Percy’s plans for the pale moss stretched far beyond brewing a new type of potion. If the ingredient was anything like the green and red mushrooms he had found in the Grisly Bog, there was a chance that it could be used for alchemy, but that was a secondary goal. Cultivating the unusual resource was in many ways an excuse to study certain other things that Percy had previously lacked the time for.
Before harvesting the plant, he examined the various patches that unfolded across the stone walls of the cavern, comparing them to one another. To an untrained eye, the herbal layer coating every vertical surface in the room might have appeared uniform, but Percy easily identified three distinct sections – and not just because he’d been the one who had planted them.
The moss growing on the columns closest to him was slightly thinner and less vibrant, with the occasional bald spot revealing the minerals hiding beneath. This was the section that had been provided mostly with plain water, only mixed with the occasional bit of pulverized wasp flesh so that the plant would have enough nutrients to develop. The rich ambient mana inside the hive had helped this side of Percy’s underground garden to flourish despite the relative lack of sustenance, though the underfed moss might have not survived anywhere else on Remior.
The other half of the cavern shone more brightly, the magical wallpaper appearing thicker, healthier, and with almost no gaps – save for the rare crystal or sharp stony tip jutting out of the floral film. This moss had been provided with ample amounts of crushed bugs, harvested from stronger creatures and slathered onto the pillars before the mana inside the meat had the chance to dissipate.
‘It seems like we were right. The moss is carnivorous like the trolls’ mushrooms,’ Percy confirmed.
He still had no idea why seemingly unconnected ingredients of entirely different affinities had developed similar symbiotic relationships with distinct tribes of demi-humans. However, the fact that he could accelerate the moss’s growth by sacrificing a negligible number of wasps was convenient.
Having solved the first mystery, he reached out to his familiar and the clone inhabiting her body, informing them about his findings and asking them to have the Starry Workers feed every patch of moss with dead insects from now on.
With that out of the way, Percy focused on the final section at the very back of the room. It contained less than five percent of the moss, but it was growing more rapidly than even the patches fed exclusively with wasp meat. This was the section that he had personally watered with spiritual blood whenever he’d had some free time.
The Orange mana coursing through the plant was even denser than the previous region, though it showed no sign of advancing to the next grade just yet. The faint layer of silver permeating the moss within Percy’s Soul Vision was slightly more pronounced than anywhere else in the cavern, but it couldn’t be compared to even the most simpleminded animals.
‘There’s no way I’ll be able to put a clone in this thing anytime soon.’
Percy sighed, though he wasn’t too disappointed. Everything he had read about the Decree had warned that cultivating ingredients with spiritual blood required years to yield results, so he hadn’t expected the moss to reach Yellow or develop even a semblance of spirituality after only a couple of weeks. If anything, he was glad that the moss had shown a modicum of change, as it suggested that he wasn’t wasting his time.
Gathering phantom mana at the tips of his index and middle finger, he forged it into a point. With a swift motion, he carved a deep and long wound along his left forearm, clenching the corresponding fist to bleed out faster. Moulding his willpower into an invisible funnel, he directed the flow of blood onto the moss, sprinkling it evenly across the special section of the garden until he started feeling slightly lightheaded.
‘I guess that’s enough for today.’
Injecting a dose of Blue healing ink directly into his veins, he aided the remaining spiritual blood in mending the injury faster. Once there was no trace of the incision on his skin, he rummaged through his seal in search of anything edible. Luckily, he found some leftover chicken breast from three days earlier that Nesha had generously roasted for them both, still dripping with lemon juice and pieces of rosemary.
Much like Percy, his girlfriend had never been much of a cook, but she had recently made the effort to learn a few simple recipes for his sake, claiming that she couldn’t bear to watch him live “like this” any longer.
He wasn’t sure what the problem was. With two Green cores and an enhanced physique, his body was a lot more resilient than it used to be. Surviving on Honey Rolls and the occasional fruit or piece of bread without getting sick shouldn’t be much of an issue. That said, Percy did appreciate that Nesha was concerned about him, and he had greatly enjoyed her food, so he wasn’t going to complain.
As he waited for the heating enchantments he hastily engraved onto a slab of phantom mana to warm up his meal, he sat down on the bumpy floor of the cavern, using the Penitent’s Decree to dissolve small chunks of his soul into his bloodstream. Replenishing the consumed resource would take several hours, which was arguably the most annoying part of his experiments, but he was determined to soldier through the discomfort until he saw results.
It was only after his stomach was full and his spiritual blood partially recovered that he stood up again. Ignoring the fastest-growing section of moss, he used his willpower to scrape a large quantity of the ingredient from the pillars fed exclusively with wasp pulp. Rolling the pale carpet into a cylinder taller and thicker than a person, he stored it into his seal before exiting through a tunnel that led to a more spacious room.
