The Developer Reborn As Archmage

“What I found out about Dreagans?” Sarka repeated slowly. “Princess, did you come up with that question just now, or do you happen to know something about my disappearance?”

His tone turned suspicious as he finished the question. Darya had made a mistake by asking a question that hit a mark she didn’t know existed. She had thought ahead and assumed the archmage supreme had gone missing while investigating this strange problem with Dreagans. In hindsight, that was an unusual leap.

“Watch your tone, magus Sarka. It’s my princess you’re talking to!” Fominel warned, curling his hand into a fist as if Sarka would feel the threat.

“That was an assumption. I didn’t know who you were until yesterday,” Darya said innocuously. She didn’t want to give anything away by going into a long explanation.

“What?! Has my fame sunk to the sea floor!” Sarka howled in outrage. “I would think a royal child would be educated on the history of mages! Have they removed me from the pages! I shall smite the publication department!”

Seris covered her mouth, her laugh slipped through the cracks between her fingers in a string of squeaks. Fominel rolled his lips inwards, closing his eyes.

“Apologies, magus Sarka,” Darya said. “I wasn’t that interested in mage history.”

“Yet, you became a mage?” he asked, having recovered from his unhinged rant about lost fame.

“Times have changed. Mage history is not taught to us with a lot of emphasis,” Darya lied, watching Seris pat her back and cough into her hand from the corner of her eye.

“What nonsense! What are they thinking, these new mage kings! Mage history must be put in the curriculum at once!” he mumbled a bunch of things that he wished would happen to these criminals who ruined Vainfall’s education system.

“...still! You made a rather accurate assumption that I was investigating the black spheres.” Sarka didn’t bother hiding the tone of distrust. “No one was supposed to know I was investigating that. It was done off the books. There shouldn’t have been any records of it.”

“It may be weirdly accurate, but it was honestly an assumption,” Darya reiterated.

Sarka let out a sigh. “I suppose it’s out now. I shall tell you about my last expedition!”

Seris wiped her face with a serviette, and Fominel leaned in with newfound interest.

“The word ‘Dreagans’ was entirely new to me. I only heard it during some of the later outings with my corpse. I overheard it being yelled in reference to my corpse. See, at the time of my death, they were known as black, dark, or demon spheres.”

“Those are the old terms. I remember my father calling them that,” Fominel added.

“In Rhakali, we called them ‘Erlakar’, which stands for a creature of the void.”

“Ah! The mysterious fair lady is an elf from Rhakali! Now I know all three of you!” Sarka said victoriously.

Seris covered her mouth as if she didn’t want to speak again.

“Continue the story, don’t get distracted, please,” Darya urged.

“For your benefit, I will call them Dreagans from here. Dreagans were an unexplained phenomenon for centuries. In many tales all over the world, they are evil spirits. Most cultures have a story about a demon that collects souls, a demon that thrives during war times. In the majority of depictions of this demon, it is rendered rotund as a symbol of greed.”

“The frequency of Dreagan incidents saw a sharp increase during my twelfth year as the third seat of the Goliante council. We believed that this was the work of an unregistered necromancer. This was only confirmed when someone finally managed to defeat and secure the remains of a Dreagan. This had never happened before.”

“After nearly six months of constant study, the conclusion was that this lifeform far exceeded the known necromantic magics. It terrified everyone. A rogue necromancer with powerful arcane knowledge. This information could never be allowed to reach the public without an actual solution to counter it. I set out on my lone expedition to investigate more.”

“I’ll spare you the details of my six-year expedition. I traveled far and wide, and I dug deep into the historical record. I found a place where Dreagans were being created. I will tell you it was no necromancy. It wasn’t even arcane. They were made with bizarre magics that involved no mana. I was fatally injured during my escape. The rest you already know.” Sarka concluded his story to a room of stunned silence.

“Magics without mana?” Seris echoed, her brows twisted in confusion.

“How is that even possible?” Fominel swallowed, glaring at the soulstone ring.

“Hm,” Darya leaned back.

