Mother of Learning: ARC 2

2

Right,” Ilsa said dubiously. “As I was saying, you can pick up your badge when you finish school since it’s so expensive and—”

“What if I want to pick it up now?” Zorian interrupted. His savings should be enough to fund a month of aimless wandering so he probably didn’t need the badge for work, but he didn’t like the idea of keeping his spellcasting abilities a secret lest some overzealous policeman report him to the guild and ultimately bring the academy in. Having a badge to prove his certification and membership would allow him to do as he pleased for the most part.

“You can pick one up at any of the mage guild offices scattered around Eldemar,” Ilsa said. “Most large cities and regional centers have one.”

Oh good. He had feared he could only pick one up at the academy or something.

Eventually, Ilsa left, her parting words being that she looked forward to seeing him in class. Huh, that was new. Did she suspect he intended to blow off school to do his own thing? Well whatever. Even if she did, it did not matter much—the academy’s response to students who didn’t show up for class had always been rather anemic. They would send a letter to his parents informing them that he wasn’t attending his classes, and that was it. And fortunately for Zorian, no one would be at home to read the mail by the time the letter arrived, since his parents were going to Koth to visit their precious Daimen.

Satisfied that his course had been set for the moment, he picked up his things and set off towards the train station.

As the train departed from Cirin and started its journey towards Cyoria, Zorian began to relax. Train rides always made him kind of sleepy, and the steady rhythm and rumble sapped the tension straight out of his body and mind. Moreover, Red Robe was nowhere to be seen. Hours had passed—enough time for someone of Red Robe’s abilities to prepare and mount an attack on the Kazinski household several times over—and no hostile force had struck against him or his family, so chances were that Red Robe wasn’t coming at all. That meant his identity was probably safe for now, which was a major relief. If he hadn’t discovered Zorian’s identity in the previous restart, he probably wouldn’t discover it at all—a month was ample time to track Zorian down if Red Robe knew where to look. He wouldn’t really relax fully until several restarts passed as peacefully as this one, but this was an encouraging sign.

He just had to make sure he didn’t make any more stupid mistakes in the future.

The train stopped for a moment and then continued onward towards Cyoria. Zorian opted to stay on the train for now, despite his initial intention of getting off the train at the very first station after Cirin. The first stop after Cirin was an even smaller village that gravitated towards Cirin and had nothing notable to recommend it to anyone. Disembarking there would be noted and remarked upon by the inhabitants, and there was a chance that someone might recognize him and report him to his family before they could leave for Koth. And that was the kind of drama he really didn’t need. Besides, what the hell would he do in a tiny, unfamiliar village like that? No, it was far better to wait until Nigelvar and then travel on foot to Teshingrad. Nigelvar was also a small town of little note, but it was an important enough transport junction that no one would find a traveler who disembarked there particularly strange. Teshingrad was a regional capital. It couldn’t hold a candle to Eldemar, Korsa, or Cyoria, but it was big and influential enough that newcomers were normal.

Teshingrad also had a mage guild office, so he could pick up his badge there.

He disembarked at Nigelvar without complications and immediately set out towards Teshingrad. Unfortunately for him, the storm that invariably hit Cyoria on the first day of every restart was apparently a more wide-scale phenomenon than he first thought, and he found himself in the middle of a raging rainstorm halfway there. His rain shield held out long enough for him to reach one of the roadside inns and take shelter. He ended up spending the night, slightly annoyed at the delay despite not having any concrete plans for the restart. It did not help that the food was terrible and the people kept giving him funny looks. It was probably his clothes—the ones his mother made him wear were clearly a bit fancy and out of the price range of most commoners, and he hadn’t had the chance to change before entering the inn. He made sure to put a basic warding scheme on his room to deter would-be thieves and attackers, but thankfully no one tried anything while he slept.

Having survived the night at the inn without incident, Zorian departed the place early in the morning and reached Teshingrad a few hours later… only to be unpleasantly surprised when he tried to pick up his badge. As it turned out, Ilsa had not been exaggerating when she said the badge was expensive. It would cost him half of his savings to have one made! It was highway robbery, in Zorian’s opinion, but the man he spoke with in the mage guild office wouldn’t hear anything about lowering the price. Instead, he pointed Zorian to a nearby wall where a job panel stood. It was similar to the job panel posted at the academy in Cyoria, only the jobs were much more reasonably priced, since the town did not have the same glut of amateur mages that Cyoria did. It would take two days for Zorian’s badge to be ready for pickup, so he decided to earn some money while he waited and replenish his money stash. It wasn’t like he had something better to do.

The job list was… rather more eclectic than he hoped. He was sure that two chickens and a bag of flour was a fair price for fixing up a broken wall, but such payment was of no use to him. And the couple of job postings that did not define any concrete payment sounded very suspicious to him. Even so, he still found plenty of things to occupy his time. Thus, for the next three days, Zorian helped with a bunch of repairs, tracked down a missing goat, carried a stack of stone blocks from one end of the town to the other on one of his floating discs, helped the local alchemist harvest her herbs, and eradicated a particularly nasty rat infestation in one of the private granaries on the edge of town. None of it was exceedingly difficult, but Zorian would be lying if he said he didn’t learn anything in the process. Knowing a spell in an academic situation was not the same as using it to solve concrete problems.

“Well, there you go,” the man behind the counter said, handing Zorian his badge. It was quite unexceptional in appearance, though Zorian could feel a complex spell formula embedded in it when his fingers touched the surface. He would have to take one of these things apart someday and discover how it worked. “You can apply to any job you want with that, not just the ones on the job board. Nice work, by the way. It’s been a while since someone went through the town and helped out the townsfolk like that.”

“I didn’t really do it out of charity,” Zorian grumbled.

“Oh, I know,” the man said. “But there are a lot of mages who would consider such petty jobs to be beneath them and refuse to do them out of principle.”

“A lot of them look like something the civilians could do on their own,” Zorian admitted. “And no offense, but why don’t you help if it’s something that so desperately needs doing? I kind of doubt the guild would place a non-mage as their representative for the area.”

“Ha!” The man laughed, not at all insulted by the accusation. “I do in fact help… when I find the time. This position is a lot busier than it appears, trust me on that. And while those jobs are admittedly not very desperate, most of them would take great effort and a lot of time to accomplish without magic, whereas even a baby mage like you can solve them in less than an hour with a handful of spells. So yeah, maybe you didn’t save the world in the past few days or whatever, but the people you helped are certainly glad you made their lives a little easier. The townsfolk saved some time, you got some easy cash to spend, and I got rid of some of my more annoying obligations. Everyone’s a winner, no?”