by nobody103
"How come that there is such a demand for potions and magic items here, anyway?" asked Zorian. "This city seems a little too small for the amount of magic shops. I understand the workshops since they can always export their products elsewhere, but how do shops like yours achieve such volume on the local market?"
"Oh, that's easy," Gurey said. "Travelers. Or more accurately, settlers and adventurers. You see, this city is one of the last stops for settlers going further north as part of the 'Great Northern Push', as the government likes to call it. As one of the last centers of 'real civilization' on their journey, we get a lot of demand for critical supplies of all sorts."
"Great Northern Push?" asked Zorian.
"Not a regular reader of the newspapers, I take it? It's the whole thing with colonizing the Sarokian Highlands that the government has been pushing so hard lately. You must have noticed the posters around advertising free land and tax exemptions and what not. It's part of Eldemar's current strategy for achieving supremacy over Sulamnon and Falkrinea. The idea is that by taming the northern wilderness the country will get a major population and resource boost. All countries that have a border with the wilderness do this to a greater or lesser degree, but Eldemar has really invested a lot into this endeavor. Not sure whether it will be really worth it in the end, but I sure don't mind the traffic it gives me!"
Hmm, now that he thought about it, there were traces of that even back at the academy – it was nothing horribly blatant, but textbooks and class assignments often worked in mentions of Sarokian Highlands far more than one would expect, considering their low population and current importance.
In any case, the man soon left and Zorian returned to staring at his map. Goddamn witch.
✦ ✧ ✦
"I don't suppose that now that I have brought you the plants you asked for-"
"Don't be silly, boy," Silverlake said, snatching the bundle of plants from his hands. "You don't really think a silly little fetch quest like this is all it takes to get my help? Think of this as an… elimination round. You were horribly slow, anyway."
"Slow…" Zorian repeated incredulously. "It took me only 3 days. The only reason I could get them all so quickly at all was that I could teleport from place to place. Not to mention the danger involved – you never even told me those 'redbell mushrooms' of yours exploded into clouds of paralyzing dust if handled improperly."
"Well that's just common knowledge," she said, waving her hand dismissively. "Everyone knows that. Here, ground these snail shells for me, please."
Zorian looked at the small leather bag full of colorful red-and-blue snail shells and frowned. He knew that species of snail. They were used in production of certain drugs, and were very much illegal to harvest. More important than that, their ground up shells were a powerful hallucinogen and inhaling even a handful of dust would leave him delirious and incapacitated. He threw the annoying old woman a brief glare before simply casting a 'dust shield' spell on himself – the same one he used to protect himself against the paralyzing mushrooms – before grabbing a mortar and pestle and getting down to work.
After he was done with that, the old witch promptly handed him the very bundle of plants he had spent three days gathering, rattled off a series of brief instructions and pointed him towards an old cauldron leaning on the wall of her cottage. Wonderful – apparently he was going to be making a potion the old way. He had been tutored by another witch as a child, so he wasn't totally lost here, but the potion she wanted him to make now was unfamiliar to him. Not to mention that there was a reason why traditional potion making was considered obsolete compared to modern alchemy – it was harder, less safe, and usually gave worse results to boot.
Hopefully the potion she was having him make wasn't the sort to explode in his face or poison him with fumes if he didn't get it right. Oh, who was he kidding, of course it was. Frankly, if it weren't for the time loop and the resulting immunity to simple death, he would be leaving at this point.
As he suspected, he botched that potion. Thankfully, every time he was about to make a particularly disastrous misstep, Silverlake stopped him. He just wished she found a better way to warn him he was about to make a mistake than hitting him with a willow branch. She could have poked his eye out with that thing!
He never thought he would say this, but he was starting to miss Xvim and his marbles. His old mentor was a saint compared to this crazy old woman.
"Well that's no good," said Silverlake, peering into the cauldron and idly stirring the foul-smelling purple gunk that Zorian ended up producing (it was supposed to be a viscous, sweet-smelling, totally transparent liquid). She gave him a bright smile. "I guess you'll have to go gather a whole new batch of ingredients before you can try again, won't you?"
Zorian stared blankly at the grinning woman, feeling her anticipation through his empathy. She fully expected him to explode at this and was looking forward to it! Sadistic bitch. Unfortunately for her, she was about to get disappointed. He wordlessly reached into his backpack and withdrew a fresh bundle of ingredients.
Her smile never faltered, but Zorian could feel her disappointment regardless. It made him smile inside, though he maintained his poker face.
"You gathered extra, huh?" she asked rhetorically.
"I have plenty of experience with abrasive teachers," Zorian said simply. "I have another bundle besides this one, too."
"Good. You'll need it," Silverlake said, knocking on the rim of the cauldron. "This was terrible. I don't think two attempts will be enough. Hell, I'm skeptical you can get it in three! Go empty this crap you've made in the neutralization pit over there and start over."
