Mother of Learning: ARC 4

4

It was fascinating to watch how quickly and effectively the academy could mobilize itself when it really cared about something. Perhaps it was because House Noveda had some secret ally among the academy leadership or because the academy saw the whole situation as a chance to score some free reputation points, but they really did assemble a team to go check up on the location Zorian would provide them with.

He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t a little intimidated by the attention suddenly directed at him. For one thing, he wasn’t actually completely certain the tracking spell would work. While he personally didn’t think it very likely, it was still possible that Zach’s disappearance was really just some sort of time loop safeguard and that he was literally nowhere to be found. It would be quite awkward if that happened.

Thankfully, the tracking spell worked just fine. Zach was just outside of Cyoria, in one of the smaller private estates that technically wasn’t owned by Tesen but could be connected to his family if one looked deeper. The group assembled by the academy immediately stormed the place, presenting official-looking authorization documents when questioned about their motives and identity. There were guards in place, but they were apparently not paid enough to face off against a numerically superior force from a well-known institution, and they quickly decided to stand down and give them free rein. The secret basement Zach was being held in was cunningly hidden, but since Zorian was there to serve as a living tracking device, it was simple enough to find it.

Zach was in a soul-damage-induced coma, just like Zorian expected him to be. Due to his inability to cast anything, including soul diagnosis spells, he couldn’t be sure why Zach had ended up in a worse state than he did, but he had his suspicions. Zach’s control over his own soul was much weaker and cruder than Zorian’s, as was his ability to retain mental discipline. If he woke up early on in the restart like Zorian did and had to fight to stay awake and prevent his soul from going berserk…

Well. Even Zorian had found that struggle to be a challenge.

In any case, Zorian was now presented with a new problem. Even though he had been crucial in tracking down Zach, he now couldn’t access the other boy’s unconscious body at all! The discovery kicked up a media storm that didn’t look like it was going to die down any time soon, and Zach had been transferred to an expensive hospital and placed under guard. Zorian was not a family member, nor did he have any other known links to the Noveda heir, and many people were suddenly questioning his involvement in all this. The academy was taking his side for now, but Ilsa told him things were a bit delicate at the moment. Tesen was trying to distance himself from the matter, bitterly denying he had anything to do with Zach’s coma or imprisonment outside of Cyoria, and his faction pushed hard for Zorian to be arrested so he could be ‘vigorously questioned’.

No matter. Even if Zorian could see Zach, what would he do? Before he visited Zach in the hospital, he had to figure out how to accelerate the healing. Who knew how long it would take for Zach to wake up if he had to rely on his natural rate of recovery? Fortunately, this was something Zorian could actually tackle with his current abilities.

Sudomir Kandrei, the mayor of Knyazov Dveri, just like many necromancers, often ended up damaging his soul in various ways while training and practicing his craft. As such, he had invested a lot of time in tracking down methods of accelerating his recovery, and Zorian had made sure to steal most of these out of his head during their interrogation sessions. A lot of these were purely personal soul magic exercises that were useful only to the soul mage using them, or complex ritual spells that he wasn’t capable of casting right now, but a few actually came in the form of potions that could be administered to others.

And alchemy did not require any mana shaping. His inability to do magic did not hold him back here in the slightest. So long as he could track down and buy the appropriate materials, he would be able to create the potions in question.

Getting materials for such a relatively exotic potion was anything but easy, of course. Many of them were not sold on the open market, and even if they were, Zorian did not have enough money on him to buy them. He thought about robbing invader caches again, but his lack of magic made that a far riskier proposition than it usually was. Additionally, he had attracted quite a bit of attention, so going out for a little midnight stealing was probably unwise. Thus, he ended up amassing the necessary funds the hard way. He bought a bunch of raw materials with his available money, made a handful of rare, hard-to-make potions with them, sold them for money, used that money to buy even more raw materials, and so on. It took him a week of that to get enough money to buy what he actually wanted and then another four days before he managed to track all the ingredients down and finish the potions.

The end result was three different bottles, one holding a milky white liquid, another a blood-red syrup that looked as if it was constantly boiling, and the last one a glossy, pitch-black pill that floated in the center of the bottle as if weightless.

He gathered up all three of them and departed in the direction of the hospital that held Zach. He was still not allowed to visit him, but who cared about that? Through a strategic use of sleep bombs and other disabling potions, he managed to gain access to Zach’s room, after which he proceeded to force-feed the three soul cures to Zach’s unconscious body, one after another.

He left immediately. It would take a while for the potions to take effect, and it would be best if he were far away from the scene of the crime when people found the trail of unconscious bodies he had left in his wake.

The news of the second ‘attack’ on Zach while he was in the hospital kicked up another round of controversy and several dramatic vows by the hospital staff and city authorities that the perpetrator was going to be caught any day now. Considering that not even Zorian’s worst detractors seemed to suspect him made him rather doubtful of that claim, though. One amusing detail was that the hospital claimed they had caught the attacker in the act and ‘heroically fought him off’, which was why Zach supposedly hadn’t been hurt more as a result of the break-in.

While he waited to see what the result of his intervention would turn out to be, Zorian looked into what had happened to Alanic, since the battle priest was one of the few competent and reliable soul mages he knew of. Sadly, with Zorian being unable to teleport and busy with the whole Zach situation, he couldn’t intervene in time to save Alanic from Sudomir’s assassins, so the man was already dead. Frustrating. It did make him curious about how those assassins were even capable of killing someone of Alanic’s caliber. Investigating the case a little revealed the priest was essentially ambushed while sleeping, allowing his attackers to kill him before he realized what was going on. That… made sense, yeah. If Zorian saved Lukav, Sudomir panicked and acted prematurely, trying to kill Alanic through sheer force before Lukav could contact him and tell him someone was killing people like them. If the assassination of Lukav went through without issues, Sudomir would act with due caution and planning and kill Alanic in his sleep.

In any case, the treatment worked far better than he had hoped—four days after he fed Zach those potions, his fellow time traveler woke up from the coma. Not long after that, he demanded to see Zorian, which pretty much shut down any further attempts to keep Zorian from visiting the hospital.

“How are you feeling?” Zorian asked his fellow time traveler