Percy didn’t rush to work on his brewing yield. While the Queen’s current jelly output fell a little short of meeting their requirements, he still had enough to support the royal wasps’ cores and two of his own, so he didn’t see any reason to delay any longer. Taking out his cauldron and the secondary ingredients that he had recently acquired from the Guild, he began brewing the new elixirs.
It was none other than Freddy who had brought him the materials.
Percy had had the brilliant idea of asking his friend to work part-time as a messenger to the hive, delivering news, alchemical reagents and, of course, Honey Rolls to him. This way, Percy had kept in touch with his friend and the elders, while also conveniently receiving all the resources he required to continue his projects. Finally, it also helped justify the expensive elixirs he was paying Freddy in the plumb vendor’s mind, so that he wouldn’t feel so bad about it.
Regardless, it soon became clear that the royal jelly behaved almost entirely like regular nectar, meaning that Percy didn’t have to go through too many hoops to adjust the recipe. If anything, the uniformity of the rare substance made it even easier to work with, though not quite enough to affect his brewing yield.
The biggest challenge came not from the ingredients, but from the process itself. It had been a while since Percy had last worked with raw nectar, since he had mostly just added crystallized mana to turn elixirs into Aurora Dew over the past few decades, so he was understandably a little rusty with some alchemic steps.
Pacification and deattunement were fine, because Percy also used them for his potions, though it had been a while since he had last employed the redirection principle. Even so, refamiliarizing himself only took a couple of days. As for the rest of the recipe – most of it could be applied to the jelly with minimal changes.
‘Here it is… a core-cleansing resource more potent than anything that the vast majority of people in the universe have ever laid eyes upon,’ he thought.
He was pinching a small gemstone vial between his thumb and index finger, a dull grey liquid swirling inside. Only half of the crystalline vessel was full, since the people of Remior could now cleanse their cores with just fifty drops of elixir thanks to the Cascading Cracks technique, and they had yet to mass produce containers with half the previous capacity.
Percy’s remark was just a guess, but he felt that it was most likely true. Even many greater springs didn’t know about the cyan powder, and he had no idea if more potent forms of stable beast mana like the royal jelly existed anywhere else. Whether or not they did, the combination of the two had to be exceptionally rare.
Shifting his attention to the Starry Queen who had been observing him silently over the past week, he nodded. The giant bug remained motionless, though she must have communicated with one of her subordinates through their mental link, because a Starry Commander soon walked into the vast chamber.
“Here you go!” Percy yelled, tossing the vial into the creature’s dark throat, not even bothering to extract its contents first. The potent acid in the Commander’s stomach shouldn’t have any trouble melting it down into inert powder.
The new elixirs weren’t intended for anyone but him, his familiar and her mother, but he still thought that it was better to test the experimental resource on a more… disposable core before ingesting it directly. Risking the life of a Blue wasp wasn’t ideal either, but those were the only insects that had non-beast affinities, and it was better than testing the elixir on a human.
Either way, Percy was almost certain that it would work as intended, though it never hurt to be cautious. He and the royal wasps waited patiently for around fifteen minutes before he turned to the Queen again and established a new spectral connection.
‘Well?’
‘Success,’ the Queen replied, an excited glint finding its way into her compound eyes. ‘My subordinate has reported a more effective cleansing session without any adverse side-effects.’
Percy exhaled in relief. While he hadn’t had any reason to believe that the upgraded elixirs wouldn’t work, he’d found himself unable to fully suppress his worries. This was an extremely important matter, as it would potentially save him nearly a century from his next set of advancements, and close to a millennium from the one after.
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Pulling another similar vial from his seal, he examined it more closely, caressing it fondly with his thumb.
‘So, what should I name you? I can’t keep calling you “Aurora Dew with royal jelly”.’
