The Lone Wanderer

Crafting a bandage for Enki hadn’t been too difficult. The concealment rune didn’t have any special requirement – it worked with pretty much any material that contained some mana.

Visiting the town’s marketplace, they only had to beg a few hunters and gatherers for some scraps of mana-rich ingredients, until they collected enough fibres for Percy to do his thing. Between his Weaving trait and his growing skill with runecrafting, sewing the enchantment on a long piece of parchment was a piece of cake. Though it did mean Enki would have to pull his skirt a few inches higher to keep the bandage hidden.

‘I look ridiculous.’

‘Yeah, well. Suck it up. You have a second core now.’ Percy rolled his eyes.

‘Does that mean I can finally use it?’

‘Sure – as soon as you open up your channels. So just focus on that for the next couple of weeks, and leave me alone to study. I’ll need to concentrate if you want Ea’s Gift too.’

Returning to the orphanage, Percy rummaged through the kitchen for whatever tools he could salvage. Naturally, he couldn’t afford a proper alchemy kit, so he’d have to make do with common cooking utensils.

Being underwater and everything, the local alchemists couldn’t use a regular cauldron to heat up the ingredients, as everything would just float away. Consequently, they typically used an airtight container, made of a transparent glass-like material so that they could still observe the reaction happening within.

‘Sadly, there’s nothing like that here…’ Percy smiled bitterly.

The best he’d found was a metallic, spherical pot. The top half could be twisted on and off, allowing him to replace the tool he needed to an extent. Still, it was opaque, which meant he wouldn’t be able to peer inside it with anything other than his Mana Sense. Suffice to say, he wasn’t looking forward to brewing blindly.

And that wasn’t the only issue. The actual tool was supposed to contain a few enchantments – such as one for controlling its internal heat, one for the pressure and one for steering the ingredients. Percy had never learnt the corresponding runes, so he’d have to reproduce everything using Enki’s fire mana.

‘It can’t be helped.’ he shrugged. ‘My brewing yield should be plenty anyway.’

Putting the Aurora Dew aside, Percy estimated his yield with the regular elixirs should have already reached about 32% after brewing for thousands of hours over the past few years. And that was while going through all three of the familiar steps.

Luckily, potions and potion-adjacent products appeared much simpler, many of them only requiring a single step – the very extraction principle he was trying to learn. He guessed some of the more complicated recipes like the rejuvenation potions they had in the Guild involved more than that, as they contained multiple mana types. But that wasn’t the case for the lesser regeneration pills.

Percy only needed to gather and condense the moss’s properties into a solid – that was it. Suffice to say, his yield would have been over 68% if he was more familiar with the principle and the recipe, and if he was to do this on Remior, using his own tools.

Naturally, his yield would take a massive hit due to all the additional obstacles he had to overcome. Still, according to the textbook, a 20% yield was enough to condense a single pill – which was incidentally the requirement to pass the test.

‘Just 20%... Less than a third of what I’m normally capable of… I should be able to do it in a reasonable amount of time…’

Unfortunately for Percy, reality didn’t quite match his expectations. While the books he’d found in the library had vaguely outlined the pill’s recipe, they didn’t go into specifics. After exhausting the entire stash they’d brought back from the reef, he had yet to even determine the correct dosage of moss for each attempt.

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Percy was by no means a novice in brewing, but blindly tossing a random amount of the ingredient – mixed with saltwater – into the sphere was never going to work. At least, not unless they burned through way more materials than this.

Thinking of something, Percy left the orphanage, roaming the town in search of people with the strange glow in their eyes. If his guess was correct, that was a side-effect of Ea’s Gift – which meant that all those people were qualified alchemists. The sheer number of them was insane compared to what they had on Remior. Then again, it wasn’t that strange considering Atlantis survived by exporting their products to outsiders.

In any case, Percy approached as many of the suspected alchemists as he could find, begging them for tips and tricks to solve whatever issue he was facing, one question at a time. Inhabiting a kid’s body definitely helped a lot with that, eliciting a fair amount of kindness from the strangers.

‘Alright, so I’m supposed to only fill it about halfway with moss.’

‘Is THAT how they prevent the salt from messing with the recipe?!’

‘Ah! I hadn’t even thought of flipping the sphere’s rotation to stir the contents!’

Naturally, he asked Enki to take a break from his own task many a time, helping him retrieve more moss from the reef whenever he ran out. The boy complained, engrossed in activating his new core as he was, but still helped Percy out.

It wasn’t until around three weeks later that Percy managed to make some tangible progress, however. He hadn’t condensed a complete pill just yet, but this was the first time the moss’s essence wasn’t wasted entirely, leaving behind a few useable dregs inside.

‘This is less than a 5% yield though…’ he grimaced.

At this rate, it would take him months to hit his target, which was something he had to avoid at all costs, not wanting to keep his main body waiting longer than necessary. At least, there wasn’t a timer looming over his head with regards to Enki’s condition, as the boy had healed almost completely by now. In fact, Percy had been forced to manually keep some of the injuries open, so that he wouldn’t get kicked out of the body prematurely.

‘Percy! It’s done!’ Enki exclaimed one day.

‘Took you long enough.’ Percy rolled his eyes. ‘I only needed a week to fill up my second core the first time around.’

‘Yeah, well… I’m terrible with magic. I’ve never really practiced since learning about my fire affinity.’ the boy said, a sheepish grin plastered all over his face.

‘Fair enough. Let’s see it then. Try pulling some mana from your core.’

Following his instructions, Enki soon began to gather some mana in his hand, though that didn’t last for long. As soon as he started, Percy took over, recognizing the feel of the mana instantly. While he hadn’t paid much attention to his host’s efforts over the past few weeks, there was no mistaking these channels, as they were the exact same ones branching out of his own abdomen back home.

___

Mana cores:

• [Mana core 1 – Red – Fire]
• [Mana core 2 – Red – Pure]

___

‘Really?’ Enki asked, disappointment evident in his tone. ‘My first affinity is fire, and the second one pure?’

Percy felt a little bad hearing the boy.

‘Enki. My second core has a pure affinity too. It’s not as bad as people say. I’ve learned quite a few nifty tricks with it too.’

‘Can you teach me?’ Enki asked with some hope in his eyes.

Though that only added a pang of guilt to Percy’s pity. It wasn’t like he hadn’t considered teaching the boy Circulation or Crystallization, but they didn’t have the time for either. It would take years to hone Enki’s body enough for the former. As for the latter, it would be even tougher for him than it had been for Percy without a boosting art to fall back to.

‘Maybe next time we meet.’ he ultimately said, watching the boy deflate. ‘But it’s not all bad news. I think your new affinity might just help me solve the issue I’ve been having with the pills.’

While Percy could heat up the sphere with his fire mana and stir it by rotating it, he had no answer for the internal pressure. He couldn’t use his fire mana for that, as it would only mess with the moss, burning it. Consequently, he’d been working with a massive handicap, as he could only control two of the three main variables.

That said, pure mana was a lot less reactive than fire mana. Not to mention how much better he could control it. By injecting some into the reaction, he could probably apply as much pressure as he wanted, improving far more rapidly than before.

If he got lucky, he might even reach his target within the next couple of weeks.

‘Enki. Even with Ea’s Gift and a second core, it doesn’t mean your life will be smooth sailing. Hell, I’ve found a dozen amazing things in my travels and I still have to fight every single day.’ Percy said, before continuing.

‘I can’t give you all the answers, but I can give you the tools to figure them out for yourself, after I’m gone.’

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