She had more questions to ask about this magic that worked outside the magic system. She had a weird hunch. The topic of Dreagans went deeper than she thought. Creating lifeforms out of nothing had to be impossible in RLP. Dreagans were magical creatures that used mana after being created, but the process of their birth required none of it.

This sounded a lot like something outside of Vainfall, an artificial lifeform created for some purpose. She had thought Dreagan’s behavior was a neat game mechanic when she first learned of it. That could very well be true.

“This place you found, where was it?” Darya asked.

“It’s a remote location at the South Pole. A nameless island in the middle of a frozen sea.”

“You said the place your corpse warped to was windy. Could that be there?”

“No. I didn’t hear ice crackling or any blizzard winds. I spent a year out there in the cold.”

It’d take months to sail to any pole, and wildly unpleasant. Good thing that’s not where we need to go.

“We need to narrow down a location based on the warp spell,” Darya said, “There is a range and mana limit on that, isn’t there?”

“Indeed. What can I do to help with this analysis, princess?” Sarka asked.

“Describe the spell. You must’ve used it a lot if your corpse is using it this much.”

“The spell is called Tether of Varuka. It was grade one hundred and twenty, mythic. The shaper is a circle, and it's a balanced mix of Aenthune, Rilomar, and Unezilo. Combining matter, movement, and energy in common words. Mana cost is nine hundred and sixteen regardless of distance traveled. It has a few prerequisites. The shaper circle radius changes based on distance. You need space if you’re warping a long distance. If the place that you warp to is out of your line of sight, it must be to a place where you have activated the same spell before. You must visualize that place clearly before activation.”

“I see,” Darya nodded. “We can work with that.”

The spell was more complicated than she thought. The nine hundred mana cost made it expensive to use unless for long-distance travel, or a short distance in a very high-stakes situation. It relied on visualization for destinations beyond line of sight. The real limit of the spell was the mage’s memory.

“Seris, Fom, how big would you say that circle was?” she asked. “There are two circles. The big one when he came back, and the smaller one when he escaped. It’s the big circle I want to know about.”

“It was definitely more than a hundred feet across,” Fominel said, averting his eyes to think. “Let’s assume a coconut tree was ten feet across as seen from above. That circle was at least twenty or thirty coconut trees in a line. Two hundred or three hundred feet?”

“I’m not good at this. I feel it should be less than three hundred feet,” Seris said.

Darya came up with her own measurement based on how many Desert Roses she could pack into the circle she saw from above. She was close to Fominel’s assessment. Definitely more than two hundred, but less than three hundred.

“Shame, I didn’t think this far. We could’ve measured it accurately!” Fominel said. “Should we go back?”

“That’ll be a waste of time. Sarka, what's the distance when the circle is between two hundred and three hundred feet?”

“Roughly twice as many miles. Every foot is two miles. That ought to be four to six hundred miles.”

Darya looked at the map. It was an artistic rendition on the wall, not a real navigator map.

“We need a map,” Darya told Seris.

Fominel cleared his throat and stopped her. “No need. I can tell you what’s around us,” he said, standing up. He walked up to the map on the wall and tapped his finger between two tiny islands of the crescent-shaped archipelago near the equator to the left of the map.

“We’re around here,” he said. “Six hundred miles. I’ll round it up to two hundred leagues for now. That would be about this far.” He extended his fingers. The circle with this diameter captured a large chunk of the archipelago in the middle.

“…But, we know most of the archipelago is doing fine. There can’t be abandoned desolate places full of Dreagans. The reports we followed came from the south, the lower arm of the crescent,” Fominel tapped on the crescent below the equator line.

Good. Now it’s narrowed down. Fominel is good at this.

“We met our first Dreagans around this part,” He continued, tapping the island that they just left. “Those islands are just fine now that we killed both Dreagans there.”

“The warp destination must be outside the archipelago, then?” Seris asked, leaning in.

The circle that Fominel drew caught a separate landmass outside of the archipelago below the equator. It was a peninsula attached to a larger continent. Darya couldn’t remember exactly what it was called, but she remembered it from the VRMMO, and the continent was mostly arid.

