Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

They didn’t find out much from Jornak after that. Although Zorian personally found the man’s choices to be rather questionable, he was ultimately just a man who found a dead teenager in his guest room and panicked. If Jornak hadn’t knowingly helped the Cult of the Dragon Below so many times in the past, Zorian would have even felt sorry for the man.

About fifteen minutes after Zach and Zorian left Jornak’s room, another group of Mage Guild personnel arrived, accompanied by several representatives from Noble House Boranova, and took over the scene. Alanic informed Zach and Zorian that this marked the end of his involvement with the case… and thus the end of their ability to examine the house or question the man.

It was just as well, though. The restart was coming to a close, so there was not much time for a detailed examination. Additionally, it would have been better if they arrived in the man’s house at the start of the restart, before he had a chance to stuff Veyers' body in an icebox. And in the next restart, they would do just that.

Until then, Zach and Zorian agreed to keep speculation about what this meant about Red Robe to a minimum.

Despite numerous issues that had cropped up in their search, in the end Zach and Zorian managed to gather all the ingredients Silverlake needed (or at least claimed she needed) for a soul perception potion. It took them most of the remaining time to do so, however, and by then the end of the restart was looming close. Thus, they were somewhat anxious as they waited for Silverlake to finish making the potion.

"It should work," Silverlake told them. "I mean, I’ve never actually made that specific potion in my life and the old witch recipe that describes it is not nearly as clear and precise as the modern recipes you two are familiar with… but since it’s me making the attempt, it will probably work out fine."

"Yes, yes, we get it – you’re awesome," Zach said with a tired nod.

"And don’t you forget it," Silverlake said shamelessly. "It shouldn’t take long. Gathering the ingredients is the time-consuming part; the actual potion making could be done in as little as two hours. You two go play outside while I work. You can practice your pocket dimension creation skills or something."

"You have a real gift for finding exceptionally infuriating teachers, Zorian," Zach told him after they got out of Silverlake’s earshot.

"Yes, but they tend to be exceptionally capable ones, too," Zorian countered. He took out a small box from his jacket pocket and flipped it upside down, allowing a stream of marbles to pour out of the box and into his waiting palm. A moderately perceptive person would quickly realize that there was no way all these marbles could fit into such a small box.

"Only 28 marbles?" Zach smirked. "Amateur. I managed to cram 32 of them inside a box like that."

Zorian gave Zach a suspicious look, but it didn’t seem like his fellow time traveler was lying about that.

"Damn it," Zorian grumbled. "All those specialized shaping exercises and I still can’t advance faster in this field than you do."

"I have six times more mana than you do and you’re further hampered by the number of simulacrums you keep around you at all times," Zach said with a careless shrug. "It’s hard to make up for such a disadvantage."

He was right, of course. Truthfully, it was amazing he was able to keep up with Zach’s learning rate at all. It still made him feel a little annoyed that he lost their informal competition about who would advance faster in the field of pocket dimension creation.

Oh well – there was still time to catch up. They would be chipping away at the topic for quite a few restarts after this, and he was confident he had more patience than Zach did…

It ended up taking Silverlake nearly four hours to finish the potion, despite her claim that it could be done in as little as two hours. She claimed she had merely been waiting for the concoction to cool down to a comfortable drinking temperature before bringing it over, but Zorian suspected it had more to do with the process being harder than she’d thought it would be rather than anything considerate like that.

"You should drink the potion soon," Silverlake told him. "The instructions were a little fuzzy about its shelf life and there was a bit of unplanned excitement involved in making it, so I had to add in a little something to forcibly stabilize it. It should retain its potency for about a week, after which there is a small but non-trivial chance it might explode in your face. Best not to take that chance, hmm?"

" Unplanned excitement , you say," Zach dead-panned. "That doesn’t exactly inspire confidence."

"I’m 97.3% sure it will work as expected," Silverlake said firmly.

There was a small silence as Silverlake looked at them expectantly, no doubt hoping one of them would ask her why it was 97.3 instead of 99 or something like that. She would be sorely disappointed. They both knew better than to humor her like that.

"I’m 97.3% sure you pulled that number out of your ass," Zorian told her bluntly. "But it doesn’t matter. This month is approaching its end and time will soon reset itself. I’m going to drink this right away."

"Ah yes, the great time reset," Silverlake said. "You’re still going on about that, huh? Well, did I ever tell you about–"

But Zorian wasn’t listening anymore. He uncapped the potion bottle Silverlake handed to him and immediately drank the entire potion. The thick green liquid was bitter as hell, but otherwise unremarkable. For a few seconds, nothing happened…

…and then he experienced a sensation reminiscent of the soul-stealing move he had experienced when fighting the soulseizer chrysanthemum and his senses rapidly began to dim.

He lost consciousness.

When Zorian woke up, he found out two days had gone by. They had expected as much, though. According to what they knew, the process of gaining soul perception through this method always took at least a day, and could take as many as five. Some unfortunate souls, ignorant of this little detail, had been known to die of dehydration after drinking a potion like this in secret.

In regards to what had happened while he was unconscious, Zorian had only the fuzziest of recollections. He had periodically regained awareness throughout the process, but it was like trying to remember a dream. He remembered a series of senseless, disjoined images: a sea of suns connected by glowing threads, a massive volcano in the middle of an eruption, a carpet of smoke crawling across desolate lands…

Just like his usual dreams, in other words. He put it out of his mind, and focused on the important stuff… like whether he had successfully acquired soul sight or not.

The answer was that he had. It wasn’t as instinctive as Zorian’s mind magic, but Zorian had found a sufficient amount of instructions in Sudomir’s mind to figure out what he had to do. So long as he poured mana into his soul in very specific ways, he could see the souls of other people. It wasn’t really sight as such, so much as a whole new sense that gave him headaches when he tried to process what it was really telling him, but that would improve with time and practice.

Overall, Zorian considered the whole thing to be a massive success. The only problem with the whole thing was that he had forgotten to mention to Imaya and Kirielle that he would be absent from home for several days, so Zach had to take the brunt of their ire and convince them not to report his disappearance to the police. Now all three were kind of annoyed with him…

Currently, Zorian was sort of hiding from them in Silverlake’s pocket dimension. Of course, he did have a valid reason for being there, beside that – he was trying to find something that would convince her future self that the time loop is real. Silverlake did have a penchant for telling him little personal stories from time to time, but it was hard to discern which ones were fake and which ones real, so he doubted that would help him convince her in the future.