Percy was sitting against the boulder, using it as cover from the howling winds. It was slanted, shielding him from the snow, though a few flakes still made their way to him every now and then. They formed three small mounds – one on his head, and another on each shoulder.
The cold itself didn’t bother him much – it would have been strange if it did, with two Yellow cores filling him with strength. Yet, he did have to release a burst of mana every couple of minutes to shake the snow off. It was annoying, and what he was currently working on required his utmost attention.
Micky wasn’t with him right now.
While they had tried to remain on the move as much as possible, they’d made an exception today. After all, they hadn’t seen any humans in days, and the blizzard lowered visibility even more. Percy figured they could afford to take a short break – for a couple of hours, at least. They both needed it, as the monotonous journey had started to grate on their nerves.
That was not to say that they had lowered their guard, however.
Micky was flying leisurely around the mountain, scanning the frozen slopes for a quick snack – or any signs of an enemy attack. In fact, Percy felt every little detail his familiar experienced. From the rush of wind pressing against his wings, to the taste of iron in his beak. A few droplets of blood from Micky’s most recent meal rolled down his neck, soaking the feathers there. Percy felt the urge to gag every now and then, almost forgetting that this wasn’t happening to his own body.
He even heard his clone and his familiar chatting incessantly inside his head, the two idiots not giving a shit that he was busy with something important. They were talking about something dumb too – some kind of contest. They were taking turns controlling Micky’s body, competing to see who would hunt the most critters.
‘Can you two shut up for a few minutes? I’m at a critical juncture!’
Two waves of annoyance seeped through the cords. The bastards had the nerve to act as if he was the one disturbing them.
‘Need I remind you that this was your idea?’ the clone snapped back.
Of course, he didn’t have to voice his thoughts. Given the intimacy of their connection, Percy could easily read what was on the clone’s mind, as if he’d been the one to think it. Naturally, the opposite was also true, which only made this worse. The two had clearly been aware of Percy’s bubbling irritation all along – they’d just chosen to ignore him until he lashed out.
‘Sure,’ he sighed in exasperation. ‘But we both know you’re being extra annoying on purpose.’
It would have arguably been more prudent of him to keep the connection blocked off for a couple more days. At least until he was done with the mana threads. However, he figured this was actually a great opportunity to practice with Soul Harmony.
After all, sharing his mind with Micky wasn’t that hard when they were idle, but it wasn’t as beneficial for them either. The whole point of the spell was to let them cooperate during a fight, so they had to learn to keep it active while doing something mentally intensive.
‘I’m happy to swap places with you, if you’d rather train with Micky.’
Percy rolled his eyes.
‘You know that’s not how our bloodline works…’
He shook his head, not saying anything else. Doing his best to ignore his irritating partners, he glanced down at the grey thread in his hands. Tugging at it a few times, he applied progressively more force, trying to gauge how strong it was.
It held for a while, only snapping once he started to exert himself. This was already a little better than his regular reinforced mana, on top of being dozens of times more flexible. And he wasn’t even done yet. Not only did the threads have more room for improvement, but Percy should also be able to pack them more tightly into his new armour, doing away with its previous modularity. If everything went according to plan, he would be able to fit more enchantments on it too, but that was a project for later.
‘Let’s focus on perfecting the material for now…’
Percy was already happy with the six variants of reinforced mana he’d settled on. They all looked very different from the rudimentary materials he had invented back in Bogside town, and he’d designed each one with a very specific purpose in mind. In the end, he’d ditched the original forms of his soft and crystallized mana entirely – at least as far as his mana threads were concerned. The “alloys” he’d come up over the years were plenty to achieve his goal.
Over the past week, he’d made a few last-minute modifications to his materials, improving them even further. He had the Wiseman’s Murmurs to thank for that, as they filled him with new inspiration. Having settled on the final variants already, he only needed to play with the exact ratios, fine-tuning the configuration of the construct until he was happy with it.
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Taking a few handfuls of fused mana from his seal that he’d prepared beforehand, he set them on a piece of cloth by his feet.
Then, he grabbed a long thread from the first pile, stretching it between his hands. It was even thinner than the eventual mana thread would be. It was made of mostly soft mana, with only traces of grey powder mixed. Consequently, it was extremely flexible, but not very strong. It was meant to serve as the core of the mana threads, giving them their shape.
He tentatively referred to this variant as the “guide”.
Next, he willed some mana from the second pile to float toward the “guide”. At first glance, the mana looked like a pinch of fine dust. If one was to examine it more closely, they would notice that the individual grains sported a rather peculiar shape. Each one curved twice, making it look like a pair of hooks fused together at their base, their tips pointing in opposite directions.
