Chapter 778 – Hijacking a ritual (2)

Having confirmed that the ritual was helping his body absorb and combine the potions, Percy abandoned much of his caution. He had to make sure he fed all the Violet doses into his mutation while the vat was still rich with Thess’kalan Heartblood.

He picked the ogreskin ointment next, thinking that a tougher body would synergize more with the previous ingredients than enhanced reflexes or sharper senses. Continuously applying the cream evenly across his skin would be annoying, but he knew that it wouldn’t be as effective if he just emptied it into the water.

Shrouding himself in a loose layer of willpower, Percy extracted tiny amounts of ointment from his seal, scattering them on random body parts – everywhere from his scalp to his feet. He used his domain to keep the substance contained within millimetres of his skin, before tightening his willpower in short, rhythmic bursts to slather the ointment everywhere.

He consumed the first half dose within seconds. After matching the expenditure of the previous potions, he continued slowly adding more ointment wherever he felt that it was needed. He was sure that he’d missed a few spots here and there, but his raging blood helped the substance reach the rest of his skin and muscles.

Percy’s flesh suddenly felt firmer – almost as if somebody had replaced every plank inside a wooden hut with a sheet of reinforced steel. His wounds started closing, as the damage finally started losing ground to his regeneration despite the trollsfury ink and marshblood tonic still wreaking havoc inside his body.

‘We can’t have that now, can we?’ he thought with a smirk.

As relieved as he was that his body was no longer trying to rip itself to shreds, he knew that he had to keep pushing his mutation.

Injecting another half dose of each of his three potions and even doubling his passive expenditure, he forced his heart to beat even faster. His wounds burst open again with a vengeance as the additional ointment struggled and failed to keep his body intact.

Another wave of blood washed over his marrow, removing more solid chunks of something, and flushing them out of Percy’s injuries. The contents of the vat grew darker, as a faint stench of rotten fish started emanating from the boiling liquid, assaulting his nostrils.

It wasn’t the most pleasant smell, but he was glad that whatever was releasing it had been pushed out of his body. The stench also did little to ruin Percy’s appetite. If anything, he only grew hungrier as his body demanded even more nutrients to rebuild itself. At this rate, he was going to run out of both potions and food much faster, but it was a small price to pay given how much stronger he already felt.

Right as Percy was getting ready to empty half a dose of koboldflash breath into his lungs, the instincts afforded to him by his Mimicry trait informed him that his skin was beginning to take on a faint green hue. Suppressing the visual change on his body wasn’t too difficult, but he reminded himself to keep an eye out for any further transformations, as it might be harder to deal with them later if he failed to smother them in their crib.

After rejecting the unwanted side-effects of the ritual, Percy poured the inhalable into his body. A jolt of electricity ran through his nerves, causing hair all over his body to stand on end, and his muscles to spasm uncontrollably for a couple of seconds. It wasn’t until his fingers stopped twitching that he finally realized that the new trait might not be as unrelated to the rest as he’d initially feared.

It definitely did more than just accelerate his reflexes.

Percy wasn’t sure if he owed the new effect to the Heartblood or the potent dose that he’d inhaled, but he suddenly found himself extremely aware of everything going on inside his body.

He could feel every electrical impulse commanding his heart to beat, each individual muscle fibre knitting his wounds closed, and even the five magical reagents flowing through his body, sliding between tissues and reshaping everything from within.

Seeing how chaotic and inefficient the transformation was, he couldn’t help but scoff.

There were spots where the trollsfury ink insisted on ripping his already-mangled flesh apart, when there were just as many places of perfectly healthy skin that remained untouched. His blood impatiently rushed to certain damaged muscles, forcing them to regenerate too early, and tangling their fibres up into nasty-looking knots that promised to come undone under the slightest strain.

Noticing something else, Percy gasped.

No wonder he was eating through his precious ingredients so quickly. About a third of his potions just spilled into the vat along with his blood, or escaped his lungs every time he exhaled, before they even had the chance to do anything!

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‘So damn wasteful!’

He instinctively tried to slow down the leakage, and was shocked to realize that he could actually do that! The new potion hadn’t just improved his awareness of his body, but also his ability to manipulate functions that most people had no business tampering with.

Approaching the problem methodically, he started by keeping portions of blood that contained a higher concentration of ingredients trapped deep inside his body, while only allowing the blood that had mostly run its course anywhere close to his skin.

He spread the damage more uniformly, giving his body more chances to break and repair itself in the same amount of time, yet while consuming much fewer resources. Whenever he identified a serious vulnerability in the structure of his muscles, he held his regeneration back, waiting for his flesh to destroy itself more thoroughly before allowing his body to repair it.

