The second was just as crucial. Whatever knowledge about the time loop the matriarch gained behind his back, she almost certainly did it by ripping it out of someone’s mind. Someone who wasn’t Red Robe — probably a handful of normal people not aware of the time loop but still holding a small part of the puzzle. If he could identify these key people and read their minds he could find out what the big secret was. In other words, he needed to develop his mind magic, ethics be damned. He didn’t think he could do this on his own, so he would have to seek out other aranea webs for this.
Lastly, he was embarrassingly powerless against Red Robe in their last encounter, and if the other mage hadn’t made some big mistakes when handling him he would have lost utterly. He needed better traps and ambush tactics, better combat skills in order to not be utterly doomed when said ambushes fail, and better movement magic to retreat and escape when said combat skills prove insufficient. As far as he could tell, the only effective way to improve here was simple practice — in other words, going around and looking for trouble. The only problem with this was that this went against pretty much every instinct he had.
It would have to be done, though. He figured that delving into the Dungeon and taking a few restarts to visit the untamed wilderness to the north should do for a start, and he would figure out later where to go from there.
In line with those goals, he decided that his third post-aranea restart was going to be a bit more systematic than his previous wanderings. After marking down the locations of Kael’s associates on a map, he chose a medium-sized town called Knyazov Dveri as his next destination. The town was close to the northern wilderness and had a notable dungeon access, so there should be plenty of opportunities to practice his combat skills; it was situated on top of a Rank 2 mana well, which was fairly anemic as far as mana wells went but was nonetheless better than nothing; and finally, it was roughly in the center of a diffuse cloud of Kael’s associates scattered throughout the region, so he would have easy access to the rest of them should the one in the city prove to be a dead end. It was, as far as Zorian could tell, an ideal place to start at.
The next day he teleported to the nearest town he could reach with his teleport spell and set off towards his target.
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Chapter 028
Cauldron
‘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, that I would need to know what the best way to skin a winter wolf was, 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 intended to 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 of an old witch called ‘Silverlake’, who was one of the possible sources Kael had named in his 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 herself 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 pin point 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 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 in 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 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 mosquitos 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. He quickly backpedaled as the huge lizard-like creature tried to haul itself onto the shore 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 possible presence of more such monsters and then, having discovered none, slowly approached the corpse to inspect it.
It was a salamander. A huge brown salamander with a massive triangular head and beady black eyes that probably couldn’t actually see anything. It was a miracle that something that big could actually hide in a stream this shallow, 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 nearly fell into a ravine on his first day here, 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?” a harsh female voice answered him.
There was no one present as far as Zorian could see, and his mind sense detected only animals, but he still managed to detect fairly quickly where the voice was coming from — the source of the speech was the raven perched on a nearby branch.