Percy groaned as the spinning shards slammed onto his chest, grinding against the shirt. The fabric tensed, countless tiny runes flaring up near the impact area, robbing the constructs of most of their momentum and preventing Micky’s attack from piercing through. Still, the blow sent Percy sliding back, his cloth boots carving a pair of narrow trenches across the wet boulder.

‘Okay… I suppose it was never going to make me completely invincible,’ he admitted with a shrug, before pouring some mana into the self-repairs to revert a couple of small tears on the exterior of the material.

Micky’s attack had been on par with a Blue’s casual blow, and it was clear that it could still damage the Cloak – or at least the person hiding inside it – with enough effort. Even so, it would probably cost his opponents a lot of mana and willpower to put a scratch on Percy. The barrage he’d just eaten hadn’t so much as left a bruise, but he was sure it would have easily skewered his old armour. If the previous version of the spell had been on par with a Green’s constructs, there was no doubt in his mind that the new variant was functionally as good as a Blue’s.

As expected, the Instantaneous Formation spell hadn’t fused with the others, but three Masterful Spectral Arts had already been plenty to push Percy’s creation to the very top of the tier, sitting next to his boosting art. The fact that his Status had not offered to create a new category to distinguish his masterpieces from the rest of his spells was annoying as always, but Percy didn’t let that get to him. Despite his list shrinking by two entries on the surface, he knew that he’d taken another massive step forward.

‘Are you alright?’ Micky asked with concern, landing next to him in a flurry of crystalline feathers and frigid gusts. ‘I think we should stop here, before I actually hurt you.’

Percy nodded. As much as he would have loved to play with the new spell some more, anything beyond their brief test would be dangerous. His healing potions weren’t nearly good enough to risk getting a frozen lance through his chest, nor could he afford to waste more time. While he had several ideas on how to leverage the Cloak in a proper fight, he’d have to wait until he encountered a real enemy to test them. His friendly spars against his familiar just weren’t the same.

‘By the way, how’s the pyramid looking?’ Percy asked, tapping into Micky’s vision as the bird glanced at the crimson shape floating inside his head.

It was bad. What little was left of Nephthys’s shrunken sanctuary was crumbling slowly, with three of the pyramid’s five vertices having already chipped away. Minute traces of a bright silver colour – the goddess’s damaged wisp – were bleeding through the cracks, dispersing inside the grey ocean that was Percy’s soul. At this rate, the structure would collapse entirely in a few months. Even if it lasted a little longer, there was a good chance the damage would start affecting the lingering souls of the Amenthei housed within.

‘Alright then. Let’s head back,’

Percy said, hopping onto Micky’s neck.

There were several things he still needed to do before they approached the Fungal Spire, but it would be more efficient to work on some of them while travelling.

‘Which way?’ Micky asked.

Gently taking control of the bird’s head, Percy shifted it to the west. ‘We’ll enter the continent from the eastern coast.’

If they were lucky, their pursuers still had no idea that they had their eyes set towards the Alchemists’ Guild. Some of the teams after them might have remained stationed by the northern edge of the landmass, waiting for them. Furthermore, there were multiple densely populated provinces stretching between their destination and the western or southern edges of the continent. Not that the path Percy had chosen was pure wilderness, but it was still the shortest and safest route among the four cardinal directions.

Micky took off, clearly as eager as him to return. Percy didn’t pay the familiar much heed, however, already moving to the next item on his agenda. His new armour was great, but he wanted to incorporate his improved magiscript into his weapons too.

Fortunately, the scythes were much simpler to replace. Percy fashioned the shaft out of a thick bundle of interwoven threads, taking great care to ensure that it was far more rigid than his clothes, while still being flexible enough to let him reproduce his Third Parade later – the technique he’d invented using Kassorith’s body during the tournament’s semi-final.

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For the blade, he used regular reinforced mana instead of his silk, which lowered the difficulty to an extent, though he made up for it by adding sharpness runes to the unit cells and adjusting the matrix slightly. Neither the shaft nor the blade were wide enough to contain a second layer of enchantments, however.

