Origin Witch - A Spring in the Wall
Boiling dirt water was a stupid way to live, but realizing you’d been doing it wrong for four days straight was worse. Corinne sat on her third-floor mattress, her back resting against the bed stump, with Basic Alchemical Potions lying open across her lap and Thane’s Ledger sitting beside her right knee. She had a pen in her hand, a cheap brass ballpoint she’d traded from a former office clerk for two apples, and she was drawing dark black Xs through her old brewing notes.
“Ratio was wrong,” she muttered, scratching out a line. “10:1 solvent-to-herb ratio means twenty liters of water needs four pounds of fresh plant matter, not two hands full of unwashed roots. Temperature was uncontrolled. Stirring was uncalibrated.”
She looked at her notes from her very first batch of crude mana potion.
She’d used raw creek water full of unrefined ether, boiled it over an open wood fire without a containment array, dumped unwashed roots straight into the pot, and boiled twenty liters down to one liter of thick metallic syrup because she was terrified the pot would boil dry.
It was a miracle the pot hadn’t exploded in her face and taken her eyebrows with it.
She closed the notebook and pulled up her personal status screen.
Name: Corinne Mercer Level: Lv1 Health: 20/20 Mana: 80/80 Lore: [Herbalism E] [Alchemy E] [Glyphs E] [Drafting E] [Potions E] [Circuitry E]
Her Lore section was growing, but her practical alchemy was still limited by her tools and her water source.
The fifty-liter heated tank in her new bathroom was nice for washing off soot, but using tap water for high-purity potions was still a compromise. The water from her internal tank came from the creek below, filtered through her oak barrel, yes, but still carrying trace mineral impurities that capped her potion purity at ninety-two percent.
To break into Grade-D brewing, she needed clean untouched high-density base water. Anseic Water, Thane called it in his notes. A rare natural solvent produced only where deep elemental veins crossed under underground springs.
She pulled on her wool coat, tucked the Moonstone Carver into her waist cord, and picked up her spatial bag.
“Steelwool,” she called out.
The gray owl chick dropped from its perch on the roof beam, landing lightly on her shoulder with a sharp clack of its beak.
“Stay inside if I’m not back in an hour,” she said, tapping the bird’s beak with her finger.
She slid the glass door open, stepped off the third-floor balcony, and plunged into the morning air.
Zephyr Float caught her weight instantly. She glided down through the high canopy, steering with her hands, drifting silently past the giant oak trunks until she reached the ruined clearing where Thane’s estate lay buried.
The vine-covered mound looked dark and still under the morning sun.
Corinne landed softly inside the collapsed timber frame, her bare feet hovering two inches off the dirt floorboards. She adjusted her Spectacles of Discernment, letting the lenses scan the dark corners of the ruin.
Through the special glass, the world shifted into lines of colored light.
The rotten oak planks showed dull brown. The dirt floor showed pale gray. But behind the collapsed western wall, buried under a thick curtain of wild blackberry brambles and poison ivy, a deep pulsing blue light was leaking through the cracks in the masonry.
Corinne pulled her Moonstone Carver.
Slash. Slash.
The crystal blade sliced through the thick blackberry vines like warm butter. She cleared the fallen vegetation aside with her hand, opening a path toward the rear corner of the foundation.
Hidden beneath a massive half-rotted oak slab lay a round stone-lined well.
The rim was built from dark cut granite blocks, covered in thick moss. The timber cover that had once sealed it was rotted through, leaving a two-foot gap in the center.
Corinne drifted over the well rim and looked down.
The shaft was pitch black, descending at least thirty feet into the cold earth. But at the bottom, thirty feet down, a pool of water was glowing with an intense electric-blue light that cast long dancing reflections up the stone walls.
She checked the appraisal text floating in her lenses:
Structure: Thane’s Private Water Shaft. Depth: 32 Feet. Fluid Detected: Concentrated Anseic Spring. Warning: Sub-zero fluid temperatures. Prolonged exposure will inflict [Frostbite Stage 2].
“Thirty feet,” she grumbled. “Deep, dark, and freezing. Fantastic.”
She didn’t have a rope. She didn’t need one.
Corinne tilted her upper body forward, letting her lightened mass drop into the mouth of the stone well.
The air temperature plunged instantly. As she descended into the narrow stone shaft, the smell of damp pine disappeared, replaced by an intense metallic cold that made her breath freeze into thick white plumes against her lips.
