The Lone Wanderer

‘Pay attention to the background. The trees are starting to grow blurry,’ Nephthys warned.

Releasing a weak pulse of willpower, the clone cleared out the motes of mana dancing playfully in front of his host’s compound eyes, so that he could observe his handiwork more easily. His canvas was a shallow but wide puddle of water mana of his own creation, with several blobs of acid mana floating within it.

The two humans: a couple holding hands as they strolled through the woods: as well as everything else in the picture sported a deep purple hue that distinguished them from the colourless water.

Focusing on the trees near the top of the image, Percy moved some of the charge from certain sections, concentrating it on others. The spots which had the lightning mana removed reverted to regular water, losing most of their colour, while those that had energy added grew more pronounced.

A few seconds later, he managed to fix the background inside the acidic painting, though he had inadvertently lost control of the mana comprising the protagonists in the process. The couple dispersed into a chaotic mesh of purple diluted in the water, ruining the whole thing. Salvaging the art piece wasn’t impossible, but the effort required to pull everything back into place would be the same as starting over.

The clone mentally sighed, letting go of his mana entirely. He’d been at this for hours already, so he was too tired to continue. It might be better to move on to the next exercise: hopefully one that would strain a different cognitive muscle.

‘It was a good attempt. You’re getting better,’ the reincarnated goddess consoled him.

He nodded, taking a brief stroll around the cavern to unwind before resuming his work. Nephthys and her mother now lived in different rooms, for multiple reasons. The Ruby Empress had been around the former deity for around a decade already, so she trusted her enough with both her own survival and the future of her species to let her out of her sight.

Furthermore, the royal wasps had both grown too large to keep sharing their living quarters. Originally, there hadn’t even been a cavern large enough for a White wasp inside the hive, since no past Queen had dared to advance to that grade before.

Thankfully, the creature had planned for her evolution a while ago, ordering her subjects to carve out a chamber large enough to contain her, complete with wide tunnels connecting it to other key areas around the hive. The previous room had been passed on to her daughter, along with many of the former ruler’s responsibilities.

Nephthys was still not ready to inherit the entire underground kingdom: Starry Princesses typically had to wait until at least Blue for that, though it was also apparently common for a previous Queen to live out her lifespan and not abdicate her throne until her daughter was well into Violet.

Trusting a Green heir with the hive generally wasn’t a good idea. At the end of the day, Starry Wasps were just beasts, so their intelligence was heavily correlated with their grade. However, Nephthys was an exception, since she had retained her sapience from her previous life and was more than capable of fulfilling parts of her future role already.

At the height of her power, Nephthys had ruled over an entire planet, so it would be silly if she couldn’t handle a few bugs. Her main limitations were that her body was still too immature for her to lay eggs or exert her mental influence on too many wasps at the same time, though her Charged Antennae mutation helped greatly with the latter.

Had Machaon attacked the Fungal Spire, the reincarnated goddess might have participated in the battle, since she was also strong enough to hold her own against a couple of Blues. Unfortunately, flying to the Camelot province in time had been out of the question, so the wasp and the clone possessing her had resigned themselves to holding the fort until the return of the Empress.

‘Try repeated fission and fusion next,’ Nephthys suggested, officially declaring the end of Percy’s short break.

Reaching into the wasp’s second core, he split the acid mana into its components, gathering half into a hemispherical reservoir of water and the rest into dense lightning. He pushed the two affinities into the corresponding channels, circulating the mana once around the bug’s body before recombining the two streams inside her abdomen. Splitting them again, he started over.

It was a simple exercise, with the caveat being that he wasn’t supposed to draw ambient mana from the outside to replenish his host’s reserves. The natural form of affinity fusion and fission that occurred within a composite core was among the most efficient forms of mana conversion in existence. It was significantly more efficient than even converting pure mana into other elements or claiming ownership of ambient mana through a breathing technique, since a lot of it was handled automatically by the concepts swirling inside the organ.

Still, it wasn’t perfect. Some losses were inevitable.

The goal of the exercise was for Percy to help the process along, retaining as much of the mana as possible between one cycle and the next. The task would be over when he consumed three-quarters of the wasp’s reserves, at which point he would count how many times he had managed to circulate it around her body before whittling it down. The more, the better.

It was a shorter and less strenuous exercise than the previous one, so he often treated it as a break to allow his mind to relax. That said, its usefulness couldn’t be overstated for somebody who relied on their boosting art as much as Percy did.

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‘You made it last for two thousand, three hundred and forty-six revolutions,’ Nephthys said about fifteen minutes later. ‘That’s thirty more than last week.’

‘Still much lower than you though,’ Percy pointed out. ‘Didn’t you reach three thousand recently?’

‘That’s not a fair comparison. I’ve been playing with these affinities for about a decade already, while you’ve only been at it for a fraction of that time.’

Percy knew that she was right, but it was in his nature to always strive for more. When he had first started possessing his familiar, his progress had been much faster. His experience with other affinities, the endless inspiration afforded to him by the wasp’s Divine Spark mutation, and the guidance from the ancient being who was paving the way for him had all contributed to that. Unfortunately, everything had started to slow down after the first year, making it difficult to keep up with Nephthys.

