Origin Witch - Ditching the Buckets
Sunlight did not fix the mud.
By six in the morning, the violent purple lightning had faded from the sky, replaced by a dull, overcast gray that made the giant oak trunks look like dirty stone pillars rising into a cloud of steam. The air inside the ward line was still, but twenty feet out, the wild branches were still swinging, dripping heavy, muddy water onto the forest floor.
Corinne was still near the boundary stone.
She had not gone upstairs to her third-floor bed. She had not washed her face. She hung suspended two inches off the dirt, staring at the split pieces of her dark-oak bucket resting in the ferns just beyond the ward line.
Her forehead hurt. A sharp, throbbing ache pulsed right behind her right eye every time her heart beat, reminding her of the quartz stone she had smashed into six hours ago.
“A sky-goddess,” she whispered, her voice laced with an ugly, bitter self-contempt. “Floating around like a damn princess because a system gave you a floating trick.”
She looked at her hands. The mud had dried into a gray, crusty shell across her palms, cracking whenever she flexed her fingers.
She had been so proud of herself. So smug. Sitting up in her high tower, counting her logs, trading her potions, looking down on the ground-bound outcasts who had to chop wood and dig in the dirt. She had convinced herself that as long as she stayed twenty feet in the air, nothing in this brutal, violent world could touch her.
Then a minor environmental shift hit, and she fell out of the sky like a dead crow, bleeding from her face and crawling in the dirt like a worm because her legs could not hold thirty pounds of weight.
A sudden, violent surge of rage boiled up from her stomach, hot and foul.
Corinne leaned forward, reached across the invisible ward boundary with her right hand, and snatched up the largest splintered oak stave from the broken bucket.
She raised it over her head and smashed it against the granite boundary stone.
A crack split the stone.
The stave shattered into three pieces, sending sharp oak splinters flying into the mud.
“Useless!” she spat, her voice cracking as she struck the stone again with the remaining stub. The stub rang against the stone. “Useless, weak, stupid piece of trash!”
She hit the stone a third time, her Moonstone Carver’s Strength boost driving the wood so hard against the granite that the vibration traveled straight up her elbow, making her teeth rattle. The oak stub reduced to a handful of hairy wood fibers.
She tossed the fibers into the brush, her chest heaving as she panted for breath, her bloodshot eyes staring at the gray rock.
The bird on her shoulder, Steelwool, let out a quiet, hesitant click from its beak, pressing its fluffy gray head against her cheek.
Corinne did not pet it. She squeezed her eyes shut, took three deep, ragged breaths of the pine-scented air, and forced her hands to stop shaking.
Rage was a waste of calories. Breaking buckets did not fix shattered spines or build better armor.
She opened her spatial bag, pulled out a small vial of Grade-E Health Potion, and pulled the cork with her teeth. She drank half of it, letting the sweet, grass-flavored liquid sit under her tongue for a second before swallowing, then poured the remaining five milliliters directly onto the gash on her forehead.
Tingle.
A cool, soothing sensation spread across her right eyebrow. The sharp, throbbing ache eased up almost immediately as the open skin knit together, leaving behind only a faint, pink scar beneath her messy bangs.
Health: 20/20.
Physical recovery was easy when you had magic in a bottle. Mental recovery was a different story.
Corinne floated back up the stairs into her third-floor tower room, sliding the heavy glass balcony door shut behind her. She drifted into her bathroom, turned on the copper tap connected to the Anvil of Repose, and let the warm, forty-degree water run over her hands and face.
She scrubbed the dried mud off her chin, washed the dark wolf blood out of her fingernails, and cleaned her glasses with a soft cotton cloth.
When she settled at the Magic Desk on the ground floor, she unlocked the Regional Chat channel.
The chatroom was an absolute graveyard.
Sector 666 Population: 8,857 / 10,000.
In one single night, over eleven hundred people had died.
