Percy expected the attendant to lead his host to so kind of treasury like the ones on Thess’kala, but she didn’t do that. The female Maradorian only walked a couple of blocks across the city before stopping outside a seemingly random building.
“See that enchanted screen over there?” she asked, pointing at a square indentation on the tallic wall. “You’ll find lots of terminals like that scattered throughout Maradion. Just tap your badge against them to log in. You can use them to easily book accommodation, order food, find any information you need about the tournant or the city, or browse through the reward pool.”
Percy couldn’t help but frown. This sounded conveniently similar to the Vault’s system, making him wonder whether one had inspired the other. Then again, this was an extrely practical way of accessing goods and services. It might just be the case that any sufficiently advanced civilization would eventually stumble upon technology like this once their runes reached a high enough level.
“Is there no centralized treasury for the tournant?” he asked, more out of curiosity rather than because it made a difference.
The woman shook her head. “Most of our rewards are nothing like what you have earned in your regional competition. We can’t neatly store everything in a single warehouse. Decrees work in all sorts of strange ways, since titans can’t always control every aspect of the spell.”
Percy nodded, his experience with divine magic corroborating the Maradorian’s words. So Decrees – like Obatala’s – were granted in the form of lightning that was literally sent down from the heavens, and that was just one rather extre example. Others required a person to ditate atop a special platform, eat fruit from a magical tree, or morize a long poem engraved on a giant stele.
Naturally, collecting all the resources and structures required by every Decree in the prize pool and storing them in a single location wasn’t practical. It made more sense for the participants to figure out what they wanted and request the necessary tools delivered directly to them or ask to be escorted to the right facility.
Before leaving Kassorith to browse the rewards by himself, the attendant volunteered a few additional titbits of information about the competition.
According to her, the second round would comnce five days later, after the participants got sorted into groups. Until then, they were allowed to freely roam this part of the capital, where they would have access to restaurants, shops and inns ant solely for them.
Percy had been wondering why they hadn’t encountered any civilians yet, and the attendant had helpfully given him the answer. Apparently, the part of the capital where the extraterrestrial guests stayed was segregated from the residential areas to prevent unnecessary conflict.
Since the Void Hand’s mber-factions weren’t always on good terms with one another, it wasn’t unheard of for a resentful Violet or White from one of the weaker worlds to go on a rampage after suffering a bitter loss in the tournant.
Granted, most participants weren’t dumb enough to ruin their life like that, and the Maradorian authorities were more than powerful enough to swiftly diffuse any such situation. Even so, a lone madman could still hurt a lot of innocent Reds and Yellows before being stopped.
Consequently, the only civilians that Percy would lay eyes upon would be those who chose to spectate his host’s future matches.
That said, the attendant didn’t ntion anything about Kassorith having to avoid certain parts of the capital, so Percy assud that the Maradorians had erected powerful barriers to prevent them from so much as stepping where they weren’t welco.
With that out of the way, he was eager to finally get his hands on his first new Decree in over a decade, though there was one last thing that he had to do before he and his companions lost themselves inside the terminal.
Briefly taking control of his host’s body, he scanned his surroundings for the tallest, most morable structure. Activating Ludwick’s Compass, he lit up an illusory pyre around it. He didn’t know what the building was for, but it didn’t really matter. Percy just wanted a way to return to the planet in the future.
Not that he thought it would be easy to join the void tournant a second ti. Even possessing a random Maradorian would be quite a challenge, unless he figured out how to completely withhold the Moirais’ Decree from his hosts.
The recipe that he had purchased from tatron would help him suppress any unwanted mana cores, but that didn’t an much when dealing with a peak faction who likely possessed a Status-like Decree and were extrely hostile toward the Moirai.
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Still, Percy would have to be a fool not to mark the capital of one of the most powerful greater springs in the universe. Even if he couldn’t access the rewards of the competition or the Maradorians’ ancestral Decree, there was a lot that he could potentially gain rely by possessing a random critter.
Oblivious to Percy’s thoughts, Kassorith was the first in the group to run out of patience. Slithering up to the terminal, he quickly pressed the athyst badge against its smooth surface, causing the runes to flash and rge into a large screen.