Settling into a rhythm, he somehow managed to accelerate the changes in his body while draining his potions half as quickly.

Feeling more confident, he raised the consumption of koboldflash breath to match the other ingredients. His awareness of his bodily functions climbed to a new level, giving him the means to push the efficiency of the ritual even higher.

His skin tried to change colour again, and even his nails and teeth felt like they wanted to crack and grow pointy.

He didn’t let them.

The fact that his body kept trying to mutate was both encouraging and worrisome. It meant that the ritual was definitely doing its job, though he really hoped he would be able to extract all the benefits without twisting his appearance.

Once the combined effect of the first four potions hit diminishing returns, Percy decided to add the final ingredient. He didn’t expect much from the goblinsight eyedrops, but the last potion had also surprised him, so what did he know? At least, sprinkling the pale liquid into his eyes was a lot simpler than continuously applying the ointment on his skin or trying to keep the inhalable inside his lungs.

At first, the potion only affected his sensory domain slightly. Percy barely even noticed it, because he hadn’t bothered to unfold his Sage’s Pond. From the beginning of the ritual, he’d kept his attention focused on his own body, since he hadn’t wanted anything to distract him.

As he poured more Violet droplets into his eyes, something began to change.

Well… okay – two things. His irises started glowing like the goblins’, though Percy had learned how to control the colour of his eyes a long time ago, so that wasn’t as much of an issue.

The second change was more bizarre. His sensory domain seeped into his skin, pierced through his muscles, and tightly wrapped around his organs and bones. The inhalable had already granted him some awareness of the interior of his body, but now he could actually experience every cubic millimetre of flesh with all his senses.

He wasn’t sure whether the goblins’ trait had synergized with the kobolds’, his Saint’s Eye, or both, but he could see the red glow and crystalline texture of his Ruby Bones, a cloud of indigo mist swirling inside his lungs, and viscous droplets of brown sludge rolling between his muscle fibres. He could hear his heart racing, the acid inside his stomach gurgling, and the disturbing tearing sounds that his skin made whenever a new wound opened. He could even taste the iron in his blood, the saltiness in his sweat and… lots of other things that he tried his best not to think about.

More importantly, Percy could now spot several new imperfections in his body. After consuming more than a full dose of the Violet inhalable, he’d really thought that he’d ironed out most of the kinks in his muscles, yet he was only now realizing that he’d barely even started.

Microscopic knots still twisted the shape of his muscles, grains of salt or other minerals that he’d picked from Phoebe-knew-where were lodged between tissues, and lots of tiny bone fragments littered his joints or blocked some of his smallest blood vessels.

Sighing, Percy had no choice but to commence another round of purging.

Every time he felt that he was done, he greatly increased the dosage of all five potions, steadily improving his ability to sense and remove the impurities.

The ointment kept his flesh firm, the ink burned through the imperfections and forced his heart to keep pumping nourishing blood through his body, and the tonic converted copious amounts of food into building materials, constantly washing and rejuvenating Percy’s marrow and vital organs.

His nerves and senses grew sharper with each cycle, improving the resolution of his internal sight and allowing him to dive even deeper.

Percy’s body tried to turn green several times throughout the process, forcing him to keep pummelling the unwanted changes into compliance.

Less than thirty minutes into the ritual, he realized that he had already consumed over seventy percent of the Violet potions he had kept inside his seal. His body already felt significantly stronger than before in every measurable way, though its improvements had slowed down to a crawl.

His Status spoke.

[Congratulations! You have acquired a new mutation: Ancient Remiorian Physique!]

Percy frowned, unsure what to think. He was happy that the ritual had gone as smoothly as it had, and that his efforts had been rewarded with a powerful mutation. However, this wasn’t exactly what he’d hoped for.

His original plan had been to upgrade his Greater Thess’kalan Physique – not to acquire another, seemingly unrelated mutation. Not that reconnecting with his dormant lineage was anything to be disappointed about, but Percy had gone into this experiment with a very clear goal: to improve his resistance to toxins and cold temperatures, so that he would be able to handle Micky and Nephthys’ affinities better.

The Ancient Remiorian Physique would definitely help with that due to the tougher flesh, heightened metabolism and improved regenerating capabilities that it had granted him, but his original plan had been to double down on the innate resistances of his previous mutation.

He… wasn’t ready to stop just yet. He still had plenty of ingredients left, and he hadn’t even asked his grandfather for healing – let alone used his Clear mana. This just wasn’t enough. Percy wasn’t going to settle for the bare minimum.

“Grandpa… Please be ready to jump in. I apologize in advance, but I’ll have to try something risky.”