The sheer volume of information that the clones brought back would have left Percy unable to stand for a whole day before his fusion with Micky – and this was only two thirds of his recently acquired knowledge. The Yellow clone was still in the Vault, waiting to assist the main body in possessing the next batch of hosts.

  Percy was itching to go over his gains, but he figured that he should probably send the clones intended for the Green and Blue bodies out and retrieve the one still in the artificial world first.

  Emptying the new seals by his side to make space, he took a moment to appreciate the mountain of books that his clones had bought. Granted, only a fraction was unique – the rest were copies that he was planning to spread to his friends, family, and the rest of Remior.

  ‘I’ll sort that out later,’ he decided.

  He still had a lot of empty spatial amulets that he didn’t think he’d be needing anytime soon, so he could have Freddy bring some of the books back to the settlement the next time he visited. Orin would handle the rest. As for the ones intended for House Avalon, he could pass them directly to Archibald by sending a seal to his elemental body.

  Based on the memories he had just received, Percy knew that the Yellow clone would expect his cooperation to empower their connection a couple of days later.

  Timing his actions to the best of his ability, he coordinated with his counterpart to possess Tlaloc and Gabe. After that, he allowed the recycled third clone to go on some random adventure, with the understanding that he might be needed back on Remior a few months from now, when the others approached the end of their trip.

  Unlike the last batch, Percy made sure to keep Soul Resonance active with the two clones stationed in the Vault. Now that Metatron had revealed that he knew about Percy’s blessing, there was no reason to hold back.

  Sadly, only the first empowered connection was entirely effortless, while the second one took some concentration to maintain. It wasn’t much, but it might distract him when he resumed brewing. Still, Percy figured that it was good training anyway. He had severely underused Soul Resonance ever since he created it, so it was about time he changed that.

  Only after he was done with his bloodline did he finally get a chance to go over his recent purchases. Percy knew that he wouldn’t receive the books on seal-crafting that he needed for his artificial advancement until after the Green clone returned, though that wasn’t a huge problem.

  His elemental body was still busy increasing the number of runes that could be drawn inside his core at any given time, so it would be a while before he was ready to create seals of sufficient complexity. Hopefully, all the new runecrafting knowledge and experience that he had just acquired would accelerate his efforts.

  ‘I’ll have the human body join the magiscript training as soon as I’m done with everything else,’ he thought.

  Leaving aside everything related to runecrafting or his additional storage, Percy considered the rest of his clones’ purchases.

  Knowledge about demonic infestations, Cardinal Devils, and purification runes was priceless, and he was glad to have it. That said, it wasn’t immediately useful to him. The same applied to the extra set of Thess’kalan ritual ingredients. Unfortunately, Percy wasn’t even remotely ready to go on an uncertain quest to discover the latent potential that might or might not be hidden in his human lineage.

  Focusing on the more actionable rewards, he internally debated whether to absorb his fourth spectral fiend or register the new alchemic principle first.

  ‘Hmmm… the trait will probably help more in the long run, but I should stick with alchemy while all that training is still fresh in my mind,’ he decided.

  His choice definitely had nothing to do with how painful the fiend’s assimilation was bound to be.

  Sighing, he didn’t immediately start brewing. Before he registered the consolidation principle, he wanted to upgrade his cauldron again – not only because he wanted to put all his magiscript gains to work, but also because he knew that this particular alchemic principle required certain enchantments. His current cauldron might be sufficient, though Percy saw no reason to work with subpar equipment.

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  Thankfully, he was more than capable of producing a far more intricate construct than his last one. Not only had his skills reached new heights after testing himself against Metatron’s gruelling challenges with three separate bodies, but he had also vastly broadened his knowledge of the subject by reading so many books.

  ‘That analog-control enchantment sounds really useful. I should add it to the heat, concealment, pressure and rotation runes on the cauldron.’

  This enchantment built upon the cascading control enchantment that he was already using. He had studied that one on the way to Twilight City, and it allowed him to stack multiple control runes to provide finer control over other enchantments. This was how Percy could carefully adjust the temperature and pressure of his concoctions within small denominations of what his runes were capable of.

  The analog-control enchantment took the idea a few steps further. By adding controlled-amplification runes into the mix, Percy would have the option of boosting the potency of his enchantments by up to another fifteen percent over their maximum value.

  The enchantment also included yet another new type of runes that he had recently mastered: reversal runes. These would allow him to flip the direction of his enchantments so that they could achieve the opposite of the default effect.

  For example, a rotation rune that would normally stir a mixture clockwise would now do so counterclockwise, heating enchantments would cool down his brews instead of heating them up – even without using ice mana – and pressure runes would reduce the pressure inside the cauldron rather than increasing it.

  If a regular enchantment was always at a hundred percent of its capacity as long as it was supplied with mana, a controlled enchantment could be switched on or off without having to cut its fuel off.

  In this example, a cascading control enchantment with, say, five control runes could have its effect fine-tuned within a thirty-second of its maximum potency, anywhere between zero and a hundred percent.

  Finally, an analog-control enchantment would greatly expand that range. Not only would it allow one to fine-tune the effect within a thirty-second of its potency, but it would do so for any value between a hundred and fifteen percent, to minus a hundred and fifteen percent.

  Obviously, the inclusion of this feature would inevitably make Percy’s unit cells a lot more complicated – especially since he was already affixing his enchantments with a whopping seven controls each. However, he felt that the benefits were worth the effort, as his extra freedom would make the new principle a lot easier to use.

  Other than altering the controls, he added amplification runes to the structural integrity enchantments, preservation runes and self-repairs, to make the cauldron more resilient.

  He also further shrunk the size of his runes after realizing that he could do a lot better than his previous attempt, so that he would be able to fit more of them onto the cauldron. It wasn’t too difficult, because his magiscript skill wasn’t the only thing that had changed since then.

  Percy had also acquired an extremely powerful domain that helped him carve his runes with greater precision. His mental capacity had also markedly increased.

  Finally, he thought that this was a good opportunity to expand the volume of the spherical construct a little. The change wasn’t as drastic as the previous time – he only raised its capacity from forty times that of a standard cauldron to fifty. He didn’t want to be too greedy, as he felt that this modest upgrade was more in line with his recent growth as an alchemist.

  The expansion of the cauldron naturally increased its total surface area by about sixteen percent, giving him more space to actually carve the runes. The unit cells now contained over seventy runes each instead of forty, but Percy was able to shrink them greatly, making each rune less than half as wide as before.

  After all was said and done, he estimated that he had fit about ten times as many runes onto the construct, bringing the total to over ten thousand.

  In terms of its actual impact, Percy wasn’t expecting too much. At the very least, he didn’t think that his cauldron was tough enough to handle Blue ingredients, though he was sure that he’d be able to compress Green potions without worrying about the occasional crack.

  The most important change was arguably the sheer flexibility that the new enchantments would give him, letting him put the consolidation principle into practice.

  If it worked as he had guessed, he should be able to pair it with the scaling principle to completely eliminate the unnecessary losses – at least so long as he didn’t attempt to brew inside a cauldron too large for him. Hopefully, this would allow him to prepare his Gloomy Dawn inside the oversized construct, saving valuable time without having to worry about wasted ingredients.

  Between the new principle and the pending spell upgrade that he had been working on before the interruption, Percy would finally be able to retain enough royal jelly to cover all of his needs.

  That said, it seemed like a different spell upgrade took precedence.

  [Congratulations! Your spell has evolved: Spectral Art: Cauldron of a Thousand Whispers – Masterful -> Spectral Art: Cauldron of a Myriad Screams – Masterful!]

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