Since that day, Percy worked alongside his host to develop his own domain, though he knew his efforts might ultimately prove unnecessary. Depending on how the Decree got disseminated, he might receive his own free copy regardless. Still, he didn’t want to risk it.
He hadn’t forgotten how close he and Enki had come to missing out on Ea’s Gift. Had the totem in the assessment centre not decided to shower them with a second portion of mind mana, they would have swum away with merely half of the Decree each. And he didn’t know if the mechanism granting Obatala’s Approval would be equally generous with a cheating outsider.
The good news was that he didn’t have to worry about Duwa’s survival as much. Young as he was, the Green-born wasn’t a complete amateur – he’d already spent over a year in the wilderness by himself, and he understood Gallimus’s environment way better than Percy did. This gave Percy the chance to focus primarily on the happenings inside their mana core. He had a lot of ground to cover, if he hoped to catch up to the boy.
‘He’s already made more progress than I thought,’ Percy realized a few days later.
Duwa hadn’t yet managed to gather enough of his willpower to form even a semblance of a domain, but he had succeeded at extracting some of it from his mana. Percy hadn’t been able to tell at first, because he had no way to detect somebody else’s willpower directly. Even mapping out his own was somewhat challenging.
He’d only discovered this by accident, while studying the child’s methods. Whenever Duwa peeled away some of his willpower from the mana, he left a small gap behind. Percy’s willpower then rushed to fill it up, giving him an estimate of how much willpower the boy had extracted. Copying the Green-born’s exercises, Percy started tugging and pushing at the mana too, occasionally tearing a short-lived sliver of willpower from the core.
‘This isn’t as hard as I thought it would be!’
Percy had been afraid that he would never catch up to Duwa in time for it to make a difference. The boy did have quite a head-start on him, after all. Luckily, Percy soon realized that he possessed several major advantages of his own.
To start, his willpower had already been honed to perfection, without having to go through all the hoops that Duwa had been putting himself through. The boy’s daily hardships might have been plenty for the average person – let alone a child – but they utterly paled in comparison to what Percy had subjected himself to over the last couple of decades.
Ever since he discovered his bloodline, he had endured agonizing pain on a regular basis – be it during the creation of his clones, through the use of his boosting arts, or whenever he experienced his hosts’ – often gruesome – deaths. Beyond just pain, Percy had also spent an arguably unhealthy amount of time training, shared his beast hosts’ crushing hunger, and carried a lot of stress and responsibility over his shoulders.
‘Maybe winning the masochist challenge isn’t something I should be happy about…’ he thought, grinning sheepishly as he scratched the back of Duwa’s head. ‘But I can’t argue with the results.’
On top of having essentially graduated from the school of hardship, Percy was better positioned to handle the domain too. He’d experienced several hostile domains over the past few months and even sliced through a bunch of them with his scythes. Furthermore, he’d even received some advice from his counterpart wielding a proper domain of his own while possessing his cousin. None of that could eliminate his current grade gap to a real Blue, but these were things he doubted any other Yellow or Green in the universe had experienced.
That said, developing his nascent domain wasn’t the only thing on his mind.
None of this would matter if the boy ended up dying before they succeeded, and their survival didn’t depend solely on Duwa’s skill or experience. A lot of it came down to luck. The two had found more critters to munch on since the centipedes, so they didn’t have to worry about starving to death just yet, but it did take them about a week to find a source of drinking water.
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Duwa would have teared up at the sight of the narrow creek – if only his eyes hadn’t dried out already. And Percy shared the sentiment. Sprinting excitedly towards the serpentine line of azure curving around the hills, splitting the bumpy plain in two, they gulped down as much water as they could fit in their stomach. Had the child been human, he would have definitely died of thirst by now, Green or otherwise. Thankfully, Duwa seemed to require much less water to stay hydrated. The liquid tasted a little different from what Percy was used to – likely thanks to Gallimus’s unique distribution of minerals – but he didn’t care in the slightest, as this wasn’t his first trip to an alien world.
Having barely survived another obstacle threatening their life, Percy took the chance to evaluate his situation and plan for the long term.
‘Based on what Duwa says, he’ll be awakening his domain a few months from now. At my current pace, there’s a good chance I’ll catch up by then.’
Percy had already observed and copied his host’s methods enough to understand how it all worked. Of course, there was always a chance the boy would get lucky and pull it off as early as tomorrow, leaving Percy without the Approval, though there wasn’t much he could do about that. Even if their skill level had been equal, there was no guarantee they would unlock the ability at the same time.
‘Wait, no… I actually do have a way to eliminate this uncertainty…’
Perhaps, Percy would be giving the boy his second core after all. If they both improved enough to approach their goal, they could use the boost from the new organ to instantly lower the difficulty of the challenge, allowing them both to awaken their domains in quick succession. The problem was that the stubborn child would likely consider that cheating.
Thankfully, Percy had an answer for that too.
The second core would only affect the boy once it was filled up with mana for the first time. In theory, Percy could use the mushrooms to repair the Moirais’ Decree, take some time to clear some of his host’s new channels, and stop shy of the last step.
Then, they could wait for Duwa to awaken his domain fairly and squarely. Right when he was about to receive the Approval, Percy would then fill the core up, hopefully giving him the push he needed to complete the challenge too.
There were many things that could go wrong, and the mechanism granting the Decree might not be one they could trick in the first place, but Percy was confident that this was the best possible approach in the face of the unknown.
Now, he just had to convince his host to go through with it. The boy didn’t really have a reason to decline. At the end of the day, a second core was a good thing, as long as it didn’t interfere with Duwa’s morals. Then again, cheating his people’s most respected titan out of a Decree for the sake of an outsider wasn’t exactly the behaviour of an upstanding citizen…
Percy mentally shook his head.
‘Well, Obatala will have to suck it up. Gallimus is getting more than me out of this exchange anyway…’
Overall, Percy was happy with the plan. One thing he wasn’t a fan of, however, was how long this would all take. He figured the boy could easily need half a year to awaken his domain. It would give Percy plenty of time to bridge the gap, but it also meant he’d be taking up one of his main body’s cords for months. None of his clones had ever spent that long away – at least, not from their perspective.
Then again, he had so many more of them now, and each was busy with their own projects. The ones in Elaine or Nesha’s bodies might return before he did, bringing back the water version of the Dance or some new advancements in magiscript. Percy had a second clone hopping from planet to planet alongside this one, so he might also discover something new that way. And even if none of that happened, his main body still had several other things to work on.
At least, he didn’t think his presence would be urgently required for the infiltration mission, so even in the unlikely scenario that he spent over two years here, the original should be fine.
‘Hey, it’s a Decree we’re talking about. It’s definitely worth taking things nice and slow… The others will just have to manage without me for a while.’
Percy was looking forward not only to Obatala’s Approval, but also to the numerous breakthroughs he would experience once he fused into his main body. Having so many clones training in parallel was quite exhilarating. It gave him the feeling of progress even when he wasn’t doing anything. Percy had essentially turned himself into an entire team of specialists, each of them working tirelessly toward their common goal. And the temporary lapses in memory only made the eventual surprises even more thrilling.
The next couple of weeks passed relatively uneventfully, with both Percy and Duwa making good progress. He even advised his host to stay close to the river this time, to make sure they had access to water and more food as they looked for more beasts to fight. Things had been going well, though that wasn’t destined to last. One day, during their break from training, the boy warned Percy about something that he had honestly been expecting.
Gallimus was finally about to enter a new season.
And it was going to be a nasty one…