Perhaps, that was the difference between a mortal and somebody who had experienced the Concept realm before. Deities in the Elemental Acquisition stage typically had to spend hundreds of thousands of years to branch out to new affinities, but that was because they didn’t have the benefit of possessing a mana core with the correct element.

Through a strange set of coincidences, Nephthys had received the best of both worlds: the experience and inspiration of a goddess, coupled with the core of a mortal.

It also didn’t help that her approach to magic was entirely different from Percy’s. The Ruby Princess didn’t seem to care about creating bigger or more destructive spells, her attention being solely on deepening her understanding of her affinities and comprehending the underlying concepts related to them.

Percy wasn’t sure whether this was something that she had always done: even as a mortal: or whether it was her experience as a former goddess that had informed this approach.

Percy had too many enemies to stop thinking about fighting entirely, but he wasn’t arrogant enough to disregard the methods and guidance of somebody who had reached the peak of the Self-Discovery stage before, even if she had done that with a different element.

‘How about practicing your lightning control next?’ she asked, breaking him out of his thoughts.

Refilling his host’s second core, Percy separated the acid mana into its two components again, though he ignored water for now. Pulling the indigo mana to his borrowed antennae, he fired a jolt of electricity into the nearest corridor, striking a green protruding crystal that they’d agreed to treat as the first target.

Hitting the first mark was simple enough, but that was just the start. The electric arc connected to a second target deeper in: a red mineral this time: followed by a third and a fourth. Due to the curvature of the tunnel, Percy swiftly lost sight of the projectile, but his Sage’s Pond allowed him to continue aiming at distant targets, located far beyond the reach of the typical Green mage.

The problem was that his control weakened rapidly over that distance. While he could keep track of the spell even a couple of kilometres away, his ability to manipulate it was limited to about a fifth of that range. Lightning also happened to be among the unruliest common elements, so keeping the arcs straight wasn’t easy.

By the tenth target, Percy’s accuracy noticeably dropped, causing him to accidentally scorch the minerals surrounding the targets. The repeated hits also stretched the indigo bolt thinner and thinner, exhausting its power by the fifteenth target.

Letting the spell disperse, Percy started over with a fresh stream of lightning mana, trying to zap more targets and do so more accurately.

All things considered, he felt that Nephthys’ approach was a bit of a mixed bag. The exercises that she had shown him varied greatly, covering every aspect of her three elemental affinities: though she admittedly had no idea how to do anything with beast mana that she and Percy didn’t already know about.

In some ways, Percy wasn’t sure that this was an effective way to train. He felt pitifully weak: if not in an absolute sense, then certainly in relation to the amount of time that he had poured into this project. Learning to convert mana more efficiently, fire lightning bolts from farther away, or control intricate shapes of acid and water sounded good in theory, but it was debatable which of these skills would find a use in combat.

In other ways, Percy felt that his mastery of the new mana types was deeper than even his own, despite having only trained under his familiar for a negligible amount of time. There were certain aspects of his soul and pure magic that he had never even thought of measuring, let alone working to improve.

For example, Percy wasn’t sure what the range of his scythes were. How far from his body could they travel before he lost the ability to control them?

Using the Carnival, he was used to circulating phantom mana through both of his cores, but how efficient was that exactly? It was an unstable form of affinity fusion, so it should be lower than what he could do in Nephthys’ body, but how many revolutions would that translate to?

Over the years, Percy had always prioritized the next “big thing”, constantly thinking about the fastest way to grow his fighting strength or achieve his goals. He’d never had time to study every facet of his magic as thoroughly as Nephthys did.

Considering his results, he wasn’t even convinced that his own approach was wrong. Why bother optimizing less important aspects of his spells when he seemed to have a knack for choosing the most useful area to focus on?

The fact that Percy had invented an Extreme spell, defeated mages three grades higher than his own, and figured out how to artificially promote his cores proved that his way of doing things had its own merits.

That said, he had decided to listen to Nephthys while he was borrowing her body. There was certainly much that he could learn from her methods and wisdom, not to mention that this was an excellent opportunity to get to know his familiar better.

‘Micky? Do you want to have a go next?’ he asked his fellow aspect who was obviously also a part of the clone, yet had remained uncharacteristically silent today.

Percy’s training with Nephthys had shown them even the water element in a new light, despite them having previously felt confident in their mastery of it.

‘No thanks. I find this type of training too boring. I’m sure it’ll help us at some point, but I’d rather let you agonize over it and benefit from our shared memories later,’ the Huehuan cheekily replied.

Percy would have rolled his host’s eyes, though they were fixed in place. Without anybody to pass the reins to, he began the next exercise: one that involved splitting his water mana into as many distinct blobs as he could handle at the same time, without spilling a single drop to the ground.

Hours stretched into days, but Percy’s Insomnia trait allowed him and his host to keep going without stopping, the unchanging environment inside the hive making it difficult to keep track of time. Other than a few breaks here and there: mostly to empty the wasp’s jelly glands and cleanse her second core: they took turns going through the exercises, growing a little better with every session.

Eventually, his Status decided that he had done enough for a small reward.

[Congratulations! You have mastered a new spell: Basic Water Control: Refined!]