Alchemist’s Intuition was a spell that Percy had registered over a decade ago, emerging naturally as he explored the intersection of multiple schools of alchemy while brewing in Twilight City.

  Developing the Wild Art had allowed him to channel his insights and understanding of various principles through his eyes, greatly improving his yield. The spell had only grown more powerful over the years – especially after registering the compression principle and adding new senses to his mutation.

  At its core, Alchemist’s Intuition allowed him to peer beneath the surface of a concoction, detecting the lumps and bubbles forming in its depths. Each passive improvement had increased the depth slightly, though Percy hadn’t had the chance to actively work on upgrading the spell yet.

  Reaching the Refined tier was bound to help even more, but Percy had opted to focus on easier ways to improve his yield in the past – such as crafting a better cauldron or getting used to his thermal vision.

  Now that he had more time in his hands and fewer low-hanging fruit to pick, resuming this old project of his might not be a terrible idea.

  ‘The only question is, how should I go about it?’

  The spell already did a great job drawing from his senses and registered principles to paint a cohesive picture of his cauldron’s contents. He couldn’t quite intuit what was going on in every cubic centimetre of his concoctions, but he estimated that his Wild Art had already grown about as powerful as it was ever going to be in its current state, as improvements had slowed to a crawl after countless hours of brewing.

  There were two indirect ways to strengthen the spell, of course: registering yet another new principle, or evolving his mutation again. Seeing as neither of those options was currently on the table, he would have to come up with a third – hopefully more direct – method.

  Fortunately, he wasn’t entirely without ideas.

  ‘I guess I’ll still have to borrow a page out of my other Wild Arts, after all…’

  As early as when he had first registered the spell, Percy had noted its similarity to Greater Foresight and hypothesized that he could potentially develop the ability to predict the future – eliminating solid lumps inside his brews before they even formed.

  If he succeeded, he would greatly cut both his losses and brewing time by another step. If he got lucky, this predictive feature might even synergize well with the current effect of the spell, allowing him to see deeper into the concoctions as well.

  The only problem was that alchemy was very different from fighting.

  Percy had a lot more cues to study when trying to read an opponent’s moves. He could gauge their intention through the shifts in their soul, guess the shape and size of their spell through the flares in their mana core, the flow of their willpower, and even their physical movements. In fact, this was precisely how he had developed Greater Foresight in the first place – through countless sparring matches against the trolls in the Grisly Bog.

  Grim Dance was even simpler, as it merely gave form to his own intentions – something that Percy was obviously privy to.

  Unfortunately, most of these tricks weren’t applicable to his brews. Mana inside his ingredients contained no willpower, nor did it belong to anyone with a soul or a physical body, leaving Percy with very little information to base his predictions off.

  ‘I suppose the reactions aren’t entirely random, otherwise alchemy wouldn’t exist,’ he reminded himself.

  Ingredients interacted in certain ways, giving rise to the many alchemic principles and recipes that he was intimately familiar with. Their reactions were determined solely by the properties of the involved affinities, so his new spell would have to rely on that.

  The problem was that these reactions were extremely chaotic, making each brewing session somewhat unique. It was an alchemist’s job to develop a set of rules and hone their intuition through years of practice, gradually getting better at dealing with the bubbles and solid lumps threatening their yield. If Percy wanted to develop anything even remotely akin to an alchemic foresight spell, he would have to deepen his understanding of mana itself – in all its many flavours.

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  ‘Well, I’ve got a few advantages over other people,’ he thought.

  After decades of fighting against powerful opponents, Percy was at least tangentially familiar with pretty much every affinity that he’d ever heard of. Through his clones, he’d even wielded most of them – usually, multiple times. It would definitely help with this project, though he knew it wouldn’t be enough.

  Mana behaved differently under a person’s control than it did in nature. His experience couldn’t hurt, but he should probably study how various mana types acted when left alone. Luckily, he’d already taken a step in that direction as well, by using ingredients of many different affinities in his concoctions. After all, many of the alchemic principles he had mastered required specific reagents.