Ten feet down. Twenty feet down.
The stone walls narrowed until her shoulders almost brushed the damp granite.
At thirty feet, her feet hit the water.
The cold hit her like an iron hammer to the ribs the instant her feet slammed into the water with a flat, bone-numbing splash.
Even with her mass reduced by Zephyr Float, her dead legs sank into the fluid up to her hips. The water wasn’t just cold, it was sub-zero spring fluid, so dense with elemental magic that it refused to freeze into ice. The chill ripped through her cotton gown, turning her thighs and waist numb in less than three seconds.
Corinne gasped, her teeth chattering so violently she almost bit her tongue.
“Jesus, fuck!” she hissed, her hands flailing to catch the slippery stone walls of the well shaft.
She forced her mind to focus, using her arms to keep her torso suspended above the dark water while her spectacled eyes scanned the bottom of the well.
The shaft was roughly six feet wide. The water was four feet deep, crystal-clear, and lit from within by dozens of floating translucent blue orbs, Water Element Essences, that drifted through the fluid like glowing jellyfish.
And sitting right in the center of the silt at the bottom of the well lay a stone.
It was an unpolished oval boulder about the size of a watermelon, dark gray and smooth as glass. It didn’t look special, but through her Spectacles of Discernment, the stone was radiating a blinding white-blue aura that outshone every glowing orb in the water.
Item Appraised: the Anvil of Repose (Rank-S Relic) Effect: Continuously generates high-density Anseic Water at a rate of 500 Liters per day. Has a 5% daily chance to condense pure Water Element Essences. Note: A master-tier alchemical water source created by Arch-Alchemist Aldous Thane. Permanently alters any surrounding fluid into pure base solvent.
An S-Rank relic. An infinite source of pure alchemical base water.
Corinne’s hands were turning blue. The skin on her forearms was stiffening, the cold creeping up toward her elbows.
She took a deep breath, plunged her arms straight into the freezing water, and grabbed the dark stone.
It was heavy, at least eighty pounds.
Even with her Moonstone Carver granting her 32 Strength, lifting an eighty-pound wet rock while hovering in waist-deep freezing water was an agonizing muscle-tearing struggle.
She dug her fingernails into the smooth surface of the stone, planted her upper body against the granite wall of the well shaft, and pulled with everything she had.
“Up!” she screamed through her clenched teeth.
She broke the surface with a second splash, the heavy rock still clutched against her chest.
Zephyr Float fought the sudden mass, her mana bar flickering as the talent worked overtime to counteract the eighty-pound relic.
1 point, 2 points, 3 points per minute.
She didn’t care about the mana burn. She planted her wet palms against the stone walls of the shaft, pushing herself upward inch by inch, her dead legs dragging behind her like wet ropes as she climbed out of the pitch-black hole.
Five feet. Ten feet. Twenty feet.
She burst out of the well mouth into the bright morning sunlight, tumbling forward onto the mossy floor of the ruined clearing.
The heavy stone hit the dirt with a loud, hollow thud.
Corinne lay on her back beside the rock, shivering so violently her whole body vibrated. Her hospital gown was soaked through, sticking to her skin like ice sheets. Her dead legs were pale white, marbled with blue veins from the sub-zero water.
She pulled a Grade-E Health Potion from her bag, popped the cork with her teeth, and chugged the green fluid in three frantic gulps.
Warmth burst in her stomach, spreading down into her chest and arms, driving the frostbite out of her skin before it could turn into permanent tissue damage.
She sat up, wiping her wet hair away from her eyes, and looked at the gray stone resting in the dirt beside her.
A thin continuous trickling sound filled the quiet clearing.
Where the stone touched the damp soil, pure sparkling Anseic Water was already beginning to seep out from its base, forming a small crystal-clear pool in the moss.
Corinne reached out, her shivering fingers resting against the smooth dark surface of the relic.
“No more creek water,” she whispered, her voice still trembling from the cold, but her eyes bright with a sharp triumphant light.
She pulled two thick vines from her bag, bound the eighty-pound stone securely to her back, and pushed off the mossy ground. Halfway up the ruined stair, she paused, reached into her spatial bag, and pulled out her ballpoint pen and a scrap of cured bark. With fingers still stiff from the cold, she scratched a single line into the bark: Anvil of Repose, Secured. Then she tapped the granite block twice with her knuckle, felt the steady pulse of fresh water leaking from its base, and steered herself back toward the canopy.
— Origin Witch —