Chapter 776 – Violet potions

Locating all the demi-human tribes, harvesting the ingredients, cultivating large quantities of them, and figuring out the best possible way to use them had only taken Percy a couple of weeks.

He’d spent the rest of the time working on the next pair of steps: deattuning his brews one final time so that they wouldn’t interfere with one another during the bath, and compressing each product to the next grade.

That last part was by far the most difficult and time-consuming. Despite having spent several months on it, Percy still needed a few more days to accumulate enough ingredients for the ritual bath.

Blue potions were already a full grade higher than Percy, making them exceptionally potent for him. However, his fight against Machaon had proven that he could handle several doses of Blue trollsfury ink, so he knew that his body was strong enough to withstand something even better.

The exact grade didn’t matter, because Percy would eventually promote his cores to Violet, White, and beyond. That said, the relative gap between the potions and the person who consumed them was important.

Everyone was naturally resistant to the effects of weaker potions, and more susceptible to higher-graded products. Drinking a Violet potion would grant Percy a stronger boost than the equivalent amount of Blue mana, and he hoped that it would also allow the ritual to affect his dormant lineage more deeply, helping his body to internalize the benefits of his potions.

The good news was that all his new brews were individually useful, so he didn’t think that he had wasted his time, regardless of how the ritual went. Even if he failed to upgrade his mutation, he would always have the option of simply consuming the potions in their default state before each battle.

Not that he looked forward to rubbing ointments all over his body every single time, nor injecting all sorts of magical substances into his organs. Even the thought of spending weeks stocking up on the consumed resources after every fight sounded like a pain in the ass.

Percy really hoped that he could turn most of those effects permanent, so that he would never have to worry about any of this again.

All five of his brews were useful, but some were even more important than others. His trollsfury ink, ogreskin ointment, and marshblood tonic were the only ones that might improve his ability to handle Nephthys’ acid mana and Micky’s upcoming blessing.

As for the other two… if Percy was being honest with himself, he could probably just skip them. His goblinsight eyedrops and koboldflash breath weren’t bad, but minor boosts to his sensory domain and reflexes wouldn’t really affect his ability to wield the composite affinities of his familiar and fellow aspect – which were the main benefits that he was trying to get out of the magical bath.

Even so, Percy intended to include all five brews in the ritual, as he had no idea what hidden synergies they might unlock within his lineage.

Sadly, elevating the potions to Violet had proven a hundred times harder than compressing them to Yellow, Green, or Blue. Figuring out the right configuration of pulses to induce the transformation wasn’t a problem, but there were several other issues.

The first was the fact that Red gravity ingredients weren’t potent enough to compress Blue mana to Violet. Thankfully, it wasn’t too difficult to deal with this.

Percy had searched for Orange or Yellow gravity affinity herbs to use as secondary ingredients, though there didn’t seem to be any on Remior. Luckily, they did have many different types of Red reagents, and Percy had eventually figured out how to use one type to repeatedly compress another.

Using the same ingredient on itself hadn’t been an option, as heating it up enough to begin the reaction would just consume it. Different reagents responded to specific temperatures and pressures, which was the property that one had to take advantage of to make one ingredient affect another of the same grade without simply mixing with it. If Percy hadn’t found at least two different types of gravity plants on Remior, he would have had to import some from outside.

With that out of the way, Percy had theoretically possessed all the ingredients necessary to compress his potions to not just the Violet grade, but even White and Clear. He would have simply needed to push the secondary reagents through additional rounds of compression to reach the highest grades.

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Unfortunately, the second problem he’d run into had been much harder to solve: Percy’s cauldron wasn’t strong enough to handle the reaction. Even after enchanting his reinforced mana with his most powerful formations, his equipment struggled to contain the pressure necessary to compress Blue potions to Violet.

Percy was more than capable of killing Violet or even White opponents in battle, but safely and reliably condensing Violet mana within a superheated cauldron for a prolonged alchemical session was a whole other challenge.

