undoubtedly create a lot more panic.
‘Metatron will not be happy about this though,’ Micky reminded him.
‘Yeah. All the more reason to delay our next trip to the Vault,’ Percy agreed.
The pentapus had invested a lot into Percy’s participation in the tournament, and it didn’t look like he would get much in return. Kassorith hadn’t acquired the Void Decree, and it appeared that none of Metatron’s past, present, or future test subjects would either.
That said, the titan had been aware of the risks, and it wasn’t like Kassorith had returned from Maradion empty-handed. While Percy had admittedly prevented the Thess’kalan from picking rewards that he might have preferred, three Decrees and an extended lifespan was still quite the haul.
Unfortunately, Metatron might not see things that way – especially with Kassorith whispering Phoebe-knew what in his ears for the next few centuries.
If it wasn’t for his friends in the artificial world, Percy might have considered cutting his losses and writing the Vault off. There were still things to be gained from Metatron, but not as many as there used to be. Percy could continue practicing magiscript on his own, and he could access high-level information and resources through the planets that he had recently marked.
The problem was that he couldn’t allow Gabe, Leo, Tlaloc and the others to pay the price for his choices, so he would have to think hard about how to appease the irritated titan before his next visit.
‘So me, you, and Zurvanai might become the only three-cored mages in the entire universe,’ Micky recapped. ‘I suppose that it’s possible for Nephthys to join us if and when she becomes an aspect, but we won’t know until it happens.’
‘Indeed. Let’s stop dilly-dallying and figure out how to activate this thing,’ Percy said.
Sifting through the information that had entered his mind upon acquiring the Decree, he confirmed once again that it wasn’t a coherent set of instructions – or, at least, hadn’t been intentionally designed to be one. It felt more like a bunch of scattered realizations that had come from multiple people.
Percy guessed that the titans who had created the Void Decree hadn’t known what to expect from their own creation. Their goal had been to imitate the Moirais’ Decree, but the finer details had been completely outside of their control.
It wasn’t until they had neared the end of their spellcasting that the specifics – including the price of the new mana core – had become apparent. Realizing that this information would be useful to the mortals who received the Decree, they had performed some last-minute adjustments to bundle their thoughts and insights into the acquisition process.
‘They don’t even use the same medium,’ Percy noted.
A few fragments took the form of written text, while others rang like softly-spoken whispers. A couple were closer to vague feelings that Percy struggled to make sense of.
Most of the information had at least been conveyed in a language-agnostic manner that Percy could understand despite not currently possessing a host who was a native of the Void Hand. Not wanting to risk missing anything important, he still pulled his translation device out of his spatial seal and stuck it to the side of his head before proceeding.
‘The Decree has to consume the mana cores of seventy-three living mages,’ Percy realized after trying to make sense of the rules for several minutes.
His face paled as the words sank in. After everything that Metatron, Lanthaniel, and Zurvanai had told him, he had honestly suspected that it would involve hurting somebody, but the exact number of sacrifices was horrifying.
‘Seventy-three people… just to make a single mage stronger…’ Micky echoed, sounding just as appalled.
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Percy understood that this was an easy choice for a peak faction like the Void Hand to make. Nobody would care about a few dozen dead Red-borns or Orange-borns, if it meant empowering one of their most talented mortals. Even if the recipient of the new core ultimately failed to attain divinity, the weakest demigod in the universe was arguably more valuable than a million low-borns, let alone seventy-three.
The requirement left a bad taste in Percy’s mouth, but he knew that he couldn’t change it, so he kept studying the scattered instructions. After another ten minutes, he managed to decipher an additional morsel of information:
‘If you ensure that all the consumed mana cores have the same affinity, you can control what element you get.’
This… explained a lot of things.
Everyone obviously wanted a rare affinity, but finding seventy-three mortals with a specific element wasn’t easy. If the Void Hand’s factions were anything like Remior, less than one percent of the population was born with rare or composite affinities – and that included all such elements.
It wouldn’t be impossible for the alliance to produce, say, seventy-three space affinity users, but what if they all had to be low-borns? What if they also had to be criminals, to justify the mass murder?
The Void Hand could still probably do that once or twice every now and then, but could they keep gathering such numbers on demand, for every rare affinity, whenever another batch of participants qualified for the Decree?
Even if they could, regularly purging so many rare affinity users would bring about many other negative consequences. The number of people inheriting those elements from their parents would decrease, hurting the population of rare affinity users over time.
It would also affect various areas of magical research that required test subjects with rare affinities. Finally, the odds of a mage being born with a combination of a powerful bloodline and a rare affinity – like Percy or Zurvanai – might be affected.
After taking all of this into consideration, Percy could see why most people would rather sacrifice a bunch of pure affinity users and upgrade their cores with rare affinity-changing treasures.
‘I’m not thrilled about the idea of killing so many people for personal profit, even if they are criminals,’ Micky said.
‘Me neither.’
Percy considered what this requirement might mean for him and his fellow aspect.
