The cord yanked Percy’s clone towards Remior as his thoughts lingered on the giant eel and the exotic ecosystem of its home planet. After years of fruitless adventures, it had been easy to write lesser springs and barren worlds off as mostly worthless, but it appeared that the universe still contained many unique and interesting places for him to visit.

If the strange material proved as useful as Percy hoped, this trip wouldn’t be a one-off. He was planning to turn the uninhabited world into a resource farm for Remior. As far as he could tell, the Divine Order didn’t have any of those, though such places were relatively common among greater springs.

While there were several past destinations that Percy wouldn’t mind revisiting, most were just places where he might be able to study magic from the natives – like the Proudheart Academy, the Vault, Thess’kala, Gallimus, or Atlantis.

The closest thing to a resource farm that he had ever come across was Melodia, though Sol’s world didn’t exactly qualify. Her people didn’t seem to have any precious resources to export – they only had their Elemental Source. Percy couldn’t bring the Mirror Lake back, and he would rather avoid revealing its existence to the gods.

Even though he had grown to trust Phoebe a little after her help, he knew that the existence of the Elemental Source wasn’t his secret to share, which was why he’d been careful not to touch any of his memories of Melodia while creating his mindset under Phoebe’s guidance.

The titaness did know about everything listed in his Status, as well as any object that he had handled with his main body on Remior, so there was no hiding Zoris’s existence, nor Percy’s ties to some unknown alien civilization where he had obviously left the Ring of Sacrilege. Even so, it would be a stretch for Phoebe to guess that Percy had discovered an Elemental Source.

Either way, the planet of the giant eels presented Percy with a unique opportunity, and Ludwick’s Compass would allow him to return to the magical ocean whenever he wanted.

Tuning everything else out, he concentrated on the journey itself, helping the mindset memorize the location of the marks. After having done this several times, it wasn’t very difficult, but it still required some effort.

Over the past few years, he and Micky had found many opportunities to explore the limits of the mindset that they had acquired on Robari, so they understood a lot more about the way it interacted with Percy’s bloodline and the plane of souls.

While Percy easily lost track of any marks that he left in the Vault of Magic, he now knew that this wasn’t an issue with Ludwick’s Compass or regular planets, but the artificial world itself.

The range of Percy’s senses when searching for a host in his disembodied state was even larger than he’d initially expected, to the point that it could easily bridge a couple of neighbouring solar systems. In hindsight, this wasn’t that strange, since it was how he had ended up on Felmara while aiming for Huehue. Planets and stars weren’t static, but it would normally take a very long time for his marks to drift so far away from their original location that they were no longer useful.

Percy’s guess was that the artificial world was moving not only several times faster than a regular planet, but also much more erratically. Metatron was constantly on the run from major factions, and his creation had only survived this long due to how elusive it was. It was probably equipped with all sorts of powerful enchantments that compressed space or allowed the massive cube to tunnel through it.

As for how long Percy’s marks on other planets would remain useful?

Well, it was impossible to be certain, since he hadn’t possessed the mindset nearly long enough to test that, and not every planet moved through the universe at the same speed. Based on how little the offset between his experimental marks and the souls on the marked worlds had grown over the past few years, he expected them to remain useful for anywhere between several centuries to a few millennia.

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Regardless, even that

wasn’t a huge problem, because he could easily send additional clones to refresh the marks every few decades, just to be safe. The only problem with that was Robari, since Percy didn’t dare step foot on a world infected with a Cardinal Devil after everything that Metatron had told him, no matter how brief the trip would be.

The irony of Marnok’s world being one of the hardest to return to – despite being where Percy had acquired Ludwick’s Compass from – wasn’t lost on him. Sadly, he would have to somehow grow powerful enough to at least protect himself from the insidious entity in the next thousand years or so, and hope that Marnok would survive that long.

As much as Percy hated leaving a friend behind in such a dire situation, he kept reminding himself that he had offered to bring the stubborn sailor out of his dying planet multiple times during his stay, only to be rejected repeatedly.

Perhaps Percy should have just kidnapped the guy, but the Vault wasn’t exactly a paradise either, so there was no point in forcing his opinion onto his friend just to stuff him into a different prison.

‘It is what it is. All the more reason to focus on getting stronger,’ he thought, shifting his attention back to his current task.

‘By the way, don’t you think we got out a little too easily?’ Micky suddenly asked in a thinly veiled attempt to cheer Percy up after sensing his foul mood. At the same time, the Huehuan assisted Percy in memorizing the location of the mark to lessen his mental load so that they could chat.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I know that we were quite far from the eel and ultimately nothing more than a tiny snack to it, but a demigod’s senses aren’t a joke. Wouldn’t it have noticed our soul slipping out of its domain?’

Percy mentally shrugged. ‘Maybe it has, but it doesn’t really matter. A quasi-divine beast might be as intelligent as a person, yet the ones on this planet are still as ignorant as children. The poor thing probably has no idea how dangerous it was to let us go.’

In a world without sapients, a Clear beast couldn’t possibly imagine that creatures as small as humans could be as intelligent as it was. It most certainly hadn’t encountered any affinities other than beast mana, nor was it familiar with souls or the existence of deities and other worlds.

Even if the eel had registered something fleeing from its willpower, the thought that it had just allowed someone to potentially report its existence to beings powerful enough to crush the eel with a flick of their palms wouldn’t have occurred to it.

‘That settles that, then…’ Micky said after hearing Percy’s explanation. ‘I still think we should stay farther away next time though.’

‘Agreed,’ Percy conceded.

Now that they had gone through this once, Percy was confident that he could fill his spatial seal up with the exotic material from as far as four kilometres away. There was no way the eel would be able to do anything from that distance, so their future trips would be fast and risk-free. The only reason he’d even stayed this long this time had been his curiosity, but he’d rather not give the quasi-divine beasts another chance to notice or hurt him.

‘How long do you think the eels will be around anyway?’ the Huehuan asked. ‘Demigods or not, they’re still mortals.’

‘Hmmm… had it been just one, I might have been worried, but that’s clearly not the case,’ Percy replied.

They hadn’t seen the other two creatures, but they had seen evidence of other red regions, suggesting that the three demigods were of the same species – or, at least, had a similar relationship with their environment. The monstrosity they had encountered wasn’t just a one-off freak of nature, but a regular existence on this planet. Percy didn’t know how the creatures reproduced or got replaced, but he was willing to bet that he wouldn’t lose access to the red substance the moment the last of the current generation of demigods died.

‘That settles it then. What are we going to call it?’ Micky asked again, this time even more cheerfully.

‘Huh? What do you mean?’ Percy asked.

‘The planet! There are no sapients, and I doubt that the eels have bothered to develop a language of their own. In other words, we get to pick a name for this place!’

Percy would have blinked if he had eyes. His friend was right, though he’d never thought that he would find himself in a position to decide the name of an entire planet. Thinking about the characteristic red substance that had defined their whole adventure, it wasn’t hard to come up with something.

‘How about… Ruby Heart?’ he tentatively offered.

‘I like it.’ Micky chuckled. ‘Let’s just hope that the material proves genuinely useful… otherwise it’ll be embarrassing.’

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