The “flying caterpillars” that Percy’s sentries imitated were unfortunately rather uncommon near or inside the town. Thankfully, he didn’t actually need his minions to move that fast, since the place was too dense with structures and people to navigate quickly. There were also plenty of other types of small vermin scurrying about in dark alleys or atop almost-forgotten rooftops for him to study and emulate.
Avoiding the Blue and Violet citizens was his greatest challenge during this mission. Tenefyre might not be the most impressive greater spring in the universe, but it was still among the most developed planets that Percy had visited. Even a seemingly random town in the middle of nowhere was packed full of powerful mages who would have enjoyed coveted positions of leadership back on Remior.
Getting his constructs caught up in somebody’s domain was the quickest way to lose them. The good news was that Percy’s Sage’s Pond could directly perceive willpower, so he could actually steer his minions away from someone’s range before they got scanned.
Occasionally, a sentry inadvertently got boxed between multiple encroaching domains that blocked all its escape routes. When that happened, Percy had to turn the construct corporeal and mimic the behaviour of a real animal to the best of his ability and hope that the Blues and Violets bought the charade until he managed to escape their range and resume traveling covertly.
The second major danger was the possibility of triggering some sort of alarm baked into the local infrastructure.
The town was a jungle as much as its surroundings – albeit one of towering metallic buildings, three-dimensional roads meant for all sorts of magical vehicles, and enormous bridges that linked the structures together, rather than trees and undergrowth. A lot of the infrastructure was covered in enchantments that had been carved or painted in a runecrafting language that Percy was entirely unfamiliar with.
His only option was to slow down and carefully plan his sentries’ movements. He could understand the purpose of some enchantments if he studied them for a few minutes, but there were many obscure formations that he had no choice but to circumvent.
Percy knew that he was probably being overly paranoid. The odds of these people having filled some random town with anti-spying enchantments were minuscule, though he didn’t want to risk it. Losing a single sentry wouldn’t be the end of the world, but it would likely prompt the locals to be more cautious, needlessly complicating the rest of Percy’s trip – and all his future visits to the planet.
Ironically, even with a handful of minions at his disposal, Percy was forced to progress through the town at a snail’s pace.
The final issue that he and Micky had had to deal with was luckily the easiest to solve. They’d opted to possess a random beast this time, so leveraging their connection to understand the local’s language wasn’t an option. Having considered this problem, Percy’s main body had packed the translation device into the clone’s seal before activating his bloodline.
The oversized gadget looked ridiculous next to Percy’s tiny host. It was normally meant to be attached to the side of a person’s head, but it was about as large as half of the snail’s slimy flesh, so Percy had been forced to crawl onto the object and plaster his host’s body onto its surface.
‘At least it seems to work as intended, though I’m not looking forward to scrubbing it clean afterwards,’ he told his friend.
‘Maybe we can store it into the seal without the goo if we’re careful,’ Micky suggested.
Percy mentally sighed, not quite convinced that it would work. Alas, getting some alien sludge on his face was a small price to pay to understand the Tenefyrians.
The first conversation he managed to comprehend was one between a couple of adolescents. They appeared to be talking about the strange vehicles that every adult in the town seemed to own. They were excitedly chatting about the new features of the latest model that some big corporation had recently unveiled.
‘Okay… there are too many people and too many unimportant topics being discussed for us to listen to everything,’ Percy realized. ‘What exactly are we looking for?’
‘Advancement resources, the Ring of Sacrilege, their bloodline Decree, and anything else that might be useful to us. Preferably in that order,’ Micky summarized.
Percy nodded internally. ‘The first one shouldn’t be too difficult to stumble upon.’ Unlike the people of Maradion that had been on guard against mortals from the allied factions, the Tenefyrians shouldn’t have a reason to be too secretive with their elixirs. ‘How do we get information on the ring though?’
‘I don’t know,’ Micky admitted. ‘Look for ice users?’
‘The average ice user will never get their hands on a Ring of Sacrilege. Only the most talented mortals might,’ Percy pointed out.
‘Gauging a person’s talent isn’t easy,’ Micky protested. ‘It’ll take us forever to find a handful of true geniuses in a city this large.’
‘Well… we don’t necessarily have to find somebody who is eligible for the ring. We just need to hear somebody mentioning it in a conversation to give us a lead,’ Percy explained. ‘Rather than somebody who is currently a talented ice user, we only need to hover over a bunch of people who have the potential to become talented ice users in the future.’
‘Kids, then?’ Micky guessed. ‘Green-borns, ideally?’
Percy hummed to indicate his agreement. ‘Green-borns with the ice affinity might be too difficult to find, but Green-borns with water or air, and Yellow-borns with ice should be doable.’
If Tenefyre was anything like Remior, less than one in thousands of people would be born in either group. It wasn’t a lot, but there should still be hundreds of such individuals in this town.
Percy and Micky had to look for a place where lots of young children gathered. This type of conversation was more likely to crop up soon after a kid awakened their core. A Green-born’s excited parent was likely to daydream or brag to others about their child’s potential.
