The Lone Wanderer

Percy was dying to explore the strange feeling, but he had to finish all his chores first. He spent a couple days brewing ahead for himself and his companions. He also sent a new clone out – hopefully to the Vault, but he wouldn’t know that until he was back.

Only then did he finally allow himself to delve into this new project. Perhaps it would lead to a dead-end, but until he obtained the runes he wanted from the artificial world, he couldn’t start working on his next spell upgrade anyway.

‘Let’s see… My pure mana can essentially take four different forms.’

Leaving his fused mana aside – since it was structurally identical in its corporeal phase – Percy manifested his cyan mana in all its different states, one after the other. At the same time, he allowed himself to sink into the clarity afforded to him by Weaving, contemplating the feedback it provided.

First, the regular mana felt soft and squishy. Trying to fashion it into any sort of solid construct was ill-advised, as Percy had found out years ago. Not that Weaving was particularly constructive with its criticism. While it was happy telling Percy what it disliked about the substance, it didn’t bother explaining how he was meant to fix it.

Then came the crystals. Again, his trait loudly protested their creation, warning him that they were way too brittle. And too rigid. He wouldn’t be able to weave a web out of–

‘Wait, what?! A web?! Why would I care about that?’ he creased his brow.

Were these intrusive thoughts some side-effect of the trait? Percy wasn’t particularly happy evaluating his magic based on how suitable it was for catching bugs. But he shook his head, unwilling to write this path off before he even treaded it.

‘Fine. Web it is. Let’s see if I can please you.’

Next was the intermediate step he obtained by mixing the soft mana with the cyan powder. In his analogy to concrete, these rice-shaped grains were equivalent to the gravel that made up most of the substance. Expecting the trait to complain again, Percy was shocked to receive some positive feedback for a change! He could tell Weaving still wasn’t overly thrilled with the grains, but it wasn’t as quick to dismiss them as before. Instead, it nudged him along, encouraging him to keep going.

‘Weird, but ok.’

Finally, Percy used Reinforcement. Filling the space between the grains with powder, he held everything in place with regular mana, before hammering at the mixture with his willpower, trying to lodge its pieces together. Over the next few minutes, he gradually ironed out the kinks in the material, purging its impurities one after the other. In the end, he was left with a cylindrical slab of cyan in his hand – a small section of what he usually used for his scythe’s shaft. It hadn’t taken him too long either, as he’d grown much faster at this over the past year.

‘How about this one? You’ve got to be a little impressed this time, right? It’s a Refined spell, for Phoebe’s sake!’

Unfortunately, the response from Weaving was lukewarm again. It was indeed satisfied with the rod’s strength, but it still protested loudly over its excessive rigidity. The greedy trait wanted its mana both strong and flexible! After all, how else would he spin it into the ultimate thread?!

Percy frowned.

‘Is that the goal? I don’t even know if such a thing is possible…’

He smiled bitterly. Who was he even talking to? Was it himself, the spider, or the trait? Either way, this was quite the high standard his customer had imposed on him. Pure mana was universally hailed as hot garbage for a reason. Percy was counting his lucky stars that he’d managed to amend that into something useful, yet Weaving demanded so much more…

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Then again, it wasn’t so strange, given the trait’s name. Percy couldn’t help but wonder what effect such a result would have on his magic. Could pure mana truly be as hard as steel, yet as flexible as silk at the same time? If possible, that ought to qualify as a Masterful-tier spell.

‘Well, the clone won’t be back for a few more days at the earliest… I suppose I’ve got some time to kill.’

***

From that day onward, Percy spent his mornings brewing for the group, while devoting his afternoons into researching the new form of his pure mana.

As for how he did that? Well, he was essentially playing a game of hot or cold with his trait. He tried applying subtle changes to his Reinforcement, using the trait’s reaction as well as his own intuition to assess whether they brought him closer or further from his goal.

At first, he’d started with something obvious – decreasing the width of his constructs. Originally, the shaft of his scythe was about as wide as a finger, so Percy gradually reduced that a few millimetres at a time, gauging how its properties changed. Not surprisingly, the rod grew far more fragile past a certain point – namely as soon as it had shrunk to around half its previous width.

And it didn’t take a genius to figure out why. If somebody was to examine the rod’s cross-section, they’d quickly notice it wasn’t homogeneous, as it was made of three different variants of pure mana, held together in a very specific configuration. Obviously, shrinking the shape too much messed up the delicate balance, compromising the object’s integrity.

‘I’ll need to go deeper…’ Percy realized.

The next step was to play around with the grains themselves, adjusting their shape. Which was easier said than done, as even the slightest tweak affected the construct greatly. For example, making the grains thinner allowed Percy to fit more of them in the rod’s cross-section – which was good – but it also made each individual grain more fragile – which was bad.

The solution was to make them shorter too, maintaining their rice-like shape while scaling them down. However, the shorter they were, the harder it was for them to interlock with one another, which again compromised the integrity of the material.

To amend that, Percy tried making them thinner while packing them more densely, to counterbalance their fragility. This worked, but it made the rod even more rigid – it wouldn’t bend at all!

‘Well, this wasn’t what my trait wanted, but I suppose it isn’t useless… I can make my scythes a little stronger like this.’

In any case, Percy had to admit this wasn’t going to work with just three ingredients. The only way forward was to add another intermediate step in the process, giving himself an extra variable to play around with. However, this also meant that the number of possible combinations would shoot up exponentially. As would the effort required to sift through each of them…

Not seeing any other path, and since his clone had yet to return, he gritted his teeth before diving into the experiments again. This time, he used two grain variants. One was small and sturdy, the other long and thin. This seemed to yield some results, as he did manage to shrink the rod some more by the end of the second week. Even better, he did that without compromising its strength!

‘At least, not by much.’ he thought as he examined the long, cyan fibre in his hand.

Its cross-section was smaller than a ladybug, and it seemed to bend rather easily too! A few quick tests confirmed that it wasn’t any weaker than his scythe’s shaft either. Percy had verified this by stacking a few of them together and then comparing how much force it took to break them.

‘Still nowhere close to my goal though…’

As it was, he couldn’t think of a good application for it. It wasn’t nearly as thin as a thread, so the prospect of weaving it into a fabric was nothing but a pipe dream. Shrinking it down any further wasn’t going to be easy either.

‘There’s no way I’ll have it ready by the time the Greens arrive. I suppose I’ll have to fall back to my original plan.’

He’d have to put this project on the side for now. For all he knew, it might be years until he got anywhere with it. The realization filled him with disappointment, as he’d been looking forward to perfecting the mana threads. Perhaps it was the thought of obtaining a Masterful spell, or maybe it was just the trait’s influence on his subconscious, but he’d really enjoyed the past couple of weeks. Sadly, it couldn’t be helped.

On the bright side, the clone finally returned a few days later. And it brought with him exactly what Percy had ordered.

Finally, he had some shiny new runes to play around with!

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