by nobody103
"Hmm," said Zorian noncommittally.
"So… do you have a specific job already waiting for you or are you in search of a one?" the man asked.
"Nothing specific," Zorian said. "I was going to wander around for a while and see what catches my eye."
"Ah, I see. Well, I can recommend a few neighboring sites if you're interested in checking them out."
"Sure," shrugged Zorian. "It can't hurt to check thing out, I guess."
"Alternatively, if you're looking for a better paying version of the sort of one-off jobs you've been doing for the past few days, I recommend you go north, towards the Sarokian Highlands. Always plenty of work at the frontier, whether it's in infrastructure building or hunting monsters and whatnot. Much more dangerous than hunting overgrown rats, of course, but also a lot more profitable."
"An interesting idea," Zorian said. The only problem was that Cyoria was the main springboard for the expansion efforts into the Highlands. From what Zorian could figure out from the maps, it was very hard to bypass Cyoria when going that far north, and he didn't want to be anywhere near the city for the foreseeable future. "You know, I can't help but notice that the mage guild is pushing the settlement of the Sarokian Highlands pretty aggressively. What's up with that?"
"Ah, well, it's the whole thing with the Splintering, you see? Successor States are always looking to one-up each other and searching for advantages that could let them overcome their enemies. Eldemar has a nice big access to untamed wilderness to the north, so it would be a bit silly not to take advantage of it. It's a place rich in natural resources, I hear, both magical and mundane."
Zorian spent an hour with the man, discussing the region and his options. He didn't really want to settle down in any place in this particular restart, but he supposed he might want to try out some of the options presented by the man in the future, and in that case it might be convenient to have visited the location already and thus be capable of teleporting there directly.
So for the next two weeks, Zorian walked around the region, visiting various workshops, libraries, alchemists, herbalists and so on. Or just plain sight-seeing and doing odd jobs for the villagers and townsfolk he encountered along the way. He did not stop his magical training, but in the absence of any sort of clear goal or a convenient repository of spells like the academy library had been, he defaulted to the most basic of advancement methods – shaping exercises. It helped that most of the rural mages he met on his journey had some private shaping exercise they were willing to show him… and unlike Xvim, who simply told him the end result he wanted and refused to elaborate, they actually had detailed instructions about what to do and in what order.
By the end of the time loop, Zorian had learned how to peel the surface of a marble away, layer by layer; how to do the same to an apple and other fruit; how to cut paper by dragging his finger along the cutting line; how to induce a gentle ripple in a pool of water without touching it; how to levitate a blob of water and shape it into a perfect sphere; then freeze that sphere; and finally, how to telekinetically draw geometric shapes in the dust. None of those were really mastered in the Xvim sense of the word, but luckily Xvim wasn't anywhere near him this time so he could simply move on to the next exercise when he felt he had absorbed it to his liking. Shaping exercises were a lot less annoying when he didn't have to keep doing them until they could be done flawlessly, he found.
He also continued practicing his mind powers. They were extremely important, he felt – if it weren't for them, he would have never survived his altercation with Red Robe intact. At some point he planned to seek out other aranean colonies and execute his 'exploit the time loop to slowly leech aranean magic from them' plan, but right now he couldn't do it. It was too soon, his memories of aranea and their demise (and the role his obliviousness and carelessness played in it) too fresh in his mind. So instead he simply used his empathy on every person he spoke to and practiced connecting to the minds of various animals. He particularly liked walking near streams and ponds and taking control of the dragonflies flitting about in order to make them perform dizzying acrobatics around him. Insects had such rudimentary minds that taking total control over them was exceedingly easy, though figuring out how to puppeteer them effectively took some doing and he still couldn't keep control over more than 3 dragonflies at the same time.
Time passed. For the most part he managed to keep himself busy enough that he didn't have enough time to be depressed, but all his worries and feelings of powerlessness returned in full force every evening as he prepared himself for sleep. Every plan he tried to make seemed hollow, doomed to failure. He wasn't powerful enough. He didn't know enough. Red Robe had years and years of experience over him, and that was never going to change.
As the end of the restart approached, his mood only turned darker. He had avoided another confrontation in this restart, but what about the next? Would he wake up next time to eerie silence, only to find out that Red Robe got to his family after he had left and left them lifeless, soulless husks for him to find?
On the last night of the restart, Zorian didn't sleep at all, simply watching the night sky from a small, isolated hill he had found in his travels, idly using his mind powers to deflect mosquitos away from him as he stood consumed in his own thoughts.
✦ ✧ ✦
Zorian's eyes abruptly shot open as a sharp pain erupted from his stomach. His whole body convulsed, buckling against the object that fell on him, and suddenly he was wide awake, not a trace of drowsiness in his mind.
"Good mow- Hey!" Kirielle yelped as Zorian enveloped her into a strong hug. "What the hell, Zorian!? Let me go, you brute!"
"Still the same Kirielle as ever," Zorian sighed dramatically, a weak smile on his face. "Now get off of me before I hug you some more."
