It had been over a year since Percy read – or skimmed, really – the information in Nephthys’s Sanctuary. Luckily, he’d long burned the key points to his memory, eagerly waiting for a chance to put them to practice. He would have started months ago, of course, if perfecting his Cloak hadn’t consumed so much of his time.

In many ways, the compression principle was more important than both scaling and restructuring. Other than boosting his brewing yield, the benefits of the two principles he had mastered in Twilight City were somewhat modest. Admittedly, mass-producing potions and elixirs helped when he was pressed for time, and turning his potions into tattoos improved both their efficacy and practicality, but neither of those things could compare to high-grade potions.

And that was without even taking into account the most important application of the new principle – Percy’s ambitious plan to incorporate it into his boosting art, to give himself an artificial advancement.

Regardless, that was a project for later. Right now, his priority was to brew a few Yellow healing potions so that he could acquire his new mutation as safely as possible.

‘Let’s see… I’m supposed to apply rhythmic bursts of external pressure to the cauldron, to help the gravity ingredients do their job.’

The hundreds of runes he’d engraved onto the construct would allow him to control both the amplitude and the frequency of the pulses with great precision. Still, Percy had to be methodical, as he couldn’t afford to squander his ingredients. He’d bought a lot of them with Nesha’s help – more than the pitiful scraps he’d collected on Gallimus – but not nearly enough to match his enormous stash of green mushrooms.

Setting the enchantments to about a quarter of their maximum intensity, Percy induced bursts of pressure lasting half a second each, interspaced by just as long. The fluid bubbled up as lumps formed, prompting him to stir and heat the concoction up to get rid of them.

About a minute in, he’d yet to see any trace of Yellow mana in the cauldron, having accomplished nothing but wasting a portion of the ingredients. Not one to get discouraged so easily, Percy maintained the same amplitude and duration, changing just the interval between the pulses to three-quarters of a second. A minute later, he increased it to a full second, then to five-quarters, and so on. Before long, there were only inert dregs at the base of the container.

‘Alright. I guess it was never going to be that easy, or the principle would have been a lot more widespread in the cosmos…’

Beginning a new session, Percy reduced the intervals back to half a second, this time incrementing the duration of the pulses to three-quarters, planning to repeat the previous steps from a slightly different starting point. If it didn’t work, he would keep changing the duration, and later the intensity of the pulses. If that wasn’t enough, he’d have no choice but to break the numbers up to even smaller fractions, which would inevitably consume more time. It wouldn’t be ideal, but it might be the only way to home into the correct configuration…

***

‘Percy, look ahead!’ Micky exclaimed, the distraction causing Percy to turn the heat up a little higher than intended, ruining the concoction a few seconds sooner than he otherwise would have.

Sighing, he lifted his eyes, spotting a few mountains on the horizon, their faint silhouettes biting into the straight line that separated sea from sky. They were about to reach shore.

‘Stop at the nearest island,’

he instructed his familiar.

It pained him to delay their arrival when land was in sight, but they weren’t ready to re-enter civilization yet. Percy had actually made some progress with the new principle, yet not nearly as much as he would have liked.

After reducing the duration of the pulses to about three-eighths of a second, the pressure to about three-sixteenths of what the cauldron was capable of, and the interval to about five-eighths of a second, Percy had finally witnessed the first strands of Yellow mana appearing in the liquid.

Sadly, they’d been short-lived, barely lasting a moment before collapsing back into Orange mana. Even worse, Percy had already consumed about a tenth of his gravity ingredients to make it this far. Unless he picked up the pace, he’d run out of materials long before he amassed enough potions to undergo the ritual.

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‘Well, three days to reach this point isn’t that bad,’ he consoled himself.

It sucked that the process was supposedly unique to each type of brew, however. Percy would probably have to start over when he switched to trollsfury potions. In fact, he didn’t even know whether ink would require a different configuration from a similar potion, or whether compressing Yellow mana to Green would.

He shook his head. ‘One step at a time. Right now, I only need a bunch of Yellow potions. The rest can wait.’