Fominel shook his head. “Not necessarily. It could be the inside of the crescent,” Fominel said, tapping the center of the crescent. “There are abandoned islands at the center, don’t forget.”

“By the light, no! The center of the crescent is infested with sea beasts!” Seris said shakily.

Darya stood and walked over to the map. She needed to refresh her memory about the Vainfall’s map.

The Red Crescent archipelago was a moon-shaped scattering of islands that lay across the equator of Vainfall. Hundreds of tiny, unnamed islands dotted the few large landmasses like insects. In this hand-drawn map, it was depicted as a perfect circle. It was evenly divided in half by the equator line. In reality, it was more southwards than north.

The center of the crescent was a deep trench depicted with the tentacles and fins of sea monsters. The sea around the crescent was depicted as swirly and turbulent.

The Red Crescent was designed to funnel players of a certain level into the intended path of exploration while leaving more dangerous and challenging things around it for higher-level players. The only safe way to navigate this crescent was by catching a current and entering the circle from either the northern or the southern sharp ends of the crescent and navigating through the semicircle island to island.

The problem they faced now was simple.

In RLP, there were no difficulty tiers of enemies based on levels. It wasn’t going to be a cool sea beast battle with a health bar. Archmage or not, a monster could sink a wooden ship with one spank from a tentacle. Darya knew the kind of creatures she wrote custom pathfinding algorithms for. She didn’t want to meet them in person.

“Oh, that’s bad,” Darya said, rubbing her cheek. “Sarka, have you ever been to these islands at the center?” she asked, fearing the worst.

“Why of course I did. I explored the whole of Red Crescent when I was younger,” Sarka said enthusiastically. “I remember meeting a fine merfolk lady in the Greybone Towers! Oh, she was sweet!”

“We’re doomed, aren’t we?” Seris asked dismally.

“Fear not, elf lady! Greybone merfolk knows who I am. You will be escorted to safety and treated well!” Sarka said confidently.

Fominel glared at the ring. “I already told you those islands are abandoned now. There’s no one there. Greybone fell a long time ago. All the merfolk went back to the sea. They don’t have their own kingdom anymore.”

“What?! mother goddess! What disaster befell them while I was dead?!” Sarka thundered.

“Corruption and rebellion, the same story. Nothing new under the sun,” Fominel said.

“This is not important right now,” Darya said. “Tell me, could Dreagans have invaded those islands?”

“If they did, no one would know; it’s suicide to sail there,” Fominel said.

“Well, we can’t die to get our friends back. What’s the plan now?” Darya asked, looking at the map. “I think we still need a Seer to confirm. We can’t go anywhere on a hunch and waste time.”

“I agree, princess. We’ll have to find a seer, and we have to hide the ship if we don’t want to fight the RCMF. The plan remains mostly unchanged.” Fominel paused, tapping on the map. “We can solve all our problems much more easily if we can find a Seer in a merfolk colony nearby. We might find someone who can help navigate the center of the crescent.”

“There’s a merfolk colony nearby?” Darya asked.

“Yes. There was one right here,” Fominel tapped a small island. “About a day’s sailing from here.”

“Get there faster. We should hurry. Use whatever coal we have. We can always buy more wherever we end up.”

Seris cleared her throat, raising her hand. “Uh, we ran out of money for this expedition weeks ago, princess!”

Ah, is that why I only had one coin when I started?

“What happened to my money?”

“You’re not allowed to use your personal fortune outside of Karossa. This is because we’re in a rogue expedition. You didn’t inform the treasury or your father before leaving.”

“Now, why did I do that?”

Seris glanced at Fominel uncomfortably. He made no sound.

“You see, when we got first reports of Dreagan sightings in the archipelago, you decided to use it as an excuse to escape a marriage proposal.”

That won’t do. I can’t let an arranged marriage ruin my second life pirate adventure. I have to make money some other way then.

She had several ideas, ranging from questionable to illegal.

“Hm. Money. That’s a problem I can solve,” Darya said with a smile.