‘What if we searched for this planet’s authorities instead?’ Micky suggested. ‘I think we’re more likely to find the ring that way, on top of other valuable things.’
‘We could, but we have no idea how many temples or strongholds their equivalent of the Divine Order controls. I don’t know about you, but I find the idea of tiptoeing around gods a lot more stressful than spying on a bunch of mortals.’
Sneaking into wherever the ring was stored would inevitably involve some risks, yet Percy would rather limit them as much as possible. Locating the artifact some other way sounded preferable. Also, spying on children and their parents was more likely to yield information about the Tenefyrians’ bloodline Decree, thus killing two birds with one stone.
With a tentative plan in place, Percy and Micky doubled down on their mission.
Sneaking around on a developed world that housed several potential threats was a lot harder than doing so on Remior or Melodia, but it was good practice for the Huehuan anyway. Micky’s main body could only handle a fraction of his sentries at any given time, so accumulating additional experience through the clones accelerated his training.
With every hour that passed, every building Percy and Micky scanned, and every Blue’s willpower that they had to hide from, they grew faster and more efficient.
A couple of days later, they had yet to find any leads on the ring, but they had managed to answer some of their questions about the other topics.
The natives cleansed their cores by consuming a certain type of turquoise pill several times per day. The pills clearly contained both beast mana and crystallized pure mana, just like the Aurora Dew. The discovery was as disappointing as it was expected. Percy still held some hope that the Tenefyrians might have found an additional way to accelerate their advancements or extend their lifespans, though he had yet to spot any evidence of either.
His sentries hadn’t found any buildings that housed large numbers of young children, but they had stumbled upon several families, as well as adults in the process of procreating or laying eggs, so Percy understood the Tenefyrians’ reproductive habits a lot better.
Apparently, Percy and Micky had been wrong about the natives being entirely asexual. It was true that Tenefyrians only possessed a single gender, and they did appear to have the option of reproducing asexually. However, they could also choose to absorb a donated piece of slimy flesh from another adult if they wished to mix their lineages together.
Percy had even spotted a group of four adults sharing flesh with one another and gestating several multicoloured blobs of goop inside their semi-translucent bodies before laying lots of communal eggs.
Leaving aside how disgusting the scene had been, or how awkward Percy had felt after intruding on such a private moment, he was quite fascinated by how much freedom the Tenefyrians’ reproductive abilities granted them.
Through snippets of conversations that he had caught here and there, he’d even managed to piece together some information about the locals’ bloodline Decree. For the most part, it worked like the one they had on Remior, with an important caveat: it allowed its owners to discard pieces of their bloodline, devolving it into a simpler, and often weaker, strain.
The discarded features appeared to be random and couldn’t be recovered if one changed their mind later. If somebody like Archibald made use of this option, he might lose his ability to control his life clones, his capacity might stop scaling with his grade, or he might retain the ability to control his current clones while permanently losing the ability to produce more. Even if somebody discarded their bloodline entirely, they couldn’t obtain a new one – they’d just turn into an empty slate that couldn’t be filled up, like Elaine or Micky.
Percy’s first thought was that this was a rather useless ability, though it only took him a couple of seconds to recognize its benefits – of which there were many.
The most important one was the potential to fix or eradicate a blighted bloodline. Had Rambert been given this Decree, he could have attempted to shave random chunks of his bloodline off until he rid himself of his insatiable hunger – the curse that had forced House Tantalus to keep tormenting innocent people. Even if they got unlucky with the discarded features and failed to retain a beneficial strain of the bloodline, many might choose to remove it entirely over keeping it in its flawed state.
This Decree synergized extremely well with the Tenefyrians’ flexible reproduction, as it allowed them to mix and mutate their bloodlines more intentionally. In theory, ten siblings with the same bloodline could each attempt to shave it down into a simplified variant, producing as many as ten different results. After essentially stripping down the bloodline into its most basic building blocks, they could select the most useful ones and try to mix them again in the next generation.
Another potential application would be to have an individual discard their bloodline before laying an egg. This might be done if their own bloodline was weak and they would rather have their offspring inherit one from their mates or just mutate a brand-new bloodline entirely.
‘The possibilities are endless!’ Percy concluded, his soul flaring with greed.
He was tempted to try and grab it, as it sounded like a strictly superior version to his own. Downscaling one’s bloodline wasn’t useful for everyone, but it was simply a good option to have. Percy had no intention of so much as touching his own bloodline – especially in a way that he couldn’t control – but it would be nice if he could pass the new Decree to his descendants and eventually spread it across Remior.
‘Hmm… I think it’s an unnecessary risk for us at the moment,’ Micky replied. ‘We don’t know what mixing the two Decrees might do to you, and it’s not like you were planning to have kids anytime soon.’
‘Agreed,’ Percy conceded. ‘Still, it’s good to know that this option exists. If we ever find a way to grant you or Nephthys a bloodline and it turns out into a shitty one, it might not be too late to come here and try to fix it.’