The Lone Wanderer

Percy was dying to explore the strange feeling, but he had to finish all his chores first. He spent a couple days brewing ahead for himself and his companions. He also sent a new clone out – hopefully to the Vault, but he wouldn’t know that until he was back.

Only then did he finally allow himself to delve into this new project. Perhaps it would lead to a dead-end, but until he obtained the runes he wanted from the artificial world, he couldn’t start working on his next spell upgrade anyway.

‘Let’s see… My pure mana can essentially take four different forms.’

Leaving his fused mana aside – since it was structurally identical in its corporeal phase – Percy manifested his cyan mana in all its different states, one after the other. At the same time, he allowed himself to sink into the clarity afforded to him by Weaving, contemplating the feedback it provided.

First, the regular mana felt soft and squishy. Trying to fashion it into any sort of solid construct was ill-advised, as Percy had found out years ago. Not that Weaving was particularly constructive with its criticism. While it was happy telling Percy what it disliked about the substance, it didn’t bother explaining how he was meant to fix it.

Then came the crystals. Again, his trait loudly protested their creation, warning him that they were way too brittle. And too rigid. He wouldn’t be able to weave a web out of–

‘Wait, what?! A web?! Why would I care about that?’ he creased his brow.

Were these intrusive thoughts some side-effect of the trait? Percy wasn’t particularly happy evaluating his magic based on how suitable it was for catching bugs. But he shook his head, unwilling to write this path off before he even treaded it.

‘Fine. Web it is. Let’s see if I can please you.’