Teshingrad also had a mage guild office, so he could pick up his badge there.
He disembarked at Nigelvar without complications and immediately set out towards Teshingrad. Unfortunately for him, the storm that invariably hit Cyoria on the first day of every restart was apparently a more wide-scale phenomenon than he first thought, because he found himself in the middle of a raging rainstorm halfway there. His rain shield thankfully held out long enough for him to reach one of the roadside inns and take shelter there. He ended up spending the night there, slightly annoyed at the delay despite not having any concrete plans for the restart. It did not help that the food was terrible and the people kept giving him funny looks. It was probably his clothes — the ones his mother made him wear were clearly a bit fancy and out of the price range of most commoners, and he didn’t have the chance to change before entering the inn. He made sure to put a basic warding scheme on his room to deter would be thieves and attackers, but thankfully no one tried anything while he slept.
Having survived the night at the inn without incident, Zorian departed the place early in the morning and reached Teshingrad a few hours later… only to get unpleasantly surprised when he tried to pick up his badge. As it turned out, Ilsa had not been exaggerating when she said the badge was expensive. It would cost him half of his savings to have one of those made! It was a highway robbery in Zorian’s opinion, but the man he spoke with in the mage guild office wouldn’t hear anything about lowering the price. Instead he pointed Zorian at a nearby wall where a job panel stood. It was similar to the job panel posted at the academy in Cyoria, only the jobs were much more reasonably priced, since the town did not have the same glut of amateur mages that Cyoria did. It would take two days for Zorian’s badge to be ready for pickup, so he figured he may as well earn some money while he waited to replenish his money stash. It wasn’t like he had something better to do.
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.