Chapter 770 – Underground ocean (4)

After deciding to expand their search downwards, Percy and Micky started sending the sentries about a kilometre deeper every twelve hours. The descent was painstakingly slow, but neither of them wanted to miss the depth where the geodes became common or any other valuable clues.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the number of Violets they encountered increased around the eight-kilometre mark before beginning to decline again, while the population of White-cored mages kept rising until the sentries were eleven kilometres deep.

Percy initially found it strange that the Whites didn’t bother to dive deeper than that, because he knew that they were far more powerful than the Violets. He supposed that it was ultimately a question of practicality.

A White could theoretically resist much higher temperatures and pressures but doing that for a prolonged period of time would gnaw away at their mana reserves. Replenishing their cores also wasn’t exactly a great option in this environment. Ambient mana wasn’t any scarcer than it was on the surface – if anything, it was richer – but its balance was heavily tilted away from the air, water, and ice affinities, making regeneration far slower for these mages.

The closer to the surface one searched, the longer and more frequent their trips would be, and the shorter their breaks. It was better for the Whites to dive just a little deeper than the Violets to escape the unwanted competition, without negatively affecting their efficiency too much. After all, there were much fewer Whites than Violets, even on a greater spring like Tenefyre.

Unfortunately, Percy and Micky still failed to find even a single geode until they were about fourteen kilometres below the surface. By then, the ocean of magma had grown eerily empty. The occasional delineation that separated sluggish currents was often the only thing breaking up the endless crimson expanse, its hazy boundaries drifting so slowly that they almost seemed frozen in place.

At that depth, the Whites were nowhere to be seen, making the aspects of the Lone Wanderer wonder whether the Tenefyrian deities had even bothered to scatter any droplets that far below the surface. Wouldn’t the precious resources just go to waste if nobody ever looked for them?

After arguing about the optimal depth for the sentries for what felt like the millionth time, Percy and Micky agreed to stick to around twelve kilometres, where only the fastest and most skilled Whites appeared to linger. Those people clearly weren’t just wasting their time, so there had to be some geodes there.

If Percy and Micky couldn’t find one after another week of searching at that level, they would have to resume spying on the locals directly and figure out what they were doing wrong. Maybe there was some trick to detecting the droplets that they weren’t privy to, or perhaps experience alone made all the difference.

Three days later, or around a full week after entering the underground ocean, Percy finally stumbled upon an unclaimed piece of stone drifting aimlessly amidst the magma. He had to move the nearest sentry practically on top of the object to make out its details, but its spherical shape and the faint blur of mana at its core left no question as to its identity.

‘Thank the Dying Hero!’ Micky mentally exclaimed. ‘I was starting to think that these things wouldn’t appear unless we spoke some magic word or put on some special glasses.’

Percy chuckled through their connection, his relief and excitement as palpable as the Huehuan’s. ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We need to find the droplets a lot faster than this, otherwise we’ll have to spend close to a decade to collect enough for the blessing.’

Micky nodded. ‘How do we carry it back to the surface?’

Percy pondered over the issue. He would need to turn the sentries corporeal to actually grab or move the geodes, but his tiny constructs wouldn’t survive for long in this environment. Storing the objects inside his seal and phasing his minions out of the physical plane would have been convenient, but Percy wasn’t going to risk placing even the tiniest fragment of his precious spatial device inside the fragile constructs.

The most obvious solution would be to work together with a Tenefyrian, but Percy would rather leave that as a last resort. He wasn’t above revealing some of his secrets and trying to strike a deal with a native in exchange for a blessing – he’d done similar things plenty of times before – but he wanted to exhaust every other option first.

If possible, he wanted to grab everything he needed from this planet without anybody so much as suspecting his existence. It was more than just stubbornness – this was a test run in achieving his goals without making too many unnecessary concessions during his trips.

Revealing a couple of secrets to the ignorant people of a random barren world or lesser spring wasn’t as problematic, since both Percy and Remior would hopefully climb up the cosmic hierarchy by the time those weaker factions grew strong enough to pose a threat. However, the chaos that Percy had recently stirred during the auction had stayed with him, making him understand that he had to be more careful moving forward. That didn’t mean that he was going to be afraid of his own shadow, but the fewer loose ends he left behind, the less trouble he’d have to deal with later.

Deciding to examine the geode carefully, Percy concentrated his already-shrunken sensory domain onto the even tinier round object. At the same time, he had the other sentries gather in a wide circle around the droplet and begin patrolling the area in case a Tenefyrian happened to swim his way.

‘The shell looks like it’s made of the exact same material as the surrounding magma,’ he noticed. ‘It’s about equally dense, which explains why the geode drifts at a constant depth instead of sinking or floating. Well… the magma is too viscous and the currents too slow to push the geodes around quickly, but still...’

‘I’m not sure I get what you’re trying to say,’ Micky replied.

‘I don’t think the gods bother to encase each droplet in stone,’ Percy explained, ‘They probably just dump them into the magma and let the shells form naturally around the Clear mana due to the sharp drop in temperature.’

‘Wouldn’t the droplets just evaporate?’ Micky protested.

Percy shook the front end of their host’s body. ‘Small or not, don’t forget that they are made of Clear mana, while the surrounding magma is ultimately just a mundane material. I bet that a weaker Tenefyrian would instantly freeze into a sculpture if they so much as touched a droplet with their bare hand. And whatever lingering conceptual energy exists within them only makes them even more potent.’

If he was right, the spherical shells formed around the droplets before the heat had the chance to penetrate deeply into the Clear mana. Afterwards, the thick geodes likely helped insulate the magical fluid, allowing it to last for years in this harsh environment. The stone didn’t need to block heat entirely – just slow the leakage to a crawl.

Even if the droplets continued to shrink despite their solidified shells, Percy was confident that the conceptual energy that they had inherited from the Ring of Sacrilege remained entirely unaffected, otherwise it would have been too wasteful for the local deities to leave the geodes here indefinitely.

‘Do you think we can use a similar approach?’ Micky suggested.

‘It’s worth a try,’ Percy replied with a spectral shrug.

He willed the sentry to turn corporeal next to the geode, but the only thing he achieved was to lose contact with his construct immediately. Moving another minion close to the droplet, he examined the scene, trying to understand what had happened to the first sentry.

There was a second piece of stone drifting next to the original geode, this one about as large as a watermelon. Scanning the object internally, Percy spotted a fist-sized pocket of scorching steam sealed within its core – the remains of his destroyed minion, no doubt.

The sentry had clearly evaporated on touch with the magma, while cooling its immediate surroundings enough to solidify. Unfortunately, the minion hadn’t survived the process, and Percy doubted that the spiritual blood that he had poured into the sentry could be recovered.

‘I think that our idea has merit,’ he said, not feeling too disappointed. ‘Green mana just happens to be nearly a hundred times less potent than a demigod’s, and that’s without even mentioning the lack of a blessing. But it did manage to freeze a decent amount of magma, so we should be able to scale the effect up.’

‘We’ve already consumed an entire sentry,’ Micky protested. ‘That’s much more mana than the droplet.’

‘More, yet clearly not enough,’ Percy pointed out. ‘We’ll make up for the much lower quality with a much higher quantity. I think I’ve finally found an application for your elephant-sized sentries – the ones that require almost all your spiritual blood to make.’