Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

Well, the inner layer of her pocket dimension. The cottage itself was also hidden in its own pocket dimension, which is why Zorian couldn’t find it by just wandering the forest. But the cottage dimension was just the outer layer of her hidden world, one that could be deployed (thereby becoming actually accessible to visitors) and compressed (seemingly disappearing from the world entirely) on a whim. Nested inside this cottage dimension was another, bigger pocket dimension, which served as Silverlake’s actual home and base of operations.

In Silverlake’s own words, the cottage was just a front to fool idiot visitors .

As for the contents of the inner layer, it consisted of three things: a nice, luxurious two-story house, an expansive herb garden full of rare magical plants and a heavily warded alchemical workshop where she did most of her work.

Yes, a powerful witch that was clearly very proud of her traditions and made distinctions between alchemy and potion making had a fully equipped alchemical workshop that would be familiar to any conventional alchemist out in the major cities. Zorian couldn’t help but find that a little amusing.

It had been five days since then, and thus far Silverlake was keeping to her side of the deal. Zorian was afraid she would try to shirk her duties as an instructor, giving them inscrutable training regimens that weren’t certain to work before disappearing into her workshop for the rest of the day, but this didn’t happen. Probably because they were deep inside her home base and there was a real danger that they could torch her home and herb garden if they felt cheated by her. Or maybe because she really wanted the Gate spell modifications and knew that the level of cooperation she could expect out of Zach and Zorian in regards to that would directly correlate to the level of dedication she showed when teaching them how to make pocket dimensions. Whatever her reasons, Silverlake actually gave them long, exhaustive explanations and even created a few fist-sized pocket spaces in front of them as a demonstration.

Creating a pocket dimension was deceptively simple. The basic idea was to stretch and fold a chosen volume of space into a miniature spatial bottle and sort of… cap it. This cap was called the anchor point and it prevented the folded space from snapping back into its natural form the moment it was no longer being forced into shape, as space was naturally wont to do. After that, the pocket dimension could be gradually inflated to the maximum size the anchor point could bear.

Obviously, the creation of an anchor point was the most important part of pocket dimension creation. It was the place where the dimension was connected to the main reality, and served as both an entrance and as a foundation upon which the stability of the dimension ultimately rested. Its size, power and sophistication determined how big and stable a pocket dimension could be. If it was ever destroyed, the dimension attached to it would quickly meet the same fate.

Neither Zach nor Zorian had yet managed to successfully create a stable anchor point, no matter how minor. The process was every bit as hard as learning how to cast the Gate spell, except it required even more mana and attention to detail. Zorian was somewhat annoyed to realize that Zach would probably get the grasp of the ability far sooner than he would, simply because he had far more mana to burn on training than Zorian did.

It didn’t help that Zorian had heavily stunted his ability to recover mana by maintaining six different simulacrums. Funny how he invented a brand new method of using simulacrums, halving the maintenance cost of each one… and then promptly doubled the amount of simulacrums he kept going at any particular time.

Currently, Zorian was sitting on the ground in the Silverlake’s pocket dimension, reviewing reports from his simulacrums while he waited for his mana reserves to recover. One of the simulacrums was in Koth, brainstorming how to get to the other pieces of the Key with Daimen. Another was raiding the academy library for restricted theory books on advanced dimensionalism. The third one was arranging a trade deal with one of the minor experts they were approaching for work. The fourth and fifth ones were working on upgrades to the simulacrum’s golem frames. Not quite something he’d invest so heavily in normally, but he had little choice – all simulacrums went on a strike until he agreed to permanently station two of the copies on that particular task.

Finally, the sixth and last simulacrum was working on something very delicate and possibly dangerous – mental enhancements.

It was pretty low-key for now. He didn’t want an insane copy of him rampaging around, or worse, going after him. Additionally, the simulacrums were still essentially him, which meant they were not at all okay with thoughtlessly risking their minds. Taking into account the possible risks to his own safety, and the disturbing possibility that his own simulacrums might mutiny if he pushed things too far in this direction, Zorian had ordered the last simulacrum to limit himself to self-inflicted illusions for now. Things like figuring out how to block out noise and other distractions, add highlights and reminders to his perception, and so on. It was a very orthodox, very safe sub-field of mental enhancements. Because it only modified the caster’s senses, not their thoughts and emotions, there was only so much one could mess up, and little of it was unfixable. Human mages had done quite a lot of work in this regard, mostly because they had been trying to make divinations that could display their output though illusions projected on the caster’s senses. Of course, Zorian also consulted the various aranean webs too. The Luminous Advocates and Perfect Phantasm Crafters were the two webs most helpful to this project, though he had also received notable help from several otherwise minor webs such as Band of Fog and Dreaming Refuge.

"Boy, I told you to keep an eye on that cauldron," Silverlake snapped at him, breaking him out of his thoughts. "It’s going to boil over if you keep daydreaming like that. Quit it. It’s unprofessional."

"Ugh," Zorian grunted unhappily, throwing a glance at the huge iron cauldron to his left. Silverlake did basically rope him into helping her with her alchemy – sorry, potion making – while he recovered. However it was only supposed to be for 10 minutes and she had only come back now to take over, after at least half an hour had passed.

"We never agreed I would be your personal assistant when we made the trade. I should start charging you for these things," Zorian muttered, just loud enough for her to hear him. She pretended he didn’t say anything. He raised his voice at her. "What is that cauldron even doing? If you’re going to recruit me in your projects, you should at least tell me what’s going on."

"It’s an experiment," Silverlake said distractedly, too busy cleaning some kind of carrot-like wild root to look him in the eye while speaking. "I’m sure you noticed me chopping up those runty salamanders in the last few days. I’m trying to artificially concentrate the salamander’s regenerative essence to see if I can create a workable substitute for the hundred-year-old salamander that I lack. Probably won’t work, but eh. It’s worth a try."

"Regenerative essence?" Zorian said, frowning. "Is that what the giant salamander is for?"

"Of course," Silverlake said. "They can regrow anything, repair any damage. If you carve them carefully enough, both halves will regrow into fully healthy, functional copies. Useful thing, that. Most healing magic simply enhances and accelerates the body’s natural healing abilities, so it doesn’t work well on some wounds. The salamander’s regenerative essence, if concentrated enough and combined with some other ingredients… why, it might even turn back the clock and undo the effect of old age!"