The Lone Wanderer

Percy wanted nothing more than to dive back into his work, having lots of urgent tasks to tend to. The looming threat of House Tantalus aside, there were only 9 more months until the lotus bloomed, and he wanted to return to his family by then.

Sadly for him, his injured channels forced him to place everything on hold for a few more days. Unable to use mana, he couldn’t condense crystals, nor cleanse his cores. Even sending out his next clone had to wait a while longer.

But that didn’t mean he remained completely idle.

Knowing the name of his trait, he figured this was as good a time as any to explore the benefits it granted him. Of course, he still had no clue how it could possibly help him improve his magic, but there were other, mundane ways to put it to the test.

To this end, he approached Leah, the lady who’d spoken for him and Nesha during the other day’s discussions. Apparently, she was the town’s resident tailor – the very person Nesha had purchased their clothes from. Though it wasn’t a wardrobe change Percy wanted from her.

“Do you think I could work here for a couple of weeks?” he asked, eliciting a raised eyebrow from the woman.

Naturally, she was a little surprised to see a young man – and a noble scion at that – display a sudden interest in her profession. Still, she eagerly agreed to his request as soon as her initial confusion faded, happy to help Percy after everything he’d done for the town. In fact, she offered to tutor him of her own volition, and even to pay him for his work.

Suffice to say, Percy refused to take any money. Besides the fact that he didn’t need it, he had no idea if he’d be any good at this. His trait might have raised his proclivity towards the art, but he wasn’t sure if being a little skilled with a thread and needle would cut it.

‘Getting some experience is more than enough.’

Over the next few days, Percy showed up at Leah’s workshop every morning. At first, he merely watched her as she wove patches of linen, stitching them together into shirts and trousers. The outfits she crafted weren’t anything special. They looked simple and unassuming – a far cry from the silken robes and elegant dresses noble men and women regularly wore. But they were certainly practical. Far better suited for the difficult, laborious lives of the commoners they were meant for.

“Do you want to give it a try?” she asked on the third day.

Under different circumstances, Percy might have chosen to observe her for another week or two. But his channels were almost back to normal, and he knew his schedule was about to grow a lot more hectic. The more practice he got with his trait now, the better.

‘Oh well… If I ruin the fabric, I can just pay her for the damages.’

Recalling the way the tailor had handled her tools, Percy set to work. The first thing he noticed, was how natural it all felt. Holding the needle wasn’t awkward in the slightest, and guiding the thread came with an innate understanding of how to avoid knots and tangles. Paying more attention to the process, he was surprised by the sheer dexterity and precision by which his hands moved. As was his mentor.

Not wanting to freak the poor woman out too much, Percy took a step back, trying to appear more normal. He knew it wasn’t his own talent at work, but the Weaving trait doing most of the heavy lifting. Still, he continued to experiment a little whenever she wasn’t looking.

At some point, he discovered he didn’t even need the needle!

Somehow, he could pinch and push the end of the thread through the smallest of holes and openings with his fingers alone! It almost felt like an extension of his body, responding to his will as well as his mana did! By now, Percy would have to be a fool if he couldn’t tell his skill in this profession bordered on the supernatural!

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Tracing his fingers along a coarse linen shirt, he could easily visualize the way the horizontal weft and vertical warp threads interlocked into its grid-like texture. More than that, he instinctively understood why they’d been woven like that, and how the slightest variation in their structure could affect the final shape and seam of the shirt.

‘This is wild. Between my trait, Sengo’s teachings and Nesha’s help, we can probably start a business empire…’ he chuckled.

Of course, that was not to say he had nothing to learn from Leah. While he could handle fabric as naturally as breathing, there was still a lot of nuance involved in crafting a functional set of clothes.

“You’ll want to match the stitch to the weave,” the tailor said, watching him closely. “If you just sew straight across without following the grain, the fabric will bunch up, or worse, the stitches might tear again.” she advised him at some point.

Well, that certainly explained why the patches he’d hastily applied to his own clothes were starting to come undone already. Whatever instincts he’d stolen from the mysterious spider, they didn’t cover making clothes for people.

In any case, to accommodate his rapid learning speed, Leah handed him progressively tougher tasks over the next three days, before culminating in his final project – weaving an entire linen shirt from scratch. It was time-consuming work – or was meant to be, in any rate – yet Percy still managed to finish it in an afternoon after putting everything the tailor had taught him into practice.

‘Wow. How do I get more traits?!’ he wondered, half-jokingly.

He did vaguely remember he was only ever meant to absorb one, but he’d have to ask the girl about it once he figured out how to return to her world. The only thing he lamented was that his trait didn’t seem to have a direct application in combat. Having achieved so much with it in a single week, he could hardly imagine how powerful he’d grow with a trait related to spellcasting.

‘Let’s not be ungrateful.’ he sighed. ‘I didn’t even know these things existed a year ago…’

Bidding his mentor farewell, he returned to his house. He’d agreed to drop by Leah’s to help her out whenever he could, but he could no longer afford to do it full-time.

“Is your little vacation over already?” Nesha asked.

“More or less.” he shrugged. “What’s the situation with the snitches?”

Percy had asked Nesha to keep an eye on the people she’d singled out. If they were right, the traitors should be leaving town soon, to report them to their masters. Of course, people did travel to and from the town every now and then, mainly to transport goods to the neighbouring Greyquarry town or House Tantalus, but such occurrences weren’t that frequent.

“Yes.” Nesha nodded. “Two of them left this morning under the pretence of transporting wheat to House Tantalus. For context, the harvest season isn’t even over yet – so typically they shouldn’t have done this until a couple weeks from now. Not to mention, they aren’t the ones normally in charge of this.”

‘Micky. From now on, I want you to fly in a wide circle around the town every few hours.’

‘For how long?’ the crow groaned.

‘Indefinitely. We’ll need to know when the Greens arrive, so they don’t catch us by surprise.’

Naturally, the bird complained. Waking up several times per night was bound to be unpleasant. Still, he agreed, not wanting Percy or Nesha to get killed in their sleep.

It wasn’t until all of that was settled that Percy finally activated his boosting art, sitting down to condense some crystals. As cumbersome as it was, it had grown into a bit of a habit by now. In fact, he thought he might have even missed it after not doing it for over a week…

‘Nah… Not really.’

Forming a blob of cyan in his hand, he soon shaped it into a solid sphere, before squeezing it between his palms. Its size shrunk rapidly as Percy settled into the routine task.

And a few minutes later – seven to be exact – it was done. Percy had managed to shave a lot of time off Crystallization over the years, though his improvements had already slowed down to a crawl. He estimated he wouldn’t be getting much faster before Yellow.

Shrugging, he was about to condense another one, when he noticed something strange. A weird feeling bubbled up as he stared at the cyan orb pinched between his thumb and index finger. It was almost like disdain… or disgust, even.

He frowned.

‘What’s going on?’

It wasn’t like he’d done anything new. Nothing he hadn’t done a million times before. Yet, for some reason, condensing his mana like this had felt wrong. He could instinctively tell there was a better way to do it.

Suffice to say, he had no clue what it meant, but he did harbour a pretty good guess as to where this feeling was coming from.

‘Interesting…’

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