Other than brewing Gloomy Dawn and Blue potions for himself and his closest allies, Percy hadn’t invested as much time into alchemy as he would have liked during the past couple of years. Upgrading his Sovereign’s Encroachment to the Sage’s Pond, promoting his cores, and crafting a new cauldron had still boosted his brewing yield by two points, bringing it up to sixty-six percent.
The jump had been even smaller than the previous time, making it clear that reaching seventy percent as a mortal would be a massive challenge, but Percy was more than satisfied with his gains.
Qualitatively speaking, his Sage’s Pond wasn’t that much better than the previous iteration of Percy’s Wild Art, but it did mark a huge quantitative improvement. By focusing his entire sensory domain inwards, he had been able to brew much greater volumes of ingredients without negatively affecting his efficiency. In practice, that had allowed him to double the size of his newest cauldron once more, allowing it to fit a hundred times the ingredients of a standard cauldron.
The fact that Micky and any soul clones possessing sapient hosts could brew similar quantities of ingredients independently from him only made the situation even better. If he and his fellow aspect decided to drop their other projects and focus exclusively on alchemy, they would be able to brew as much Aurora Dew as thousands of alchemists.
‘Maybe one day,’ he thought with a shrug, knowing that this wasn’t an option as things stood.
Either way, figuring out the properties of the yellow moss should be trivial.
Less than a day later, Percy was holding a vial full of a pale liquid, glowing with a deep Orange colour within his Mana Sense. Sadly, consuming the potion in this state wouldn’t tell him much, because his grade was already too high to be affected by something this weak.
Compressing it all the way to Blue took a couple more days, since each step required him to work out the correct frequency and amplitude of pressure to apply on the concoction. The fact that he had to undergo a similar but slightly different process three times – to elevate the liquid to Yellow, Green, and finally Blue – didn’t help.
The good news was that the consolidation principle would eventually allow him to combine the three steps into one, eliminating redundancies and saving him a lot of time and wasted ingredients in future brewing sessions, but there was no avoiding the initial period of research.
When the concoction was ready, Percy gulped it down. The dense light mana spread out of his stomach, permeating every corner of his body. Most body parts remained unaffected, though Percy noticed that his eyes seemed to react to the foreign substance in a unique way, making his vision slightly clearer.
The exact effect wasn’t obvious at first, though he’d gone into the project already having a hunch of what the potion would do.
Having anticipated that his well-illuminated cavern wouldn’t be the best place to test the effect of his brew, Percy entered a narrow tunnel leading to a smaller room only a couple dozen metres away.
The new chamber was special in that it had been coated with regular dirt and mundane rocks, to minimize the ambient glow that permeated the rest of the hive. Using his domain, Percy pushed the colourful motes out of the room as well, plunging it into complete darkness.
Or… well. That was what should have happened.
Despite his efforts to eliminate every possible source of light, Percy wasn’t too surprised to find himself capable of examining the rocky walls in front of his eyes just as clearly as before.
‘Night vision… exactly like the goblins.’
It was a little disappointing. Percy’s wide assortment of magical senses already provided him with plenty of alternatives to navigate even complete darkness, so a mild form of night vision wouldn’t really change much. At most, the additional trickle of information might push the range of his Sage’s Pond a little higher still, but he didn’t expect a large improvement – certainly not one worth the trouble of regularly brewing the Blue variant of the potion.
Percy didn’t give up immediately, however, guessing that there was probably a more efficient way to use it.
Considering its similarities to the green and red mushrooms, he first spent a couple of days figuring out how to convert the potion into tattoo ink, thinking that it might be more effective when injected directly into his skin or bloodstream.
Contrary to his expectations, the effect of the ink appeared to be even weaker than that of the ingested potion, marking this as the first notable area where the properties of the moss had deviated somewhat from those of the fungi.
In a burst of inspiration, Percy eventually tried pouring the original version of the liquid directly into his eyes, finally seeing a significant improvement. Perhaps this should have been the first thing he tried but, in his defence, he didn’t have any prior experience using his potions as eyedrops.
Over ninety percent of the light mana got absorbed by his eyes, sharpening his vision twice as much as before, though it clearly worked best in dark environments. It also stretched his Sage’s Pond by another five hundred metres.
Combined with the modest effects of the mindset that he had acquired just days earlier, the potion stretched the radius of Percy’s secondary domain to a little over six kilometres. It was a sizeable increase – albeit a temporary one.
‘Eh… it might be worth having a few doses on the side. I’m going to call this one “goblinsight potion”,’ he decided.
It wasn’t the most original name, nor was he too thrilled about his new brew. Even the trollsfury ink wasn’t the most potent resource, despite having saved his life a bunch of times before.
That said, his success had left him even more curious about demi-humans. The two tribes that he had encountered had both produced strange ingredients that were suitable for alchemy, and Percy knew of at least one other species that Elaine had mentioned hunting in her youth.
Perhaps, it was time to pay them a visit. There was clearly some deeper secret linking the primitive creatures to the magical ingredients growing in their habitats, and Percy was going to uncover it.