Chapter 773 – Command (1)

Pulling up his page again, Percy shifted his attention to a different section.

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Spectral traits [5/5]:

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Phoebe’s Decree had finally fixed itself, though Percy wasn’t sure what the catalyst had been. Perhaps, he owed this development to the Spectral Broodmother’s explanation about the new trait, or to the clone’s Status recalibrating itself after his reunion with the main body.

Either way, it now displayed Percy’s expanded capacity correctly, indicating that he couldn’t absorb any more traits, even with the Source’s help. If he wanted another, his only option would be to turn his familiar into an aspect and hope for the best, though he wasn’t going to merge with the reincarnated goddess just for that – especially when he hadn’t even figured out what to do with Command.

Percy had never imagined himself with an ability that turned him into a more effective leader, though he knew better than to look a gift horse in the mouth. Many of his previous traits had also seemed useless at first, yet Percy had turned every single one into an indispensable part of his arsenal.

Even Mimicry – an arguably weak utility trait with purely cosmetic applications in anyone else’s hands – had become one of the pillars supporting the Shapeshifting Sentries spell – an ability that had served the Lone Wanderer and his clones well during their recent adventures.

‘Sure… but what exactly are we meant to do with this one?’ Micky asked after being allowed into Percy’s head.

‘As far as I can tell, its uses can be separated into two main categories: turning us into more effective leaders, and granting us the ability to control spectral fiends,’ Percy replied.

It was the same ability, really, though dominion over the Broodmother’s spawn came with all sorts of interesting implications, so Percy was inclined to study that facet of his trait first.

Wasting no time, he tried to summon a few of the creatures to Remior through sheer will. His clone had already verified that he could control the fiends swarming above the Mirror Lake like the mantises could, but he had never tested the range of that ability.

After a few hours of failing to draw even a single fiend to the Alchemists’ Guild, he understood that he still couldn’t communicate with them from too far away.

Entering the hive, Percy reached out to his familiar, explaining what he wanted to do and requesting a few test subjects again. As soon as Nephthys sent him a handful of Starry Soldiers, he applied a series of precise incisions on the first bug’s soul and placed a clone inside its body. Next, he spilled large volumes of phantom mana through the wounds, lacing it with emotions of fear and pain in an attempt to lure some fiends to Remior.

Attracting the first batch of ethereal pests took several hours. It was a rather annoying and time-consuming process, though it thankfully didn’t last as long as the previous time, probably due to the higher grade of mana that he was releasing as bait.

Once the fiends finally arrived, Percy confirmed that he didn’t even need to capture or trap them with his willpower, since his new trait allowed him to telepathically stop the tiny creatures in their tracks as soon as they entered his sight.

The thought of keeping a giant swarm of fiends on Remior to use as ammunition during a fight had crossed Percy’s mind, though it didn’t sound very practical. Melodia was probably the only place in the universe with such a high concentration of fiends – to the point that Percy had wondered how the Spectral Broodmother had even prevented its spawn from leaking away from the planet and betraying its location.

Regardless, gathering enough creatures on Remior would be difficult for Percy, and keeping them under his supervision for weeks or months to prevent them from scattering would only complicate things further. Besides, he didn’t think that using the fiends as weapons would work for him. That trick had served the Green and Blue mantises well, but Percy’s magic had already crossed deep into the Seventh Circle. He doubted that any number of fiends would be enough to threaten Whites or demigods.

However, that didn’t mean that he had no use for the creatures.

Commanding the first fiend to seep into the injured wasp’s soul, Percy hoped that the two would be compatible. It wasn’t a guarantee, because the Starry Soldier didn’t possess a soul affinity of its own, and Percy had been forced to use his own phantom mana to bait the fiend over. At least, he had channelled the substance through his host’s spectral injuries, infusing it with the bug’s negative feelings.

Percy tried ordering the fiend to meld into the creature’s soul by itself, though that didn’t work, leaving him no choice but to try and manually grind it down.

Without the right mana core, Percy had to improvise. He spent a few hours clearing a couple of channels within the Starry Soldier’s soul. It was nothing too elaborate, but he made sure to carve enough untempered pathways to at least circulate a faint trickle of phantom mana through the wasp’s largest and most important body parts.

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Pushing a pair of opposing flows along the Soldier’s channels, Percy willed the mana to hug the walls of the pathways as tightly as possible, while relying on the friction between them to grind down the pieces of the spectral fiend and disseminate them through the wasp’s soul. Naturally, he tried to keep the grains away from his own wisp, as he didn’t want to accidentally absorb a sixth trait of his own.

Unfortunately, he failed to elicit a reaction, regardless of how stubbornly he ground down the fiend. Eventually, he was forced to accept that what he was trying to do with just his phantom mana was simply not the same process that a spectral fiend would undergo when destroyed within a soul user’s mana core.

Zoris had warned him about this, though Percy still wasn’t entirely convinced that there was no way to accomplish his goal. He knew that his boosting art could turn a person’s channels – and even the external flow of mana surrounding their body – into extensions of their core.

Of course, Percy wasn’t trying to use Circulation with the Starry Soldier. He would need a lot more channels for the Refined spell than the ones that he was currently using, and he would have to temper them properly.

