51. Out of Control

Chapter 051
Out of Control

The new restart began in the same manner as all of his previous restarts – with Kirielle mercilessly jumping on top of him to wake him up.

“Good morning, brother!” Kirielle yelled on top of him. “Morning, m- Hey!”

With a simple act of will, Zorian seized Kirielle telekinetically and levitated her into the air. She stopped her customary morning greeting with a startled yelp, her hands grasping around her in a panicky attempt to find some sort of purchase and stop her ascent. She struggled in vain. Perhaps if she had been expecting Zorian to levitate her off of him, she could have grabbed onto something in time, but she had been caught completely by surprise and was entirely at his mercy. After a few moments of wild flailing, she seemed to realize this and pouted at him.

“That’s not fair,” she complained, looking down on him from her vantage point above him. “Since when can you even do that?”

Zorian ignored the question, instead studying the magic he was using to levitate her with his mana perception. He was still a long way from mastering even the most basic forms of mana perception, but an entire month of Xvim’s tutelage was definitely showing its results. Even a rudimentary ability to sense his own mana flow helped immensely when performing unstructured magic like he was currently doing, allowing him to notice and correct minute flaws in his technique that would have otherwise destabilized the whole undertaking. It was somewhat embarrassing that he had neglected such a potent skill all this time, but maybe it was fortunate he had done so. It was Xvim’s guidance, as much as the shaping exercises themselves, that was responsible for his rapid growth in the skill, and he would have wasted a huge amount of time if he had tried to piece things together on his own.

Taking advantage of his momentary distraction, Kirielle suddenly started struggling again, swiping at him with her hands in an attempt to reel herself back down. Zorian promptly floated her further up in the air, causing her to miss his covers by a few hairs.

“Oh, come on!” she whined. “Zorian, don’t be such a jerk! Put me down!”

Zorian gave her an evil smile and started to float her sideways, away from the bed…

“Slowly!” Kirielle quickly clarified, catching on to what he intended to do. “Put me down slowly!”

He thought about letting her fall and then telekinetically catching her in the last moment before she hit the floor, but quickly discarded the idea. He wasn’t that confident in his unstructured levitation skills… or his timing, for that matter. He gently floated Kirielle down to the floor and got out of bed.

Unfortunately, Kirielle was rather fascinated by her brief experience with magical levitation, and was instantly upon him, bombarding him with an endless stream of questions. Well. That kind of backfired on him. He just couldn’t get her to calm down…

“How long can you keep doing that?” Kirielle asked.

“I don’t know,” Zorian said. And he really didn’t, but he was hoping that if he answered some of her more inconsequential questions, she would eventually give the matter a rest. As such, he tried to give her a more detailed answer. “It would depend heavily on how docile you were being and whether I had something else disrupting my concentration. At least an hour, assuming I had your cooperation.”

“Great!” Kirielle said happily. “In that case, I have an idea!”

– break –

Zorian slowly descended down the stairs, trying not to make too much noise. The idea, after all, was to surprise Mother, and he couldn’t exactly do that if-

“Zorian, get down here already!” his mother shouted, the sound of her footsteps making it clear she was rapidly approaching the bottom of the stairs. “Your breakfast is getting… cold…”

She entered the main hallway where the stairway was located and then stopped to stare at the spectacle. Zorian himself was fairly unremarkable, but Kirielle was floating in the air beside him instead of using the stairs.

There was a brief moment of silence as the two sides stared at each other, one in surprise and the other in expectation of an eventual reaction. In the end, though, it was Kirielle who eventually broke the standoff. The little imp just didn’t have the patience to stick to the plan.

“Mom, I’m flying!” Kirielle announced loudly, waving her hands up and down in mimicry of flapping wings.

Mother opened her mouth for a second to say something but then thought better of it. She silently rolled her eyes and turned her back on them, mumbling something uncharitable about mages and children.

“When you’re done playing around, come and eat,” she told Zorian, before disappearing into the kitchen again.

Zorian and Kirielle shared a glance. Conveniently enough, with Kirielle floating beside him as she was, they were actually at the same eye-level.

“It was totally worth it,” Kirielle opined.

Yeah. Yeah, it was.

– break –

“Thus it so happened that Sumrak’s quest for restoring his lost memories took him to Korsa, where he descended into the tunnels beneath the city in search of the mythical Scorpion Swordsmen, and the even more mythical Orb of Memory which they guarded,” Zorian spoke dramatically. “Little did he know, however, that the Scorpion Swordsmen were not nearly as honorable as the myths had made them out to be, and that his journey into the depths beneath Korsa would be his most dangerous adventure yet…”

Zorian swept his hand through the air with a flourish, and the illusion that was there promptly dissolved into ectoplasmic smoke, only to reform into a completely different illusionary scene.

Kirielle sat on the edge of her seat, listening in rapt attention. Over the various restarts, Zorian had more or less worked out what sort of things Kirielle found impressive and interesting, so it wasn’t very difficult to keep her attention these days. Which was good, because it made the long train ride at the start of the restart a lot more bearable, for both of them, than it would have otherwise been.

