The Lone Wanderer-Chapter 293: Scaling

Percy was still struggling to fit the third control rune into the heating enchantment. And he needed to stack four of them, to craft a cauldron on par with his own. Even worse, he wasn’t satisfied with merely matching it: ideally, he wanted to upgrade it: otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a point.

‘I guess it’s gonna be tougher than I thought.’ Percy grimaced, staring at the fried enchantment on his training slab.

Upon successfully stacking the second control rune, he’d assumed the rest of the journey would be smooth sailing. It appeared he might have been a little too optimistic, however.

Wrapping his mind around the cascading controls was indeed half the battle, but the complexity of the enchantments still grew exponentially with each added rune. In other words, visualizing their joint effects was a lot harder each time, meaning that he had his work cut out for him.

Nevertheless, Percy wasn’t one to falter after the first setback. Or after the millionth, for that matter. Pouring mana into the self-repair runes, he erased the malfunctioning enchantment before going for another attempt.

Upgrading his cauldron wasn’t something he’d decided to do on a whim either. There was a very specific reason for it: one which tied heavily into their current plans. And once again, it had to do with the sheer quantity of elixirs that he needed to brew in a relatively short period of time.

After all, Percy had stolen around 175,000 doses of elixir from House Tantalus. A downright colossal amount. Granted, he and his companions had consumed some during the past couple of months, but it had barely put a dent into his stash. And he needed to convert the entire thing into Aurora Dew pretty soon: preferably before they entered the Valley.

‘Well, I can try to do it inside if all else fails. But it’s best to avoid that.’

Nearly all their spatial amulets were full to the brim with elixirs, leaving them no space to bring any more ingredients with them. Getting more amulets wasn’t going to be easy either, as they were quite expensive, and Nesha wasn’t ready to craft one.

Yet, that wasn’t even the main problem.

Even if they found some way to smuggle the secondary ingredients into the Valley, Percy wasn’t sure if the conditions there were suitable for alchemy. The Thirsty Valley hadn’t earned this name by accident: accelerating time severalfold usually came hand in hand with severe side effects.

From what he’d heard, all bodies of water were affected in strange ways after prolonged exposure to the temporal Decree. For all he knew, that might extend to his brews. Thus, it would probably serve him well to have the Aurora Dew prepared beforehand and stored safely inside his amulets until the time he needed it, rather than to brew it out there in the open.

Not to mention that he might not even have the luxury of sitting still for hours at a time, to brew peacefully.

Thus, on top of completing the recipe and procuring a large volume of ingredients, Percy also had to vastly increase his own output.

‘Currently, each brewing session starts with four doses of elixir and takes me about 15 minutes…’ he thought, doing the calculations in his head.

Assuming he spent over twenty hours a day brewing, he could convert about 320 doses of elixirs into about half as much Aurora Dew. This was already several times more than what he used to brew back in the Guild, during his collaboration with Nesha. Between his new eyes, and not having to waste two thirds of his time condensing crystals, he could brew faster than ever before.

‘Still, not fast enough.’

At this rate, he’d need nearly two years to convert the whole stash. Acton would be close to Violet by then, if not already there. Thus, Percy had to find a different solution.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

Luckily, he already had one in mind! It was all thanks to an alchemic principle he’d read about on Atlantis. One that he hadn’t been able to practice at the time, as it had some steep requirements.

The scaling principle.

Normally, alchemists all over the universe tended to use cauldrons of a very specific size, capping the quantity of ingredients they could brew at once. Or, at least, this was the case with both the regular-shaped cauldrons they had on Remior, and the air-tight, spherical cauldrons he’d seen on the underwater world.

And there was a simple reason for that.

As the quantity of ingredients went up, it became increasingly difficult for the enchantments to apply heat and pressure uniformly to the concoction. It was also harder for the alchemist to pry beneath the surface of the substance, and to take all the internal changes into account.

This resulted in one’s yield declining sharply past a certain point. Trying to brew more than that was highly inefficient. On the other hand, brewing less than that was needlessly slow: hence the standard size of cauldrons that multiple factions in the universe seemed to have settled on, independently of one another.

Yet, that only applied to novice alchemists on Atlantis.

The more experienced ones had a few additional means at their disposal, that other places lacked. One of them was, naturally, their eyes. Once they grew accustomed to their mutation, they could use it to peer deeper beneath the surface of the concoction, allowing them to handle the increased volume more easily.

Percy hadn’t felt confident to practice with this principle while sharing Enki’s body, as neither of them had had much time to adjust to their new vision. Not to mention that he’d still been suffering from a rather intense headache as his two Decrees fought for dominance inside his head. Even after returning to Remior, mastering the scaling principle just hadn’t been a priority, as his plate had been full of other, more urgent matters.

Finally, there was one more advantage the Atlanteans had, which had clearly helped them invent this principle. And funnily enough, this had probably been completely accidental.

Their spherical cauldrons had initially only been designed as such purely out of necessity. It was the only way to brew anything underwater. Yet, they had inadvertently opened the door to a series of innovations that made their lives a lot easier.

For one, they’d had to craft their cauldrons out of transparent materials, as that was the only way to even see what was going on inside with their regular vision. As luck would have it, this also helped alleviate some of the problems with scaling the concoctions up.

The fact that their cauldrons fully encompassed the ingredients was also beneficial. It gave them twice the surface area, which not only allowed them to see more, but also to more uniformly apply their enchantments.

Thus, master alchemists on Atlantis capitalized on all these advantages to use larger cauldrons than their untrained peers, allowing them to brew more ingredients at once. The exact size of their cauldrons depended on their skill. The more they improved, the further they could push their output without harming their yield.

From what he’d read, some could even use cauldrons dozens of times larger than normal. That said, Percy was looking at something a little more modest to start with.

‘I guess I’ll start with a fivefold increase. I can always craft a larger cauldron later, once I get better with the runes and the principle…’

Some losses would still be unavoidable, so it was best not to get too greedy. Other than that, Percy was confident he had everything he needed to craft himself an air-tight cauldron just like the Atlanteans, and to dip his toes into the principle.

He didn’t have whatever materials they used, but that was fine. He had his own reinforced mana, and he could even turn it invisible at will. Granted, it would run some interference in his passive Mana Sense, but he could probably work around that by engraving controlled concealment runes on it. That way, he could tune their effect down until they only worked on the cauldron’s walls, without hiding its contents from his eyes.

Whoever the Atlanteans employed to craft their cauldrons for them was likely a more experienced runecrafter than Percy, but he figured the Vault’s superior runes would help close the gap. Lastly, his self-repair enchantments would allow him to maintain the cauldron in perfect condition.

‘In fact, I have a much higher ceiling than them too.’ he grinned.

Right now, even catching up to them might be a struggle, but Percy was confident that both his alchemical and his runecrafting skills would surpass theirs in due time. In fact, his eyes already had!

So, believing in himself and in his plan, Percy continued to work on completing the recipe whenever he had enough ingredients at hand, and on improving his cauldron whenever he did not. Progress was slow, but steady. He estimated that getting everything in order would take a few weeks. Though what happened just a couple days later still caught him by surprise.

No, he hadn’t succeeded yet in any of his projects: not with the cauldron, and not with the Aurora Dew. Nesha hadn’t brought him any news either, nor had Acton and Micky reached the city.

This new development had come from a more… peculiar direction.

From above.

His clone was finally back!

And what a haul this one had brought…