Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

Regardless, the reason for their uncharacteristic presence in the Noveda mansion was simple: the place still had a well-crafted, perfectly functional warding scheme and the two of them didn’t feel like traveling outside of Cyoria and creating a temporary base just to have this discussion. Thus, they simply retreated into one of the private study rooms that could be found in the estate and hoped this would be enough to foil any spying attempts by Quatach-Ichl or others.

The room was pretty nice. It was small but luxurious, with heavily decorated wooden furniture, several marble statues, magical lighting and temperature control and bookshelves lining every single wall. The center of the room contained a table and some chairs, and sitting in the center of that table was the object that Zach and Zorian had gathered to discuss.

The ring. One of the pieces of the Key that they had to bring to the Guardian of the Threshold in order to reopen the time loop exit and one of the artifacts associated with the first emperor of Ikosia. It was made out of solid silver and largely featureless, with no notable decorations or gems. A few faint lines and sigils covered its surface, only visible upon close scrutiny. It did not seem very imperial, unlike the crown that Quatach-Ichl was wearing or the palace orb.

If they had not possessed the tracking function of the marker on their side, it would have been very hard to pick it out as special from the rest of the small trinkets that the sulrothum high priest had been carrying. Just like the palace orb, it seemed completely immune to divinations of any sort.

They already knew what it did. Maybe it was because they already had plenty of experience with the palace orb, but figuring out how the ring functioned only took a visit to the Guardian of the Threshold and half a day of tinkering with it. It was just that the end result was… not as useful as they had hoped.

"Interesting thing, isn’t it?" Zach said, picking the ring up and making it spin on its edge like a top. "Heh. Of course, it’s more useful for me than it is for you… but that may be a good thing. At least we won’t have to struggle with the question of who to assign it to in the future, like we do with the palace orb!"

Zorian clacked his tongue at the analysis. The ring had an intriguing main function: it somehow granted the wearer an ability to use soul perception through it. As far as Zorian knew, there was no other item with a similar function, which made the ring quite interesting and unique… but also very useless for people like him who had already unlocked soul perception through other means.

Zach, of course, was another story. Due to the safeguards on his marker, unlocking his soul perception was anything but easy. Most methods to do so required one to be brought to the very edge of death and tampered deeply with the user’s soul to achieve their goal. The soul perception potion Silverlake made for Zorian did the same, which was why they had not bothered to have Zach try it out thus far. They just didn’t think it would work and didn’t want to cut a restart short for now. The soul perception ring basically negated any need for such dangerous unlocking, giving Zach a way to practice soul magic easily.

Frankly, Zorian suspected the ring was created specifically with the goal of solving this kind of issue. Since it was extremely difficult for a controller with an intact marker to unlock their soul perception through classical means, it made sense for Shutur-Tarana to prepare a workaround for his successor.

"It’s a bit inconvenient that the ring is so hard to get to, though," Zorian remarked. "The ring only grants you soul perception while you wear it. No ring, no soul perception. If you started each restart with the ring on you, like the controller was probably supposed to, then that would be a minor issue. As it is, it will take us a week at minimum to get ahold of it in each restart, and that’s after optimizing things…"

"Yes, that does suck," Zach agreed. "I definitely intend to try and figure out a way to gain soul perception the right way , so that I don’t need to depend on it, but this is still good. I doubt finding an alternative will be easy and we know from your example that simply unlocking soul perception is just the first step in the process and that a lot of training is needed to use it – with this, I can get started on that right away."

"I guess that’s true," Zorian nodded. A part of him was annoyed that Zach got to skip a large chunk of the work Zorian had to do to gain his soul perception ability, but he knew that was just his jealousy talking and that this was objectively a good thing. "It still feels to me like the ring is relatively underwhelming, at least compared to the other two examples we know about. Even its time loop related skill is not that exciting."

Like all Key pieces, the soul perception ring had an ability that could only be accessed inside the time loop by the current controller. Specifically, the ring could place a tracking marker on target souls, allowing the ring bearer to track their movements with ease. According to the Guardian of the Threshold, the markers persisted across restarts, allowing them to know exactly where people started their restarts and what their usual routines were.

Or at least that’s the effect they would have had if Zach and Zorian had started the restart with the ring. Since they hadn’t, the value of the tracking markers was greatly reduced.

In any case, Zach and Zorian had tested the ability on various animals and random bystanders and found that the marker placement was fast and stealthy, that the ring could keep track of marked entities across intercontinental distances, and that divination wards didn’t seem to hamper the effect in any way.

This sounded pretty amazing, and it was, but the markers had a serious flaw. Namely, anyone skilled in soul magic could detect when they were placed on them. This meant that Quatach-Ichl was effectively immune to it, as was Sudomir, Silverlake and a whole plethora of other potential targets.

"They can’t all be amazing," Zach shrugged. "And truthfully, I think the real issue is less with the usefulness of the ring and more with how late we got ahold of it. If I had the ring with me right from the very start, it would have been an absolutely priceless treasure. The tracking ability alone would have saved me a ton of work and some dying. Currently, we’re both so good at divinations, memory reading, stealth spells, various tracking magics and things like teleportation that the ring is no longer very impressive to us. But that’s just us being awesome, not the ring being underwhelming."

Zorian hummed thoughtfully. There was a lot of truth in that.

"Besides, it may be a good idea to place these tracking markers on all of the high ranking cultists and Ibasans to see if they’re doing something we don’t know about," Zach said.

"That would take quite a bit of effort, though," Zorian pointed out. "The ring just gives you the distance and direction of your target, and only one at a time as well. You’d have to constantly pay attention to the ring, cycling through all of the tracking markers and matching the information you receive to places on the map to see where they actually are in actually useful terms. Then you’d have to go out personally to check up on any interesting movements to see the details of what is going on, or send a simulacrum, and–"

"You’ve done more complicated projects before, Zorian," Zach said, waving him off.

Zorian raised an eyebrow at him.

"You… do realize it’s you who will be doing this, right?" he asked Zach. "After all, you’re the one who’s going to be wearing the ring. What with you needing its soul perception granting abilities…"