Even then, he didn’t think that it would be enough. The boosting art was ultimately just an extension of a person’s mana core, not a way to replace the organ completely. Percy had never managed to circulate foreign affinities that belonged to his clones’ hosts – or even to Nephthys. Even if he borrowed their cores to attach his own willpower to the mana, and then combined the result with soul mana to transfer the resource back to his own body, it was impossible to activate the boosting art with it.

The only partial exception was Micky, due to their shared soul and connected identities. Even when it came to the Lone Wanderer’s aspects, they could only produce and circulate a fraction of each other’s reserves.

‘Well… it’s not like I’m trying to give the Starry Soldier a soul affinity. I just need to somehow grind down the spectral fiend within its soul in the same way...’ Percy thought.

According to both Zoris and the Spectral Broodmother, giving spectral traits to non-soul affinity users had never been done before. Even the myriapede could only grant people its own Command trait – it couldn’t help them absorb the fiend that they were supposed to be compatible with.

Still, the Huehuan boosting art had already allowed Percy and Micky to accomplish things that had been considered impossible by everyone, so he didn’t want to give up on this project too easily.

‘You’re missing a mana core’s most important function,’ Zoris suddenly said, having clearly been paying attention to Percy’s experiments. ‘You’ve focused too much on grinding the fiend into tiny particles, and not so much on applying the required conceptual changes.’

‘Conceptual changes…’ Percy repeated with a frown.

Turning the wasp’s channels into extensions of his own core didn’t seem to be possible, but what if he bypassed the need for a mana core entirely?

His new Basic Soul Control spell might be the perfect tool for that. In its final state, the spell was supposed to become the foundational concept of the soul affinity, allowing Percy to convert mana of any type into soul mana. Wasn’t that the same as generating the element without the corresponding core? And if he did that to the fiends, wouldn’t that cause the same conceptual changes?

Zoris fell silent for a couple of minutes after listening to Percy’s idea, which was a good sign.

‘It could work,’ the disembodied deity eventually admitted. ‘Though I’m not surprised that this hasn’t been done before. It’s a rare affinity, so even gods in the Elemental Acquisition stage have always failed to comprehend it. Only demigods that already possess the right core have ever mastered the concept before their ascension, and they wouldn’t need to rely on such tricks to absorb a fiend, because they can just use the normal method. You’re the only one who can possess other creatures and might be able to replicate the process happening within your core inside another’s channels.’

Percy nodded, deciding to give that a shot.

Expelling the fragmented fiend from the Starry Wasp’s wounds – in case it had gone bad or something – he commanded a second fiend to enter the bug’s soul. The clone began the process anew, though he did more than merely grind the ethereal pest down this time. He focused on the properties of the soul affinity that he had studied over the past couple of months, trying to forcefully apply them to the fiend’s shrinking pieces, as if they were made of mana themselves.

It was difficult, because the creature didn’t behave like proper mana. Even broken down as it was, Percy could feel the fiend’s lingering instincts resisting the transformation. Worse still, Percy knew that he couldn’t afford to eliminate the creature’s unique properties entirely, as some of them would be responsible for granting the actual trait.

The final nail in the coffin was the fact that Percy hadn’t actually comprehended the concept of his affinity. He wasn’t even using Advanced Soul Control, but merely the Basic version of the spell.

Still, he tried his best to visualize soul mana as well as he currently understood it, and to push the fragmented fiend as close to that state. He didn’t expect to succeed today, but he would happily settle for some proof that his idea had merit.

The broken creature slowly melted into weightless and invisible droplets of soul mana. Luckily, spectral fiends already possessed many similar properties, though they lacked uniformity. Percy felt like he was mostly trying to strip away unwanted concepts and preserve others, instead of adding one that wasn’t already present.

Eventually, the droplets began to leak out of the wasp’s channels, seeping and disappearing into its soul by themselves. The bug’s soul finally stirred and roiled in response, causing a series of wriggling features to faintly manifest along its surface.

Percy’s heart skipped a beat as the Starry Soldier showed the first sign of absorbing the trait, though his excitement didn’t last long. The change was promptly rejected, the bug’s soul swiftly returning to its undisturbed state.

Undeterred by the setback, Percy commanded two more fiends of the same type to enter through the creature’s wounds, while also providing his clone with more phantom mana to break them down with. He knew that this was probably a bad idea for the Starry Soldier. Each person was only supposed to absorb a single fiend, though he was curious to see whether he could make up for his subpar conceptual manipulation with sheer quantity.

That… went south quite fast.

Despite the fact that Percy could only preserve a fraction of the fiends’ essence, the wasp’s soul still reacted violently to the addition of the second and third creatures. The half-formed features began to violently attack one another, just like what happened when somebody tried to absorb a couple of different traits. Even in their nascent state, the new traits refused to coexist.

Before the clone even had the chance to stop the process, his host’s soul violently tore itself apart from within, instantly killing the Starry Soldier and sending Percy’s wisp back into his own body. A strange expression formed on his lips: an ugly cross between a grin and a grimace.

The good news was that this could work. Unfortunately, he would probably need to truly master the concept first.