Only half of his attention was on the story he was telling, though – he was also considering what to do in this new restart. More specifically, he was considering whether to have another relatively quiet restart like the previous one had been, or if he should notify the Triumvirate Church about Sudomir’s soul trap. The first option seemed more sensible – he had only two more restarts (including this one) to raise his skill at interpreting aranean memories to levels necessary to open the matriarch’s memory packet, and he couldn’t afford to get distracted too much. Aside from that, the second option was very attention grabbing and had the potential of leading Red Robe straight towards him if he did it even slightly wrong.

The choice seemed obvious, but Zorian was getting concerned. Red Robe was being too quiet. Sure, the third time traveler may be laboring under the delusion that there’s a whole army of other time travelers out to get him, but Zorian would have still expected Red Robe to make some kind of move by now, even if strictly through proxies. That Zorian could detect no trace of Red Robe’s actions was slowly making him more and more paranoid. It didn’t help his peace of mind that both Taiven and Kael were even more certain than Zorian that Red Robe was planning something big rather than simply laying low. Stirring the hornet’s nest a little by exposing Sudomir to the authorities just might create enough waves to reveal what Red Robe was planning…

In addition to that, pointing the authorities towards Sudomir was bound to do wonders for his investigation into the invasion and their leadership. There was no way that an investigation into Sudomir would not point them towards the Cult of the World Dragon and the Ibasans. That was almost certainly going to save Zorian months of work, if only because he could watch carefully who they’d arrest and then investigate those people on his own in future restarts. And if he could actually gain access to written records and the investigators’ memories? Absolutely priceless.

His main problem with trying to map out the organization of the invasion was that he was just one person and had to conduct his investigation under utmost secrecy. An official investigation would not labor under similar limitations. In fact, Zorian suspected that no matter how skilled and experienced he became over the restarts, he would never really be able to match the investigative power of the entirety of Eldemar and its counter-intelligence agencies. People who worked there had dedicated their whole lives to this sort of thing, and he knew for a fact that Eldemar had mind mages of their own under their employ. They could discover things that Zorian wouldn’t even think of looking for, because he didn’t possess the necessary background to know which questions to ask.

The more he thought about it, the more he liked the idea. He would have to be very, very careful, but this could be just what he needed to connect everything together.

Yes, he was definitely approaching the Church when they arrived in Cyoria…

“Hey, don’t space out now!” Kirielle protested. “You haven’t finished the story. We just got to the good part!”

“Sorry, sorry!” Zorian apologized hurriedly. He found it kind of amusing that what Kirielle considered ‘good parts’ usually involved fighting of some sort. Well, that or usage of some kind of epic magic. “As I was saying, the Scorpion Swordsmen had just led Sumrak to the supposed secret area where the Orb of Memory rested on a pedestal, beneath the Holy Stalactite, when suddenly his guides turned on him…”

– break –

Though Zorian had resolved to approach the Triumvirate Church about Sudomir, his first action upon settling a little in Cyoria was not to go to the nearest temple – it was to track down Xvim and tell him about the time loop. He saw no point in wasting time by waiting until Friday to confront him, as the sooner Zorian told him about the time loop, the sooner Xvim would accept it as true and start working with him again. In fact, Zorian had hoped that Xvim would be even easier to convince this time, since he was in possession of the password thingy that Xvim had given him in the previous restart.

Unfortunately, ‘easier’ didn’t mean effortless. Despite the password (that Zorian was certain he had memorized correctly), Xvim was highly suspicious of him. It took several hours’ worth of questions before he was willing to accept Zorian’s story even provisionally, and he didn’t seem terribly convinced even then. He told Zorian they would talk more on Friday and then basically kicked him out of his house.

Maybe he should have waited until Monday and spoken to Xvim in his office instead of visiting him at his home…

No matter. Depending on how things went with the Church, he might actually need a free week to set things up properly.

The next day, he went to a temple. Specifically, he went to a temple he had already visited in the previous restarts – the one with the nice green-haired priest and the future-divining high priestess. There was no particular reason to pick that temple over the others other than familiarity, but he didn’t think it would matter. Whatever temple he went to, they would still report to the same parent organization.

Batak was as polite and welcoming as always – he immediately greeted Zorian upon his arrival at the temple and ushered him inside. After serving them both some tea and engaging in some small talk, he probed Zorian for his reason of coming.

“It’s unusual to see a young man like you visit our temple,” Batak remarked. “Do you do this often?”

“Well, no,” Zorian admitted. “To be honest, I tend to avoid temples. I’ve had some bad experiences with them in the past. But I wanted to report something and ask for some advice, so here I am.”

“Oh? What kind of bad experiences?” Batak asked curiously.

Of course he wanted to know about that. Zorian would have thought that ‘something to report’ would have aroused Batak’s curiosity more, but apparently not.

“It’s a bit of a long story,” Zorian sighed. “The first thing you have to keep in mind is that I am an empath.”

“As in, you can sense other people’s emotions?” asked Batak. “A useful gift.”

