Origin Witch - Distilling Down
A silver film clung to the bottom of the clay crock, twelve hours of distillation baked into it, and Steelwool wanted every bit of it.
Corinne blew on the ladle, steam fogging the lower rim of her spectacles, and thumbed the owl chick’s fluffy belly away from the rim.
“Get your face out of my dinner, bird,” Corinne grumbled, nudging the chick’s fluffy belly with her thumb.
Steelwool let out an indignant keek! and hopped two inches back, its metallic gray feathers puffing up until it looked like a fat, angry cushion.
Corinne picked up a pair of wooden chopsticks, carved from dry pine with her Moonstone Carver, and dipped them into the broth. She pulled up a thick cluster of tuber noodles along with a piece of flaky white fish, blew on it twice to cool the chili oil, and shoved it into her mouth.
The heat hit her tongue first. It wasn’t the chemical burn of raw sulfur or the metallic bitter tang of her own potions. It was rich, deep, and fiercely spicy, the chili oil cutting through the cold dampness that had settled into her chest over the last twenty-four hours of continuous cauldron work. The fish meat dissolved on her tongue, tender and sweet, while the potato noodles were chewy, absorbing every drop of the spiced fish broth.
A deep, continuous wave of liquid warmth bloomed in her gut the second she swallowed.
Status Buff: Volcanic Fish Stew (Active). Effect: Restores 1 Mana Point per second for 10 minutes (Total: 600 MP). Effect: Restores 2 Health Points per minute for 10 minutes (Total: 20 HP). Physical Alignment: Fatigue Removed / Mental Strain Reduced by 40%.
Corinne let out a long, quiet breath, her shoulders dropping two inches as the dull, throbbing headache behind her left eye faded away. Her mana bar, which had been resting at a miserable 18/80 after her morning array carving, began ticking upward: 19, 25, 40, 60, 80 (Max).
“Piper’s getting better at this,” she muttered, taking another large mouthful of noodles.
She picked up a small piece of cooked trout from the broth, blew on it until the steam stopped, and tossed it into Steelwool’s waiting dish on the floorboards. The chick pounced on the meat, its sharp black beak snapping shut with a satisfied crunch as it swallowed the fish whole.
Corinne ate slowly, taking her time for the first time in two days.
Outside the glass sliding doors of her high balcony, the second day of the Ether Tide was in full swing. The sky wasn’t dark anymore. It was a dense, glowing shade of electric violet that made the rain look like purple ink falling through the high tree branches. The wind was howling, a long, mournful shriek that hit the Spire’s living timber walls and bounced off, unable to penetrate the thick, green curtain of her Tier-3 protective ward.
She didn’t look at the main chat channel on her Magic Desk. She didn’t need to. The regional death alerts had slowed from a flood to a trickling stream. Most of the outcasts who were going to die from weak shelters or lack of wood were already dead. The three thousand three hundred people remaining in Sector 666 were the ones who had either hoarded massive timber stacks, joined Garrett Thorne’s stone fortresses, or bought Corinne’s iron kegs of mana potions through Jasper Finch.
She tapped her spectacles, pulling up her private trade thread with Piper Bell. She told the girl the stew was good and the chili oil had helped with the throat smoke. Piper wrote back that she had found three dried chili pods in a supply crate and worried they might be too hot, then asked how the cauldrons were holding. Corinne said they were fine, that the Ward Engine sat at twenty-six thousand energy points and they had enough liquid mana to ride out four more days if the tide extended.
Piper said Sun-Tae’s fortress stood right across the ridge from her window.
[Corinne]: What’s happening over there?
Piper wrote that it was terrible. About forty people still lay in the mud outside his walls, not screaming anymore, just lying there in the purple water, with two archers posted on the stone battlements to keep anyone from reaching the gate. Corinne swallowed a piece of cooked tuber, her face unreadable behind her black wire frames, and told Piper not to look out that window, to focus on her cooking.
Piper said she knew. She added that Garrett Thorne’s second-in-command had dropped off fifty pounds of raw wild boar meat and two iron buckets of clean spring water an hour earlier, saying they were preparing the battering rams for tomorrow morning.
[Corinne]: Tomorrow morning?
