Chapter 712: – Sentries (1) |
Having nothing else to do and not wanting to interrupt Percy’s reunion with Nesha, Micky decided to go ahead and start experimenting with spiritual blood on his own. His fellow aspect usually took the lead on such projects, but there was no reason why Micky wouldn’t be able to handle some preliminary tests to save his friend a few precious hours.
Micky wasn’t too interested in the healing properties of the blood, since his body was completely malleable and injuries didn’t really hinder him in any way. At the same time, he understood that his very existence was currently held together by Percy’s bloodline, which was ultimately tied to the latter’s survival. It would be remiss of him to not at least go over what they had learned during their battle against Machaon.
As they had hoped, Percy’s spiritual blood had proven quite effective at staving his fatigue off and accelerating his recovery. Despite his powerful physique, Percy would have never managed to inject so many doses of Blue trollsfury ink into his body in a row without it, since the potions were a grade higher than his own.
Even better, spiritual blood appeared to synergize extremely well with other forms of healing. It had made both the Blue ink and Archibald’s treatment faster and smoother than it would have been. The fact that the concentration of magical blood inside Percy’s veins didn’t seem to have dropped in the slightest was just icing on the cake, as it meant that its effect was entirely passive.
Perhaps, their blood would eventually thin if they relied on it often and a long time were to pass since its creation, but that wasn’t a serious problem. At worst, Percy and Micky might have to spend an hour or two every couple of years to replenish the lost volume.
‘This will probably become more of an issue when he starts bleeding himself to feed his herbs, but I’ll let him worry about that one,’ Micky thought with a shrug.
Unfortunately, even the combination of spiritual blood and thrice-compressed healing ink had its limits. Percy hadn’t been able to regrow his severed leg, nor was he likely to replace a destroyed organ, though anything short of that appeared to be well within his power.
If they managed to brew healing ink two grades higher than Percy, they might be able to lift that limitation, though that came with its own set of problems: their cauldrons could only handle Blue ingredients at the moment, and there was another issue that they had discovered after their artificial advancements.
Compressing their potions up to Blue had required more gravity herbs than expected – probably because the plants were only at Red. Apparently, if there were too many grades separating the primary and secondary ingredients in a concoction, the latter wouldn’t be as effective.
A possible solution might be to look for Orange gravity herbs. Assuming that there were any on Remior, they would be considered primary ingredients in other concoctions, but they would be taking on a secondary role in this particular recipe. If Percy and Micky didn’t find any, it might be possible to compress their current ingredients to Orange or Yellow, before using them on the mushrooms.
‘I suppose that’s not a priority right now. It’s too complicated and the gains would be small. Let’s revisit it once we’re done with more promising avenues of research.’
Even if the superior ink could regrow Percy’s limbs, it wouldn’t work fast enough to matter in a fight. It would be simpler for Micky to just give his friend temporary limbs fashioned out of living ice, like they had done while fighting Deimos. The problem was that mana was scarce in such high-level battles.
He sighed. Leaving their alchemical ventures aside for now, he moved on to another facet of their spiritual blood that had made itself apparent during the fight. Tearing his hand off, Micky willed it to transform. The severed piece of ice melted into an amorphous blob of grey liquid that squirmed enthusiastically for a couple of seconds before settling into the shape of a baby crow.
The moment the frozen hatchling came into existence, Micky felt his senses branch out and split off in a new direction, his real body towering before his extra pair of eyes. Even better, the tiny bird didn’t seem to be limited to just regular sight. Micky’s grey soul, Blue and Green mana, pitch-black willpower, and low temperature were all visible within the second instance of his Sage’s Pond.
‘Interesting. I wonder what its range is.’
Percy and Micky had already noticed that they’d been able to handle more constructs than usual during the battle, and that those fashioned out of Micky’s body had fed a lot of additional information into their mind. They’d expected some of those changes after learning about the Penitent’s Decree on Marador Prime, but they hadn’t had the time to explore its limits properly.
If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.
Taking control of his miniature self, Micky flew into the nearest tunnel, speeding away from his main body. At first, he carefully steered the construct through the winding corridor, mindful of crashing the fragile hatchling into a wall, though he eventually remembered that he could just phase the whole thing out of the material plane. After all, his blood and mana were interchangeable, and the small bird didn’t even possess a core to stop it from turning completely incorporeal.
The range of Micky’s senses had initially not increased much, since the tiny crow had been quite close to his main body, but his Sage’s Pond quickly stretched into an oval shape as the creature slipped through layers of stone and coloured minerals, moving away from him.
