Mother of Learning 2 - Outside World

by nobody103

  [A valid point, but let's refrain from antagonizing the city government for now,] he said.

  [More than fine with me,] the aranea responded.

  Having exhausted all of the topics Zorian could think of, they bid each other goodbye and agreed to meet the next day for his usual mind magic lessons.

  ✦ ✧ ✦

  Weeks passed, and while he didn't make any incredible breakthroughs, his various projects kept slowly advancing forward. He absorbed everything about memory packet creation and reinforcement that Memory of Sublime Glories could teach him, he dutifully practiced what the other two Filigree Sages had to teach him, he scoured the academy library for interesting shaping exercises for both himself and Taiven, he built no less than three different golems with Edwin, and he learned a large number of spells from the books he and the Filigree Sages had found in the aranean treasury.

  The most interesting of these new spells were a couple of highly illegal teleport variations that could punch through weaker teleport wards. If he could master those, he would get a major mobility boost within the city. Admittedly, it was possible that the city authorities could detect when someone was bypassing the city's teleport redirect in that fashion, but even if they could indeed do that, that would still make those spells incredibly useful during the actual invasion, when they'd be far too busy with other things to deal with him.

  Oh, and he also met with Raynie a couple of times. He was given a lot of information about the current political climate among shifter tribes and their history, which was kind of interesting but probably not really important for anything. The meetings were a nice distraction, though, so he didn't care that he wasn't really learning anything.

  "So there is something I'm kind of curious about when it comes to shifter magic," Zorian said. "I apologize in advance if I'm asking you to reveal some kind of tribal secret, but what exactly is the big advantage of being a shifter as opposed to just using a potion or a ritual to assume an animal form? I know that shifters can eschew material components that are otherwise needed to make a transformation shell and that you can do a partial transformation to access the senses and other traits from your alternate forms, but that seems a little underwhelming, all things considered…"

  "Well, you have to remember that shifters originate from a different time, when other methods of transformation were far less developed and common than they are now," Raynie said. "But there are some things you're missing. The shifter transformation is much faster and safer than anything you can cook up with your alchemy skills, and you automatically get instincts to go along with your new form. A normal wizard that transforms into an animal will have big problems moving in their new body and even interpreting the animal's senses if they're too different from what humans are used to. A shifter can innately understand how their alternate form works, so it doesn't take much for bird shifters to learn how to fly as easily as birds or for wolf shifters to actually understand what their enhanced noses are telling them."

  "Ah," said Zorian in understanding, remembering how badly he flew while transformed into an eagle, even after spending several sessions practicing his flight. "Yeah, that does sound like a major improvement over a transformation potion."

  "There is also a stealth factor to consider, as your cat shifter friends can attest," Raynie continued. "It's much easier to use transformation magics covertly when you can transform at will, whenever you want, to what extent you want, with no strange movements and material aids required. And since we're on the topic of your feline friends, let me ask you something that I've been kind of curious about. Did you know all this stuff about shifters before you met the cat shifters, or did you only researched the topic because you started hanging out with them?"

  "I'd known about shifters for a while by the time I met them," Zorian said. It was true, in a way. "I was searching for help with something and came to Vani for advice. He actually advised me to seek you out."

  "Me!?" she asked incredulously. She frowned. "Or do you mean shifters in general?"

  "Both. But he recommended you by name," Zorian said.

  "Oh?" she leaned forward in her seat, curious. "And what exactly could I help you with?"

  "It doesn't matter," Zorian said, shaking his head. "I've already gotten help elsewhere, and I've been told by others that you couldn't have helped me anyway."

  "Oh come on," she huffed. "That's just teasing. You can't just say something like that and then say it doesn't matter. Either you tell me or I send a letter to Vani, asking him what he sent you to me for."

  Ugh. He didn't think she was serious, but if she was that could easily lead to awkward questions about why Vani doesn't remember ever talking to Zorian in the past. He really had to learn how to watch his tongue better; he was becoming as bad as Zach.

  "It's very personal so I'd appreciate if you leave the matter alone, okay?" Zorian sighed. "The short story is that I had the misfortune to end up on the receiving end of a necromantic spell and had a piece of foreign soul spliced with my own. I wanted answers as to what exactly happened to me, and Vani suggested I approach your tribe for help. But since he had no idea how to actually find them, he named you as a possible contact."

  "Ah, that's… more serious than I thought," she said. "I'm sorry I pried. Are you…"

  "I'm fine," said Zorian, waving her off. "Don't worry about it. I found a nice priest that helped me learn how to sense and protect my soul, so there should be no further incidents like that."

  "I see. That's good," she said. She stared to the side for a few seconds, considering something, before refocusing back on him. "So did you at least get any good abilities out of the whole thing?"

  "I'm… not sure," Zorian said evasively. "I'm still not sure what exactly the newest addition to my soul is or what it does."

  "Really?" she frowned. "But didn't you say you learned how to sense your soul?"

  "Yes, so?"