Zorian sighed and levitated the cauldron onto a disc of force before marching off into the direction of the neutralization pit. It was really just an open pit that had been lined with stones and painted over with alchemical resin so that alchemical compounds poured into it didn't seep into the ground or nearby water supply. His alchemy teacher back at the academy would have been horrified at the mishandling of alchemical waste, but if the great Silverlake thinks an open pit is sufficient for disposal of alchemical sludge then who was Zorian to disagree?
That done, he placed the cauldron back over by the fireplace and started over. Silverlake was probably right that he wouldn't get it right in the next two times either, though – the potion clearly required fairly delicate temperature management, but that was a very hard variable to control when using wood burning and a regular fireplace. An old witch with lots of experience like Silverlake probably knew by instinct how to control the fire, but Zorian didn't have the faintest idea of how to do it.
That was generally the main problem of 'traditional alchemy', as it was sometimes called. It relied heavily on the ability of the practitioner to adjust their methods on the fly to produce a usable product. Unlike modern alchemy, which relied on standardized equipment and exact measurements, traditional alchemy was all about eyeballing it and improvisation. Expressions like 'a handful of leaves', 'a slow fire' and 'a moderate amount of time' were extremely common in traditional alchemical recipes. Zorian knew because he once broke into his grandmother's recipe cabinet to see if he could learn something from them. 'A pinch of salt' apparently meant very different things to him and his grandmother, if the results of his secret potion attempts were any indication.
A further problem for him was that he was only really proficient in producing potions one by one, and the cauldron method was designed for producing batches of potions. There were some very important differences between production methods for single potions and for batches, but hell if Zorian could remember what they were at the moment.
"Who taught you?" Silverlake asked suddenly.
"Huh?" Zorian mumbled. "What do you mean? You want to know my alchemy teacher?"
"I want to know your potions' teacher," she corrected. "You're still pretty terrible, but you're not nearly as clueless around the cauldron as I thought you would be. Who taught you?"
"Err, that
would be my grandmother, I guess," Zorian said.
"A witch or just a housewife that picked up a few recipes?" Silverlake asked.
"A witch," said Zorian. "Though not a particularly dedicated one, I think. She gave me some lessons when I was a kid, but it didn't last very long. My mother didn't really like her teaching me."
Actually, Zorian was pretty sure his mother didn't like his grandmother, period. Mother and daughter did not get along, in their case. Zorian always found it kind of hypocritical that mother spent so much time preaching to him about the value of family when she herself couldn't stand her own mother if her life depended on it.
"Huh. Interesting. Don't expect to get any fuzzy feelings out of me just because of that, though," Silverlake said.
"Wouldn't dream of it," Zorian said lightly.
"Good. You'll be happy to know I've decided on the price of my help for you."
"Oh?" said Zorian, suddenly perking up.
"Yes. You see, a little birdy told me you've been wandering around the forest, picking fights with the wild life. So this should be something right up your alley. Tell me… have you heard of a something called 'the grey hunter'?
Chapter 29
The Hunters and the Hunted
Considering the reputation the Great Northern Forest had among people living in more southern, civilized territories, one would expect the place to be a giant death trap, with every animal and a good portion of the plants trying to kill you at every turn. The truth, Zorian had found, was a little more complex. While yes, the forest was full of dangerous creatures – even the deer were kind of aggressive and had tried to gore him a couple of times instead of fleeing from his approach – it was entirely possible to spend an entire day without endangering your life if you knew what you were doing. Granted, Zorian had a somewhat unfair advantage in the form of his mind sense, which let him sense a lot of the dangers before they had the chance to detect him in turn. Furthermore, the region he was frequenting was a border area – thus a little friendlier to humans than the deep, untouched wilderness in the far north. Still, he was confident that even a skilled civilian could move through the forest unmolested, much less a mage. Hell, he was doing just fine at the moment, despite having less than a month of experience.
Usually, Zorian wouldn't have wanted to move through the forest undetected. The whole point of going here was to get combat experience, so avoiding danger was kind of missing the point. This time, however, sneaking around was more or less mandatory. He really didn't want to get distracted around a threat on the level of a grey hunter, and he definitely didn't want to alert the monster that he was coming by engaging in a loud, flashy fight right next to its lair. He slowly circled the area around the grey hunter's lair, checking it for threats and hostile terrain that might inhibit him should he choose to retreat in any particular direction. In several places he carved clusters of explosive glyphs into the trees and exposed rocks – he doubted they were powerful enough to seriously hurt a grey hunter, but they might buy him a few seconds he needed to teleport away to safety.
He almost succeeded in reaching the lair without a fight. Thankfully the trio of fly-mosquito-whatever things that tried to ambush him were very easy to dispatch (they burned beautifully) and the fight didn't raise enough ruckus to attract the monstrous spider's attention. Zorian picked out a rather tall tree close (but not too close) to the grey hunter's lair and levitated himself to the upper branches, where he promptly took out the binoculars he enchanted earlier for the purpose and started studying his target.