  ‘I should ask Freddy to bring me more of everything.’

  Percy wasn’t going to stick to just the ingredients that he was familiar with. While he had no expectation of inventing a new principle during this endeavour, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to broaden his knowledge by exploring how different kinds of ingredients reacted with one another – even in concoctions without any practical applications.

  He was sure that other alchemists in Remior’s long history had attempted this, but he doubted that they had a background on par with his own, so he was confident that he would be able to learn things that had eluded his predecessors.

  Finally, he had one other major advantage that separated him from everyone else: his environment.

  Scanning his surroundings, Percy examined the colourful motes dancing in the air, a strange idea forming in his mind. The vibrant particles drifting around the cavern were essentially manifestations of ambient mana, brought about due to the extreme mana density in the depths of the Fungal Spire.

  The alchemists living on the surface experienced a lesser version of this, but the magical swarm wasn’t nearly as abundant in the settlement or atop the giant mushrooms.

  Back when Percy had first arrived in the Guild, he had wrongly assumed that the colour of the particles indicated their mana type – that a cyan mote corresponded to pure mana, an orange mote to fire mana, and so on. This wasn’t entirely off base, but not quite accurate either.

  It wasn’t until his fight with Deimos that he had learned more about the nature of the particles. While trying to convert them into his own affinities through his boosting art, he had realized that changing their colour was a lot easier than a complete conversion.

  Regardless of what they looked like, the particles were all made solely of ambient mana – a mixture of every affinity that was only slightly biased toward specific elements, giving the motes their hues. In other words, a silver particle wasn’t quite made of soul mana – just ambient mana with a subtle inclination toward it.

  Percy’s domain could affect motes over a wide area, shifting their bias toward his own affinities, essentially priming them so that they could be absorbed or converted more easily through his boosting art. This was actually a property that his willpower had inherited from his Extreme spell, though a complete conversion required additional effort.

  In any case, this knowledge was very relevant to his current project. By observing how particles of various colours behaved, he could learn more about the corresponding mana types, and what properties they bestowed upon the ambient mana.

  ‘Hopefully, I’ll accumulate enough insights from these experiments to push the spell over the tipping point.’

  Perhaps it was a long shot, but wasn’t it through pure understanding of alchemy that he had registered the Wild Art in the first place? It was only fitting that he should follow a similar approach to upgrade it.

  Besides, it was only a Crude spell that he needed to raise to Refined. Even if it proved as ambitious as Internal Magiscript – well… he had succeeded once, hadn’t he?

  Happy with his plan, Percy immediately got to work.

  Bringing out his cauldron, he began mixing secondary – and even primary – ingredients in random configurations, studying how they interacted and trying to discern any interesting patterns that he might have missed in the past.

  Given his current status as the undisputed lord of the Fungal Spire, acquiring supplies should be easier than ever before, so he didn’t worry about his expenditure in the slightest. He could always ask his friend to bring him more of anything he needed during his next visit.

  Nobody would dare complain – and not just due to the leverage that Percy held over their world. The knowledge he had shared with the rest of Remior was priceless. Besides, any further progress he made in the field of alchemy would eventually trickle down to the others in the Guild in one form or another.

  The only ingredient that he didn’t dare squander was naturally the royal jelly. It was limited and way too precious, so he wasn’t going to waste a single drop of it. However, even regular nectar wasn’t safe from his experiments.

  Over the next few weeks, Percy – the human body, at least – alternated between four main tasks: brewing Gloomy Dawn for the royal wasps and himself, cleansing his cores, experimenting with random ingredients in his cauldron, and spending hours observing the colourful motes dancing around the cavern.

  It quickly became apparent that this project would take a while to yield any results, though Percy wasn’t deterred by that. With three clones completing challenges in the Vault and his elemental body busy with other things – including practicing Internal Magiscript – in the Camelot province, Percy knew that he was spending every second of every day over five times as productively as the second most hard-working person in the world.

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