While Tiberius’ kinsmen were long gone, there should be other deities travelling to the auction. Grabbing their attention wouldn’t be easy, but that was still the simplest part of Percy’s plan.
What came after being found promised to be far more troublesome, as there was no way to eliminate the risk of being captured by another group of space bandits. Even gods from a proper world weren’t guaranteed to treat Percy’s host fairly. The Sapphire Pavilion technically didn’t allow the attendees of their auctions to harm each other, but would anyone know or care if a mortal got squashed like a bug in the middle of nowhere?
‘We’ll have to give them a reason to help, and eliminate any reason to hurt us,’ Percy told his host.
If he decided to go all out, there were many rewards he could offer that would entice pretty much any deity in the universe to at least hear him out. The secret of the cyan powder would be priceless to a lesser spring, while his boosting art and the ability to pass the Moirais’ Decree to a large number of mortals would incite greed even in the representatives of a peak faction.
The problem was choosing which of his secrets would be the least damaging to share, and to incentivize the gods to transport Tiberius safely to the auction instead of just killing him after extracting everything of value.
‘I’m leaning toward the cyan powder,’ Micky suggested. ‘The other things can strengthen even the most powerful worlds, while a faster means of advancement is more relevant to lesser springs and mid-tier greater springs like Thess’kala.’
Percy mentally indicated his agreement. An argument could be made that the Moirais’ Decree could only affect a finite number of people, but it would require additional clones to be compromised and might lead to Percy directly provoking the wrath of the strongest faction in the universe.
Producing another greater spring wasn’t ideal either – he’d resisted selling the secret to Metatron for so long – but not every deity treated their mortals as cruelly as the pentapus, and Percy had already technically given the secret away to a few of his past hosts like Enki.
More importantly, a random lesser spring gaining the ability to keep pace with Remior’s development was unlikely to affect Percy’s people. It would be millennia before either faction reaped the benefits of the priceless resource, and the two species might even be located too far apart to ever interact with one another.
New greater springs emerged every few thousand years anyway, so Percy’s actions wouldn’t change the cosmic order that much. He also needed something valuable to trade at the auction, so he might as well sell the same item to multiple interested parties.
‘Keep in mind that we might still lose this clone,’ Percy warned.
He was pretty sure that the peak factions actively worked to prevent the secret from leaking, otherwise others would have thought of selling it for ridiculous sums of money. Hell, the leaders of the Void Hand clearly didn’t want even the weaker members of their own alliance to learn the secret, so selling it at a public auction was going to be extremely dangerous.
Hopefully, the Sapphire Pavilion wouldn’t allow anyone to act against them within their premises, but Percy would have to investigate whether there was an option for selling items anonymously, to avoid implicating his host.
The precautions he and Micky had set up with Kerfyl’s Decree gave him some confidence in taking the risk, but he had to mentally prepare himself for the very real possibility of this version of him dying.
‘I understand,’ the Huehuan said with a solemn mental nod.
Having made his mind up, Percy pulled a rectangular grey slab out of his seal and asked his main body to mix some phantom mana with the air mana he was supplying through the cord. After receiving the new resource, the clone carved a few simple enchantments on the smooth frontal surface of the learning aid, before snapping it in half and pouring mana into the controlled self-repairs on the back as well.
Tiberius’ eyes widened in shock as he watched the fragments regenerate into identical copies of the original construct, but he didn’t interrupt, clearly curious to see what mysterious technique his spectral guest would show him next.
Percy replicated the slabs as quickly as the pitiful trickle of phantom mana would allow, eventually generating a towering stack hundreds of pieces tall. He had to envelop the constructs with his domain to prevent them from drifting away.
‘Mind explaining what you’re trying to do?’ Tiberius asked, clearly unable to endure his saviour’s silence any longer.
‘These are illumination, lightning resonance, and amplification runes respectively,’ Percy laconically said, letting his host mull over the plan by himself.
He’d chosen weaker but more versatile variants for the enchantments, to ensure that they could be fuelled by mana of any affinity and any mage – not just their creator. He could have drawn more potent runes by restricting them to Tiberius’ lightning mana – since that was what Percy was going to activate the final formation with – but refilling his host’s reserves multiple times in this environment would take a while. The auction might finish before he was done.
Once he had enough constructs, he spread them out in a wide, flat area with his domain, arranging them into even larger runes joined together into a four-layered formation. With everything in place, he poured his host’s mana into the enchantments, causing the whole structure to light up.
Tiberius had failed to capture the attention of his kinsmen earlier, but there was a massive difference between the basic indigo flashes he had released by himself and the output of Percy’s intricate formation. The multiple layers of amplification and lightning resonance runes greatly empowered the effect of the Violet’s mana, while the illumination runes converted every drop of that power into light.
Not satisfied with just that, Percy approached the problem more methodically than before. Instead of a single, continuous glow, he employed numerous short-lived bursts to create a blinking signal. His host’s limited reserves would last longer this way, the individual flashes would be even brighter, and the rhythmic contrast between light and darkness would raise the odds of somebody noticing the artificial nature of the signal.
As a final failsafe, Percy fed phantom mana into his host’s core, converting it to lightning. Due to the soul mana present within the resource, it wasn’t as efficient as regular pure mana, nor was Percy particularly skilled in generating lightning mana, because the most recent clone in Nephthys body had yet to share his memories with the original and the other clones.
Due to his lower grade and the additional losses incurred during the transmission, Percy was unable to fully keep up with his host’s consumption, but his efforts still allowed him to take fewer and shorter breaks.
‘Thank you for doing this,’ Tiberius said a few hours later, during one of those breaks. ‘I’ve no idea if I’ll survive, but this is the first time anyone’s gone to such lengths to help me.’
Percy shrugged. ‘No need to thank me. Like I said, my original plan was to catch a glimpse of the gods’ battle, grab the affinity-changing treasure and leave. If you hadn’t mentioned the auction, you would have probably been dead by now.’
The affinity-changing treasure in question was still inside Percy’s seal. Perhaps it would be wiser to just give up on the auction and bring the dandelion back to Remior to strengthen a couple of his allies. The Sapphire Pavilion had lots of branches, so it might not be impossible to attend another auction in the future. However, Percy had no idea how long it would take, nor did he have any other viable leads for extending his lifespan and activating his third core.
Since the two-stemmed plant was unlikely to last that long, Percy didn’t mind giving one of its two uses to his host – it would even serve as a permanent memento for the man to remember his deceased mentor by. Percy had held off, because changing his host’s affinity to sound would make the formation more difficult to use.
‘The fact remains that I’m only alive right now because of you,’ Tiberius insisted, though he kept it at that.
Resuming his efforts, Percy continued pumping phantom mana into his host’s core and lightning mana into the enchantments for several hours – or had they crossed into days already?
For the longest time, their surroundings remained perfectly unchanging, making Percy doubt that there was even anyone still travelling nearby. Perhaps this was an unpopular route, or everyone had already reached the venue of the auction. It was also entirely possible that the signal was still too weak to reach the nearest deity.
Throughout the operation, he and his spectral companions hadn’t stopped bouncing ideas off one another, trying to come up with a backup plan, but they hadn’t managed to think of anything even remotely viable.
It wasn’t until after Percy’s main body informed the clone that he’d been feeding him air and phantom mana for three days straight that something finally changed: a slender, long-necked humanoid covered in short yellow fur popped out of nowhere, floating a few dozen metres away and examining Tiberius curiously.