Tired as he was, Percy couldn’t help but keep his eyes glued to the egg during the first couple of hours. The bundle of souls rolling inside the obsidian orb calmed down after a while, showing no immediate signs of collapsing – which had to be a good thing. It was still a mess in there, of course, and the familiar’s soul had no defined shape, making Percy question whether something had gone terribly wrong with the operation.

  Then again, he didn’t have anything to compare this to, since he had been unconscious during the early moments of Micky’s “creation”. Only now did he realize that passing out the previous time might have been a blessing in disguise. At least, it had spared him from all this worrying.

  ‘Stop staring at the egg,’ the Queen suggested at some point, her words coming out soft and strained.

  Her body was still covered in injuries from head to stinger, though she had survived the ordeal. Her subjects had already refilled the hole in front of her with nectar twice, the sumptuous meal having improved her situation slightly. Percy had no idea how much of her lifespan remained after producing all those royal eggs that she had never been supposed to lay. Still, he very much hoped that the creature would be around for a few more years at least, to mentor her successor.

  ‘I’m anxious to know the result too, but even a regular Starry Princess takes a while to hatch. Watching it the whole time will only drive you crazy…’ she continued, oblivious to his thoughts.

  Percy nodded, though he still pressed the Violet beast for a more concrete timeframe. Sadly, the mismatch between human and wasp timekeeping methods got in the way again. The Queen did have eyes and antennae in the outside world, so she wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the concepts of days and nights, but she apparently preferred to estimate durations by referencing various biological processes inherent to her species.

  After some back and forth, Percy concluded that it would be at least a couple of weeks until the egg was done incubating. It wasn’t that long, but he’d inevitably have to find other things to keep himself busy.

  Nephthys didn’t seem to be conscious yet, as she failed to respond to any of his transmissions. Even so, he kept feeding her morsels of soul mana through the cord, and regularly replenished the healing bath the egg was in, to hopefully improve her odds.

  Other than that, there wasn’t much else that begged for his immediate attention, which led him to another realization.

  ‘I’m free! For the first time since forever ago!’

  As long as he could remember, it had been one deadline after another. Years of hunting, studying and brewing in the Guild to meet his and Micky’s needs… followed by even more years of planning to infiltrate House Tantalus… and things had only gone downhill from there – Acton, the race to the next grade, the bounty hunters, the wasp familiar…

  It had been decades since Percy last had a moment to relax!

  Granted, it wasn’t like there was nothing left for him to do. Just off the top of his head, he still had to break Baldy and Orin out of their prisons, send out more clones, work on his artificial advancement, figure out the situation on Remior, help out House Avalon, and deliver the affinity-changing treasures to the girls.

  That said, none of those things was terribly urgent. The treasure would last years, and none of his pursuers would consider searching for him in the depths of the hive. In theory, there was nothing wrong with him and Micky taking a short vacation as they waited for Nephthys to hatch!

  ‘Well, okay… I can still spend this time productively, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be fun.’

  The line between training and entertainment had always been blurry for Percy, as he didn’t really dislike any of the things he normally spent his time on. He genuinely enjoyed alchemy and runecrafting, and was passionate about developing his spells or coming up with new ways to get stronger – even if some of those methods got a little unpleasant every now and then.

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  What he wasn’t always a fan of was how much pressure he was in to do everything in the most optimal way, micromanaging every second of his life. Not that he regretted making a few sacrifices to move faster toward his goals, but the thought of setting himself loose for a few weeks sounded nice.

  ‘Mending our soul is still a priority. Those stiff patches are rather uncomfortable. The rest is more negotiable though…’

  Percy definitely wanted to do some alchemy during his break. He still had plenty of Aurora Dew left, and he didn’t think that he’d have much trouble acquiring nectar or royal jelly in the future now that he’d forged new ties with the Starry Wasps, so he wasn’t interested in doing anything elixir-related at the moment. Instead, he wanted to focus on something simpler and more relaxing.

  ‘I’ll just brew some regular healing potions.’

  He didn’t need that many of them, but the product itself wasn’t the point of the task. Extracting potions from a single ingredient was about the easiest thing an alchemist could work on, and this was a recipe he was intimately familiar with. He could just turn his brain off, slowly digesting his gains from the past few weeks.

  The experience was bound to be a hundred times more pleasant without a tight quota he had to meet, or limited ingredients he had to be mindful of. He still had a ton of green mushrooms, and the Queen would probably be fine with giving him a few dead wasps to plant more ingredients on if he asked.

  ‘It’s about time to master the Cascading Cracks technique too,’ he remembered.

  Reducing his elixir consumption hadn’t been a priority lately, and it wasn’t going to become one anytime soon, given his current circumstances. However, that only applied to him personally.

  Assuming that everything went well with the new familiar, Percy was planning to start giving back to Remior, forging new alliances and mending broken bridges. A technique that could halve everyone’s elixir consumption would make for a great peace offering.

  Working on the painful technique didn’t exactly fit with the spirit of his “vacation”, but he didn’t think much of it, because he couldn’t spend more than a few minutes per day cleansing his cores anyway.

  Between him and Micky, they had a total of three cores that had to be cleansed thrice a day, so it shouldn’t take them too long to perfect the technique. Percy had already laid most of the groundwork for it on Thess’kala. Combining it with his Whirlpool of Four Streams would take a little longer – especially since he could only practice that using his human body, but his increased mental acuity should help with that too.

  ‘I should also start sending clones again,’ he thought, adding another item to the agenda.

  He’d kept the cords available for the infiltration mission, but that was no longer necessary. Sadly, half of his slots had somehow ended up occupied by Micky and Nephthys – and that was without counting a potential fourth cord that he might need to tie up into the wasp familiar at some point.

  Even so, there was no question that fusing with Micky had been worth losing a couple of cords. Percy was sure that the wasp familiar would pay for herself too. Leaving aside all the sentimental and political reasons he had for helping Nephthys and the Starry Queen, the royal jelly alone was precisely the sort of treasure he generally had his clones searching for.

  As limited as the resource was, he was confident that he’d find a way to take advantage of it. In a way, the clone he had just placed inside the egg was one of the most successful yet, regarding his long-term goal of attaining divinity.

  ‘That said, I should stop creating new familiars for another grade or two, or I’m going to run out of cords for regular clones…’

  Three would have to do for the time being, and Percy was going to give them some time off too. Seeing as he was currently in the mood for a vacation, he decided to ease up on his orders a little, allowing the clones to do whatever they wanted. After all, there was close to a ninety percent chance that he’d end up as one of them by the time he severed the third of them off his soul.

  Rather than embarking on high-stakes missions involving treacherous Blues and scheming titans, he’d much rather go on a few whimsical adventures for a while. That meant that he wasn’t going to look for greater or lesser springs in the next few weeks. Finding them took too long anyway.

  With everything settled, he had both of his bodies sit cross-legged across from one another, taking a few minutes to activate his bloodline a couple of times, producing the clones. As soon as he was done, he took out his cauldron and tossed a few green mushrooms in, commencing a new brewing session as he resumed mending his soul.

  If he got lucky, one of his throwaway clones might find something interesting in the next couple of weeks, or his main bodies might improve their brewing yield by the time the new familiar was ready.

  Either way, he knew that this break was ultimately good for him.

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