The Lone Wanderer-Chapter 307: Intersection

The moment the scaling principle finally registered, Percy’s stepwise yield instantly jumped by ten percentage points. On top of that, his daily gains picked up: at least for the first couple of days: bringing him back to 75% by the end of the week.

That was certainly impressive in and of itself, but the improvements went deeper than just his yield. Literally.

‘Wow… I can see twice as deep into the concoction now!’

Percy watched a lump twisting and swirling five centimetres beneath the surface of the potion, tuning the heat and pressure enchantments up to dissolve it. More than the numerical improvement, it was the way his vision had expanded that interested him.

Even with his mutated eyes, there should have been a limit to how deep he was capable of seeing, considering how mana-dense the concoction was. Whether it was his regular sight or his passive Mana Sense, they should have run into too much interference long before he reached this point. Yet, somehow, his eyes seemed to have bypassed those limitations entirely.

‘I guess this is a separate sense, brought about by inference.’

It was a bit like his Wild Arts. Greater Foresight and Wild Dance didn’t actually show Percy the future. They merely drew from his understanding of himself and his enemy, projecting that into a shadow: a prediction of the most likely outcome. The depth of his understanding was directly proportional to the accuracy and duration of the shadow.

And this new sense of his wasn’t that different: it drew information from the surface of the concoction, to let him guess what was going on just a little deeper. Perhaps, his yield would grow even more steeply if he truly gained the ability to see through objects at some point.

In any case, all the alchemic principles Percy had mastered helped him even when he wasn’t using them directly.

Even when he used his old cauldron, the scaling principle allowed him to peer further into the concoction, improving his yield. Of course, no alchemist had a complete understanding of what was going on inside their cauldron, regardless of whether they could observe it or not.

Alchemical reactions were way too complicated to be understood. The sheer number of magical concepts interacting at various levels was staggering: too much even for gods to fully fathom. Instead of trying to comprehend and calculate the outcome of a reaction from first principles, alchemists relied on a few high-level rules to inform their actions, to guide the concoctions to the desired outcomes as swiftly and efficiently as possible.

Every brewing session was different. Lumps and bubbles wouldn’t always form at the same time, nor with the same intensity. And the alchemist could never be entirely certain of what had caused them. Sometimes, it would be due to imperfections in the ingredients, reacting when mixed together. Other times, they were brought about by the heat or the pressure.

But alchemists could develop certain rules to handle all these issues when they emerged. These rules weren’t easy to teach. There was only so much one could learn from a book or a mentor. From there on, it was all about experience: about developing one’s own instincts through years of gruelling practice.

At least, Percy had a few advantages that others lacked. His eyes showed him more than most, giving him a lot more information to build these instincts on. And every alchemic principle he mastered further expanded his understanding of alchemy, allowing him to develop more esoteric rules.

Another example was how the restructuring principle aided him even when he wasn’t brewing the tattoo ink. When somebody wanted to turn a mundane ingredient: such as a glass of water: into steam or ice, they simply had to adjust its temperature or pressure, and let nature take its course. But things weren’t as simple when magical ingredients were involved, since their behaviour was largely governed by the different mana types they contained.

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One could try to boil a healing potion into an inhalable the traditional way, but the most likely outcome would be to waste over 90% of the potion. The solution was to attack the problem from a different angle: to alter the very nature of the ingredients by introducing new mana types, such as air, water, earth or mud, depending on what the goal was.

Yet, it turned out that this knowledge was far more broadly applicable than Percy had originally thought.

Even when he was brewing simple healing potions, the restructuring principle helped him better understand all the different factors at play. How the liquid part of the potion interacted with the bubbles and the lumps, and how everything was affected by the heat and pressure.

This information then fed into the scaling principle, allowing him to see deeper. In turn, that gave him more information to decipher through the restructuring principle, forming a virtuous cycle amplified by his mutation and strengthened with every brewing session.

‘It’s like an intersection of three schools of alchemy…’

His mutation, the scaling principle, as well as the shape and size of his cauldron had all come from Atlantis. Meanwhile, the restructuring principle had come from Felmara. Then, there was everything he’d learned on Remior under Orin’s tutelage. Finally, there was the bonding principle he’d discovered on his own, though he guessed many of the greater springs had stumbled upon it too.

All these seemingly disparate building blocks came together to expand his foundations more than he’d ever thought possible.

[Congratulations! You have mastered a new spell: Wild Art: Alchemist’s Intuition: Crude!]

Percy blinked twice, staring at the notification in disbelief. He was certainly happy with his recent progress, but he hadn’t expected to register a new spell while brewing.

He grinned.

‘I bet the Atlanteans would be shocked if they saw this.’

Ea’s Gift was a Decree originally designed for alchemy, lacking the ability to register spells. This was something that had only changed in Percy’s case, after merging with Phoebe’s Decree. And it had greatly boosted his combat strength ever since.

But this was the first time the opposite had happened. Unlike before, it was Phoebe’s side of the Decree and its ability to register spells that was feeding back into alchemy, allowing him to improve even faster.

***

Percy had registered the scaling principle by the end of his third week brewing, and the new spell by the end of the fourth. Yet, it wasn’t until the fifth one was over that his yield finally stabilized.

’80%?! That’s insane!’

An 80% yield per alchemic step translated to about 51% when it came to the regular elixirs. This was already much higher than Orin’s. In fact, according to his old mentor, the highest recorded yield in the Alchemists’ Guild was only 56%.

In other words, Percy was nearly at the level of the five Violet-cored elders leading the Guild!

Of course, his achievement was the result of all sorts of cheats, more so than hard work. Not that Percy was lazy: far from it: but one’s brewing yield simply couldn’t climb that high in such a short period of time through traditional means. From what Orin had said, each percentage point past 30% took years or decades. Meanwhile, each point past 40% took centuries, and each point past 50% took entire millennia.

Percy had essentially skipped over a thousand years of alchemy practice thanks to his clones!

Then again, stealing Decrees and alchemic principles from under the noses of alien gods and titans was probably harder to pull off than merely living for a thousand years…

At any rate, this was just the start. Now that Percy knew his Status was capable of registering alchemy-related spells, he already had a few ideas. In fact, the path to raising his Alchemist’s Intuition to Refined was already clear in his mind.

Since the spell was so similar to his other Wild Arts, why not take a page out of them directly, and incorporate some kind of future sight into it? That way, he wouldn’t just be able to see deeper into the concoction: he’d be able to directly predict the lumps and the bubbles too.

Of course, hypothesizing how the next level of his spell would work didn’t mean it would be easy to get there. He certainly didn’t think it would be possible before they entered the Thirsty Valley.

For now, he was more than satisfied with how much his output had climbed.

Taking a peek into his spatial seal, Percy’s eyelid twitched. So focused had he been on exploring his growing skillset over the past two weeks, that he’d lost track of how much stuff he’d brewed.

‘Nesha will have a tough time selling all this… Then again, that was the goal…’

Once he handed everything over tomorrow, he could receive the first batch of ingredients he needed for the Aurora Dew.

It was finally time to begin the next phase of their plan.

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