He also visited several of the experts Xvim had named in his notebook.
He opted not to attack and memory-probe them yet and simply tried to talk to them to see what he could gain from them peacefully. Xvim probably would have gloated about the results of that method—they weren’t willing to share their best tricks for any price. On the bright side, even the stuff they were willing to share was useful to Zorian. Of note was a woman who specialized in magic sensing techniques. With her help, he was able to identify several dead ends among his ideas and narrow down which creatures had the most useful magical senses to try to obtain. Apparently an eye beast—the floating purple blob covered with eyes that had killed him in one of the restarts—was one of the best choices for this.
Sadly, when Z
