“It’s almost enough,” the Violet Tenefyrian replied. “The minimum recommended amount is around fourteen hundred droplets, though most people I’ve talked to wait until they gather sixteen hundred before absorbing them, just to be safe. It would be a waste to throw away so many years of hard work when you’re so close to the finish line.”
“That’s amazing!” the Violet’s sibling admitted, every trace of their previous annoyance gone. “I can’t believe that we’ll have a Violet with a blessing in our little family. Are you planning to join the Court of Deities, too?”
“I’ll apply.” The ice mage did something with all four of their forearms, causing the gooey limbs to oscillate for a couple of seconds. Percy had come to associate that gesture with a shrug. “It’s hard to get accepted without a rare affinity or a good bloodline, but composite mana types and blessings are also valued pretty highly, so I reckon my chances aren’t bad.”
The family switched to other topics afterwards, quickly losing Percy’s attention. He was too busy pondering over what he’d just learned about the underground ocean and the blessing to care about how the teenagers’ day at the academy had been.
‘What do you make of this?’ Micky asked. ‘Did these people really invent another way of acquiring blessings?’
‘I doubt it,’ Percy replied. ‘If they have, it’s clearly a flawed method, since it only seems to work for ice users. Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure that it’s still tied heavily to their Ring of Sacrilege. Let’s watch this person a little longer.’
After the meal was over, the Violet brought out the strange stones from their spatial device again, drawing another round of exclamations from the children. Before the younglings’ awed gazes, the Violet cracked the spherical rocks open, revealing a single glowing droplet of some midnight blue liquid inside the core of each broken geode.
Taking a cylindrical piece of metal out of their spatial device, the Violet unscrewed the lid. They poured their latest harvest into the container, which appeared to be about three-quarters full. Finally, they screwed the lid back on, stored the cylinder away again, and got rid of the fragmented spherical shells of the geodes.
‘That liquid is clearly magical, but I couldn’t sense any mana. The only thing I could tell was that it was really, really cold,’ Micky said.
Percy nodded internally. ‘It has to be Clear mana. Of the ice affinity, specifically.’
‘The colour is all wrong,’ the Huehuan pointed out.
‘Because of the blessing, most likely,’ Percy guessed. ‘Just like how my soul mana turned from silver to grey, or how Gabe’s fire mana is blue instead of orange.’
‘That… makes sense,’ Micky admitted, before mentally shaking his head. ‘But everything else doesn’t. Didn’t Zoris explain that you can’t just absorb someone else’s augmented mana to internalize a blessing? If it were possible, there wouldn’t be a need for Rings of Sacrilege. People could just have gods or their children spread their blessings to every single mortal on the planet.’
‘Yeah. We’re still missing something. Maybe the Tenefyrians have produced a Decree that lets them cleanse the willpower from someone’s mana and preserve whatever conceptual energy remains right after it flows through the ring,’ Percy speculated.
He was almost certain that the artifact was still an integral part of the pipeline. Had the natives found a way to grant the blessing without the ring, they would have probably figured out how to scale their methods up to the whole planet, to give all their ice users the concept. There would have been no need to ration the augmented mana and make their mages work for it.
Even if all their Decree did was store the resource for later and allow it to be used by anyone, there were still several benefits to the Tenefyrians’ invention.
For one, the ring no longer had to change hands every few months or years, decreasing the odds of somebody stealing or damaging it. Whatever system these people used to extract the artifact’s value was probably more efficient too, so Percy wouldn’t be surprised if the Tenefyrians could grant the blessing to several times as many people as other factions in the same span of time. He guessed that they could also store the mana for extended periods of time when demand was lower or if there weren’t enough worthy candidates, accumulating it for a more promising generation of mages.
‘Interesting,’ Micky mused after listening to Percy’s reasoning. ‘I don’t think that even the Void Hand or the Vault have come up with a similar approach for their own rings. This could be useful for us.’
‘It would be,’ Percy replied with a mental sigh.
