The version of Percy possessing the mantis had been on Remior until a couple of hours ago, so suddenly finding himself in the middle of a magical lake and surrounded by countless spectral fiends required some getting used to. His fellow clone had obviously brought him up to speed on the situation, and every incarnation of Percy recalled his previous visit to the Elemental Source, but it had been years since then.
Flexing his host’s powerful limbs, he hopped onto the surface of the water and jumped around a couple of times to adjust to the creature’s movements.
‘It’s actually not that different from how my main body moves during a fight – if I ignore how much bulkier the beast is, and the fact that it’s constrained to two dimensions.’
Another thing he noticed was that he could feel the location of every spectral fiend in the area without actively paying them much attention. His range appeared limited to the contents of his Sage’s Pond, meaning that the creature’s strange ability still relied on its other senses.
Whenever Percy stopped concentrating on the swarm, his mind passively discarded all the unnecessary information about his minions, reducing them to mere dots at the edge of his vision. He felt that there was more data embedded inside the dots than just the fiends’ locations, but he wasn’t sure what to make of that.
Finally, he instinctively knew that he could control the creatures. It took him a few attempts to learn how to click his host’s antlers, and a couple more to figure out how he was meant to convey his instructions through the act, but the swarm proved quite responsive to his call.
Commanding the fiends was as simple as visualizing what he wanted them to do while sending out the signal. The fiends flew around him in intricate formations pulled straight out of his imagination, making him feel like he was simply shaping mana of an unfamiliar affinity rather than directing a swarm of living creatures.
‘It’s such a shame that we can’t store the mantis in our spatial seal or bring it back to Remior,’ his copy of Micky lamented. ‘You do realize we’ll have to get rid of it sooner or later, right? I don’t think it’s safe to have Sol and Doh bring the creature home.’
Percy sighed internally. ‘It can’t be helped. Its ability would be useless without a huge number of spectral fiends anyway, so there wouldn’t be much of a point to moving it away from Melodia. The best we can do is figure out how it works and hope that there’s something we can learn from it.’
Opening his Status, he ignored most of the entries that had nothing to do with the mantis, skimming through the page for some mention of the creature’s unique gift. Percy expected to find it in the mutation section, though he was shocked to see the ability listed somewhere else.
___
Spectral traits [5/5]:
· [Command] – Boosts one’s proclivity in directing any entity that can be perceived as a subordinate.
· [Weaving] – Boosts one’s proclivity in manipulating one-dimensional structures.
· [Insomnia] – Eliminates the need for sleep.
· [Scribing] – Boosts one’s proclivity in expressing meaning onto any written medium.
· [Mimicry] – Boosts one’s awareness of their physical appearance, as well as their ability to maintain or modify it.
___
‘Command? That makes zero sense!’ Micky blurted out upon reading the entry.
Percy nodded, though he wasn’t planning to solve this mystery by himself. Gesturing at the Melodians to approach, he waited for Sol to place her hand on his front-left leg before establishing a spectral connection with her, the other clone, and the disembodied deity that hopefully held all the answers.
***
‘I have no idea what this is,’ Zoris admitted. ‘There’s so much wrong with what your other clone is saying that I don’t even know where to begin.’
The clone possessing Sol couldn’t help but massage his host’s temples.
Before discussing anything else, just the fact that the mantis had a spectral trait went against everything they knew about the fiends, as it was supposed to be impossible to absorb one without the soul affinity. Percy could chalk that up to some unprecedented quirk in the creatures’ biology, but that only led to the next major issue.
Nobody in the group had ever heard of this trait before.
This was especially problematic, because they’d spent an afternoon, a few months back, pooling their resources together and cross-referencing their collective knowledge about this topic.
They’d confirmed that the index Percy had purchased from the Vault listed the same fiends as the Melodian books, down to the last entry. The order had obviously been different, so going through the information had been a major headache, but they had double- and triple-checked that Sol’s people had recorded the same seven hundred and twenty-nine fiends that the rest of the universe had encountered.
The only exception was the Beacon trait that Sol had acquired from Percy’s clone, but that was a mystery for another day.
Even Zoris – an experienced soul deity in his own right – had largely agreed with the list. While he couldn’t remember every spectral fiend in existence off the top of his head, he had recognized all the entries described in the books and failed to recall any traits not mentioned there. The total number of traits had also sounded correct to him, though it had been too long since he’d last thought about this subject for him to be certain.
Either way, Command wasn’t supposed to exist.
There were nearly a hundred thousand Melodians alive today, along with several times as many who had lived and died since Zoris had taught them the method to absorb fiends, yet not a single person had ever acquired this trait.
If that wasn’t problematic enough, there was a third huge issue.