  "So why don't you just focus on the spliced part for a while and try to figure out what it is? That sounds important to know. I know you probably want to forget about whatever happened to you, but as a shifter I can tell you it's very unhealthy to ignore parts of your soul because they won't ignore you."

  "Hold on, how would I sense a part of my soul?" Zorian frowned. "That wasn't a part of the lesson I received from the priest."

  Raynie opened her mouth to say something before quickly closing it. She stayed silent for a while, considering something.

  "You know," she finally said, "I'm not sure whether anyone other than shifters would even want to sense specific parts of their soul. No need, probably. Unless they intend to modify it somehow, and that's usually a bad idea. And also not something a priest would do, unless they're a very heretical priest. So your teacher probably didn't even know that it could be done."

  "Oh," Zorian said lamely.

  "Do you want me to teach you how to do it?" Raynie asked.

  "What?" asked Zorian. "Really? Aren't shifters very secretive about their magic?"

  "No?" Raynie said uncertainly. "Not about stuff like this, anyway. This is simple stuff, every shifter learns how to do this as a child. They have to if they want to make use of their abilities properly. I can't see any harm in teaching how to do it if you're willing, and I kind of feel like I owe you for all the help you've given me during the practice sessions you organized."

  Huh, something good came out of that time sink? This restart was just full of surprises.

  "Well, I'm willing," he shrugged. "Name the time and the place."

  He didn't have much hope that a technique designed to sense a part of your soul would give him anything particularly substantial about his soul marker, but it didn't hurt to try and see if it led to something.

  At the very least, Raynie implied it was a simple thing to learn, so it shouldn't become another thing vying for his time.

  ✦ ✧ ✦

  As it turned out, the method for sensing parts of your soul turned out to be rather simple when someone actually
pointed it out to you. Well, provided one had already went through the trouble of developing a personal soul sense beforehand. The results he got when he used it to inspect his soul were… better than he hoped. He actually could sense his marker and the way it was woven into his soul, but unlike shifters, he didn't get any instinctive understanding of its function and how to use it (if it could be actually used by the one it was stamped on). Which made sense, considering it was not actually a part of his soul in the way a shifter's alternate form was.

  Raynie herself seemed unfazed by the partial failure and told him to keep trying for a while. It usually took months for shifter to fully map out the way different parts of their soul interact, and while she doubted his case made him as complex as a shifter she felt it was too early to give up after a single day or two.

  Fair enough. He supposed he could set aside an hour or two every weekend and see if it led anywhere.

  In the meantime, the day of the summer festival approached and Zorian became consumed with preparations for the end of the restart. This time, he had something a bit more ambitious he wanted to try out.

  He was going to try and infiltrate the Ibasan main base during the invasion and pass through the dimensional gate to see where it led. And then, hopefully, find someone new and more interesting to interrogate on the other side.

  Chapter 46

  The Other Side

  "I'm ready," Zorian said. "You can start casting whenever you want."

  Estin, his current practice partner, gave him a solemn nod and started launching magic missiles at him in quick succession. Zorian calmly intercepted them all with his shield, dividing his attention between watching the way Estin was casting the spell so he could help him improve it afterwards and trying to work out the absolute minimum shield strength he could get away with to safely tank the attacks. A bad idea usually – if this had been a real spar, like the ones he had been having with Taiven recently, being as cheap as possible with his counters would be a recipe for disaster. But well, his practice group had pretty much given up on those when he was involved. He was too good and didn't know how to hold back properly, so these days he mostly served as a living target and dispenser of advice.

  Not that this made him useless to the group, far from it, but it did mean he had to get creative to get some personal benefit from attending these practice sessions.

  After fourteen magic missiles, Estin stopped casting and they switched positions, with Estin defending himself and Zorian attacking. The former Ibasan was the only person in the training group who could really tank one of his magic missiles at maximum power, so there was no need for Zorian to hold back. The floating earth spheres Estin used as shields were far more resilient than he initially gave them credit for, soaking up his magic missiles with ease. No matter what he tried, he could not even shatter one, much less punch through them. It was an interesting challenge.

  He had largely reached a plateau in terms of magic missile strength. Like all spells, magic missile had a limited amount of mana it could be supercharged with, and Zorian was at the point where he simply couldn't cram in more mana without hopelessly destabilizing the spell boundary. That was a shame, as magic missile was his most-energy efficient combat spell, thanks to the amount of practice he put into it. In fact, the spell was so mana-efficient at this point that it was playing merry hell with his ability to judge how far his mana reserves had grown. He could cast about 35 of them in quick succession, which was more than four times the amount he could cast before the time loop – that shouldn't be possible, especially since he was sure his mana reserves still hadn't topped out yet, so the most logical conclusion was that his magic missiles required significantly less mana now than they had in the past. The magnitude system probably wasn't designed with people like him in mind. He doubted a lot of people practiced magic missile as doggedly as he did.

  And yet, for all the refinement his magic missile now had, he knew from Kyron that he still hadn't reached the pinnacle of the spell. A properly executed magic missile would be totally invisible. Which his magic missiles weren't.