If he could get his hands on this Decree – or whatever it was – he would have a much easier time passing his own blessing to other people. He didn’t want to let Zoris out of his sight if he could avoid it, and the former deity hadn’t agreed to be traded away to strangers. If Percy obtained a way to circulate soul mana through the ring and store its effect in a stable and persistent form while the artifact remained on his person, it would solve the problem entirely.
‘Let’s add that to the growing list of reasons to revisit Tenefyre. It’s not just about Zoris, but also any other Rings of Sacrilege that we might find in the future. But let’s start by collecting enough droplets for you. Everything else can wait,’ Percy said.
Micky’s attention lingered on the Violet’s spatial device, an unspoken question simmering in his and Percy’s shared soul. ‘Should we…?’
Percy fell silent for a few seconds.
‘I’d rather not,’ he eventually said. ‘Stealing a renewable resource isn’t as morally reprehensible as snatching the ring, but I’d still feel bad taking all the augmented mana from a single person. The poor guy has spent years collecting their droplets. We should try gathering our own.’
Sure, grabbing unclaimed mana from the underground ocean was still technically theft, since the resource was meant for the natives – not outsiders. Percy wasn’t hypocritical enough to pretend that he was some sort of saint who had never stolen from others, yet he felt that taking a negligible amount of resources from an entire faction was very different from stealing something that a specific, innocent individual had sweat and bled for.
The mind mana that Percy had used up on Atlantis and Gallimus, the rewards that he had “earned” in the tournaments – which would have gone to more deserving contestants if not for him – and the Wiseman’s Dust that he had consumed in the training room on Felmara were just some examples of times when he had done something similar.
Arbitrary as it might be, these were the moral lines in the sand that he’d always abided by, and this trip wasn’t going to be an exception.
‘It’s not like the ring belongs to Tenefyre in the first place, though,’ Micky protested. ‘If this was purely their invention, I might have agreed with you, but it’s just something they found or stole from others. If anything, the rings ultimately belong to Svarog.’
Percy frowned internally. His friend had raised a good point. Then again, Svarog hadn’t exactly crafted the objects in an ethical way either – he’d slaughtered dozens of gods for them – so was there anyone in the universe who had a legitimate claim over the artifacts?
‘We aren’t Svarog, nor his victims though. Our own claim would be even weaker than that of a faction that has presumably held onto the object for generations. Besides, the Decree that preserves the conceptual energy within the mana did come from Tenefyre, and the Violet we’ve been spying on has worked pretty hard for their droplets,’ Percy concluded.
‘Fair enough,’ Micky conceded. ‘How should we go about collecting our own?’
‘We’ll follow the Violet when they head to the underground ocean tomorrow. Once we figure out where the ocean is located, we’ll send our sentries to scout the place out and see how we can harvest some droplets for ourselves.’
The Huehuan nodded internally, before thinking of another problem. ‘Are we sure that it’s a good idea for me to acquire the blessing in the first place?’
‘Why wouldn’t it be?’ Percy asked, genuinely confused.
‘Well… you don’t have the same resistance to ice mana that I do. Your Greater Thess’kalan Physique and our fusion have improved it, but you might lose the ability to wield my affinity if it becomes even more potent. You saw how much trouble Gabe’s hottest spells used to give him, and that was from his own blessing,’ Micky explained.
It was a valid concern. Percy hadn’t even figured out how to handle Nephthys’ acid mana yet, so losing access to his fellow aspect’s ice mana as well wouldn’t be ideal.
‘Whether this will become a problem depends on the blessing,’ he argued back. ‘My Blessing of Permanence, for example, doesn’t really make my soul mana any deadlier for others to touch. Either way, once my main body upgrades his mutation, he should have an easier time wielding both acid and ice. Even if that fails, I’d rather you grow stronger individually than worry about our teamwork. Besides, this will all be fixed once we forge a shared internal world.’
Maybe Percy was being overly optimistic, as there was no guarantee that they would attain divinity anytime soon – if ever. His plans for the Thess’kalan ritual and the demi-human ingredients might also hit a dead-end. Still, he wasn’t going to deny his friend a free blessing for his own sake.