Origin Witch - Violet Sky Warning
The sky to the west went the wrong color – bruised violet bleeding into a sickly yellow haze – three hours before the system warning ever sounded.
Corinne leaned her upper body over the high wooden railing of her third-floor balcony, watching the wrong-colored clouds pile toward the Spire.
Heavy, swollen clouds hung low over the giant oaks, bruised violet at the center and fading into a sickly, yellow-gray mist along the edges. The air didn’t smell like evening pine anymore. It smelled like crushed marigolds, ozone, and wet tin.
Beside her knee, Steelwool let out a low, vibrating click-click from inside its wool scarf nest. The owl chick’s round honey-colored eyes were wide, fixed on the sky, its metallic gray feathers puffed out until it looked like an oversized spiky melon. It shivered once, tucked its small beak under its wing, and tried to cram its body deeper into the dark folds of the scarf.
“I see it, bird,” Corinne grumbled softly, rubbing her aching right temple with a thumb.
Her ears popped again. The atmospheric pressure was dropping fast, pulling at her eardrums.
Ding!
A golden announcement banner, twice as thick as the standard regional notices, flared across every screen in Sector 666 with a low, bone-deep hum that vibrated through the Spire’s timber walls.
[GLOBAL REALM ANNOUNCEMENT] [Event: First Monthly Ether Tide] [Start Time: 00:00 Midnight (In 5 hours, 12 minutes)] [Duration: 72 Natural Hours (3 Days)]
[Environmental Details: Raw atmospheric ether density will surge by 1,200%. Unshielded outdoor areas will experience high-frequency mana erosion. Exposure to raw tide-ether will inflict 5 Elemental Damage per second and induce rapid Ether-Sickness in organic life.]
[Defense Protocol: All transfer individuals must remain inside an activated Shelter Ward. Ward Engines will automatically consume energy to neutralize the ambient tide. Ensure your Ward Engine is adequately supplied with raw materials or pure mana potions before midnight.]
Corinne read the system text twice, her eyes narrowing behind her lenses.
Five damage per second.
A standard human in Sector 666 had twenty or thirty total health points. Going outside during the tide without a ward meant death in six seconds flat.
She turned her floating torso around, drifting back inside her third-floor bedroom, and looked at the northern wall beside her bed.
Engraved directly into the solid timber of the Spire’s inner trunk was an inverse, circular rune array, a complex network of dark green sap lines that centered around a fist-sized, hollow stone socket. This was the Spire’s Ward Engine, the core mechanism responsible for projecting the invisible, twenty-meter protective barrier around her tree.
She tapped her spectacles, focusing her vision on the inverse rune array.
[Tier-3 Ward Engine (Grade-D)] [Current Energy: 30,000 / 30,000] [Consumption Rate (Normal): 1 Point / Minute] [Predicted Consumption Rate (Ether Tide): 1 Point / Second] [Status: Fully Charged (Holds 8.3 Hours of Tide Defense)]
“One point per second,” she whispered, her voice dry.
She pulled a pencil stub from her tunic pocket, flipping to a blank page in her yellow notepad.
One point per second meant sixty points a minute. Three thousand six hundred points an hour.
In twenty-four hours, a Tier-3 Ward Engine would swallow eighty-six thousand four hundred points of energy.
Over the course of the full three-day tide, the barrier would burn through two hundred and fifty-nine thousand two hundred energy points.
A Tier-1 treehole shelter only had a maximum ward capacity of ten thousand points. Without constant, manual energy replenishment, a Tier-1 shelter’s ward would drain to absolute zero in less than three hours.
Corinne set her pencil down, her jaw tightening. “It’s a slaughterhouse.”
She opened the Regional Chat channel on her Magic Desk.
The public feed had gone completely berserk. The text was scrolling so fast the white lines looked like snow falling past a black window.
