The job list was… rather more eclectic than he hoped. He was sure that 2 chickens and a bag of flour was a fair price for fixing up a broken wall, but it was of no use to him personally. 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 with. 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 particularly difficult, but Zorian would be lying if he said he didn’t learn anything in the process. It was a lot different knowing a spell academically and trying to use 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 to see what that was about. “You can apply to any job you want with that, not just unofficial ones like 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 efforts and a lot of time to accomplish without magic, whereas even a baby mage like yourself 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?”
“Hmm,” said Zorian noncommittally.
“So… do you have a specific job already waiting for you or are you in search of one?” the man asked.
“Nothing specific,” Zorian said. “I was going to wander around for a while and see what catches my eye.”
“Ah, I see. Well, I can recommend a few neighboring sites if you’re interested in checking them out.”
“Sure,” shrugged Zorian. “It can’t hurt to check things out, I guess.”
“Alternatively, if you’re looking for a better paying version of the sort of one-off jobs you’ve been doing for the past few days, I recommend you go north, towards the Sarokian Highlands. Always plenty of work at the frontier, whether it’s in infrastructure building or hunting monsters and whatnot. Much more dangerous than hunting overgrown rats, of course, but also a lot more profitable.”
“An interesting idea,” Zorian said. The only problem was that Cyoria was the main springboard for the expansion efforts into the Highlands. From what Zorian could figure out from the maps, it was very hard to bypass Cyoria when going that far north, and he didn’t want to be anywhere near the city for the foreseeable future. “You know, I can’t help but notice that the mage guild is pushing the settlement of the Sarokian Highlands pretty aggressively. What’s up with that?”
“Ah, well, it’s the whole thing with the Splintering, you see? Successor States are always looking to one-up each other and searching for advantages that could let them overcome their enemies. Eldemar has a nice big access to untamed wilderness to the north, so it would be a bit silly not to take advantage of it. It’s a place rich in natural resources, I hear, both magical and mundane.”
Zorian spent an hour with the man, discussing the region and his options. He didn’t really want to settle down in any place in this particular restart, but he supposed he might want to try out some of the options presented by the man in the future, and in that case it might be convenient to have visited the location already and thus be capable of teleporting there directly.
So for the next two weeks, Zorian walked around the region, visiting various workshops, libraries, alchemists, herbalists and so on. Or just plain sight-seeing and doing odd jobs for the villagers and townsfolk he encountered along the way. He did not stop his magical training, but in the absence of any sort of clear goal or a convenient repository of spells like the academy library had been, he defaulted to the most basic of advancement methods — shaping exercises. It helped that most of the rural mages he met on his journey had some private shaping exercise they were willing to show him… and unlike Xvim, who simply told him the end result he wanted and refused to elaborate, they actually had detailed instructions about what to do and in what order.
By the end of the time loop, Zorian had learned how to peel the surface of a marble away, layer by layer; how to do the same to an apple and other fruit; how to cut paper by dragging his finger along the cutting line; how to induce a gentle ripple in a pool of water without touching it; how to levitate a blob of water and shape it into a perfect sphere; then freeze that sphere; and finally, how to telekinetically draw geometric shapes in the dust. None of those were really mastered in the Xvim sense of the word, but luckily Xvim wasn’t anywhere near him this time so he could simply move on to the next exercise when he felt he had absorbed it to his liking. Shaping exercises were a lot less annoying when he didn’t have to keep doing them until they could be done flawlessly, he found.
He also continued practicing his mind powers. They were extremely important, he felt — if it weren’t for them, he would have never survived his altercation with Red Robe intact. At some point he planned to seek out other aranean colonies and execute his ‘exploit the time loop to slowly leech aranean magic from them’ plan, but right now he couldn’t do it. It was too soon, his memories of aranea and their demise (and the role his obliviousness and carelessness played in it) too fresh in his mind. So instead he simply used his empathy on every person he spoke to and practiced connecting to the minds of various animals. He particularly liked walking near streams and ponds and taking control of the dragonflies flitting about in order to make them perform dizzying acrobatics around him. Insects had such rudimentary minds that taking total control over them was exceedingly easy, though figuring out how to puppeteer them effectively took some doing and he still couldn’t keep control over more than 3 dragonflies at the same time.
Time passed. For the most part he managed to keep himself busy enough that he didn’t have enough time to be depressed, but all his worries and feelings of powerlessness returned in full force every evening as he prepared himself for sleep. Every plan he tried to make seemed hollow, doomed to failure. He wasn’t powerful enough. He didn’t know enough. Red Robe had years and years of experience over him, and that was never going to change.