The corners of Percy’s lips curled up as he read the notification. It was his other body who had worked tirelessly to upgrade the spell, but it didn’t really matter. Ever since the fusion, his cognitive prowess had grown enough that he could have each body focus on a different task while remaining perfectly aware of one another.

  ‘Would you look at that? So, it’s possible to reach Masterful through sheer complexity after all…’

  Internal Runecrafting had been an extremely difficult spell to register, yet his Status had classified it as merely Refined. At the time, he’d hypothesized that Phoebe’s Decree had been hesitant to give it a higher tier because it wasn’t particularly useful.

  Strictly speaking, the same was true with Internal Magiscript. Percy might be able to find a few niche applications for it here and there, but it was a rather impractical spell – all things considered. Evidently, the overwhelming difficulty in upgrading it had been enough to push it to the next tier despite its relative uselessness.

  Regardless, the value of his new Spectral Art lied in his plans for the artificial advancement, not its current applications. He still had to spend a lot of time practicing before he could draw large unit cells inside his core, though this was something that his main bodies could work on while his clones researched the next steps in the Vault.

  Sighing, he shoved those thoughts aside, returning to the task at hand. There were a few other things he needed to finish up on Remior first, to free up his cords.

  Walking to the nearest Starry Commander, he hurled a few spinning scythes into its carapace, carving several deep incisions into its soul. This would have been dangerous had it been a human, but the creature’s size and grade made it difficult for the reinforced mana to injure it too badly. Not to mention that Percy was proficient enough with his weapons to avoid harming the wasp irreversibly.

  Obeying its grandmother’s instructions, the insect didn’t so much as flinch. Not wasting time, Percy grabbed a chunk of his own soul, using his bloodline to sever and stuff it into the cuts. He didn’t stash any mana into his wisp, as he could just provide as much as necessary through his boosting art and the cord.

  Leaving the clone behind to stitch up the oversized bug, he moved to the next one, repeating his actions.

  A swarm of Starry Drones and Workers dropped a mountain of green mushrooms onto the first Commander’s enormous body by the time Percy reached the third insect. As soon as the creature’s new core was done absorbing life mana from the fungi, the clone flew back into Percy’s body, merging into his soul and allowing him to recycle the slot necessary for the fourth wasp.

  It would take a few seconds longer for the potent phantom mana flowing through his channels to completely mend the injury, so he had to fashion the new clone from a different body part.

  Falling into a trance, he passed the Moirais’ Decree to one Blue wasp after the other, the previous ones marching out of the cavern to make space for more. Every step the colossal creatures took sent a tremor through the chamber, the occasional shard of glowing crystal falling and shattering on the ground.

  Percy didn’t mind, used to it by now. Averaging a clone every ten seconds, he granted second cores to over three hundred insects per hour, eight thousand a day, or two hundred and fifty thousand a month. Of course, he hadn’t been nearly this fast when he first started, having gradually streamlined the process after weeks of painstaking efforts.

  He’d already passed the Decree to half a million wasps in the past six months, leaving only a few left. At this rate, he estimated that he’d be done in a couple of weeks at the latest.

  He wasn’t planning to extend the same generosity to the Starry Knights. It would take much longer to go through all of them, while being far less impactful. Even so, he’d asked Nephthys and the Queen to teach Hibernation to all the Green and Blue wasps in the hive to further reduce their beast mana consumption and save him time. Any bug weaker than that was unfortunately too dumb to learn it.

  The hive would hopefully start producing a lot of additional nectar as the creatures advanced their new cores and improved their conversion rates. They might never develop any mutations because they couldn’t evolve past Blue, meaning that they wouldn’t have a very efficient way to feed their second mana type into their beast cores, but even doing it inefficiently was better than nothing.

  Percy didn’t know how much their output would increase exactly, though he was optimistic that it would be enough to cover Remior’s needs. After all, the hive consumed a lot more mana internally than the few drops the hunters looted from the weaker creatures sent to the surface, and much of it was tied up by the Blue bugs.

  The Guild would have never been able to provide the Commanders and Breeders with half a million doses of elixirs per day, but luckily the wasps didn’t need that. They could cleanse their new cores using their own beast mana, and they could even double their advancement speed through the cyan paste that the humans had already started mass producing.

  It wasn’t quite as effective as the Aurora Dew – which the creatures couldn’t replicate on their own because they had no way to bond and deattune the crystallized pure mana to theirs – but it was several times cheaper.

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  ‘They should start advancing in a few months,’ Percy thought, his lips parting into a grin.

  When that happened, he’d move back to the surface and work with the alchemists to harness the additional nectar. It would be years before the Blue wasps reached their maximum output, but even a fraction of that would be a great start.

  Percy’s biggest worry was that the noble Houses would grow restless before he had results, though he assumed that nothing of the sort had happened yet, otherwise Orin and the elders would have informed him already.

  The senior alchemists were currently busy upgrading the settlement and bolstering their ranks. Percy had even asked them to procure lots of secondary ingredients for later – not just the ones used in the elixirs. He wanted them for both his own use and because he intended to teach everyone many of the alchemic principles that he had mastered.