His family was alright and, just like in the previous restart, Red Robe was nowhere to be seen. Thus, a much happier Zorian once again boarded the train and disembarked at Nigelvar. He didn't bother picking up his badge this time, though – it really was very expensive, and no one had actually asked to see it anyway. Instead he simply teleported himself to the last place he'd been at in the previous restart and continued his wanderings.
Being a mage out there in the periphery was a lot different than being a mage in Cyoria, Zorian mused. Without the massive quantities of ambient mana gushing out of the Hole, conserving mana was actually a noticeable issue – even shaping exercises tended to deplete his reserves after a couple of hours, whereas back in Cyoria his main limitation had been his patience and existing obligations eating into his free time. That was another reason why Zorian focused on shaping exercises in preference on any actual spellcasting while traveling.
He was also starting to miss the academy library. He had thought its reputation was way overblown for a while now, but now that he could no longer hit its vast shelves every time he ran into some issue he realized just how damn convenient it really was. It had a lot of holes where really exotic topics were concerned, but its selection of basic spells and books on common topics were second to none. Out here in the periphery, finding a spellbook that had the exact spell you needed was damn hard. They existed, but they had only the most basic of things and if you wanted anything exotic you were directed to some other settlement or private collection or what not.
He also found out that magic detection spells were a lot more useful than he had first realized. Outside of Cyoria, magical items and creatures actually stood out when exposed to such scrutiny. Back in Cyoria, most general magic detection spells just returned false positives all the time – you had to narrow your divination criteria down to something specific to get results.
All in all, he was starting to understand why mages tended to flock towards Cyoria and other cities situated on top of mana wells. Those kinds of places provided a whole lot of resources that were hard to acquire elsewhere in one convenient location.
But Zorian's journey continued. He was determined to visit every large city in the count
ry, if nothing else then so he could teleport to any of them as he pleased, and he was seriously considering a journey around the continent as well. The only thing stopping him was that international travel was bound to be a hassle, and he was doing all this traveling to relax, not argue with border officials about authorization.
When another restart passed and Red Robe still failed to show up, Zorian finally allowed himself to more fully relax. It had been three restarts, and Red Robe still hadn't tracked Zorian down – he was pretty sure that meant he never would, then. Not a master detective then, that was good to know. Buoyed by the knowledge that he dodged the bullet this time, Zorian seriously considered what to do next.
He needed to contact Zach, but it wasn't a priority. Zach likely didn't have any crucial information that would help Zorian figure out how the time loop functioned, and Zorian didn't know how to find the other time traveler anyway. They were bound to meet again at some point, and Zorian wasn't going to play dumb again when they finally encountered one another, but he saw no need to waste his time on looking for a boy that probably didn't want to be found right now. It wasn't like he didn't have anything to do in the meantime. He absolutely needed to master a number of skills before he considered going back to Cyoria and look for Zach: he needed to find out more about soul magic, he needed to hone his mind magic into a proper tool and weapon like the aranea had done, and he needed to raise his combat skills to a level where he could meaningfully counter Red Robe in open combat.
The first priority was pretty obvious: he needed to know how to at least counter soul magic if he wasn't going to get blindsided again when dealing with Red Robe. Preferably he also wanted to figure out what Red Robe really did to the aranea and – if possible – reverse it. He still had Kael's list of people who could help him in that regard, and all of them were conveniently outside of Cyoria.
The second was just as crucial. Whatever knowledge about the time loop the matriarch gained behind his back, she almost certainly did it by ripping it out of someone's mind. Someone who wasn't Red Robe - probably a handful of normal people not aware of the time loop but still holding a small part of the puzzle. If he could identify these key people and read their mind he can find out what the big secret is. In other words, he needed to develop his mind magic, ethics be damned. He didn't think he could do this on his own, so he would have to seek out other aranea webs for this.
Lastly, he was embarrassingly powerless against Red Robe in their last encounter, and if the other mage hadn't made some big mistakes when handling him he would have lost utterly. He needed better traps and ambush tactics, better combat skills in order to not be utterly doomed when said ambushes fail, and better movement magic to retreat and escape when said combat skills prove insufficient. As far as he could tell, the only effective way to improve here was simple practice – in other words, going around and looking for trouble. The only problem with this was that this went against pretty much every instinct he had.
It would have to be done, though. He figured that delving into the Dungeon and taking a few restarts to visit the untamed wilderness to the north should do for a start, and he would figure out later where to go from there.
In line with those goals, he decided that his third post-aranea restart was going to be a bit more systematic than his previous wanderings. After marking down the locations of Kael's associates on a map, he chose a medium-sized town called Knyazov Dveri as his next destination. The town was close to the northern wilderness and had a notable dungeon access, so there should be plenty of opportunities to practice his combat skills; it was situated on top of a Rank 2 mana well, which was fairly anemic as far as mana wells went but was nonetheless better than nothing; and finally, it was roughly in the center of a diffuse cloud of Kael's associates scattered throughout the region, so he would have easy access to the rest of them should the one in the city prove to be a dead end. It was, as far as Zorian could tell, an ideal place to start at.
The next day he teleported to the nearest town he could reach with his teleport spell and set off towards his target.