“When trained,” Zorian nodded. “But as a child, I had no control over it. I didn’t even know I’m an empath. All I knew was that being around large groups of people made me sick and dizzy. And back in my home town of Cirin, the temple was usually packed full of people. The few times my parents brought me there, I ended up fainting and causing a bit of a stir…”

“That’s unfortunate,” Batak said sympathetically.

“Not as unfortunate as the old priest’s reaction was,” Zorian said, shaking his head. “He really took my reaction personally. He decided that I have some kind of ‘bad blood’ that was repelled by the holiness of the temple.”

“Bad blood?” Batak asked incredulously.

“My mother was of witch lineage,” Zorian clarified.

“Ah,” Batak said in understanding. “That makes more sense. While I don’t condone the man’s reaction, it was not entirely unreasonable to believe you have some witch-descended bloodline issue going on with you. Lineages were very important to witches, and they loved inheritable magic abilities. Many of their influential families had some kind of bloodline power to draw on.”

“Wait,” Zorian frowned. “Then my empathy…”

“It is entirely possible,” Batak nodded.

Damn. So it was possible that the bigoted old priest could have actually been right about him, at least in a way? Because if his empathy really was something he had inherited through his witch lineage, then ‘bad blood’ really did have a hand in his fainting episodes…

He didn’t know whether to be amused or bitter about that.

“I thought empathy was fairly generic, as far as special powers go,” Zorian said. “Lots of people have it, relatively speaking.”

“Special powers don’t pop out of nowhere,” Batak said. “Most are a product of potions, rituals, spiritual possession and the like. But sometimes these powers can get transferred to a person’s descendants while staying dormant for a generation or two before resurfacing. It’s a bit of a public secret, but when a child is born with a magic power ‘out of nowhere’, that almost always means the child has some interesting things hidden in their family tree. In regards to empathy being relatively common, well… I’m guessing that there are more people with, shall we say, interesting backgrounds than most people would be willing to admit.”

That was very interesting, because witches were endemic to Altazia, but empaths could be found all over the three continents inhabited by humans. Zorian didn’t think all those empaths in Miasina and Hsan drew their roots from some witch born in Altazia. Assuming that Batak was indeed right and ‘random’ empaths originated from an ancestor that deliberately made themselves psychic, that would mean that lots of people managed to turn themselves psychic over the course of history.

In other words, there was some kind of reliable method of turning normal people into psychics circulating around. It couldn’t be too easy, since empaths were still rather rare, but clearly it wasn’t impossibly hard either.

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There was also the matter of his family. If his psychic nature was indeed some kind of pseudo-bloodline thing, then his mother and siblings were bound to have it as well, if only in a dormant fashion. He knew that most of them were not full-blown psychics, since he would have felt it if they were, but maybe Daimen was. His oldest brother did have an uncanny ability to understand people…

Well, there was no way to confirm it one way or the other. Daimen was in Koth, and Zorian didn’t think he could reach him even if he dedicated an entire restart just to get there. Unless he found a way to instantly reach another continent or something, they would never meet while the time loop lasted.

In any case, even if the rest of his family weren’t fully psychic, there may yet be a way to awaken their dormant mind magic talent. It was surely easier to unlock a dormant magic ability than to create it out of nowhere, so he couldn’t help but wonder if it was possible to, say, make Kirielle psychic in a relatively easy and painless fashion. Not that he would do that, as the idea of a psychic Kirielle absolutely terrified him, but maybe once she was older and able to handle the power responsibly…

“Anyway,” Batak continued after a short pause, “I believe you said something about wanting to make a report and needing advice?”

“Yes,” Zorian said. He then withdrew a blank, sealed envelope from his pocket and handed it to Batak, who frowned at him.

“An anonymous report?” Batak mumbled to himself.

Personally, Zorian didn’t feel this was very anonymous. Anonymous would have meant sending the letter through normal mail, without ever having to meet face to face with anyone. Unfortunately, as much as Zorian liked that idea, that would have gotten him nowhere. Such a report would not be taken seriously at all, and would likely be thrown into the trash before it ever reached someone important. If he wanted the Church to actually do something, he had to talk to an actual priest and have them vouch from him that his report had been made in good faith.

“I have to ask, is this absolutely necessary?” Batak said, concerned.

“The information contained in the letter concerns the crimes of a highly influential person with plenty of subordinates,” Zorian said blandly. “If my name is known, I would fear for my safety.”

“I see,” Batak sighed. “Very well, I will forward your report to my superiors as it is. I must warn you, however, that they are not terribly fond of anonymous reports. They are seen as unreliable. Rest assured that your concerns will be looked into, but it may take some time before the Church investigators get around to it.”

“How long is ‘some time’?” Zorian frowned.

“A few weeks. Possibly months, if something more urgent comes up,” Batak said.

Damn. So much for that idea. It seemed he would have to go with his plan B – talking to Alanic Zosk. He had wanted to avoid doing that, since he kind of doubted that the old warrior priest would just leave him be without any questions afterwards, but it seemed he had no choice. If he absolutely had to make a face-to-face report to someone, Alanic was probably his best shot. The man was almost certain to believe him and probably cared enough about Zorian to keep his identity secret.

He could always just end the restart prematurely if things got too out of hand.