Percy and Micky didn’t stop him. Knowing that their host was not only more familiar with the Void Hand but had also lived in the Vault of Magic a lot longer, they silently waited for him to figure out how the machine worked.
Its interface was sowhat different from those in the artificial world, but still quite intuitive, and the underlying principles were identical to the Vault’s, so it didn’t take the Thess’kalan long to find the information they needed.
To no one’s surprise, the alliance had produced a lot of Decrees over the years.
Even the weakest mber-factions had birthed anywhere from several dozen to a couple hundred titans – orders of magnitude more than Remior – with the founding factions approaching a thousand each. The Void Hand as a whole had produced several thousand Decrees over its long history, not including any that their mbers had chosen to keep secret from one another.
Percy and his companions weren’t in a rush to pick one, since they still had several days before their first match. Instead, they took their sweet ti browsing carefully through not only their options, but also any auxiliary information that they could find about Decrees in general, wishing to broaden their horizons.
tatron had once explained that collaborative Decrees were more difficult to cast than those created by a single titan, thus making them more powerful and valuable. However, that designation only concerned how the Decree in question had been produced – not what it did. As it turned out, Decrees were also categorised by their function.
Infrastructure-type Decrees were the most common in the universe, since it was much easier to enchant a stationary patch of dirt, a hill, forest, or lake, than it was to safely and permanently empower a person – or worse, a group of people.
It was also much easier to do that with common and composite affinities, which were obviously more abundant. Furthermore, negative side-effects were easier to tolerate in such Decrees, so long as they remained useable.
After all, there weren’t many factions willing to accept their people being permanently disfigured like the Ollorians, but nobody would care if a forest enchanted to produce valuable herbs faster ended up being uncomfortably hot.
Infrastructure-type Decrees were further broken down into sub-types, such as the ones that most greater springs used to increase the density of ambient mana on their worlds, those that created specialized training zones like the Thirsty Valley, or Decrees that made transportation and communication easier.
Only one of Remior’s three titans had produced an infrastructure-type Decree, but Percy quickly realized that his ho was too small to draw any useful conclusions from.
Factions in control of multiple planets and moons had a much greater need for such Decrees, as well as an abundance of suitable locations to place them at, so they were far more common among greater springs. According to the docunts that Percy and his companions were reading, over ninety percent of the Void Hand’s Decrees fell into this category.
Unfortunately, this ant that several thousands of them were practically useless to Percy. They weren’t even available in the tournant, nor did he have any way of bringing them back to Remior.
Of the several hundred Decrees that affected people, most couldn’t be shared with the tournant’s participants – at least not in a convenient manner – and many others were considered too precious to share.
Still, the prize pool listed over a hundred Decrees that Percy could potentially choose from.
The second most common type was one that Percy had encountered before but hadn’t known the na for: active-type Decrees. These Decrees basically contained a single, powerful ability that could be unleashed at will, without consuming a single mote of mana or willpower. The titan had already taken care of the cost by making the ability fully self-contained.
Upon reading this, Percy was inford by his host that tatron’s Decree actually belonged in this category, which admittedly made sense.
As common and powerful as active-type Decrees were, they apparently suffered from a severe restriction that Percy hadn’t been aware of. A mortal could only ever possess a maximum of three such Decrees at any given ti.
According to Kassorith – who had actually learned this directly from tatron – this had to do with the way these Decrees functioned. While they didn’t consu any of their owner’s resources, their effect didn’t manifest out of nowhere. Activating them imposed a new set of temporary rules in the local space, essentially modifying reality around the user on a small scale.
Carrying too many at once caused them to interfere with one another in catastrophic ways.
Luckily, Percy and Kassorith wouldn’t have to worry about accidentally killing themselves during the tournant. The Void Hand had implented all sorts of failsafes into their Decrees to prevent a mortal from absorbing too many.
The problem was that Percy and his host would hit that wall sooner than they were supposed to if they attempted to claim three active-type Decrees from the tournant, which could expose their ties to the Vault. In fact, this was the only reason the titan had bothered to warn the Thess’kalan about this issue.
‘Well… shit,’ Percy spat with a grimace. ‘I can’t believe that he forced it into one of my limited slots without ntioning this sooner.’
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