The Lone Wanderer

The four months following the mission to claim the lake passed by in a blur.

Sol’s people didn’t have any further existential threats to deal with, but that didn’t mean that it was smooth sailing for them. Guarding the newly erected wall stretched the Melodians’ manpower thin, leaving their soldiers in a perpetual state of exhaustion.

The same was true of their civilian population, who had to keep working on the enormous structure for weeks, adding one layer of stone after the other until the barrier reached its completion.

Sol, Doh, and Tonett continued sending small extermination teams to purge the remaining creatures inside the lake, to ensure that their cities didn’t receive any nasty surprises from within their territory before the end of the beast tide.

Percy didn’t participate in those missions, since the Red critters swimming inside the lake were too numerous for his reconnaissance abilities to make a difference, but that didn’t mean that he was wasting his time.

Accompanied by Doh and Tonett, he patrolled the wall, slowly but steadily applying structural integrity and self-repair enchantments fuelled by airborne dust and ambient mana on every new layer that got stacked onto the structure. The rune variants that he had selected worked slowly and inefficiently, but they should greatly help with the long-term maintenance of the wall.

The two Blues remained by his and Sol’s side partly to ensure that everything went smoothly, and partly because Percy had insisted that Tonett stayed within his sight as she had agreed. However, his host’s fellow leaders weren’t wasting their time either.

They were the only Melodians fast enough to keep up with Sol, so Percy seized the opportunity to teach them a thing or two about magiscript, knowing that their people would have to delve into the versatile field sooner or later. Even the weakest lesser springs always developed a local branch of runecrafting, and Melodia had a unique opportunity to begin their research atop the solid foundation that was the Vault’s magiscript.

Tonett clearly lacked the patience or aptitude to become an expert in the fine art, though she surprised Percy by trying to follow his teachings as best as she could without complaining.

Doh, on the other hand, proved extremely talented in runecrafting, absorbing Percy’s lessons like a sponge. When asked about this, Percy’s former comrade explained that he owed his success to his second spectral trait: Translation.

Translation helped understand foreign languages more easily. It had originally been a rather useless skill for the Melodians, since their tiny community had only ever spoken a single dialect. Thankfully, Percy’s friend had found yet another chance to shine, by mastering the Vault’s language much faster than anyone would have thought possible. That said, understanding the language and drawing runes were two different things, but the former would massively aid Doh’s efforts with the latter.

By the time Percy was done enchanting every centimetre of the wall, Doh and Sol had learned the basics of magiscript and grown capable of drawing a couple of simple runes of their own.

Of course, that alone wasn’t enough to jumpstart Melodia’s runecrafting endeavours. Having predicted this issue, Percy had brought multiple copies of his magiscript books to the primitive world, passing them to those interested in the subject.

There were plenty of civilians with the Scribing or Translation traits, as well as many others that would greatly accelerate their training in the coming years. It would be up to them to advance the field, and Percy wouldn’t even be surprised if these people eventually overtook Remior and House Etna due to their advantages.

Percy also designed a few intricate formations for water purification. The facilities drew vast quantities of water from the lake, treating it with heating runes and other enchantments, before depositing the cleansed liquid into a large reservoir at the centre of each city.

In theory, the natives could have tried to purify their drinking water by themselves instead of attempting the dangerous mission to claim the lake. The problem was that they didn’t have runes, fire affinity mages, nor the ability to safely and repeatedly venture into the wilderness to harvest massive amounts of firewood, so they had lacked the means to design the facilities efficiently without Percy’s help.

Percy himself could have offered to do it for them – as he eventually did – but he had deliberately assisted them in expanding their territory first, for multiple reasons.

The more space Sol’s people had, the faster and more comfortably their population would grow, which was in Percy’s interest. He needed to accelerate Melodia’s development in every way he could, to turn them into reliable allies as soon as possible.

The mission had also presented him with the perfect opportunity to show his abilities off and make it clear to his host’s people that they needed him a lot more than he needed them. It might have been callous of him to prioritize something like that, but he understood how important it was to cultivate a healthy amount of respect toward him in the Melodians’ hearts.

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It would prevent them from getting any funny ideas of pushing his friends around or taking his stuff while he was away – which had already happened one too many times. The expedition to the Mirror Lake had also elevated Percy’s status in their eyes, but only three Melodians had survived the journey, and experiencing something first hand was far better than hearing about it from somebody else.

In any case, water purification facilities were good to have, even though the water coming in from the lake was already of a much higher quality than before, so Percy made sure to build one in each of their four cities.