Zhao Dulai and Lin Feng were screaming about the three days, about ward burn rates that would drain their Tier-1 shelters in under three hours. Wu Gang was begging for the wood-to-energy ratio. a basement actuary from Cleveland named Two-Times Okafor had run the numbers and posted them: one unit of raw wood or stone fed one point of energy, which meant a Tier-1 shelter needed two hundred fifty-nine thousand logs to survive. Karapo called the number insane. Bellman confessed he only had four hundred logs, six minutes of ward time, and a fear of dissolving in the dark. Asang Singh called for binding shelters together. New-Year-Joy, predictably, tagged Corinne and Jasper demanding they distribute their warehouses immediately for the global emergency. Unknown User 4412 begged for wood, for potions, not to be left to die in the dark.
Corinne ignored New-Year-Joy’s message. She did not bother blacklisting him this time. The guy was already on her permanent ban list anyway.
Her private inbox chimed three times in rapid succession.
Messages arrived from Jasper Finch, Garrett Thorne, and Piper Bell.
She clicked Jasper’s thread first.
[Jasper Finch]: You saw the system alert?
[Corinne]: I did the math. Tier-1 shelters die in two and a half hours. Tier-2 shelters die in five hours.
[Jasper Finch]: My private warehouses have sixty thousand units of wood and stone combined. That buys me and my core haulers about sixteen hours of ward time. After that, we’re dry.
[Jasper Finch]: But your potions, Corinne. How much mana energy does a Grade-E Mana Potion yield when poured directly into the Ward Engine?
[Corinne]: One ten-milliliter vial gives fifty points of pure energy. A fifty-milliliter jar of health potion gives fifty points as well. The Ward Engine absorbs refined alchemical liquid instantly without needing time to break down raw timber cellular walls.
[Jasper Finch]: Fifty points per vial… That means one hundred vials gives five thousand energy points. We need to start buying every drop of raw herb stock left in the sector before midnight.
Corinne tapped her chin with her thumb, thinking fast.
[Corinne]: Tell your haulers to stop chopping timber. Have them spend the next four hours washing every Bitter-Grass root and Yellow-Tail blossom they can lay hands on. If they bring me clean herbs, I will keep your brokerage’s Ward Engines filled for the entire three days.
[Jasper Finch]: Done. I’m reassigning forty men to herb-washing right now.
She closed Jasper’s window and opened Piper Bell’s thread.
Piper’s message was frantic, filled with typos and exclamation marks.
[Piper Bell]: Corinne! I’m scared! My log cabin is only Tier-2! The ward energy bar is already at 18,000/20,000, and I don’t have enough wood to keep it burning for three days! What should I do?!
[Corinne]: Calm down, Piper. How much food do you have prepared?
[Piper Bell]: I have four clay pots of Volcanic Fish Stew, twenty stone bowls of cooked rabbit, and about fifty pounds of smoked wolf meat!
[Corinne]: Good. Send me two pots of the Volcanic Fish Stew right now. I’m going to send you fifty Grade-E Mana Potions. Do not burn your wood. Pour one mana potion into your shelter’s Ward Engine every forty minutes. Fifty potions will buy you forty hours of safety.
[Corinne]: Stay inside your cabin. Lock your glass windows. Do not open the door for anyone, no matter who screams outside.
[Piper Bell]: Thank you, Boss! Thank you so much! Sending the stew now!
A clay pot of steaming, rich fish soup materialized on Corinne’s transfer panel, smelling strongly of wild garlic, pepper, and dried Yellow-Ring earthworms.
Corinne immediately traded fifty vials of her private potion stock back to Piper, ensuring her primary chef stayed alive through the tide.
Lastly, she opened Garrett Thorne’s chat.
[Garrett Thorne]: My war-band has consolidated into three connected Tier-3 stone fortresses on the northern ridge. We have seventy thousand units of raw timber and stone stored in our cellars, plus thirty Grade-E monster cores.
[Corinne]: That’s about twenty hours of ward time for three fortresses.
[Garrett Thorne]: We’re going to burn the timber first. Save your potions for when our wood piles run dry on Day Two. My boys are currently hauling fifty barrels of Anseic water up from the creek to keep your workshop supplied.
[Corinne]: Good. Keep your sentries inside once midnight hits. The purple lightning outside isn’t going to be friendly.
She closed all her private channels, floating down the heartwood stairs to her second-floor alchemy laboratory.
The fifteen-square-meter workshop was dead quiet.
