Домагой Курмаич - Mother of Learning

Fortunately, that was not so difficult. He had no idea where the exit had deposited him, exactly, but he and his original body shared a certain bond with each other.

It was hard to cast much as a pure soul, but Zorian could do enough to craft himself a set of ghostly hands. From that point, everything became easy. A couple of divinations to lock down on the location of his old self, a couple of quick teleports to enter his room and he was there.

His old self was sleeping, blissfully unaware of the invasion. Soul Zorian did not hesitate. His soul form plunged straight into his old self’s chest, causing the boy to gasp before all his body locked up as the two souls started to fight for the ownership of the body.

Maybe it was quick. Maybe it was slow. Zorian had never fought a soul battle or possessed someone’s body before. What he did know was that his old self never had a chance. From the moment he attacked, the ultimate outcome was never in question.

He opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling of his room.

His room. Yes. Definitely his room.

He rose into a sitting position and looked around. It was night. He thought he would maybe wake up when Kirielle came to jump on top of him, but then he remembered that the time loop technically began much earlier than that.

He placed his right palm in front of him. A ghostly orb of white light bobbed up and down just above it.

The soul of his old self.

He stared at it for a full five minutes, trying to decide what to do with it. He had considered the issue before, of course, but now that he was actually here…

After a while, he closed his palm around the soul, causing it to fade away and move on to the afterlife.

To do anything else, seemed… cruel.

Then he jumped out of bed, took a look around his dark, silent room and cracked his knuckles.

It was time to get to work.

In the months leading up to their disastrous exit from the time loop, Zorian and the other members of the group had entertained many different outcomes and how each of them would reflect on what they would have to do immediately after crossing over into the real world. This included the possibility of having to cross over in soul form, much like Zorian had ended up doing in the end. Theoretically, this meant that Zorian already knew what to do and how to arrange his priorities.

In practice, things weren’t so simple. While he had succeeded in leaving the time loop and possessing his old body, the process had a critical flaw.

Their theorizing had assumed that, if Zorian executed everything correctly, he would be at his top form upon seizing his body. After all, he would possess a body that was flawlessly matched to his soul, so there shouldn’t be any rejection issues that usually plagued possession attempts. Having crossed over as a soul meant losing all the physical resources and information storage they had planned to bring, but at least his magic would be fully intact.

In reality, he didn’t even have that .

The problem was the dimensional ability of the tunneler toad he had anchored to himself in the time loop. His body may have been perfectly matched to his soul, but it wasn’t the body to which he had anchored the ability to. Without the life force portion of the anchor, the part located in his mana reserves couldn’t persist for long, either. He was fortunate he had managed to prevent its collapse before successfully possessing his old body, or else he’d be dead right now and all the sacrifices the others had made would have been for nothing. However, once he established full control of his body, the ability anchor in his mana reserves finally gave out and unraveled completely.

Unraveling a permanent enhancement like that was not a small matter. It caused him no pain, and he would not be permanently crippled by any means, but his mana reserves would be in utter turmoil for the next four to five days.

An eternity, considering time was of the essence.

Standing completely still in the darkness of his room, Zorian closed his eyes and sensed his mana again with a more critical eye. It was bad… but not unmanageable. A regular mage would have been completely crippled by the chaotic, unruly nature of his current mana reserves, but Zorian had honed his shaping skills to virtual perfection. Plus, he had experienced something similar before, when Quatach-Ichl had inflicted grievous soul damage, so he had experience in how to handle these sorts of things.

Slowly and carefully, he waved his hands in the air in front of him, softly muttering a spell chant. After some time, a single flawless simulacrum materialized in front of him.

The simulacrum did not speak or wait for Zorian to give him a command. He knew what was asked from it. He simply walked back to the bed, lied down, closed his eyes, and focused completely on calming down the raging mana reserves they both shared.

Zorian breathed a sigh of relief as he felt his mana reserves immediately stabilize into a more manageable form. Good. So long as one of his simulacrums focused all their attention on stabilizing them, his mana reserves would remain usable. It wasn’t the same as him being in top form, but it would do for now.

His spellcasting restored to a usable condition, he immediately threw himself into the next task before him: confirming that Zach had left the time loop and waking him up before Red Robe had a chance to assassinate him in his sleep. A critical task that would normally require him to drop everything else and rush to Cyoria, but which might be achievable through faster and cheaper methods.

Quickly rummaging through his old school supplies for alchemical reagents and deconstructing a bunch of old items scattered around his room for necessary materials, Zorian constructed a simple ritual circle on the floor of his room. He then spent almost a minute performing a special long-range ritual spell… one that tapped into his marker. The same marker that he had shared with Zach.

There was no guarantee that Zach still had the marker on his soul, of course, even if he had successfully left the time loop. Unlike Zorian, Zach was supposed to leave the time loop the normal way for a Controller. That is to say, the Guardian of the Threshold would perform the transfer. For all Zorian knew, this process may have involved erasing the marker, since it was no longer necessary.

However, Zorian had a suspicion that the marker was definitely going to stay embedded in Zach’s soul. A suspicion that turned out to be correct when the ritual finished, and the information from it rushed into Zorian’s mind. He could feel the existence of the second marker in the direction of Cyoria, shining like a star in the darkness.

He breathed a sigh of relief. He had made it out. There was no reason why he wouldn’t have, but so many things had gone wrong that Zorian did not dare take anything for granted.

He then reached out to Zach over the faint connection provided by the ritual and their identical markers. His mana reserves dropped like a stone. Bridging the vast distances between Cirin and Cyoria was hard and costly, even for such a small thing. Without the two identical markers connecting them, it would have been entirely impossible.

Just before he was about to run out of mana, he succeeded in touching Zach’s soul. It was just a light brush, but it was enough. A sharp spiritual jolt shook his soul, shocking him awake.

After observing things for a second to make sure he had really succeeded, Zorian broke the connection and stood up. He couldn’t actually talk to Zach through a spell like that, so there was no point in burning through his mana to keep the link going. They would talk more once they actually met.

He waited for a while till his mana reserves recovered and then cast the simulacrum spell three more times. Like the first simulacrums, these ones did not bother speaking either. There was no point. Zorian’s connection with his simulacrum was very strong, intertwining them on both mental and spiritual levels. Though they still had their own individual minds, they were constantly exchanging thoughts with Zorian and each other, much of it on a purely unconscious level with no need to expend effort or concentration to make it happen.