The weapon was ready in less than a day.

Percy’s Status remained silent this time, which wasn’t very surprising. His Soul Harvesters had already fused with lots of other spells to form the Carnival, and there was no way a top-tier Masterful spell would register an upgrade just because he’d improved on one of its many facets. Still, that didn’t mean that he hadn’t grown stronger – the next Blue dumb enough to stand in his way was in for a nasty surprise.

Percy didn’t even take a break before moving to yet another project.

This time, it was his cauldron that he wanted to improve, having no intention of using his Phantomspun Silk at all. Unlike his combat equipment, Percy wanted the tool’s material to remain as plain, rigid and simple as possible. A wobbly surface would only mess with his brews, and the faint patterns of the fabric would inhibit his vision even after he turned them transparent. Not to mention that the concoction might just leak through the gaps. The fact that he would only be using reinforced mana didn’t mean that he couldn’t improve it, however.

The unit cells he drew on the cauldron were very different from those on his other constructs. He ditched the sharpness, lightness and adaptation runes entirely, keeping only the self-repairs, the structural integrity enchantments and the concealment, preservation and heat runes. Naturally, he also added all the alchemy-specific enchantments – the pressure and rotation runes, equipping all of them with controls.

And much like the previous iteration of his cauldron, he added multiple controls to the heat, concealment, pressure and rotation runes. Only, this time, he brought the number from five up to seven, allowing each of the enchantments to be carefully adjusted to within a one hundred twenty-eighth of its full effect. Counting everything, the new unit cell contained forty-one runes – nearly twice as many as those on his armour!

Even with Percy’s new trait and after months of intense magiscript practice, managing to draw the monstrous pseudo-enchantments was a colossal challenge. In fact, he probably only succeeded because over three-quarters of the symbols were control runes.

Percy was also able to pack the unit cells a lot more tightly onto the cauldron’s spherical surface. The previous version had only housed ten of each kind of alchemy-related enchantment, while this one could fit over two hundred unit cells – each containing all of the required runes.

The fact that he was capable of drawing much smaller runes certainly played a huge role, but that wasn’t the only reason he was able to increase the number of enchantments so much. Percy also made the sphere larger than the last one, doubling its volume. The previous iteration had already been five times as large as a standard cauldron, having allowed him to take advantage of the scaling principle.

Thanks to the experience he’d accumulated during his time in Twilight City, and because of his improved tool, Percy felt ready to double his output again, without negatively affecting his yield.

He also made the walls of the container slightly thinner, relying on the higher grade of his mana and the tightly packed structural integrity runes to prevent the cauldron from cracking open from the internal pressure of his concoctions.

Once he was done, the corners of his lips curled up in satisfaction.

Other than handling more ingredients at once, the thinner walls should also interfere less with his vision, allowing him to observe the cauldron’s contents with less obstruction after he activated the concealment runes. Finally, with twenty times as many runes of each type, a more uniform distribution of enchantments around the tool, and with the ability to control each of them with four times the precision, he was confident he was in for some major improvements to his craft.

At the top of the construct, he left a circular gap even wider than the previous one, taking some time to create a new Spiritforged Effigy larger than before, to use as the new lid. The task was laughably simple compared to the cauldron itself, his scythe or his armour, since it was purely decorative at this point.

He’d initially designed the spell as a way to mass produce the powder he needed for the Aurora Dew or his reinforced mana, but he could get as much of the now-grey dust as he wanted by replicating and shattering a couple of scythes – or hell, even tearing and regenerating a piece of cloth from his sleeve.

Finally, he took some time to forge a new stand for the cauldron, this time giving it four legs instead of three, for added stability – mostly so that it wouldn’t shake as much when he placed it on Micky’s head, brewing while the crow was flying.

Putting all the pieces together, Percy assembled the new construct. Unlike with the scythe, his Status was kind enough to announce the upgrade this time, clearly deciding that it was more meaningful.

[Congratulations! Your spell has evolved: Spiritforged Cauldron – Refined - Spectral Art: Cauldron of a Thousand Whispers – Masterful!]