Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

"Annoying," Zach remarked with a frown. "Is this really necessary? We have lots of candidates for ability theft when it comes to magical creatures with relevant abilities."

"None of them are easy to track down," Zorian pointed out. "Not only are they rare and mostly extinct near human-dominated territories, the very nature of their abilities means these creatures can hide and retreat with incredible ease. The other may very well be even more annoying to find. If you think tunneler toads are bad, wait till you hear how annoying it is to track down a phase spider without it taking the initiative to reveal itself."

"Right," Zach said, clacking his tongue unhappily. "I guess I’ll try to be a little nicer to the stupid wasps." He paused for a second. "So we’re really going to start dabbling in blood magic and enhancement rituals in this restart, then?"

"Yes. Although we should start with something relatively easy and well tested," Zorian confirmed. "Eagle Eyes enhancement, for instance. Or any of the simple physical enhancements that aim to improve the user’s strength, stamina, regeneration and so on. Well-known, straightforward things that are unlikely to go catastrophically wrong when attempted by beginners like us."

"Not really instilling me with a sense of confidence here, Zorian," Zach complained.

"What can I say?" Zorian shrugged. "Blood magic is dangerous. If it makes you feel any better, I will be going first."

"It does not," Zach said. "We both know it will be me who has to take the biggest risks in regards to this. I have way more mana to burn on permanent enhancements and I am also proficient in medical magic, so I will be able to push my limits more and understand life force manipulation way better than you."

Zorian didn’t dispute him. While he had no intention of piling most of the risk on Zach, his fellow time traveler was likely right in his prediction.

"Eh, don’t make such a grim face," Zach said dismissively. "I already agreed we should do this when we talked before, didn’t I? I didn’t change my mind."

"I kind of feel I’m pressuring you over this," Zorian admitted.

"I’m not that easy to pressure," Zach assured him. "You’ve been trying to pressure me to let you inspect my mind for a long time now, for instance, and I have never let you do it."

"I still think that’s a mistake," Zorian told him.

"And the answer is still no," Zach said, grinning. "See? Pressure ineffective. I agreed with this creepy blood magic stuff because I honestly think you’re right. We’re too slow at figuring out primordial prisons. Only distasteful, unconventional methods like this can let us find a shortcut we need."

"Fair enough," Zorian said. Personally, he did not find blood magic to be that creepy, and even viewed it as a potentially useful tool for usage outside the time loop, but he understood where Zach was coming from.

They spent two more hours discussing various ideas before they both entered the pocket dimension inside the imperial orb for a very important task.

They had to convince Princess to let Zorian examine how her mind worked without trying to bite his head off for his insolence.

It would prove to be a very challenging task.

As days went by, some curious things began to be noticed by various countries of Koth, Xlotic and Altazia. The first one was that House Taramatula suddenly organized and launched a major expedition to Blantyrre in order to find the fabled imperial staff of Ikosia, sinking a massive amount of money and manpower into the endeavor. The level of support House Taramatula had given to the project was not as extensive as Daimen had hoped, but it was still major by virtually any means, and the frantic speed with which the whole thing was organized and executed was enough to give others pause. The Taramatula seemed almost desperate to track down the staff, and nobody could figure out why. The leadership of the House declined to answer any questions regarding the matter, contributing to the air of mystery.

More importantly, the Taramatula displayed the ability to open cross-continental dimensional passages between their land and their base in Blantyrre. This was not something Zach and Zorian wanted to make known, but proved to be utterly impossible to hide, given the scale of the operation. This information soon spread around like a wildfire throughout various spy agencies, especially ones based in Koth, who were immediately consumed by an intense desire to know everything possible about the situation. Amusingly, this included trying to track down information about the imperial staff. They thought the imperial artifacts were just historical curiosities, but since the Taramatula wanted the staff so badly, there had to be something special about it. Many people suddenly wanted to get their hands on the imperial staff, or at least hoped to understand what sort of power their rivals would possess should they successfully claim the item.

Zach and Zorian intended to steal the results of all such research near the end of the restart. Who knows, maybe the combined might of all these spy agencies would find something they had overlooked.

The second thing that got people’s attention, especially in Altazia, was intricate spell formula schematics, alchemical recipes, new spell compendiums and sensitive spy reports that started to surface all over the continent. Nobody knew who was responsible for this, how they had come up with all this in complete secrecy, or what their motives were… and it was completely unknown just how many people had received this assistance, considering many people had simply accepted their gifts quietly and set out to exploit them in secret. Finally, the gifts seemed to be most heavily concentrated in Eldemar, which was a huge concern for everyone around them. This caused a frenzy of speculation and activity across the continent, as people tried to figure out what this meant and how to hopefully take advantage of it.

This was, of course, done by Zach and Zorian. They did it for a very simple reason: to muddy the waters and prevent their newly marked fellow time travelers from standing out too much. It was too much to expect all of them to behave themselves at all times or never make a blunder, especially in this first restart while they were still under heavy impression of their first repeat of the month. Introducing enough waves into their surroundings would hopefully keep most people too busy with other matters to pay attention to crazy stories of time traveling academy professors and the like.

Thus far, the idea seemed to be working, but it would remain to be seen if that would hold out until the end.

This done, Zach and Zorian turned their attention to organizing the search for the imperial staff in Blantyrre. While the bulk of the job was done by Daimen and his men, it was a necessity for Zach and Zorian to get regularly involved. For one thing, the descriptions of the imperial staff were vague and contradictory, so they were the only ones that could identify the staff with any degree of certainty, thanks to their ability to sense the presence of the Key. Additionally, they were necessary for transporting people and supplies all over Blantyrre, since they were the only ones that could easily open dimensional gates from one location to another.

Zorian had been quietly hoping that the immense amount of resources they had mobilized in the search would provide quick results, but his hopes were soon dashed upon the rocks of reality. Finding the staff turned out to be much, much harder than finding a Bakora Gate. The gates were rare and obscure, but fairly distinctive. The staff, on the other hand, was something incredibly common in Blantyrre. The lizardmen loved their staves – they were a popular symbol of authority, and virtually any lizardman ruler and priest had a staff to call their own. While this meant that the imperial staff probably hadn’t been thrown away and forgotten in some ancient treasury, it also meant that tracking it down was akin to searching for a needle in a haystack. The one saving grace was that the imperial staff was free of most decorations, being just a plain piece of dark wood, whereas the lizardmen liked to decorate their own staves with gems and feathers and whatnot. Then again, what was to stop the new owner from adding those things to the imperial staff to pretty it up? Ugh…