Micky landed on a small island with a few tall boulders to hide them from anyone that might patrol the coastline in the coming days. They had enough food to last a few weeks, so the crow wouldn’t need to go fishing anytime soon. Percy welcomed the newfound stability as he set his equipment on the rocky ground, resuming his work.

He continued to experiment with the pulses, fine-tuning the configuration some more. It was a lot easier now that he knew how to manifest at least a few Yellow strands, since he no longer had to wander in the dark. With a benchmark to compare each of his attempts to, he could determine whether he was moving closer or farther from his goal.

Sure enough, he managed to retain some Yellow liquid a couple of days later. By now, he had optimized the process a lot, already counting the amplitude, duration and interval of the pulses in sixty-fourths.

‘Just how the heck did the Amenthei figure this out by themselves?!’ he couldn’t help but wonder.

He doubted their cauldrons were as good as his, and they didn’t have his mutated eyes either. Then again, adjusting the duration and interval of the pulses didn’t require complicated runework – just good timing. As for the intensity, it could be controlled in any number of ways, from including fewer enchantments on the cauldrons, to feeding less mana into them. It wouldn’t have been as precise or easy to use as Percy’s new tool, but it was more than doable.

‘Either way, my yield is crap,’ he thought, clicking his tongue with irritation.

He’d only been able to preserve about seven percent of the ingredients at best. Since the compression principle involved converting three Orange potions into one Yellow potion, it meant that he’d only ever collected a little over two percent of the liquid he’d started with. Considering the capacity of his oversized cauldron, two percent was still a lot – almost a full dose from each brewing session – but not enough for his Status to register the principle, nor for him to brew all the doses he needed before he ran out of ingredients.

‘I must be doing something wrong. Is there another step I’m missing?’

It was possible. Percy had been in a hurry when he studied the principle – even keeping his eyes open had been a challenge. While the gravity ingredients and the external pressure had already led him to some interesting results, there was clearly another important piece of information he must’ve skipped.

In theory, he could try varying the amplitude and frequency of the pulses some more, but he didn’t think that was the answer. The previous round of optimization had barely increased his yield, the Yellow strands already appearing about as often as they were going to. Unless they drifted close enough to merge, they tended to collapse back to Orange, ruining his efforts.

‘Close enough to merge… that’s similar to what happens inside a mana core during a promotion, isn’t it?’ he recalled, having experienced that multiple times.

The best way to replicate that would be to add more ingredients halfway through the brewing session, replenishing the lost mana and causing more strands to emerge. It would be the equivalent of a mage breathing in more ambient mana during their advancement to raise the pressure in their core – something that Percy’s enchantments only partially accounted for.

But this wasn’t a good solution to his current problem, as new ingredients would mess with the uniformity of the concoction, greatly lowering his yield. There had to be a better way.

‘If I can’t cause more strands to appear, maybe I can try grouping them up somehow…’

Percy’s eyes widened as an idea took root in his mind. Emptying the cauldron, he replenished the ingredients, beginning a new session. At first, he applied the same configuration of pulses as before, the first strands of Yellow soon forming in the concoction.

‘So… what if I do this?’ he wondered, pouring a lot of mana into the rotation runes.

For this type of brew, he mostly kept the heat and rotation runes available to use whenever he needed to dissolve the solid lumps in the liquid. This time, he pushed the latter to their absolute limit, however, stirring the mixture with reckless abandon, causing something interesting to happen.

The violent rotations pushed the denser Yellow strands closer to the walls of the cauldron, the lighter Orange mana inevitably getting pushed to its centre. Gathered together, the strands latched onto one another much faster than before, slowly coalescing into a thick film that coated the crystalline walls of the construct. It grew thicker with every passing second as the Orange mana was slowly consumed, until only Yellow mana was left.

Exhaling deeply, Percy deactivated the enchantments, allowing the film to splash down, filling about a tenth of a container – indicating that he had achieved a thirty percent yield. There was still room for improvement, but this was already a result he could work with.

Especially since his output was about to receive another notable boost.

[Congratulations! You have mastered a new alchemic principle: Compression!]