The new elixir sported a dull grey colour with a faint greenish-blue tint, reminding him of a cloudy sky lit up by the rising sun. Technically, it owed its darker hue to Percy’s soul mana – not the royal jelly. His elixirs had already looked exactly like this for years now – acquiring a silver hue after he began crystallizing his phantom mana instead of regular pure mana, later turning grey due to the blessing. As for the royal jelly, it hadn’t really affected the colour of the liquid in any noticeable way.
However, the rest of Remior would soon start producing, trading, and consuming Aurora Dew that looked just like Percy’s original version, while the jelly-enriched variant that he personally brewed would be the only one carrying this characteristic grey hue moving forward, so he thought that it would be fine to name it accordingly.
‘How about… Gloomy Dawn?’
Nesha was the one who’d named the previous recipe, though she wasn’t here to share her opinion this time.
Remembering that he still had to segregate his memories before he could spend quality time with his girlfriend again dulled Percy’s excitement slightly, though he shook away the distracting thoughts to focus on the matter at hand.
After helping the Queen and the Princess drink their first doses of Gloomy Dawn, he consumed some too, sitting cross-legged to cleanse his cores.
Drawing two streams of phantom mana, he churned the contents of his stomach, allowing his mana to blend with the elixirs. Percy had stopped using his Whirlpool of Four Streams technique, returning to the original ‘Two Streams’ variant that the Moirais’ documents had mentioned.
He had originally had no choice but to modify the technique, because his soul mana was incorporeal and couldn’t be used to stir the liquid in his stomach. Consequently, he had taught himself to draw two streams from each core to balance out the affinities while still having a pair of corporeal streams to control the whirlpool.
Recently, Percy had realized that this was no longer necessary, since he was used to circulating phantom mana through both cores nowadays, which he could freely turn corporeal. There hadn’t been a reason to return to the simpler version before learning the Cascading Cracks technique, though it was now making it a lot easier to combine the two arts.
Turning one of the infused streams incorporeal again as it left his stomach, he led both through his channels and to their corresponding cores, building up pressure inside the spherical organs. Releasing the violent bursts, he caused the crystalline walls to crack, giving Percy several spots to gently target with the following waves of mana.
Fifteen minutes later, he was done.
He was still getting used to simultaneously cleansing his cores in such an elaborate manner, though his efficiency had already surpassed ninety percent. The minor losses stung a little, but he knew that they would fade away completely after a few more months of practice.
Percy had come up with a name for the new technique too: Whirlpool of Cascading Cracks. Admittedly, it wasn’t all that original, but he felt that it captured the essence of the technique well enough.
‘It’s such a pity that I don’t have enough Gloomy Dawn for the elemental body,’ he lamented.
Even though Micky was dozens of kilometres away from the hive, Percy had discovered an easy way to pass resources between his two bodies. Now that his soul was capable of freely flowing through the ethereal cord, they could send their spatial seal back and forth. This was something that he couldn’t do with his clones or familiar, because they could only share mana through their connection.
This was obviously quite convenient, as it would give the elemental body access to anything within the human body’s reach – potions, nectar, royal jelly, Aurora Dew, Gloomy Dawn – no matter where he travelled on Remior or even beyond!
That said, Percy had decided that the ice core was the best one to fall behind until he improved his yield, for two main reasons.
First, the cores of his human body directly affected the number of ethereal cords he could support, so it was more important for them to reach the next grade as soon as possible.
Secondly, Percy saw this as the perfect opportunity to equalize the progress of his Yellow cores that had fallen slightly out of sync. He had obtained and cleansed them at different times and with different resources. Micky in particular, had stayed inside the Thirsty Valley a lot longer, so the ice core was currently a few years ahead of the others. Even the soul core was a few months closer to Green than the pure one, so Percy could try to balance them out a little better as he worked on his yield.
In any case, it would be another eight hours before the next cleansing session, and twenty-four before he had to brew the next batch of Gloomy Dawn. Percy fully intended to use this time productively, already having a promising idea on how to improve his efficiency.
‘It’s about time to upgrade my Alchemist’s Intuition. Wild Art or not, it’s embarrassing to still have a Crude spell in my Status.’
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