Her ten iron cauldrons sat arranged in two neat rows, their dark rims clean and wiped down. Her hundred-liter water tank was full, fed continuously by the S-Rank Anvil of Repose sitting in the basin below. Beside her stone workbenches, five hundred empty glass test tubes lay neatly stacked inside wooden crates, their cork stoppers ready.
Corinne looked at her hands.
Her palms were rough, stained with yellow sulfur dust and dark green plant oils that wouldn’t wash out. Her thumb still had a small, faint pink spot where a hot syrup bubble had burned her skin three days ago.
She pulled her Spectacles of Discernment onto her nose, adjusting the wire frames against her ears, and opened her primary textbook: Basic Alchemical Potions & Decoctions.
There were four hours left before midnight.
She was not going to spend those four hours panicking in a chatroom. She was going to stack her shelves until there wasn’t a single empty glass tube left in The Spire.
She grabbed her Abyssal Meteorite Mortar, dropped three pounds of fresh, clean Bitter-Grass roots onto the star-iron surface, and raised the heavy pestle.
The heavy pestle came down with a familiar crush, and the quiet sound of iron grinding magic herbs filled the dark room, rhythmically beating against the soft, ominous rumble of the purple thunder building outside.
The Spire groaned from its roots to its crown as the tide slammed in.
Midnight arrived without a sound. There was no wind at twelve o’clock. The broad oak leaves outside Corinne’s glass balcony doors hung completely motionless in the heavy, humid dark.
Then, the sky turned inside out.
A sheet of intense, blinding violet light erupted across the clouds, not a single bolt striking down, but an entire sky of liquid purple electricity that illuminated every branch, every leaf, and every blade of grass in Sector 666 in an unnatural, neon glare.
A heavy, suffocating pressure slammed into The Spire.
The giant oak tree groaned, a deep, vibrating bass sound that shook the floorboards beneath Corinne. Down on the third floor, the inverse rune array carved into the wall, the Spire’s Ward Engine, erupted into a violent, pulsing green and violet light.
Corinne hovered in her bedroom, her black frames resting on her nose, watching the energy counter on the wall array.
[Tier-3 Ward Engine (Grade-D)] [Energy: 29,999 / 30,000] [Energy: 29,998 / 30,000] [Energy: 29,997 / 30,000]
The numbers were dropping every single second.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Outside the glass sliding doors, twenty feet away, the air beyond the invisible ward line was churning. The purple atmospheric ether looked like thick, oily water, swirling in violent eddies that ate through the leaves of neighboring trees, turning the green foliage brown and withered in seconds.
Corinne drifted over to the Ward Engine wall array, holding a ten-milliliter test tube of Grade-E Mana Potion in her hand.
She uncorked the glass tube and poured the turquoise fluid directly into the hollow stone socket at the center of the array.
Whoosh.
The liquid vanished the instant it touched the stone, absorbed like a drop of water hit by a hot iron plate.
The digital energy counter jumped: [30,000 / 30,000].
“Fifty points per vial,” she muttered, her eyes tracking the numbers. “Instant conversion. No delay.”
She turned back to her Magic Desk.
The regional chatroom display was a slaughterhouse of panic. Lin Feng shouting his walls were burning. Zhao Dulai watching his Tier-1 ward drain toward six thousand. Wu Gang jamming fifty logs in for only five hundred points and realizing he had an hour left. Asang Singh begging anyone to sell mana potions for an iron pickaxe. Bellman’s last message flashing that his wood was gone, his ward at zero, the purple light coming through the window, and then cutting off mid-sentence.
[System Alert]: Survivor ‘James Bellman’ has died. Cause: Ether-Sickness / Cellular Dissolution.
[System Alert]: Survivor ‘Unknown User 7712’ has died. Cause: Ether-Sickness / Cellular Dissolution.
[System Alert]: Survivor ‘Unknown User 9012’ has died. Cause: Ether-Sickness / Cellular Dissolution.
Red death notices began popping across the feed every three seconds.
People who hadn’t upgraded to Tier-2, people who hadn’t stockpiled thousands of logs, people who had spent their first three weeks slacking or arguing in the public chat, their wards were collapsing one by one as the energy pools hit zero. The raw, unrefined purple tide outdoor air poured through their broken windows, dissolving their lungs and skin in minutes.
