PathOfPen
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Chapter 274 – Reigniting one’s will
🕑 Added 2025-05-15 06:00:08 +0000 UTCAll things considered, going through the notebooks had been relatively straightforward. Percy had merely had to replicate a few well-defined exercises, without much room for interpretation. And he’d been generously rewarded for his efforts – both at a personal level and with respect to his host’s recovery.
The diary, on the other hand, was a lot more open-ended. Its contents spanned every detail of Leo’s life, and it was up to Percy to actively claw through the mess to dig the memories out. The good news was that he had plenty of ammunition to help him.
Whenever Klatz’s name came up, Percy could almost hear the boy’s laughter. Every time Lyn’s pastries were mentioned, he felt them melting in his mouth, spreading their sweetness and their warmth. Whenever Leo wrote about the garden, Percy smelled the unique aroma of the flowers there, feeling the cold breeze caressing his fur.
Of course, he had plenty of blind spots too, having barely scratched the surface of Leo’s memories. But he’d already recovered just enough to allow him to draw a lot more out of the diary. Not every paragraph sparked a new flashback, but nearly every page did.
‘Even better, I’m starting to get a feel about his personality.’
A lot of the memories came bundled with feelings and emotions, letting Percy understand his host better than before. What troubled him a little was that Leo had always talked to others politely, seemingly going out of his way to avoid friction. It was strange, because it didn’t fit the image of a delinquent he’d drawn about his host.
‘He’s a good kid… How the hell did he manage to piss half the academy off?’
None of the memories touched upon Mana Flow or the traumatic event that had derailed the boy’s life. Whatever had happened, Leo had buried it in the deepest recesses of his mind. Percy wouldn’t be surprised if those were the very last memories they recovered.
Regardless, the landscape inside Leo’s mind looked a lot better than before. Earlier, the memories associated with pre-casting had been little more than disparate seeds scattered throughout his brain, very few of them linked to one another.
But the more of them he recovered, the larger the lumps grew, several tendrils soon snaking outwards from each of them. By now, the place looked like a few networks of roots woven through one another. And every time two of them touched, they caused everything to shuffle – to reconfigure itself into something closer to the original state of Leo’s mind.
Whenever that happened, Percy had to pause and take a few minutes to recover from the vertigo and the pain. It was a struggle – especially since it happened more frequently as he progressed through the diary – but he pressed on, knowing he was getting closer to his goal.
Eventually, all the memories joined the same network. The empty space still vastly exceeded the recovered memories, but Leo had healed enough for something new to happen.
‘It’s filling up by itself!’
Even without him doing anything, the mind mana flooded his brain on its own, faster than ever before. The mist in the room had turned cyan, the pure mana in the magic potions being the only component left untouched. The vents had never stopped spewing more life and mind mana, streams of brown flowing towards Percy, turning milky white as they neared him.
Either way, this was promising! Given enough time, Leo might even recover by himself!
That said, the passive recovery was still a lot slower than his active efforts. Thus, Percy had no choice but to dive into the diary again, pushing the process along. Or at least, that was the case at first…
A few hours later, he noticed the passive recovery had caught up. The way it worked reminded him of his own Mend spell. The mysterious girl had taught him to focus on growing thin tendrils along the surface of his soul injuries, as it was much easier to fill the space between them. And Baldy had mentioned at some point that he did something similar when he wanted to heal physical wounds efficiently.
‘Evidently, the same applies to one’s mind!’
Percy was really interested in how bodies, minds and souls were connected. Granted, he only possessed one of the three affinities, but learning more about the topic might help him use his clones better.
As far as he could tell, each of the three aspects was intimately related to the other two. Minds were deeply rooted in one’s brain, but they had to be rooted in one’s soul too, since Percy’s clones always retained his memories even without access to his body. At the same time, bodies protected and nurtured one’s fragile soul, but the soul also piloted their body.
