Mother of Learning: ARC 2

5

“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, I would need to know the best way to skin a winter wolf, 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 the blood and grime off his hands and clothes. At some point, he would 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 belonging to an old witch called Silverlake, one of the possible sources from Kael’s 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 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 pinpoint 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 had 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 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 had 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 mosquitoes 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. As the lizard-like creature tried to haul itself onto the shore, he quickly backpedaled 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 the presence of more such monsters and then, having discovered none, slowly approached the corpse to inspect it.

It was a salamander. An enormous brown salamander with a massive triangular head and beady black eyes that probably couldn’t actually see anything. It was a miracle something that big could actually hide in such a shallow stream, 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 had nearly fallen into a ravine on his first day in the forest, 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?” The female voice was harsh and Zorian spun around in search of it.

There was no one present as far as Zorian could see, and his mind sense detected only animals, but he still managed to determine fairly quickly where the voice was coming from—a 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.

“You would be Miss Silverlake, I presume?”

The raven answered him with a burst of laughter. It was really strange to see a bird laugh like that.

“Miss, am I? Well aren’t you a polite one. Don’t get too many of those these days. Why, maybe I’ll even listen to whatever silly request brought you here,” the bird said. “Now why are you just standing around? Didn’t I give you a task to accomplish?”

With a sigh, Zorian turned away from the bird and started casting a levitation spell to haul the giant amphibian out of the water.