The location was actually kind of picturesque – a small rocky gully surrounded by forest, with some pretty sediment lines crisscrossing the stone and a few strategically placed clumps of grass growing between the cracks. On one of the walls stood a perfectly circular hole that served as the entrance to the cave. It was pitch black and surprisingly unremarkable and unthreatening – if Silverlake hadn't told him it was there, it was entirely possible that Zorian would have missed it entirely if he had ever stumbled into the place in one of the restarts.
It would have been the last mistake he ever made, at least in that hypothetical restart – grey hunters were crazy good jumpers and possessed downright surreal speed. Zorian would bet anything that the one inside that cave could jump straight from the cave entrance to the other side of the gully in a single leap and close in before Zorian could so much as realize what was happening.
The grey hunter was fundamentally a very simple monster. It was a grey, furry spider the size of an adult man… and it also happened to be incredibly fast, strong, durable and spell resistant. It could run faster than a hasted mage, jump incredible distances, shrug off regular firearms and lower-level attack spells like a duck shrugging off water, outright ignore most direct-effect spells and bite through steel. Oh, and it had a very nasty poison that, instead of destroying tissue or wrecking the nervous system like most poisons, utterly disrupted a mage's ability to shape and control their mana instead. Once bitten, you wouldn't be casting anything for a while, and it would take weeks for the poison to fully flush out of your system. Apparently it was a type of poison adapted specifically to bring down magical beings that were the grey hunter's typical prey, but it was just as effective against human mages. Basically, if you were fighting against a grey hunter alone and got bitten, you were done for.
These things were known for chewing through entire groups of battlemages sent specifically to get rid of them. Quite a feat for what is ostensibly an animal-level creature – most non-sapient monsters, no matter how impressive, were too easy to lure into traps to pose such a huge danger to a prepared hunting group. Naturally, Silverlake wanted him to tangle with said mage-killing super-spider as her price for her help. The good news was that she hadn't asked him to kill the thing, something that Zorian suspected might be beyond him at the moment. The bad news was that her request was only a smidgen easier than that. She wanted him to confront the female grey hunter who laired in the cave he was currently observing and steal some of her eggs.
The lifecycle of grey hunters was a total mystery, as they were considered too dangerous to study through anything other than post-battle reports and vivisection, but Zorian was willing to bet that grey hunters mothers were fiercely protective of their spawn. Getting even a single egg was likely to be quite a challenge. In all likelihood, the mother would be reluctant to go far from her egg sack for any reason, so waiting for the chance to simply swipe some may be impractical, or even futile. For all he knew the female sat on her egg sack all day long and lived off her fat reserves until the young hatched.
Zorian placed the binoculars back into his bag and started jotting down notes in one of the notebooks he brought with him. The question of how to acquire the eggs without getting horribly murdered in the process was ultimately a question for another time – he was currently here just to scout out the situation and see if the task was even possible. As much as he wanted to prove the shriveled old witch wrong by completing her impossible quest, dying here would be incredibly stupid. He was on a time limit. A long time limit, but repeatedly dying because he decided to take on opponents way over his level would be an unforgivable waste. Every restart cut short was a restart he wasn't using to its full potential. If he couldn't think of a way to get the eggs that he was absolutely sure would work, he wouldn't do it. And even if he could think of a way, he would only try it out near the end of the restart, when the most he would lose was a couple of days.
"Alright," he mumbled, snapping the notebook shut. "Let's see what I'm dealing with."
The first thing he did was try to locate the grey hunter female to make sure she wasn't outside her lair at the moment. He had no way of tracking down grey hunters specifically through divination, as he had never seen one before and lacked any grey hunter body parts, but a simple locator spell searching for a 'giant spider' pointed him straight at the cave. Since the other two giant spider varieties that lived in the region – giant tree spider and giant trapdoor spider resp
ectively – didn't live in caves, the conclusion was obvious. He then tried to scry the spider, which immediately failed. Well, the spell technically worked… but the cave was totally dark. There were no glowing crystals or ember moss that occasionally lit natural caverns – just an ordinary cave full of impenetrable darkness that hid everything.
Damn, he hadn't thought of that. Wracking his brains for a spell combination that would allow him to scout out the lair without having to go back into the city and hit the books, he decided to combine two different spells. First he cast the 'arcane eye' spell, creating a floating ectoplasmic eyeball through which he could see remotely. He then created a floating ball of light, functionally identical to the simple 'floating lantern' spell, except he altered the spell parameters so it would follow the ectoplasmic eye around instead of himself. He then sent the eye into the cave, closing his real eyes and connecting his sight to his remote sensor. There was a chance that the light would aggravate the grey hunter mother, but he doubted she would run out to confront him just for that, or that she could track him down on his tree for that matter.
As it happened, the grey hunter was either very, very bothered by his floating lantern or perhaps saw it as prey, because the eye had barely advanced into the cave, floating lantern in tow, when a grey blur slammed into it and Zorian's awareness was violently wrenched back into his body. Blinking in surprise at his sudden perspective shift, Zorian was then treated to the sight of the grey hunter leaping out of the cave and skittering around the area in search of something.