Even if Percy accepted that the beasts had somehow absorbed a never-before-seen spectral fiend without possessing the soul affinity, he couldn’t explain how every member of their species had ended up with the same trait. Spectral traits were supposed to be random, and the odds of two people getting the same one were low, yet all nineteen specimens that Percy had encountered had clearly possessed the same mysterious ability.
“I have a hypothesis,” he said, speaking out loud for Doh’s benefit. The poor guy inadvertently got left out of their internal conversations pretty often, so Percy tried to include him whenever he could. “I don’t think that this is the Elemental Source of the soul affinity.”
His words elicited numerous confused looks, both internal and external.
“How could it not be?” Sol asked. “I admit that we didn’t even know about Elemental Sources until you explained the concept to us, but doesn’t this one tick all the right boxes? It gives all of our people the soul affinity from birth, and we’ve already experienced its benefits while practicing soul magic in its vicinity.”
“I never said that the Elemental Source isn’t on Melodia, or even in this area,” Percy explained. “Just that the lake isn’t it.”
He’d actually been playing with this idea in his head ever since he realized how similar the Mirror Lake was to other lakes on the planet. He’d lacked the evidence to be certain, but the strange trait that the mantises possessed had made him more confident in his guess.
It looked like something that had been granted to them by an outside force – some kind of intelligent entity with properties similar to a fiend. Percy also recalled Kassorith mentioning that the Elemental Source of the soul affinity was widely believed to be a living creature like the World Tree. Perhaps, it was deliberately using the Mirror Lake as a front to divert attention away from itself.
“If you are right, where is the real Source hidden?” Doh asked.
“There’s only one possible location,” Percy replied, tapping the toe of Sol’s right boot on the water’s surface.
While the sky above the lake was obscured by the dense swarm most of the time, the occasional gaps between the creatures suggested that there wasn’t anything large flying among them.
The true Elemental Source had to be close, since its area of influence clearly overlapped with the Mirror Lake’s. Percy guessed that the soul mana was produced deeper underground and escaped through the surface, creating the illusion that it came from the water. As for the strange properties of the liquid… Percy wouldn’t be surprised if they were just a side-effect of its proximity to the Elemental Source.
‘Zoris? What do you think?’ Sol asked through their connection.
The former deity remained silent for a few seconds before eventually agreeing. ‘It’s possible. My ring exists on both the material and soul planes, so I was never able to phase through the ground to explore what’s under the lakebed. At the very least, Percy’s explanation sounds internally consistent.’
Confident that he was onto something, Percy focused his senses downwards, trying to pierce through the ground with his sensory domain. Unfortunately, his Sage’s Pond wasn’t great at inferring data through solid surfaces, so most of the information abruptly cut off after the first couple of metres.
Thankfully, Soul Vision didn’t care about physical obstructions. The problem was that there were just as many spectral fiends flying underground as there were above his head, blocking his magical sight.
‘Now what?’ Micky asked. ‘Please don’t tell me that you want us to dig a giant tunnel. Sol and Doh don’t have corporeal mana, and their domains are much weaker than ours, so we’ll have to do all the work.’
Percy chuckled. “We’re not digging anything. Don’t we have the perfect tools for exploring places we can’t physically visit?”
Doh frowned. “I thought your sentries had trouble approaching the lake without getting eaten by the fiends.”
Percy responded by patting his fellow clone’s chitinous limb a couple of times, careful to avoid getting his hand stabbed by the pointy protrusions. Next, he pointed in a certain direction with his thumb.
The male Melodian remained confused at first, though his eyes widened in realization as the Blue mantis leapt in the direction Percy had pointed, causing the swarm of fiends to open a path for him.
The creature returned a few minutes later, carrying a pack of fist-sized rodents on its head. Clicking its antlers one final time, he caused the fiends below the lakebed to open a path as the sentries flew into the hole as fast as they could.
The beast’s range was finite, so the swarm grew denser again about a kilometre in. The first sentry got eaten after crossing the two-kilometre mark, while two more got devoured before they reached three kilometres. Losing the constructs wasn’t ideal, as the real Micky would have to spend some time replenishing his spiritual blood later, but that was ultimately a small price to pay.
Four more sentries got eaten a few seconds later, leaving only a couple left. Percy was starting to get worried that his constructs wouldn’t delve deep enough to uncover the source of the soul mana, when his minions finally collided against something hard.
It looked a bit like a giant silver wall, except that it moved with enough speed to destroy anything that so much as touched its shell. The fragile sentries naturally didn’t survive the impact either, though they didn’t have to. The brief disturbance had clearly been enough to capture the Elemental Source’s attention.
The entire lake shook, the smooth surface that had remained mostly still during both of Percy’s visits suddenly starting to boil. The swarms flying above, around, and below the Melodians grew more erratic, the tiny fiends scattering in horror.
Just as Percy was internally debating whether to borrow another set of sentries from his main body, an enormous silver shape pierced the centre of the lake, shooting toward the sky.