Piper confirmed it. The system clock said the Ether Tide ended at midnight tonight, and the second the purple light cleared, Thorne’s war-band was moving on Sun-Tae’s fortress.
Corinne closed the message window. Midnight tonight. The three-day storm was almost over. When the purple sky cleared and the environmental spell stability returned to normal, Sector 666 was going to undergo a bloody reckoning. The surviving outcasts, furious, starved, and armed with iron weapons, were going to tear through the forest like wild dogs, settling every score that had built up during the tide. And at the center of that storm stood Sun-Tae, sitting on two hundred thousand units of stolen wood inside a fortress surrounded by two hundred fresh corpses.
Corinne set her empty clay crock on the desk, wiped her wooden chopsticks clean with a dry rag, and picked up her Moonstone Carver. She didn’t need to join the siege. She didn’t need to stand in the mud with a battering ram or swing an iron axe at Sun-Tae’s gates. She hovered down the heartwood stairs to her second-floor laboratory, her weightless body floating through the warm, quiet air.
In the corner of her workshop, sitting on a heavy oak rack, were three leather-bound crates filled with round yellow glass throw-vials:
30x Corrosive Slowness Decoctions
20x Crude Explosive Charges
15x Flame Potions
She picked up one of the yellow flame vials, turning the smooth glass over in her hand, watching the thick, orange Fire-Bell syrup swirl inside like liquid sun. Garrett Thorne was bringing pikes and battering rams to Sun-Tae’s wooden gates. She was going to send him with fire.
Corinne slid the yellow vial into her Pouch of Preservation, opened her copy of Basic Mana Circuitry, and began reviewing the nodal resonance points for localized incendiary arrays, her fingers steady and her eyes clear as she settled into the work ahead.
The violet glare outside her glass balcony doors simply snapped off. Corinne hovered four inches above the floorboards of her third-floor bedroom, her right thumb pressed against the stone socket of the Spire’s Ward Engine, and for three full seconds she didn’t move.
Midnight hadn’t come with a church bell or a siren. It came with the sudden, deafening absence of a hum. The heavy, suffocating pressure that had been pushing against her ear canals for seventy-two straight hours vanished. Her eardrums popped with a wet, sharp click. The air inside the room suddenly felt light, cool, and thin, smelling no longer of crushed marigolds and ozone, but of damp bark and cold night rain.
Her arm stayed raised, her hand hovering over the stone socket, her thumb twitching. The inverse rune array carved into the oak wall slowed its violent pulsing, dropping from a feverish lavender flare down to a soft, steady emerald glow.
Global System Announcement: First Monthly Ether Tide has officially concluded. Environmental Status: Atmospheric ether density returning to baseline. Outdoor spell stability restored to 100%. Ward Engine consumption rates normalized.
Corinne let out a long, ragged exhale that sounded like dry paper scraping over stone. Her arm dropped to her side like a lead pipe. Zephyr Float flickered, her body bobbing once in mid-air before her dead legs settled back against her dark linen tunic.
Beside her bed, Steelwool popped its round gray head out from inside its wool scarf nest. The owl chick blinked its big, honey-colored eyes twice, rotated its head a full ninety degrees to check the glass doors, and then let out a loud, demanding keek-keek before hopping onto her knee.
“Yeah,” Corinne rasped, her voice thick with dry soot. “I know. It’s over.”
She reached up, slid her black frames down the bridge of her nose, and wiped a smear of cold grease off her cheek with the back of her wrist. Her right thumb was raw, the skin split near the nail where she’d dropped a hot stone array base during the noon brew run.
She tapped the Magic Desk display projected into her spectacled vision.
[Tier-3 Ward Engine (Grade-D)] [Energy: 28,910 / 30,000] [Consumption Rate: 1 Point / Minute]
The energy drain had dropped from sixty points a second back down to one point a minute. The three-day marathon was done.
She drifted over to the glass sliding doors, pushed the heavy frame open, and floated out onto the third-floor balcony. The forest of Sector 666 lay beneath her absolute, unbroken dark. The sky above was clear for the first time in three days, washed clean of the purple storm clouds, revealing an ocean of cold silver stars that cast a pale, icy light across the high canopy. But where there had once been endless miles of unbroken green leaves, the forest was now scarred with vast, empty black patches.
