Origin Witch - What the Lens Shows
The copper tap spat a gravelly cough and stalled. Corinne rapped the valve twice with the Moonstone Carver’s hilt, and the thin cold stream finally ran clean into the hundred-liter tank.
No buckets. No river trips. No mud.
Steelwool let out a sharp click-click from its perch on top of an oak shelf, its steel-feathered head spinning halfway around to stare at the splashing zinc basin.
“Quiet, bird,” Corinne grumbled, rubbing the bridge of her nose with a soot-stained thumb. Her eyes were bloodshot. She’d spent six hours straight filtering eighty test tubes of Grade-E health potion to clear out her trade backlog, and her shoulders felt like someone had driven wooden wedges into her shoulder blades.
A bright green notification dot flashed on her Magic Desk interface.
[Private Message from: Jasper Finch] [Sender Tag: Professional Broker]
She drifted over to the desk, her bare toes dragging lightly through a scattered pile of dry oak shavings on the floor. She tapped the floating glass interface.
[Jasper Finch]: Miss Mercer. One of my southern scavengers just brought in a non-standard item from a crashed supply pod near the granite quarry. It isn’t food, and it isn’t raw ore, so the idiot tried to trade it for two loaves of stale rye. [Corinne]: What is it? [Jasper Finch]: An appraisal tool. A pair of black frames. The system tags them as ‘Spectacles of Discernment’. They don’t require mana activation, but they scale their readouts directly off the user’s Lore stat. Since I know you’ve been buying every useless textbook on the market to inflate your knowledge rating, I assumed you’d be interested.
Corinne’s heart gave a sudden sharp thud against her ribs.
Appraisal tools were insanely rare. Right now, every outcast in Sector 666 had to rely on the Magic Desk’s small screen to identify items. You had to physically pick up an object, haul it back to your treehole, and set it flat on the glass panel just to figure out if a weed was poison or medicine. If you were out in the deep woods, you were basically guessing.
[Corinne]: Name your price, Finch. [Jasper Finch]: 40 Grade-E Health Potions, 20 Mana Potions, and 10 vials of that Thermo-Salve you listed yesterday. The southern ridge gangs are getting restless, and my haulers need cold protection for the night shifts. [Corinne]: 20 Health, 10 Mana, 5 Salve. I’m not funding your private army, Finch. [Jasper Finch]: 30 Health, 15 Mana, 8 Salve. And I’ll throw in three copper ingots I skimmed off Thorne’s latest shipment. [Corinne]: Send the trade window.
She didn’t haggle further. Forty vials of potion was twenty minutes of work in front of her new iron array plates. A mobile appraisal tool was a game-changer.
Ding!
A system trade square opened over the glass desk. Corinne dragged the requested vials from her stasis crate into the digital slot, and Jasper’s end flashed green. A second later, a dark velvet-lined wooden box materialized on her transfer panel with a soft clack.
She opened the box.
Inside lay a pair of thin black-wire spectacles. The frames were lightweight, made of a dull dark metal that felt cool under her fingers, and the circular glass lenses were thin, clear, and etched along the outer edges with microscopic silver rune circles so faint they looked like scratches.
Corinne picked them up, unfolded the thin metal arms, and slipped them over her ears, resting the wire bridge against her nose.
The world didn’t turn blurry. It shifted.
The room didn’t change its shape, but a faint translucent blue tint settled over her vision. As her eyes swept across her workshop, tiny floating text boxes, neat, sharp, and silent, began appearing over every object she looked at, floating in the air like pale blue dust.
She looked at her wooden workbench: [Timber Worktable (Grade-E) – Material: Seasoned Oak – Durability: 100/100]
She looked at her water tank: [Expanded Iron Water Reservoir (Grade-D) – Contents: Anseic Spring Water (98% Purity)]
She looked down at Steelwool sitting on the shelf: [Aurora Owl / Glacial Strix Chick (Grade-B) – Status: Healthy / Well-Fed – Affinity: High]
The readouts didn’t have the sarcastic snarky tone of the Magic Desk’s appraisal screen. They were clean, functional, and instantaneous. She didn’t have to touch anything. She just had to look.
Because she had spent her nights reading Basic Herbalism, Basic Glyphs, Basic Drafting, and Basic Mana Circuitry, her Lore attribute was high enough to unlock detailed secondary data bars that normal survivors couldn’t see.
Corinne turned her head slowly, her blue-tinted vision sweeping over the dark corner of her workshop where her primary brewing setup sat.
Her eyes locked onto her old rusted cauldron, the dark heavy-bottomed iron pot she’d dug out of Aldous Thane’s ruined underground basement on Day Two and cleaned with river gravel.
