Mother of Learning: ARC 2

4

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 mor— 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 all right 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 in Teshingrad—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 in the previous restart and continued his wanderings.

Being a mage out in the periphery was a lot different from 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. Actual spellcasting would eat into his mana far too quickly, so he continued focusing on shaping exercises.

He was also starting to miss the academy library. He had begun to consider its reputation overblown, 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 was 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 contained only the most basic spells. If you wanted anything exotic, you were directed to some other settlement or private collection or whatnot.

He also found 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. That kind of place provided a whole lot of resources that were hard to acquire elsewhere.

But Zorian’s journey continued. He was determined to visit every large city in the country, if nothing else 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. Not a master detective, then, that was good to know. Buoyed by the knowledge that he had 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 when they did finally encounter one another. But he saw no need to waste his time looking for a boy who 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 could consider going back to Cyoria and looking 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 counter soul magic to avoid being blindsided when dealing with Red Robe. He also wanted to figure out what Red Robe had done 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 priority was just as crucial. Whatever knowledge about the time loop the matriarch had gained behind his back, she had almost certainly done it by ripping it out of someone’s mind. Someone who wasn’t Red Robe. Most likely he was looking for several someones—a handful of normal people unaware of the time loop but still holding a small part of the puzzle. If he could identify these key people and read their minds, he could find out what the big secret was. 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 had proven to be 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 stay alive when said ambushes failed, 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. Delving into the Dungeon and taking a few restarts to visit the untamed wilderness to the north would 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.