The most time-consuming part of the real body double technique is making its mind. The original Real body double technique demands a mind identical to the person they are trying to imitate, as to not give away their nature.
This is to make sure they don't say things which are out of character of the imitated person.
Upon realizing this, Mathias came to a shocking truth about the origin of the body double technique, part of it was making a body double indistinguishable from yourself in order to shirk responsibility, but it was also for making body doubles of victims and replacing them with body doubles you controlled.
Although normally you still have to plan if you make a body double in Mathias' style. You cannot just say, 'make myself'. Proportions must be studied. Mathias himself has done body doubles of this nature before, in fact he used hundreds of them against The Lone Mother, not that it mattered much.
So Mathias had already built an aether blueprint of his own body and was able to instantly replace himself at a moment where he wasn't being watched by Zhang Li.
Timed with a sorcery that rendered himself hidden, Mathias discovered a way to dodge at the speed of light,
It was to never get hit in the first place!
Hiding in a certain state unique to Astris, Mathias Calypses then looked down at Hua Tai Zhang Li's laughing figure.
"Ha, ha, ha. Wonderful. Phew, now that's out of the way. You of course get all the trinkets carried by the fallen daoist." Zhang Li said
Dressed in a vermillion flower robe, the old elder stroked his magnificent white beard with a resounding chuckle, "Yes junior Zhang Li, this elder will collect his dues." The white bearded elder said
Not soon after he said this he continued with a beckoning motion, causing all the shiny silver and gold artifacts on Mathias Calypses' body double landed in the hand of this elder.
At that exact moment, Mathias thought that his beard was ugly.
With a smile, the Hua Tai elder and Zhang Li headed back to the interior of the clan house and Mathias Calypses followed suit in a hidden fashion, right behind them.
While walking secretly with his would-be assassins, Mathias started to examine everything this elder did to try and discern his level of sorcery. He can't see through my hidden state. Mathias Calypses thought.
That made Mathias want to think that he definitely wasn't a sage or disciple. As for Evangelist or god, it wasn't even in the question.
Ascetic maybe, or not. Ascetics have true domains of power and ideas. The elder himself took a secretive approach to assassinate me, this highlights his weariness. If he was an ascetic and truly weary of me he would use his domain. The fact that he didn't reveals that he was weary of me and didn't use his domain, which points to the fact that he doesn't have one, making it impossible for him to be an Ascetic. So due to his seniority I suspect him to be an Adept. Although I guess it is still completely possible for him to be Initiate. Mathias contemplated inwardly.
Mathias Calypses continued to follow them into the main house and didn't encounter any problems with passing by the other clan members, which gave him certain hints about the power levels of the other cultivators within the clan, as well as the clan's general power level.
He still didn't wish to meet the clan head though. Mathias considered that it carried an unnecessary level of risk.
In the following days, he continued to tail the elder and other people in the clan he discerned as being at the Adept level.
He sometimes would take food from the baskets when people weren't looking. He did this to cause a commotion. Mathias felt that if the clan members were in too much disorder that he could get away with far more without being noticed.
Although he didn't just stop there, he actively switched the nameplates of adjacent rooms, stole items of convenience from rooms and put them in other rooms, and slightly altered the position of various items which were less moveable, such as chairs, tables, desks and beds.
Who cares if they saw a wandering specter if everyone's schizophrenic anyways?
And in those following days, true chaos ensued.
Eventually the elders called a meeting with the leader to discuss this event. Mathias himself still wouldn't dare to show himself there out of fear of the clan leader's possible discernment but he still had certain guesses on what they would discuss and implement.
Not soon after the meeting was adjourned, all the clansmen were ordered to stay in their rooms, This was obviously to see if any of them were the culprit of this chaos or none of them were.
This development was, of course, within the realm of one of Mathias Calypses' guesses.
In accordance with his previous plan if they were to take this route, Mathias would stop moving anything or doing anything. He had already stockpiled food and water for this scenario.
Discovering that the chaos stopped as soon as the clans members couldn't act, highlighted the notion that one of them was the causer. Mathias thought they really had two separate ways to go about this.
One, they would keep them locked up until they started to hate it. Using this as punishment to the whole group for one person's actions. Thereby making them remember the punishment for causing chaos as to not do it again. In this case Mathias Calypses would periodically cause physical sickness for the most enraged prisoners until they all got really sick.
Two, they would periodically release individual clansmen to see when the chaos would be caused. In which case Mathias Calypses would frame everybody, using times where the elders weren't looking to move certain objects and if the elders' were looking he'd move nothing.
Not soon after Mathias realized they were going for the first option. He came upon this realization when nobody was being released.
They had set up aether sealing arrays around each individual room, as to prevent the clansmen from breaking stuff out of anger but they had inadvertently prevented Mathias Calypses from breaking into the rooms to make them sick.
Mathias thought this might happen but there wasn't really anything he could do to prevent it. He could set up anti-aether sealing arrays, he knew how to perform such an array but arrays require constant aether input, causing him to lose more aether than he would gain.
This went against Mathias' original purpose for doing all of this.
So the great Mathias Calypses decided to sit on his ass and do nothing, it wasn't like he couldn't deal with the arrays when they were set up.
So now he constantly thought of ways to bypass the array without alerting it or the people inside.
His hidden state would most likely come undone if he were to blatantly walk or teleport in.
Thinking about it for some more, Mathias came to a solution.
He identified the part of the array that would undo his hidden state and used the unique properties of Astris to hide it from the rest of the array so that it wouldn't alert the elders of something being wrong.
Shortly after doing this Mathias sighed, Perfect. I'll be done soon. He thought to himself.
He was getting anxious of wasting time here, worried that the Alchemists of Law would do something irreputable here as well and he'd be too late to stop it. He was very aware that he as an Adept could not stop a sage or evangelist directly, he just felt that as a survivor of that massacre he was somewhat entitled to at least do something about it happening in front of his eyes again.
Mathias walked up to the door of a room, knowing that physically opening this door was a bad idea he opted to walk through it.
"Astris Temptus" Mathias muttered in his hidden state.
He reached his hand out and touched the door, phasing through it. This was a more common form of sorcery among Astris sorcerers.
All the 27 different branches of sorcery can for the most part create the exact same sorceries, disregarding certain exceptions. In their journey most sorcerers come to an age old question:
What is the point of the different branches of sorcery if at the end of the day, they all can accomplish relatively the same thing?
Mathias too, came to this question and if one asked him his answer would be, that question itself is flawed and are you really asking me what the point of a furnace is when you can just go to a volcano to cook your dinner?