The Lone Wanderer

With very little warning, the woman’s skin began blistering and peeling off, a wave of searing pain seeping into her muscles and bones. The unpleasant feeling was accompanied by a pounding headache that affected even Percy, despite him being a mere guest in his host’s head.

Zurvanai suffered through the ordeal with gritted teeth, though she didn’t voice any complaints. Percy, on the other hand, was hardly even fazed by the pain, having experienced far worse things before.

If anything, a surge of excitement rose through his wisp upon confirming that the Decree had affected him as much as it had his host.

‘Let’s not count our eggs before they hatch,’ Micky warned. ‘Just because the Decree is doing something to us, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to stack properly with the Moirais’ Decree or follow us back to Remior.’

‘Of course,’ Percy agreed, though he couldn’t help but feel quite optimistic.

After several months of scheming and fighting for his third core: not to mention roughly a decade of daydreaming about it: he was finally on the cusp of success. The more the Decree altered his very being, the more confident he grew in his odds of keeping it.

If there was one thing that felt a little off, it was that the light column had yet to do anything to his wisp. From his experience with the Moirais’ Decree, he knew that his soul had to be involved in the process of acquiring a new mana core in some way, much like his mind and body.

‘Metatron did say that only two of the titans had the right affinities,’ Percy reminded himself. ‘I suppose that soul mana was the one element they were missing.’

As if on cue, the ring of lava suddenly shifted, the dense liquid flowing clockwise like a raging river of destruction. At the same time, a breeze seemed to gently sway the flowers and grass in the garden in the opposite direction.

Percy didn’t understand how the Decrees were supposed to help, but the changes in the outer rings revealed their purpose soon enough. The colourful beam enveloping Zurvanai intensified, burning her mind and flesh twice as fast as before.

With great difficulty, she dragged her forearms through the almost-solid air, bringing them in front of her face. She used them to further shield her already-closed eyes as what remained of her skin got crisped into charcoal.

Most importantly, the pain in their body and minds finally reached their souls, though it did so in a rather muted manner. Percy could tell that none of the titans: be it the three siblings responsible for the main Decree, or the countless others who had helped them: were able to affect his soul directly.

Instead, the group of deities appeared to have simply strengthened its connection to his mind and borrowed flesh, indirectly allowing the Void Decree to touch the last facet of his existence that it needed to affect.

Over the next few minutes, the beam slowly died down, leaving behind a charred mess of a woman. Before Percy had the chance to check his host’s condition, a most awaited notification flashed within the darkness of Zurvanai’s incinerated eyes.

[Congratulations! You have acquired a new Decree: Void Decree!]

‘Thank the gods! It fucking worked!’ Percy mentally exclaimed, suddenly finding himself on the verge of tears.

He felt the urge to plop down and rest, though that would have to wait until he returned to Remior. His current body didn’t belong to him, and even the tiniest movement sent a wave of pure agony rippling through Zurvanai’s flesh.

Fortunately, the titans who had designed this place weren’t cruel enough to leave the participants in this sorry state. The metallic disks flashed green, enveloping the short woman in a new column of monochromatic light. The beam was gentler than before, its touch soothing Zurvanai’s burns without restricting her movements.

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As expected, the dense life mana caused the seed in the Denyte’s abdomen to stir, giving rise to a vortex that tried to devour the light before it healed her. The good news was that the alliance’s deities hadn’t been too stingy with their mana, providing their inheritors with several times more than necessary for a complete recovery.

A few seconds later, Zurvanai was back on her feet, her charred exterior crumbling away to reveal a layer of smooth skin. Percy withdrew his senses to respect his host’s privacy as she reached into a spatial device that had survived the destruction and pulled out a new set of clothes to wear.

At roughly the same time, her second core finally stopped leeching off the green pillar, reaching saturation shortly before the runes on the metallic disks dimmed.

After making sure that his host was going to be alright, Percy shifted his attention back to his latest acquisition. Along with the notification, he had received an instinctive understanding of how the new Decree was supposed to work.

However, the information was currently in a fragmented and chaotic state. He could access a bunch of incoherent words and sentences individually, though he would probably have to spend a few hours sorting everything out before he could figure out how to activate the new core.

‘Real classy of them to give us another puzzle to solve right at the very end,’ Micky said with a mental groan.

‘I don’t think it was intentional,’ Percy said, coming to their rescue. ‘They were probably too busy trying to get their Decree to work. Bundling it with a proper instruction manual likely hadn’t been high on their list of priorities.’

‘Fair enough,’ the Huehuan conceded. ‘Let’s sift through the fragments carefully after returning to Remior. If we try to activate the Decree here, it might not work a second time in our own bodies.’

‘Agreed,’ Percy replied with a mental nod.

‘I believe this concludes our deal,’ Zurvanai said, unknowingly intruding in their private conversation. ‘I just felt some of the restrictions on my soul loosen. Only the confidentiality clauses remain active.’

‘Same,’ Percy lied through non-existent teeth.

He hadn’t felt anything, since this version of him wasn’t actually bound by the contract, though he guessed that his counterpart had fulfilled his end of the deal as soon as he’d helped him possess the woman.

‘Are you sure you don’t want us to work together during next year’s tournament?’ Percy asked, deciding to try his luck one final time.

‘Depends,’ Zurvanai replied with a smirk. ‘Do you have any other valuable Decrees to give me in exchange for my cooperation? Or are you just trying to use me to steal more rewards from the alliance for free?’

Percy sighed, knowing that this was it. Truth be told, he wasn’t too sad about missing out on the tournament’s other prizes. There were a few decent free-type Decrees that he would still like to acquire in the future, but only a couple that he could obtain without visiting Marador Prime with his main body, and neither of them was too urgent to have.

The rare affinity-granting treasures were also nice, and Percy wouldn’t mind having a couple to upgrade his second: and possibly third: cores, but those were things that he could potentially find elsewhere. It wouldn’t be easy, but he could cleanse and promote the magical organs just fine with weaker affinities until then.

He was honestly more annoyed that possessing Zurvanai didn’t seem to have given him her ancestral Decree, and that he hadn’t found a way to visit Denytos IV. Ironically, Percy had managed to mark planets belonging to as many as four founding factions: even including the long-destroyed Zath’maani: and yet he had somehow failed to set foot on what was arguably the most important one.

Unfortunately, there was no good way of convincing his already-suspicious host to bring him close to their Rings of Sacrilege. Unlike the Void Decree that she had tacitly agreed to help him earn, Percy could potentially cause a lot of irreparable damage to the alliance by stealing one of the priceless artifacts.

‘Oh well… we’ve marked enough worlds to have good access to the Void Hand in the future. I’m sure that we’ll figure out a way to get there on our own,’ he told Micky. ‘Besides, we got what we came here for, so we should be celebrating.’

With a mental shrug, he bid Zurvanai farewell, removing his wisp from her injuries. A part of him was curious to know what affinities the woman was going to awaken, but he couldn’t justify staying at such a dangerous place any longer while carrying such a precious haul.

In any case, he was sure that he would meet the Denyte again. She had been an absolute monster with just a single mana core, and she had just acquired not one but two more. There was no way that such a talented figure would fade to obscurity.

As the cord pulled him back to Remior, Percy asked his main body to get the clone possessing Kassorith to leave as well. While this clone had never met that Lanthaniel guy personally, he knew that the god had asked his counterpart and the Thess’kalan to stay on Marador Prime until they obtained the Void Decree: which was now.

With that, Percy’s business with the Void Hand had concluded for the time being. All that remained was for the Lone Wanderer’s scattered pieces to reunite and consolidate their gains.