Then came a new broadcast on the regional feed, highlighted in a greasy, golden font.
[REGIONAL ANNOUNCEMENT – SECTOR 666 CENTRAL] [Sender: “Saint” Sun-Tae]
Sun-Tae called himself the leader of the Heavenly Peace Sanctuary, a massive, multi-linked Tier-3 Fortress with a combined Ward Capacity of a hundred fifty thousand Energy Points. He could not stand by and watch his human brothers and sisters die, he wrote. If the dying could reach his southern ridge stronghold within the hour, he would open his gates. The only requirement: hand over all raw wood, stone, and iron to the shared community treasury on arrival, so they could feed the central Ward Engine together. They would survive as one family.
Zhao Dulai and Lin Feng and Wu Gang answered at once, calling him a saint, saying they were coming, surrendering their wood.
Corinne hovered on her floating bed of straw, her spectacles reflecting the golden text of Sun-Tae’s message.
Her cheek rested in her palm, her lips curling into a cold, contemptuous line.
“A shared family,” she whispered, her voice laced with dry, bitter disgust. “Right.”
She knew how this played out. She’d seen it on Earth when the floods hit the low-income districts back in ’21. The saviors who called for community cooperation were always the ones who owned the boats.
Two hours passed.
The regional death counter was ticking down with terrifying speed:
Sector 666 Population: 7,420 / 10,000. Sector 666 Population: 5,890 / 10,000. Sector 666 Population: 4,120 / 10,000.
Nearly six thousand people had vanished in less than three hours.
Then the feed from Sun-Tae’s stronghold exploded into frantic, blood-curdling messages. Zhao Dulai screaming that Sun-Tae had locked the door after taking their wood. Lin Feng hoarse that two hundred of them stood in the purple rain while their murderer counted timber inside. Wu Gang’s last post: his hands were melting, he cursed Sun-Tae’s whole bloodline.
[System Alert]: Survivor ‘Zhao Dulai’ has died.
[System Alert]: Survivor ‘Lin Feng’ has died.
[System Alert]: Survivor ‘Wu Gang’ has died.
The chatroom went dead silent for twenty seconds.
Two hundred people, slaughtered outside a closed oak gate while their murderer sat inside counting their timber.
Corinne did not type a word in the public chat. She did not waste her energy making a moral speech or expressing fake horror.
She opened Sun-Tae’s profile, clicked the administrative dropdown, and permanently blacklisted his account, his shelter ID, and every single one of the fifty chosen outcasts sitting inside his stronghold from ever purchasing a single potion from her store.
Then she leaned back against her straw pile, and for the first time since the tide began, she let herself name the thing plainly.
They never hurt me. I’m removing them because leaving them is just another Mickey waiting to happen.
No industry metaphor. No talk of bad names and sloppy business. The thought sat in her chest without apology, cold and final. She had blacklisted a man who had killed two hundred strangers for their timber, and the reason was not that he was bad for her trade. It was simply that he existed, and he would do it again. She was not protecting a supply chain. She was deciding who got to keep breathing in her sector, and the ease with which the line came to her told her more than any speech could.
She did not return to the desk right away. She opened a second private thread instead, one she had not used in days, and typed a single sentence to a minor gang boss named Hollis Vane who ran a scavenger crew out of the southern yew grove: clear your people out of my herb corridor by nightfall. No explanation. No threat. Just the line, sent from her account, and the quiet authority of her name behind it.
Then she hovered at her third-floor observation window, black frames settled against her nose, and watched the screen relay his reply.
Acknowledged. Pulling them now.
That was it. No argument, no counter-offer, no brave talk about territory. She followed the map ping he sent back, a small cluster of blue markers crawling backward out of the mist-shrouded hollow she had claimed for her Bitter-Grass runs, and she realized she was not looking at a negotiation. She was looking at obedience arriving before she could have walked to the tree line even if her legs had worked.