Damaging one of the three components could harm the other two – as many of Percy’s opponents had found out the hard way. But it was also possible to leverage one of them to heal the others, which was how Percy could give a damaged body a second wind by patching its soul up, or how he was currently working on recovering a shattered mind.
‘Actually, there are four aspects, not just three…’
Mana cores were equally important. No living thing could exist without one, and each promotion strengthened one’s body, mind and soul – to various extents. No wonder the Moirais’ Decree made use of those three things to grow a second core… Percy still had no idea how it had come to be, but it wasn’t strange that a Decree involving three rare affinities was so highly regarded.
‘In any case, I’ve already done everything I could for the kid…’
Right now, Percy’s contributions still helped a little, but Leo’s passive recovery was accelerating by the second. It was clear that the boy’s survival would ultimately be up to his luck.
Estimating that he still had around two days left in the chamber, Percy decided to move on to his personal projects. And he had quite a few of them in mind.
First, he dove into pre-casting again for a few hours, this time to reinforce his foundations with his own understanding. Leo’s training may had saved him several months of training, but it would still benefit him to approach the exercises from a different perspective, making them his own. Especially while they were still fresh in his mind and while he was under the chamber’s influence.
Once he was done going through them, he then practiced his own mana-slowing exercise. Even though Leo had never attempted anything of the sort, Percy was surprised at how much more easily he made progress in this too.
‘I guess learning to control the mana in my core is a transferable skill.’
Forming runes was still impossible, though he didn’t shy away from trying to shape the mana into simpler structures, like cubes, spheres and pyramids.
As soon as he grew comfortable with that, he then switched to another exercise he’d heard from Mr. Lonan. It was suitable for air affinity users, yet too difficult for him to have attempted in the past.
The idea was to compress the air mana inside his core further, so that he could unleash pressurized blasts of wind from his palms. It wasn’t as destructive as the spinning blades, but it supposedly worked better when he first slowed the mana to a standstill, so he figured it was good practice.
‘Might as well turn this one into an actual spell.’ he decided.
That had been one of his original goals for the term, so there was no reason not to try.
***
Percy concentrated in his core, splitting the mana into two streams. At first, they took the form of marbles, in line with Leo’s visualisation. However, he added his own spin to it, sapping the marbles of their speed, forcing them to roll down to the core’s base. Only then did he will them to shrink, compressing the mana as much as he could. Next, he pulled the marbles to his hands.
Raising his palms, he unleashed the mana with all his might, launching two projectiles.
The mana slammed violently against the walls, sending a tremor through the room. Luckily, Percy hadn’t put a scratch in the chamber, the protective enchantments more than powerful enough to resist a Yellow’s spell.
But that was not to say that his spell was weak…
[Congratulations! You have mastered a new spell: Concussive Blast – Crude!]
‘Ugh… What am I even supposed to make of this?’ he frowned.
Percy was used to his clones not having access to all of his spells, as they lacked his mutation, his bloodline, or his affinities. But this was the first time he registered a spell with his clones that he might not be able to use with his main body!
‘Well, I guess that’s not exactly right. I suppose I can always cast this through Micky and Soul Resonance…’
Either way, this was good enough for now. Technically, he still had around a day left, but he didn’t think he could achieve much more with pre-casting. Besides, there was another thing he wanted to try.
Taking a deep breath, he pushed the mana into his channels, activating Circulation. He could already maintain it for a long time while standing still, but he figured it might help him in the Mana Flow class if he got a little more used to moving around with it.
On top of that, many of his clones had the air affinity too, as did his main body – albeit indirectly. Suffice to say, it would serve him across the board to familiarize himself with it as much as possible.
‘I should do more than just learning to move with Circulation… Let’s throw in the new spell too, as well as the propulsion techniques I practiced with Gabe…’
Comments
Groo
I wonder what's going to happen if Lyn makes a move on him?
Lars Häder
Thank you for the chapter