The small bird reached the surface and kept flying away from the Fungal Spire. Only when it was roughly seven kilometres away from Micky did the enormous bubble of information finally split into two spheres. The second Sage’s Pond was slightly smaller than the original, but only because the sentry didn’t possess a domain of its own. More importantly, Micky could still control the bird as easily as his remaining limbs.
‘Holy shit! This is crazy!’
The construct was even easier to control than the tiny puppets they had fashioned out of Kassorith’s blood, and its senses didn’t seem to lose to the main body’s in the slightest. Percy and Micky had hypothesized that the latter’s unique constitution would synergize extremely well with the Decree, though the results were even more shocking than they had expected.
‘I suppose that it makes sense. The material I crafted it out of is simultaneously my blood, a piece of my flesh, and a portion of my mana. It benefits from both facets of the Decree, as well as the unique properties of the soul affinity,’ Micky reasoned.
Seeing as the small crow showed no sign of stopping or growing more difficult to control, Micky tested a few additional things.
After ensuring that he could turn the bird corporeal, ethereal, visible and invisible, he played around with its appearance, cycling through various critters native to Remior or Huehue. Since Micky was able to rob the construct of its mass, it wasn’t difficult to fashion it into a flying rat or snake, though it looked quite unnatural running or slithering through the air. It made more sense to give it a shape that fit with its surroundings, so that it would blend in.
One advantage that the construct had over regular blood sentries was how easily it could hide in plain sight, disguise itself into other forms, or escape through solid surfaces. Micky had peeled away and regenerated a few of the seals inside his cores and was constantly circulating the enchanted pieces through his channels to conceal his mana. That property had extended to the construct, so he could even hide it from Mana Sense or Soul Vision if he wanted.
‘It’s like the ultimate spy!’
Micky could send a regular-looking pigeon or mouse into a town and scan everything in the area. Even if somebody noticed it, he could have it flee into the ground and pop out of a tree trunk a hundred metres away as a squirrel. He should even be able to play around with the controlled-concealment runes inside the construct’s body to give it a fake Red core that one would expect to see in a mundane animal.
Happy with what a single construct could accomplish, Micky tried severing additional chunks off his body, sending each tiny creature in a different direction. Dozens of magical critters spread out from the Fungal Spire, a colossal bubble of information stretching for kilometres around each one. Micky handled the first handful or so well enough, though a splitting headache brought him to his knees as more and more data slammed into his brain.
Not one to give up at the first hurdle, he peeled his attention away from most bubbles of information, concentrating on only four or five at a time. That greatly lessened the pain, allowing him to keep pumping out his sentries.
‘Okay… it looks like I can have way more than a handful of Ponds active at a time, though I can’t pay attention to all of them simultaneously.’
It was a bit like reading a book. One could technically see the whole page at a glance, but most people would have to read the text line by line.
Still, dozens upon dozens of sensory domains spread out around the slender mountain, their edges fusing together into a vast, pie-shaped bubble of information that was only a few kilometres tall but over sixty wide. Micky was only capable of focusing on a relatively narrow region, but he could still slowly scan the whole thing over several minutes.
Eventually, he discovered a second limitation – a more absolute one. After the hundredth or so construct, he found it difficult to create more. As soon as he tried, both his main body and the existing critters began to squirm violently, struggling to hold their shapes.
‘Micky! What the hell, man?!’ Percy yelled through their connection. ‘I’m in the middle of something!’
‘Sorry!’ Micky told the friend who his experiments had apparently also affected. Reabsorbing the most recent construct into his body, he reined in the sensory information, keeping it from leaking to his fellow aspect.
The feeling just now had reminded him of when Percy exceeded his clone limit. Was this what this was? Had the combination of the Penitent’s Decree and Micky’s unprecedented status as a Dead Winter Elemental produced a cheap imitation of the Clone bloodline?
‘Well… it looks more like Archibald’s version than Percy’s,’ Micky thought.
While Micky’s sentries could be considered “soul clones”, they were functionally closer to the mindless flesh dummies that Percy’s relatives produced. They didn’t possess mana cores of their own, and had to be remotely controlled by Micky, since they couldn’t move or act independently.
Regardless of what he compared his new ability to, there was no doubt that it was extremely powerful and versatile. Micky’s mind was already racing with ideas on how he and Percy might be able to take advantage of it, fully aware that he had barely scratched the surface of what should be possible.
His Status agreed.
[Congratulations! Your spell has evolved: Hybrid Art: Chameleon’s Skin – Refined -> Hybrid Art: Shapeshifting Sentries – Masterful!]
Percy – who had clearly also read the notification – grunted through their connection, sounding annoyed and curious in equal parts. ‘Fine, you have my attention. I’m heading your way,’ he spat, before adding, ‘Oh, but make sure Nesha doesn’t see you for a couple of days. She sounded quite angry.’