Dozens of giant trees had been stripped bare by the raw tide-ether, their branches black and brittle like burned bone. Down in the valleys between the roots, where hundreds of Tier-1 wooden huts had once stood, there was nothing left but flat mud pools and piles of waterlogged, rotting pine planks.
Corinne opened the regional system feed. The population counter at the top of the interface had stopped its sickening downward plunge:
Sector 666 Population: 3,108 / 10,000.
Six thousand eight hundred and ninety-two people gone in twenty-two days. Nearly seven-tenths of the entire transfer population assigned to their sector had been erased. The weak shelters were gone. The gatherers who had spent their first three weeks begging for handouts instead of chopping wood were gone. The outcasts who had trusted Sun-Tae’s promises of a shared family sanctuary were lying in the purple mud outside his closed oak gates, their bodies already dissolved into gray silt. Only three thousand survivors remained, scattered across the giant trees inside a handful of Tier-2 and Tier-3 strongholds.
Corinne scrolled down to her personal inventory ledger.
Spire Storage Vault (Ground Floor):
– Wood Logs: 48,200 Units
– Cut Stone Blocks: 11,400 Units
– Smelted Iron Ore: 18,600 lbs
– Refined Copper Slabs: 5,200 lbs
– Black Obsidian Blocks: 42 Units
– Grade-E Monster Cores: 164 Units
– D-Rank Fire Element Essence: 1 Unit
– Clean Anseic Water: 100 Liters (Infinite Loop via the Anvil of Repose)
She had run a hundred cauldrons for thirty-six hours straight. She had burned through three hundred pounds of fresh Bitter-Grass, fifty pounds of dried Yellow-Tail petals, and forty clay pots of Piper’s Volcanic Fish Stew. She had filled twenty iron kegs with pure mana potions and fifteen kegs with health potions. And in exchange, she had drained the raw material reserves of every surviving war-band, trade hub, and independent scavenger team in Sector 666. She didn’t just own a treehole. She owned the raw materials needed to build a small fortress city.
Ping. A private chat window flashed blue in her spectacled vision. Garrett Thorne wrote that the purple light had just cut out and the ridge air was clear. He confirmed all three of his fortresses held, that they had burned six of her iron mana kegs over the last thirty hours but all eighty of his boys were standing, and that they were moving out right then.
Corinne leaned her upper body over the high wooden railing of her balcony, looking south toward the central ridge.
[Corinne]: Where are you going?
He said to Sun-Tae’s hill. Marnell’s southern squad was bringing three heavy oak battering rams, and Elodie was already set up on the high rocks overlooking the main gate. The bastard, Thorne said, had taken two hundred people’s timber, locked his doors, and let them melt in the rain, sitting on two hundred thousand units of stolen wood, and his boys were going to tear the stone walls apart with their bare hands.
Corinne’s fingers tapped a slow rhythm against the cold timber railing.
[Corinne]: Take five vials of my Flame Potion from Jasper’s inventory. If his oak gates are reinforced with iron straps, pour the orange syrup over the hinges. It burns through oak in thirty seconds.
Thorne said he would bring her his central Ward Engine core when they were done. She closed his thread. Down in the southern valley, three miles away, the quiet night air was broken by the sharp, distant sound of iron horns blowing. Garrett Thorne’s war-band was calling their squads together for the march.
Corinne didn’t join them. She didn’t fly out into the dark to watch the siege. She turned her body around, drifted back inside her third-floor bedroom, and settled flat on her straw mattress. Her lower back was throbbing with a dull, heavy ache from the thirty-six-hour marathon, and her right index finger was swollen where the array spark had scorched her skin.
She pulled Steelwool onto her lap, letting the owl chick nestle its soft, steel-gray body against her stomach, its warm feathers vibrating as it let out a quiet, rumbling purr. She picked up her copy of Basic Mana Circuitry, opened page one hundred and twelve, and began reading the chapter on Obsidian Nodal Integration, her eyes moving slowly across the dry parchment pages while the iron horns echoed softly through the distant trees. She had learned, in the long months before the Spire, to wash herself by touch and memory alone — her fingers doing the work her dead nerves could not report, the cloth moving over skin she could not feel and only trusted to be clean.
— Origin Witch —