The most obvious solution would have been to possess a powerful pure affinity mage – Paracelsus, one of the Guild’s Violet elders, would have made a great candidate – and borrow their mana to craft a better cauldron. The issue was that Percy would need equally powerful soul mana to fuse with it, otherwise his equipment would lose many of its most important properties – such as its ability to turn invisible and allow him to peer through the walls of his cauldron.

Percy would also have to make certain concessions in the quality of his enchantments if he wanted his main body to operate them. Alternatively, he could ask his clone to brew the potions, but that would come at the cost of having a weaker domain. No matter what he did, Percy would have to give up on his high brewing yield and waste a lot of ingredients.

Since there had been no good way to go about it, Percy had decided to design a new piece of equipment specifically for this task. In theory, it could be considered an upgrade to his Cauldron of a Myriad Screams, yet he wasn’t surprised that Phoebe’s Decree had ignored his creation, as the abomination that he had crafted could hardly be described as a cauldron.

It was closer to a huge lump of phantom mana with a tiny pocket of empty space in the middle. It was about as tall as a person, with its walls being several times thicker than its interior, and covered in dozens of layers of runes. If that wasn’t bad enough, Percy had sacrificed many utility runes to quadruple down on structural integrity and self-repair enchantments.

Despite how versatile Percy’s phantom mana usually was, or how potent his concealment runes were, penetrating the metre-thick walls of the spherical construct with his sensory domain was difficult, which severely impacted Percy’s ability to peer at its contents. Even interacting with the ingredients was much harder, as there weren’t as many heating, rotation, or pressure runes as Percy would have liked, and their effects were mitigated by the thick layer of insulation.

In many ways, Percy felt like he had given up control over his concoctions, as he could only watch the ingredients react by themselves while barely steering the process in the right general direction.

His cauldron didn’t survive every brewing session. Even when it did, Percy considered himself lucky if he could extract a few droplets of Violet potion.

Considering how time- and resource-consuming it was to brew the Blue potions, and that Percy basically had to pour thousands of doses down the drain just to fill a single vial with a product of the next grade, one could only imagine how many ingredients he had wasted over the past few weeks.

Frankly, he’d rather let Machaon kill him than drink his hard-earned Violet potions, as there was no universe were a slightly more potent boost that would fade after a couple of minutes was worth such effort.

However, the ritual was an exception. If Percy played his cards right, these few weeks of alchemy might result in passive boosts that would last for the rest of his life, so he didn’t spare any expense to prepare the ingredients.

The good news was that Micky was fully capable of helping him. This was doubly true now that the Huehuan’s main body didn’t have enough spiritual blood to practice with his Shapeshifting Sentries on Remior. They still had to keep sending mana to the clone on Tenefyre, but the process wasn’t too distracting for either of them.

After returning to Percy’s residence in the settlement, they locked themselves in different rooms and resumed compressing the potions.

They already had a handful of Violet doses for each of the five brews, which was probably more than enough, but Percy figured that it wouldn’t hurt to have a few extra vials, just in case. He had no idea how many his body would absorb, and he felt that it was better to have and not need them than to need and not have them.

Two weeks later, he was ready.

He’d not only prepared seven doses of each Violet potion, but also hundreds of Blues. In the unlikely event that the former proved insufficient, he would just have to make up for the lower quality with a much higher quantity.

On the fated day, Percy only invited Micky and Archibald to watch him, as he didn’t want to worry his girlfriend or his relatives. He would have honestly preferred to spare even his grandfather from what was certainly going to be an ugly sight, but the man was one of Remior’s most powerful healers, so Percy would have been a fool to reject his help.

As for Micky… well… even ignoring the fact that the Huehuan’s life was tied to his own, Percy wanted his friend to watch him acquire the new mutation, as he might be able to replicate part of the process on his own body later.

With everything ready, Percy hopped into a large, icy vat filled with water and stored his Phantomwoven Cloak inside his spatial seal. A Red human would have probably found the touch of the frigid liquid unbearable, but Percy was completely unbothered due to his higher grade and powerful physique.

He grinned. ‘Time to make my mutation even stronger.’