Unlike the “guide”, these grains contained a much higher percentage of grey powder, and very little soft mana. It made them extremely hard, at the cost of having no flexibility whatsoever. Percy couldn’t make them any larger without compromising their strength either. Not that he would want to do that, as it would just make the final threads thicker than they had to be.
He called them the “hooks”.
Willing the “hooks” to swirl around the “guide” for a few seconds, he waited until over half of the tiny constructs had latched onto the thin thread. The remaining ones, he rotated by a right angle, before repeating the process. He didn’t stop until most of the “hooks” were interlocked either with the “guide” or with one another. The result was a slightly thicker thread that was almost as flexible as before, but dozens of times stronger.
Of course, Percy wasn’t done yet. The current configuration was strong and flexible, but extremely unstable. If he were to shake the thread even a little, most of the “hooks” would fall off. For more chapters visit noᴠelfire.net
He drew the third ingredient from the cloth. This time, it was some kind of grey paste. Unlike the version he had used years ago to mend his cores – before inventing the Aurora Dew – this one didn’t contain a single drop of water.
Percy had spent a lot of time looking for a variant he could produce exclusively out of his own mana – one that would also have the right properties. It contained soft and crystallized mana in equal parts. Initially, the mixture took a solid form, but it was soft and brittle. Crushing it into powder, Percy ended up with something similar to the dust he brewed into his Aurora Dew, albeit far stickier.
He had named it, the “glue”.
The purpose of the “glue” was to hold the “hooks” in place, so that they wouldn’t fall off the “guide”. But he didn’t rush to apply it to the thread just yet.
First, he drew the fourth material from the cloth. It was a fine dust again, made mostly of hard mana. In fact, Percy had used the same ratio for it that he used for the “hooks”. The only difference was in the shape of the individual particles. They resembled grains of rice, although they were a hundred times smaller than that.
Percy called it the “stuffing”.
‘This time, let’s go with 10% more “stuffing” than before.’
Mixing it with the “glue”, Percy finally applied it to the thread, letting it fill the gap between the “hooks”. While the “glue” was there to hold the structure together, the “stuffing” was added to make the thread even stronger.
Happy with the spine of the mana thread, Percy then grabbed the fifth ingredient from the cloth. It was made of the same material as the “guide”, but it was two-dimensional, shaped like a thin sheet.
He called this one the “skin”.
Mixing more “glue” and “stuffing”, he coated one side of the “skin” with them, but he didn’t stop there. Next, he grabbed the sixth and final ingredient from the cloth. This time it was a bunch of small, flat plates of mana that resembled scales.
Percy called them the “shields”.
They had actually been the trickiest of the six “alloys” to invent, because they had to be both hard and flexible. Everything else – the “hooks” and the “guide” that formed the spine of the mana threads, as well as the “glue”, the “stuffing” and the “skin” that were meant to hold it in place – was there to maximize the tensile strength of the construct.
The purpose of the “shields” was different, however.
One weakness that Percy had luckily foreseen, was that an opponent could easily sever the threads by slashing at them laterally with a sharp spell. These scales had been designed precisely to prevent that, by guarding the core of the thread from external attacks.
The only problem was that the scales themselves couldn’t simultaneously be both as strong as the “hooks” and as flexible as the “guide”, so Percy had spent a lot of time scrambling his brain to achieve the right compromise.
Spreading the scales on the sheet, he allowed them to mix with the “glue” and the “stuffing”. Then, he placed the spine of the mana thread on one end, before tightly rolling the “skin” several times around it.
The final product was a grey string a few times thicker than a human hair. Thankfully, it was still thin enough to be woven into a fabric, however. That was something that both Percy and his spectral trait had been very peculiar about, after all.
Heaving out a tired breath, Percy then examined the fruit of his labour.
Tugging at both ends once again, he gradually increased the force he exerted on it, mentally comparing its strength to his previous attempt, and the ones before it. Seeing the thread refuse to break even after surpassing his previous best by a decent margin, he couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow.
At the same time, something deep inside him seemed to wake from its slumber. It was the remnants of the first spectral fiend he had absorbed, scattered throughout his very being. Noticing his achievement, his soul trembled with glee. The part of it inside his hands bubbled up and squirmed, extending outside his skin. It formed countless tiny legs that flailed in all sorts of unnatural directions.
Guided by instinct, Percy couldn’t help but trace his fingers over the grey thread, allowing the spider-like limbs to brush against the construct, sending waves of contentment rippling through him one after another.
He could tell he wouldn’t have to test another configuration anytime soon, his trait finally approving of the material pinched between his fingers!
[Congratulations! Your spell has evolved: Reinforcement – Refined -> Spectral Art: Phantomspun Silk – Masterful!]