Chapter 28
Cauldron
'Life takes you to all sorts of unexpected places,' Zorian mused, once again taking the knife to the winter wolf's corpse. 'If someone had told me, back in my first year at the academy, that I would need to know what the best way to skin a winter wolf was, I would not have believed them.'
Then again, he technically didn't need to skin the animal – he just felt it would be a horrid waste not to, since winter wolf pelts fetched a pretty high price back in Knyazov Dveri. If he was going to venture into the wilderness, looking for monsters and dangerous animals to fight, he might as well earn some money doing it.
Finally, the bloody work was done. He was sure a real hunter could have done it in a quarter of the time and hassle, but he didn't care – a success was a success. He placed the pelt in his bag and went off in the direction of the stream he had encountered earlier, intent on washing off the blood and grime off his hands and clothes. At some point he intended to use spells to do these sorts of things, but since harvesting spells were based on animation they were sort of useless to him right now. Animation spells worked by embedding a portion of the caster's mind into the spell, so until Zorian knew how to properly skin an animal the old-fashioned way, he couldn't hand it off to an animation spell.
As he walked towards the stream, he kept an eye out for the reason he was in this particular section of the forest in the first place – a small cottage of an old witch called 'Silverlake', who was one of the possible sources Kael had named in his list. So far, Kael's prediction that he wouldn't be able to find the place on his own and that he would have to loiter around the area until she approached him herself had been entirely correct – no divination could track the cottage down, and he hadn't stumbled onto it by simply wandering around the place. If he didn't have Kael's assurance that someone lived here he would have given up long ago. The only reason he even managed to pin point the area as well as he had was because the old witch had a habit of harvesting all of the alchemically-useful plants and mushrooms in the area and Kael warned him to be on the lookout for suspiciously picked, clean areas like this one.
With a sigh, he plunged his hands into the stream. The recent rains had caused it to swell into a small muddy river, but the water was good enough for washing his hands in and cooling off. That done, he crouched next to the water and idly studied his reflection. He looked like a mess. He felt like a mess too. While he wasn't entirely out of shape, and this wasn't the first time he ventured into a forest, there was a difference between taking a two-hour stroll through the semi-tame forest near his town and spending most of the week in the great northern wilderness, hunting winter wolves and dodging snakes and other dangerous wildlife. Thank the gods he had the foresight to put that anti-vermin ward on himself or else he would have been covered in ticks and leeches by the end of day one… and that was assuming the mosquitos hadn't driven him mad before that.
And the worst thing about it all? He would never get used to it, because any muscle growth and body adaptation would be wiped out when this restart ended. He made a note to himself to look into the possibility of getting enhancement potions or rituals to improve strength and stamina, because spending the first week of every restart with every inch of his body tense and hurting wasn't a fun prospect at all. Or at least a potion to ease the- wait, was the bottom of the stream moving?
He managed to throw himself back just in time to avoid the huge brown shape that jumped out of the muddy water and tried to envelop his head with its massive jaws. He quickly backpedaled as the huge lizard-like creature tried to haul itself onto the shore and sent a small missile swarm consisting of three piercers straight at its head. Thankfully, the lizard thing was actually pretty slow, its surprise attack notwithstanding, so all three missiles found their mark. The creature's skull promptly exploded from the impact, showering bits of tissue everywhere, and it immediately slumped dead where it stood,
its lower half still submerged in the stream.
Zorian immediately turned on his mind sense and scanned the creek for possible presence of more such monsters and then, having discovered none, slowly approached the corpse to inspect it.
It was a salamander. A huge brown salamander with a massive triangular head and beady black eyes that probably couldn't actually see anything. It was a miracle that something that big could actually hide in a stream this shallow, but the muddy water provided it with just what it needed to surprise him. Damn, that would have been humiliating – killed less than a week in by a giant salamander. Then again, he nearly fell into a ravine on his first day here, and there was that assassin vine that tried to choke him yesterday…
"Is there anything here in this forest that isn't going to try and kill me the moment I take my eyes off of it?" Zorian asked out loud.
He didn't expect anyone to answer, since he was alone and all, but he did receive an answer. Sort of.
"What do you think you're doing, feeling all sorry for yourself?" a harsh female voice answered him.
There was no one present as far as Zorian could see, and his mind sense detected only animals, but he still managed to detect fairly quickly where the voice was coming from – the source of the speech was the raven perched on a nearby branch.
"Well don't just stand there and stare at my familiar, boy," the voice said, cutting in through the silence. "Quickly, haul it out of the creek before the stream washes it away! Do you have any idea how valuable giant salamanders of that size are? This is the find of a century!"
Zorian was tempted to point out that this 'find of a century' nearly killed him, but decided not to. If this was who he suspected, he needed to stay on her good side. According to Kael, asking the old witch for help was a bit of a long shot, but likely to achieve very good results if he could convince her to seriously try and help him. Silverlake was very powerful and skilled, but also very annoying to deal with. She wouldn't kill him or do anything overtly hostile to him without provocation, but she was capricious and prone to wasting people's time. Zorian figured it was at least worth a try to approach her for help.