Origin Witch - Drawing the Spire
Twenty-five thousand logs sounded like a logging company’s monthly invoice, not something a girl in a stained hospital gown should be looking at on a floating glass tablet. Corinne squinted through the smudged lenses of her spectacles, her thumb tracing the digital ledger on her Magic Desk screen. Her shoulders were stiff. Sitting suspended four inches above the floorboards for six hours straight while monitoring trade pings had left her neck feeling like a dried tendon.
The raw material requirements for a Tier-3 shelter upgrade were absurd:
Treehole Shelter (Tier-3 Upgrade Requirements): Wood: 25,000 / 25,000 Stone: 1,000 / 1,000 Vines: 5,000 / 5,000 Grade-E Monster Core: 100 / 100
She had the cores. Garrett Thorne had cleared out two full wolf dens near the northern ridge over the last three days, dumping forty violet crystals into her exchange store in exchange for eighty vials of high-purity mana potions. Piper Bell had sent over thirty more through her herb trades, and the rest she had skimmed off the public market by trading fifty-milliliter jars of crude health salve.
The wood and vines, though, that was a logistics nightmare.
A single human chopping timber with an iron hatchet could yield maybe fifty or sixty units of wood a day before their arms turned to rubber. To get twenty-five thousand logs into a single inventory system meant mobilising hundreds of people.
Or one very greedy middleman with a massive distribution network.
A private chat window flashed green on her screen.
[Jasper Finch]: The last shipment of pine timber just cleared the processing node. 8,000 units. My storage grid is empty, Miss Mercer. Completely bare. My feet are covered in sap and three of my haulers are threatening to strike if I don’t give them extra bread.
[Corinne]: Did you get the sand and iron ore for the facilities?
[Jasper Finch]: 600 units of fine quartz sand from the riverbank, 300 units of smelted iron ore from Thorne’s ridge team, and 600 units of structural oak logs. It cost me 180 Grade-E mana potions and 40 health salves. My margin on this run was less than six percent. I am practically running a charitable foundation for woodsmen at this point.
Corinne snorted. A dry humorless sound that made Steelwool twitch its round gray head from its perch on the window sill.
[Corinne]: You made a twenty percent margin on the glass tube buybacks alone this morning, Finch. Send the trade.
[Jasper Finch]: You have a cold heart, Miss Mercer. Truly. Sending the payload now.
A cascade of system transfer windows flooded her Magic Desk interface.
The digital counters ticked upward in rapid blurred bursts. Row after row of storage slots filled, turned green, and locked into place as thousands of oak logs, stone blocks, coiled vines, and iron ingots were absorbed directly into her shelter’s expansion bank.
The final requirement counter flashed gold.
All Tier-3 Upgrade Requirements Met. Ready for Structural Evolution.
Corinne hovered over to the center of her second-floor room. She grabbed Steelwool off the sill, tucking the steel-feathered chick into the deep pouch of her linen tunic. The bird let out a faint click-click of protest before settling against her ribs.
She brought her thumb down flat on the glowing gold button: [Execute Upgrade].
The giant oak didn’t just vibrate this time. It groaned with a sound like a mountain splitting in two.
Deep within the core of the hundred-meter tree, ancient wood fiber twisted, stretched, and rearranged itself with deafening CRACKS that echoed up through the trunk. The floorboards beneath Corinne’s floating body surged outward.
The ground-floor footprint doubled, swelling from forty square meters to eighty square meters. The ceiling above her second floor ripped open as a third vertical chamber expanded upward into the high branches, adding another twenty square meters of living space thirty-five yards above the forest floor.
The dark green sap patterns carved into the timber walls didn’t just glow, they erupted in a blinding curtain of emerald light that washed through the glass sliding doors, casting long vibrating green shadows across the outer canopy.
Wind howled through the open balcony frame as the outer branches shifted, wrapping around the new wooden walls to form natural living buttresses.
When the shaking finally stopped ten seconds later, the smell hit her first.
It wasn’t the dusty dry rot of an old house. It was the rich overwhelming scent of crushed pine needles, fresh green sap, damp moss, and turned earth.
A massive wooden staircase, curved and broad, carved directly out of the inner heartwood of the trunk, replaced the narrow vine rope ladder, winding smoothly from the first floor all the way up to the new third story.
A customization window popped over her screen:
Tier-3 Facility Customization: You may select THREE specialized structural modifications: – Storage Room (600 Wood) – Kitchen / Hearth (60 Wood, 100 Stone) – Expanded Bathroom & 50L Heated Tank (500 Wood, 100 Stone, 20 Cores) – Expanded Apprentice Workshop & 100L Water Tank (500 Wood, 500 Stone, 300 Iron, 100 Sand) – Third-Floor High Observation Terrace (400 Wood, 40 Vines, 300 Sand)
Corinne didn’t even hesitate. She tapped Storage Room, Expanded Bathroom, and Expanded Apprentice Workshop.
The gray construction fog rolled in again, thick and heavy, smelling of ozone and wet cement. Inside the mist, the sound of rhythmic hammering and stone-grinding rang out for fifteen seconds before fading into silence.
At the rear of the ground floor, a large sixty-square-meter storage vault had been walled off with heavy oak planks, fitted with reinforced wooden racks capable of holding hundreds of material crates.
Beside it, the alchemy workshop had expanded into a massive fifteen-square-meter laboratory. A massive hundred-liter iron water tank sat mounted on the upper wall, connected by copper piping to a heavy stone workbench fitted with three separate iron array plates.
In the bathroom, a fifty-liter copper tank sat mounted above a deep stone basin, fitted with a small heat-crystal array that kept the water at a steady steaming forty degrees Celsius.
Ding!
A global sector announcement banner, pulsing in heavy burnished gold lettering, sliced across the top of every screen in Sector 666:
Global Notice: Sector 666 individual ‘Corinne Mercer’ has become the FIRST transfer student to successfully upgrade to a Tier-3 Shelter! Sanctuary Classification: ‘The Spire’ Reward Allocation Unlocked. Please choose your bonus category: [Tools] [Spells] [Items] [Knowledge]
Corinne ignored the instant chaos erupting in the regional chatroom, where hundreds of outcasts were screaming about monopolists and stolen wood, and tapped [Knowledge].
A thick dark green book bound in rough dragon-hide materialized on her small screen.
Basic Mana Circuitry & Array Geometry.
She picked up the book, flipping through the dry parchment pages. The diagrams inside were vastly more complex than the simple circles in Basic Glyphs, showing intricate multi-layered geometric networks that looked like spiderwebs spun from gold thread.
She opened the shelter naming panel, confirmed the auto-filled name, The Spire, and floated up the new wooden staircase to the third floor.
The third floor was a high circular tower room.
A massive glass sliding door led out onto a huge semi-circular observation terrace forty yards above the forest floor. The terrace was covered by a thick overhang of living branches, fitted with a heavy timber railing that looked out over the entire western expanse of Sector 666.
Corinne stepped out onto the terrace.
The night wind caught her hair, blowing it back from her face. From up here, looking down at the endless ocean of green treetops rolling away under the silver moon, the dirty slum shanty in Sector 9 felt a million miles away.
Steelwool popped its round head out of her tunic pouch, letting out a soft curious keek-keek as it looked down at the dark forest below.
“We have a lot of work to do,” Corinne whispered to the bird, her fingers resting lightly on the cold solid timber of her new high tower railing.
— Origin Witch —