Corinne stayed where she was, weightless above the floorboards, the purple tide humming against the glass at her back. Down in the grove, Hollis Vane’s eleven people moved fast, bundling their cut herbs and backing out along the creek like a school of fish spooked by a shadow they had never seen. They did not know what she would do if they stayed. They only knew she had burned three men in a root hollow the week before, and that the Green Wraith did not send warnings twice.
For the first time, she let herself taste it. Not the profit, not the logistics. The speed. Fear was moving faster than her, faster than any bullet or boot she could ever muster, doing the work her dead legs never could. It arrived a full hour before she would have needed to lift a finger. She watched them vanish into the gray trees and felt something cold and almost amused settle behind her ribs, the quiet, unfamiliar pleasure of being the thing in the dark that other people fled from.
She pulled her Magic Desk back open and found Jasper Finch waiting.
[Jasper Finch]: Did you see what Sun-Tae just did?
[Corinne]: I saw. He’s a dead man walking once this tide ends.
[Jasper Finch]: More importantly, our primary trade network is collapsing. Half my independent haulers died in the last two hours because their Tier-1 shelters ran out of wood. My raw material intake has dropped by eighty percent.
[Jasper Finch]: Corinne, if we don’t supply our remaining core partners with potions immediately, Garrett Thorne’s war-band and Piper Bell won’t make it to Day Three.
[Corinne]: How many cauldrons do you have access to?
[Jasper Finch]: My scavengers found an abandoned warehouse near the quarry yesterday. I have one hundred 40-liter industrial iron pots sitting in my storage grid.
[Corinne]: Send all hundred pots to my Spire right now. Send all your stored herbs. Send every scrap of clean water you have.
[Jasper Finch]: One hundred cauldrons?! Corinne, you can’t manually brew one hundred pots at once! You’ll burn your brain out!
[Corinne]: I have Anseic water from the Anvil of Repose. I have Piper’s Volcanic Fish Stew for continuous mana regen. And I have one hundred carved stone array bases.
[Corinne]: Send the pots, Finch. We’re running a marathon.
Ding!
A massive system transfer window opened over Corinne’s Magic Desk.
One hundred heavy, dark-iron industrial cauldrons, fifty bundles of pre-sorted herbs, and three thousand empty glass test tubes flooded into her inventory grid.
Corinne did not hesitate.
She floated down to her first-floor workshop, her weightless body moving with cold, mechanical precision.
She arranged the one hundred iron pots across all three floors of The Spire, thirty on the ground floor, forty on the second floor, and thirty on her third-floor observation level. Beneath every single pot, she placed one of the three-legged granite array bases she had hand-carved over the last four days.
She tapped her spatial bag, pulled out the clay pot of Volcanic Fish & Tuber Noodle Soup Piper Bell had sent earlier, and took three large, hot spoonfuls.
The rich, garlic-and-pepper broth burned her throat, but the deep, continuous wave of liquid magic bloomed in her stomach instantly.
Status Buff: Volcanic Mana Regen (600 MP over 10 Minutes). Mana Points: 80/80. Ticking continuous max.
She picked up her Verdant Rod, stepped up to the first row of thirty cauldrons on her ground floor, and tapped the golden glyph on the first stone array base.
Channel.
Bright, honey-colored alchemical fire erupted beneath the iron pot, bringing forty liters of pure Anseic spring water to a roaring, bubbling boil.
She moved to the second pot. Then the third. Then the tenth. Then the thirtieth.
Row by row, floor by floor, The Spire transformed into a roaring, three-story industrial potion factory. One hundred iron pots bubbled simultaneously, filling the wooden tower with a dense, shimmering cloud of turquoise steam that drifted out through the high balcony glass into the violent, purple night sky outside.
Corinne drifted between the roaring pots, her dark tunic soaked with sweat, her black frames fogged with green steam, her right arm moving in smooth, unbroken circles as she stirred the boiling magic.
Outside, the purple tide howled against her invisible ward.
Inside, the Origin Witch of Kaelum kept her fires burning.
She reached the last pot on the third floor and locked the glyph with a tap of her knuckle, then pulled her spectacles off to wipe the green condensation from the lenses with her sleeve. The hundredth flame settled into a steady boil at her back, and for the first time that night the rhythm of her own breathing matched the rhythm of the pots.
— Origin Witch —