  He had an idea about that, though.

  No one in the practice group other than Estin could reliably tank one of his magic missiles without their shields giving way. Even his normal missiles often proved too much for them, never mind if he really powered them up. As a consequence, he had been forced to learn how to adjust his attacks downwards to something they can deal with. He quickly found that trying to purposely weaken his missiles was pretty hard. Strategically sabotaging the spell boundary to make the spell less mana efficient was inelegant and offended his professional pride, but trying to make magic missile technically perfect yet functionally weaker was not as easy as it appeared at first glance. His reflexes, honed over the years spent in the time loop, and even the very construction of the spell itself naturally tended towards a certain optimum effect. Going against it was a constant struggle.

  Still, he had gotten the hang of the ability to dial down the missile's power after a few days, and had discovered that when he dialed the power low enough, he could get the shine and opacity to drop like a stone. At the very lowest point, he could produce missiles that were nothing but a faint warp in the air – and sadly, about as effective on anything they hit. Still, practicing the spell at these lower power levels made it easier to see the faults and imperfections he made in the spell boundary, and fixing those immediately led to a small but noticeable increase in his mana efficiency when casting his normal version of magic missile.

  He had a feeling this was the secret to effectively developing proper invisible force spells – don't start by making normal versions invisible, instead reduce the power and work on making a weaker version more technically perfect and mana efficient. Then steadily work your way up until you end up with a flawlessly executed, fully-powered version.

  None of the books he'd found actually outlined this method as a possible training regimen, instead suggesting endless repetition of the spell as a method, but Zorian felt his idea had merit. He had little to lose by trying it, since the officially suggested training method consisted of mindlessly practicing the normal version for years and even decades at the time. Yes, he was stuck in a time loop, but there had to be a better method than that.

  After he'd failed to get through Estin's earth defense, he called for a brief pause to let everyone replenish their mana reserves. He personally didn't need the break – he was purposely using only a small fraction of his reserves during these practice sessions, and he had already honed his ability to assimilate ambient mana as far as it could go, so it generally took him only a few minutes to go back to his top form. The others needed to catch their breath, however, and he had to be mindful of that.

  If nothing else, he was learning the limitations of people around his age. He had honestly forgotten what it was like to be on their level, and had trouble judging what people his age found challenging or even downright impossible. Hopefully this experience would make him better equipped to pretend he was a normal student in the future, or at least more aware of what would attract people's attention and to what extent.

  The break was eventually interrupted when Edwin marched into the gathering, the latest golem they'd made following after him.

  "Hey Edwin," Naim greeted. "What brings you here? Finally decided to join us?"

  "Ha, no. No, I'm here because of this," he said, grasping the little golem by its shoulders and proudly pushing it forwards so the group could take a look at it.

  The construct was pretty impressive, even if Zorian was a little biased in thinking that. Being little less than a meter tall, the golem did not look particularly intimidating, but he doubted anyone would mistake it for a harmless toy. Its slender, humanoid figure was made out of alchemically-treated steel and powered by a comparatively massive crystalized mana battery that supplied it with plenty of power. Its movements were smooth and natural, and despite Edwin's rough handling, it never lost its balance like Zorian's previous golems
would have. The golem looked and moved like a credible little helper and last ditch defender/distraction.

  They did a good job of making it, Zorian felt. Enlisting Edwin to help with his golem making had definitely been the right decision.

  "Neat," Naim shrugged. "That's what you and Zorian have been working on all this time, isn't it? What about it?"

  "Yes," Zorian agreed. The last time they met, he left the golem with Edwin so the other boy could run a bunch of tests to see if it worked properly. Did Edwin find some critical flaw in the construct or did he just come to brag about their success? "Is there something wrong with it?"

  "It?" Edwin asked with faux outrage. "His name is Chelik, and he's absolutely perfect! I mean, just look at him! Everyone, meet Chelik. Chelik, say hi to the nice folks gathered here."

  The golem quietly gave a brief wave before letting its metallic hand unceremoniously drop again.

  Yeah, apparently Edwin just wanted to brag. Zorian caught Estin and Kopriva rolling their eyes at the spectacle, while Briam and Raynie seemed honestly impressed by the little golem. Naim just continued smiling serenely, and Zorian couldn't tell whether Naim was honestly happy for his friend or just humoring the guy.

  "Unfortunately, there was one part of him that I just couldn't test properly," Edwin said. "We warded this little beauty with every defensive ward we could manage. Well, Zorian did, I just kind of watched and took notes. But never mind that, the point is that Chelik here should be able to shrug off a lot of damage and disruptive spells and…"

  "You want us to try and damage it," Estin surmised.

  "Yes," Edwin agreed with a grin. "I'll just move aside and then you can all just attack it together."

  "All of us?" Raynie asked curiously.

  "Yeah," Edwin nodded. "He's really tough, so don't worry about overkill. I don't think any of you can really do anything to it individually."