  He hadn’t slacked when it came to his own advancements either. While he had yet to take any royal jelly from the Queen or her daughter, he had consumed a lot of raw nectar with his beast core, drinking three doses of Aurora Dew per day with each of the others. He’d even grown quite proficient with the Cascading Cracks technique, though combining it with the Whirlpool of Four Streams was a work in progress.

  On a different matter, Percy had granted new cores to the Queen, Archibald, Orin and Freddy months ago – before doing so for the Blue insects. The first two had been a little trickier due to their higher grade, but he’d still managed to pass them the Decree with enough preparation and caution.

  His mentor had awakened a pure core, which he’d wanted to keep due to how convenient it was for producing the cyan crystals. Technically, there was no need to manually condense his mana when he could get as much as he wanted from other people, but Orin was an alchemist at heart. He was far more interested in having direct access to the miraculous material than increasing his personal strength.

  Percy hadn’t pressed his mentor on the issue, since it had made more sense to add a lightning affinity to his first core anyway, elevating fire to plasma and leaving the door open for a rare affinity in his second core.

  Funnily enough, Archibald had also awakened a pure affinity, causing grandfather and grandson to burst into laughter at the irony of the situation. However, the old Violet hadn’t been very distraught after receiving the same affinity that he had helped Percy obtain all those years back. Not in a rush to ditch the element for lightning, he’d been more than happy to learn the pure version of the Dance from Percy, as well as other spells like Reinforcement or Self-bestowal.

  Archibald hadn’t been the only one to express that sentiment either. According to Orin, a lot of people in the Guild had seemed quite interested in studying the cyan powder lately. Without realizing, Percy had changed everyone’s opinion of the so-called “weakest” affinity!

  Archibald was still in the hive, replenishing his long-destroyed army of clones and practicing his magic under Percy’s sporadic supervision. He could already use Circulation with his new core, and he was currently working on elevating it to the next tier. Its grade was way too low to matter, but mastering one flavour of the Dance would make it easier to figure out the life version.

  Percy had asked his grandfather to wait a little longer before returning home. He wanted to accompany him with his elemental body, not only for safety reasons, but also to bring the affinity-changing treasure to Elaine once his familiar no longer needed it.

  In a strange twist of fate, Freddy and the Queen hadn’t used it either, but for different reasons. The plump vendor had awakened a lightning core of his own. Technically, he could have still upgraded his fire core to plasma like Orin, but everyone had felt that it would be too much of a waste to consume such a valuable treasure just to end up with two instances of the lightning affinity in his body.

  As for the Violet insect, she had developed an acid affinity like Galahad’s – which already included lightning mana – causing Percy to fall deep into thought.

  Only one in a hundred people was supposed to awaken a rare or composite affinity. Given how many hosts he’d passed the Moirais’ Decree to, it wasn’t strange that this happened occasionally, but he’d still felt that this hadn’t been a complete coincidence.

  Normally, sapients had a small predisposition toward the affinities of their parents, though it wasn’t nearly enough to guarantee them inheriting a rare or composite mana type – unless of course there was a powerful bloodline or an Elemental Source involved.

  However, Percy had started to doubt that this was true for beasts.

  In the past, he hadn’t repaired the Decree with enough beast hosts to study the phenomenon properly, though he’d still noticed a pattern. Was it through sheer luck that Micky – a bird – had awakened an air affinity, and the Starry Queen – a creature that already wielded acidic venom – had unlocked a core related to that?

  Probably not.

  Fortunately, Percy had experimented on plenty of test subjects of the same species over the past few months to confirm his suspicions. Sure enough, he’d quickly noticed that a disproportional number of Starry Commanders and Breeders had acquired the acid affinity.

  It still wasn’t guaranteed – only about one in three got it, the others seemingly being completely random – but this was already orders of magnitude more common than it should have been.

  ‘I’m not sure if I should be happy or sad about this…’ he’d thought.

  Having some control over what affinity his future familiars and aspects would develop wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, nor was Nephthys getting a composite affinity for free. It would save him yet another use of the treasure and likely get the familiar another three new mutations upon evolving.

  Even better, he already knew the water version of the Dance to teach the royal wasps, as well as the lightning and acid patterns of Circulation. Perhaps, Galahad had even figured out the rest by now, which would allow Percy to relay the information to the bugs as soon as his elemental body reached the mansion.

  However, he still held onto hope that the Princess would awaken a mind affinity to help him segregate his memories. It wasn’t impossible to find a different mind user – hell, many of the Blue wasps had obtained the affinity – but he’d rather entrust the job to somebody skilled with it.

  Alas, there wasn’t much that he could do about it, besides being patient and hoping for the best.

  Luckily, it didn’t take him long to get his answers. About ten days later, the first strands of Yellow mana appeared in Nephthys’s core. Once she completed her evolution, he would be able to place a clone in her body without worrying about destabilizing her soul.

  It was great timing too, as there were only a few thousand Blue insects left to pass the Decree to. While Archibald was still some time away from mastering the Dance, this wasn’t something that they had to stay inside the hive for.

  As soon as Percy dealt with the Princess’s advancement and everything it entailed, it would be time to send one of his bodies to the Camelot province and some clones to the Vault.

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