The chat messages were scrolling in an unreadable, chaotic wave of terror, grief, and blind fury:
[Zhao Dulai]: MY LEGS! MY LEGS ARE BROKEN! The wind blew my cabin roof off and I fell thirty feet out of the tree! IS THERE ANY MEDIC IN SECTOR 666?! PLEASE! [Lin Feng]: DON’T GO OUTSIDE! THE MANA IS POISONED! I tried to cast a wind blade at a wolf and the spell blew up in my palm! It blew two of my fingers off! [Wu Gang]: My Tier-1 shelter collapsed… the protective barrier flared for two minutes and then just vanished. My brother didn’t make it out before the wolves got in. [Asang Singh]: WHY DIDN’T THE SYSTEM WARN US?! THIS IS A SLAUGHTER! THEY’RE KILLING US ON PURPOSE! [Victor Capone]: Anyone who has health potions bring them to the southern ridge immediately. My Syndicate will pay 200 wood per vial. We have thirty men wounded from shelter collapses. [New-Year-Joy]: @Corinne WHERE ARE YOU?! YOU HAVE HUNDREDS OF POTIONS IN YOUR TOWER! PEOPLE ARE BLEEDING TO DEATH IN THE MUD AND YOU’RE SITTING UP THERE DOING NOTHING?! YOU MONSTER! [Unknown User 1109]: @Corinne Save us! Please! I’ll give you all my wood! Just send one health potion! [James Bellman]: She’s not gonna answer. She blacklisted half the chat yesterday. She doesn’t give a damn about any of us.
Corinne watched the text scroll past her eyes with a cold, unblinking glare.
She did not feel pity. She did not feel satisfaction either.
She simply understood the reality of their situation better now. The Novice Protection Period had not just been a timer. It had been a training bra. Now that the bra was off, Kaelum was showing its true face. A violent, unstable world where environment alone could slaughter eleven hundred people in six hours without a single beast lifting a claw.
She opened her private messaging thread with Jasper Finch.
[Jasper Finch]: I assume you survived the turbulence, Miss Mercer? [Corinne]: I’m fine. What’s your status? [Jasper Finch]: My Tier-2 shelter held up without a scratch. The internal ward array absorbed the atmospheric shock easily. However, seven of my primary wood haulers died last night when their Tier-1 huts were ripped apart by the wind. [Jasper Finch]: The market is in complete panic. Health potions are currently trading at 150 basic materials per vial on the black market. People are selling their weapons just to get one tube of health fluid. [Corinne]: How many empty test tubes do you have left? [Jasper Finch]: Over twelve hundred. My scavengers cleared out another medical crate yesterday before the storm hit. [Corinne]: Wash them. I’m starting a twelve-hour brew cycle in twenty minutes.
Jasper did not ask questions. He did not offer condolences for the eleven hundred dead outcasts. He simply sent a confirmation ping and went back to organizing his trade lines.
Corinne closed the messaging window and drifted toward her alchemy workshop.
She looked at her setup.
Her Abyssal Meteorite Cauldron sat securely on its three-legged granite array base. Her Anvil of Repose was quietly filling her water tank with pure Anseic spring fluid. Her Spectacles of Discernment were resting on her nose, ready to give her precise real-time data on every ingredient.
She had everything she needed to manufacture wealth on a scale no one else in Sector 666 could dream of.
But as she reached into her spatial bag to grab a bundle of fresh Bitter-Grass, her hand stopped.
She remembered the feeling of falling. The sickening, breathless drop. The sharp quartz stone smashing into her forehead. The cold terror of realizing she could not move her lower body.
“I need armor,” she said to the empty room, her voice flat and firm. “I need offensive traps. I need weapons that don’t rely on my spell bar.”
She could not stay a pure merchant forever. If the environment could strip her floating spell away in a second, then sooner or later, a beast or a man was going to do the same thing. And when that happened, she needed to be able to kill them from her knees.
She opened her secondary textbook, Basic Glyphs & Array Geometry, and set it flat beside her mortar.
“First,” she whispered, her finger tracing a complex, triangular glyph for light containment, “we make sure I never have to sit in the dark again.”
She pulled ten glowing Glow-Cap Mushrooms from her bag, dropped them into her meteorite mortar, and raised the heavy iron pestle.
The heavy pestle came down with a wet crush, and the blue-glowing fungi split into a thick, luminous paste under the iron head.
Corinne did not look back at the window or the quiet forest outside. She kept her eyes on the mortar, her arm moving in a steady, unbroken rhythm, listening to the quiet, familiar sound of iron crushing magic into liquid power.
— Origin Witch —