Like everyone else, they definitely wanted rare affinities, yet they didn’t have access to the treasures they would need to acquire them. Remior’s population was much lower than the Void Hand’s factions, so finding seventy-three people with the correct element wouldn’t be easy – unless he went nuts and massacred his own relatives for a life affinity. Obviously, Percy wasn’t going to do that, nor did he want to harm innocents. Finding that many criminals was also out of the question.
Acquiring pure affinities might be an acceptable compromise for now. While it would admittedly render the new cores useless for a while, Percy and Micky would be able to cleanse and promote them just fine, so they wouldn’t lose any valuable time.
They could always try to get their hands on the necessary resources to upgrade them later. Sadly, they had missed the opportunity to grab a rare affinity-changing treasure from the tournament, but finding one in the future wouldn’t be impossible – just very, very difficult. However, there was no need to resort to half-measures and uncertainties. Percy had a much simpler – if time-consuming – solution.
‘I can create the sacrifices we need with my bloodline.’
He could possess lots of beasts, give them the Moirais’ Decree, feed them a bunch of green mushrooms to repair their second cores, and finally pick out the ones that awakened whatever element he wanted.
Out of the half a million Starry Commanders and Breeders that he had possessed over a decade ago, he should have produced at least a couple dozen users of each rare affinity.
The exact number eluded him, because he hadn’t bothered to count, and because his clones hadn’t stayed inside the bodies of their hosts long enough to explore their new organs, but that wasn’t a huge problem.
Passing the Decree to the Blue wasps had only taken a few months, so preparing the necessary numbers would just take a couple of years at worst. The hive contained several times as many Green bugs, which he had ignored in the past because the gains hadn’t been worth the effort.
The Starry Queen wouldn’t have any reason to decline his request, since most of the test subjects would survive, and even grow stronger from his experiments. Percy would essentially kill a little over a hundred Starry Knights in exchange for granting a second core to over a million.
The only issue was the enormous volume of green mushrooms that would have to be consumed. The Violet wasp would have to sacrifice a large fraction of her weakest descendants once more, but the hive had already recovered from the previous culling, and the long-term impact of this undertaking would still be positive.
‘Can we pick out the bugs’ second cores without consuming the first ones though?’ Micky asked.
Percy frowned. His friend had raised a good question. If the Decree devoured the creatures’ beast affinities as well… actually, he had no idea what would happen. Could a sapient acquire a beast affinity?
As far as he could tell, beast affinity-changing treasures didn’t exist.
It was possible that it was simply too difficult to obtain one, since affinity-changing treasures were harvested from the remains of dead gods, and Sixiang was the only faction in the universe known to have produced divine beasts. Obviously, killing one of them wasn’t easy.
That said, a few would have definitely died at some point, and the sapients who had slain them would have certainly tried feeding any affinity-changing treasures that they had produced to their mortals. The fact that Percy had never heard of such experiments probably meant either that the treasures wouldn’t coalesce, or that they wouldn’t work on sapients.
Judging by the lack of beast mages in the tournament, he felt that it was probably the latter, and that it also applied to the Void Decree. Percy and his companions hadn’t met that many people with two cores on Maradion, but it was strange that nobody had mentioned this possibility if it had been an option.
Sifting through the remaining fragments inside his mind, he eventually stumbled upon one that confirmed his guess, explicitly pointing out that beast cores would be completely ignored by the Decree.
‘Convenient. Hopefully that means that my idea is viable,’ Percy reasoned.
Micky and Nephthys didn’t need a duplicate beast affinity anyway. While Percy was admittedly a little curious to see what would happen to him if he acquired one as well, he’d rather not turn himself into a giant monstrosity without even changing the number of concepts he would be able to incorporate into his internal world.
Delaying the acquisition of his new core by another few years wasn’t ideal – especially after all the trouble that he and Micky had already gone through to get this far. However, he could stomach this if it was the final hurdle that they had to overcome to become the first three-cored mages in the universe and obtain rare elements of their choosing without compromising their morals.
Before he could finalize his decision, Percy had to ensure that he completely understood how the Void Decree worked. Scrounging through the remaining pieces of information inside his mind, he discarded most of them after confirming that they were either duplicates of things he had already learned or a bunch of incoherent nonsense.
Just as he was about to declare his recent operation an overwhelming success, Percy stumbled upon a statement that made him pause in his tracks.
‘Surely this can’t be true…’
Not daring to believe what he was reading; he went over it several times and even asked Micky to fuse his mind with his and read it with him.
After being told that he hadn’t misread, and spending another hour going through all the remaining information with a fine-tooth comb in the hope that he had misunderstood something, Percy was forced to accept the grim truth:
He could never activate the Void Decree.
Its second price was one that he – of all people – could not afford to pay. Even the Yellow-borns and Green-borns of the alliance probably weren’t happy with it, but it wasn’t as much of a dealbreaker for them.
‘Awakening the new mana core consumes eighty percent of your remaining lifespan.’