A bright glowing gold text box, not blue, but rich burnished gold, floated directly over the pot’s dark rim:
[Abyssal Meteorite Cauldron (Grade-C / Relic)] [Status: Severely Degraded (Mana Starvation)] [Effect 1: Increases Potion & Decoction Brew Success Rate by 50%.] [Effect 2: Automatically balances minor liquid thermal variance during brewing.] [Growth Potential: High. Absorbs residual ether during potion brewing to slowly repair internal metallic matrices.] [Lore Note: A master-tier cauldron forged from fallen star-iron by Arch-Alchemist Aldous Thane. Once capable of brewing Grade-S World Elixirs, long exposure to subterranean dampness has stripped its primary enchantments. Continuous use will awaken its dormant power.]
Corinne’s breath caught in her throat.
Her right hand reached out, her fingers trembling slightly as her nails scraped against the dark iridescent blue-black metal of the pot’s outer rim.
“A relic,” she breathed, her voice barely a rasp. “It wasn’t a piece of scrap metal. It was a Grade-C relic.”
She turned her head sharply toward the small wooden stool beside her bench where her heavy iron mortar and pestle sat.
A second golden text box flared to life in her vision:
[Abyssal Meteorite Mortar & Pestle (Grade-C / Relic)] [Status: Severely Degraded (Mana Starvation)] [Effect 1: Increases Plant & Organic Material Herb-Juice Extraction Efficiency by 50%.] [Effect 2: Prevents cross-contamination of volatile plant properties during grinding.] [Growth Potential: High. Absorbs organic ether to repair microscopic surface micro-cracks.]
She sat frozen in mid-air, floating three inches above her dry floorboards, staring at the two pieces of heavy dark metal.
When she had pulled them out of the wet mud beneath Thane’s ruined house, she’d thought they were just heavy durable old tools. She had used the mortar to grind dried earthworms and wild garlic. She had used the cauldron to boil creek water and basic grass.
And all the while, those two rusty pieces of star-iron had been quietly boosting her brew success rates by fifty percent, hiding her sloppy amateur mistakes and turning her crude mud-caked herbs into ninety-two percent pure liquid magic.
Without these two degraded relics, her very first batch of crude mana potion would have blown up in her face.
A strange dry chuckle rattled in her chest.
“Old man Thane,” she muttered, wiping a speck of dust off her spectacle lens with her sleeve. “You didn’t just leave me a notebook. You gave me your whole damn lab.”
She turned her eyes to the small wooden shelf where she kept her other scavenged items.
The long leaf-covered branch she used for stirring: [The Verdant Rod (Grade-C) – Material: World-Tree Sapling Branch – Effect: Eliminates liquid flavor contamination; adds +15% Natural Harmony to organic brews.]
The leather-wrapped crystal blade tucked in her belt: [Moonstone Carver (Grade-C) – Material: Refined Moon-Crystal – Damage +50, Strength +30 – Effect: Slices organic plant fibers without tearing cellular walls.]
The coarse burlap bag in her pocket: [Pouch of Preservation (Grade-C) – Volume: 1.1 Cubic Meters – Effect: Preserves raw plant freshness indefinitely.]
And finally, sitting inside a sealed glass jar on her highest shelf, a pale almond-shaped cocoon wrapped in silver silk: [Elven Monarch Chrysalis (Grade-S) – Status: Dormant – Requirement for Hatching: 1x Pure Mana Crystal + High-Density Water Element Environment.]
Corinne took off her spectacles, set them on her lap, and closed her eyes.
The blue-tinted text boxes disappeared, leaving her the warm yellow lantern light of her quiet workshop. The iron water tap was still dripping, plip, plip, plip, and Steelwool was rustling its steel feathers as it preened its wing.
She wasn’t a lucky amateur anymore. She wasn’t just a crippled girl who had stumbled onto a good recipe.
She was sitting on the complete legendary inheritance of a dead master alchemist, equipped with tools that half the warlords on Earth would slaughter a city to possess.
She put the spectacles back on, the black wire arms settling snugly against her temples.
They were hers now. The velvet box sat empty on the desk, the trade square had already gone dark, and the black frames were a permanent weight on the bridge of her nose. She owned the Spectacles of Discernment. She had paid for them, taken them in hand, and slipped them over her ears, and no system prompt or broker could pull them back out.
And the moment the lenses had fixed on her cauldron, a second system chime had rung soft in her skull. Lore scaling had just opened: the deeper her readouts went, the more the stat fed itself, every cleared book and every appraised relic bending the number higher. The tool was not a one-time trick. It was a door she had just walked through.
“Jasper Finch,” she said softly to the empty room, her voice cold, steady, and sharp as broken glass. “You sold me these glasses for sixty potions, and you have no idea what you just gave me.”
She pulled a bundle of fresh dry Bitter-Grass from her spatial bag, dropped the roots into her Abyssal Meteorite Mortar, and lifted the heavy iron pestle.
It was time to get back to work. And for the first time since she had woken on cold straw, she had a lens that would tell her exactly what everything around her truly was. That, she thought, was a weapon worth more than any vial she had ever brewed.
— Origin Witch —