On that note, the Melodians had sent about five thousand people from each of their surviving settlements to rebuild the destroyed one. Most of the buildings there had been flattened into unsalvageable ruins after years of being trampled on by hordes of powerful beasts, but a few had surprisingly remained semi-useable, and the location of the city was too important to ignore.

Restoring it to its original state would easily take a decade or two, but it would at least serve as a great temporary place of residence for the soldiers guarding the southmost edge of the wall until then, massively cutting down the travelling time from the other cities.

The fourth city’s ruins fell within the Melodians’ expanded territory anyway, so defending it wouldn’t strain their manpower further. If they were going to build new houses somewhere, they might as well start there.

Outside of magiscript, Percy focused on a few other things.

During one of his main body’s rare breaks from passing the Moirais’ Decree to his allies, he granted Doh a second core as well. While Percy could possess someone on Remior within seconds, travelling to foreign planets could easily take several hours, so he wasn’t going to extend the same courtesy to the other Melodians.

He only made an exception for the Green-born because he trusted him almost as much as Sol, and welcomed the opportunity to empower another one of his friends, to expand and solidify his influence on the planet.

The clone didn’t stay in Doh’s body for long, because his services were needed on Remior almost immediately afterwards. With a Blue and a Green core, the man instantly rose a step above Sol and Tonett, turning into the most powerful Melodian.

That only lasted a few weeks, until Percy and Micky finished elevating their host’s first core to Blue, helping her catch up to her former boss.

Her second core should follow a few months later, giving her a temporary lead until the Aurora Dew did something similar for Doh. Finally, Sol and Doh were the only Melodians who had been given enough Aurora Dew to reach their second set of advancements, so they would eventually turn into two-cored Violets while the other Green-borns remained stuck at Blue.

Perhaps, Percy would look for an opportunity to grant Doh a pair of artificial advancements as well one day, though he wasn’t in a rush to do that anytime soon, nor was he planning to give the Melodians any more elixirs.

He would much rather search for a more permanent solution for them.

In his free time – which had unfortunately been more limited than he would have liked – Percy tried to study everything he could about Melodian culture and the way they used their traits in every aspect of their lives.

There were too many different fiends for him to learn everything in a few months, so he eventually switched his focus to stuffing his now-empty spatial seal with books on all sorts of crafts and arts.

Thankfully, the Melodians were extremely grateful toward him for everything that he had done, so many of their most talented specialists made time out of their busy schedules to compile dense and informative tomes that listed their experiences and insights.

Percy was planning to study the material at his leisure back home, though he had no idea how much of that knowledge would benefit him personally. At the very least, it would be good to spread the books among his people. Remior might be a more developed world, but he was sure that there were plenty of things that humanity could learn from a civilization built by people with spectral traits.

Once the most urgent construction projects were completed and the Melodian population had a chance to slow down and take a breath, Tonett informed Percy that she was done internalizing her blessing.

Percy was a little worried that the stubborn woman would look for an excuse to keep the ring or pass it to another Green-born, but Tonett thankfully honoured their agreement, having greatly changed her tune after watching him lead the mission and studying runecrafting under him for months.

Well… the strict magical contract that threatened to rip her soul to shreds if she tried to double-cross him might have also played a role.

Upon receiving the ring back, Percy and Sol reached out to Doh, asking him to accompany them in a new expedition to the Mirror Lake – a more ambitious one than before. It would include a large detour around the continent, which they would use to search for a stable source of beast mana or anything else that they might deem valuable.

Losing two of their leaders, as well as their most powerful mages, for several months would be a heavy blow to the Melodians, but this mission could prove extremely beneficial to their civilization as a whole, so nobody complained about it.

Besides, the situation in their cities had stabilized enough for the natives to see themselves through the rest of the beast tide without issue. Furthermore, the remaining Green-borns would advance in a little over a year, producing over thirty new Blues.

Doh happily agreed to Percy’s request and even suggested that they invite Latt as well, for old time’s sake. Percy had considered it, but didn’t think that it was a good idea. As much as it pained him to admit it, their friend was still at Yellow after having selflessly donated his elixirs to Tonett, so he would greatly slow the Blues down.

Sol and Doh’s second cores had yet to advance, but they were still powerful enough to keep each other safe, regardless of what obstacles their chaotic planet decided to throw at them.

Before heading out, Percy made sure to pack the accumulated books neatly inside his seal, as he wasn’t planning to return to the Melodian cities during this trip. After scanning the continent and spending as much time as he could at the Elemental Source, he was going to let Sol and Doh return home by themselves.

With everything decided, Percy, Sol, Doh, Micky, and Zoris finally left through the northwestern gate of Tonett’s city, heading toward the place that had forever changed all five of their lives.

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