Origin Witch - Sunrise Over Sector 666
Morning light smashed through the round glass window like a yellow fist, hitting Corinne straight across her eyelids. She groaned, throwing her forearm over her face to block the glare. The straw beneath her was scratchy, but it was dry, and the blanket she’d made out of her dirty hospital gown offered just enough barrier against the morning draft.
Her stomach felt settled. The heavy beef fat from last night’s hotpot was still sitting in her gut like a warm brick, a vast improvement over the sharp gnawing hollow she’d lived with for the past three days.
She used her hands to push herself upright into a sitting position, her lower spine popping twice with a dry sound.
Mana Points: 80/80.
A full tank.
Corinne took a deep breath of the pine-scented air, uncapped her half-bottle of mineral water, and took two small sips to clear the stale chili taste from her tongue.
She focused on her leaf-mark. Zephyr Float.
The familiar sensation of weightlessness washed over her. Her body lifted off the straw bed, hovering six inches above the floor. She reached down, grabbed her sausage from the desk, peeled back the foil casing with her teeth, and took a bite while drifting slowly toward the door.
She unlatched the iron bolt and swung the heavy wooden door open.
The view took her breath away.
In the dark of night, she had known the trees were big. In the crisp golden light of dawn, she realized big was a useless word.
The forest was a green ocean of colossal titans. Trunks as wide as city buses stretched upward for hundreds of feet, their bark thick, dark, and carved with ancient deeply ridged grooves. Massive boughs, thick enough to build houses on, branched out in every direction, intertwining to form a dense sun-dappled canopy thirty yards above the jungle floor.
A crystal-clear creek snaked through the dark roots far below, its water sparkling like melted diamonds under the morning sun.
Corinne looked back at her own shelter door. Her treehole was carved directly into the trunk of an oak so massive its diameter had to be at least a hundred yards. The door looked like a thumb-tack stuck into the side of a redwood.
There were no stairs. No ladders. No ropes.
Her doorway opened directly onto a broken thick branch that extended about six feet out like a natural balcony, hovering twenty-five yards above the ground.
“If I didn’t have this talent,” Corinne muttered, chewing slowly on her sausage, “I’d be trapped in a wooden box until I starved, or I’d have to jump and break my neck.”
She looked at the thick green vines crawling up the bark near her doorway. They hung down in thick ropes, some as wide as her wrist, stretching all the way to the forest floor.
Those vines are climbing routes, she realized. Anyone on the ground could just climb up here if I leave them hanging.
She hovered out onto the broken branch platform, targeting a cluster of vines clinging to the wood near her door.
Skill: Matter Extraction.
She focused her intent on a four-foot section of the thickest vine.
A soft grayish light washed over her right hand. The vine shuddered, its fibers disintegrating into a pile of neatly cut twenty-inch green strands that tumbled off the wood and fell straight toward the forest floor.
Thud.
Corinne looked down, watching the green bundle land in the mud below.
No auto-inventory, she noted dryly. Hardcore survival rules. You cut it, you carry it.
She floated down after the bundle, grabbed the thick green ropes under her arm, and floated back up to her doorway, tossing them inside onto the floorboards.
She checked her personal status.
Mana Points: 60/80.
One cast of Matter Extraction cost 20 Mana Points. A quarter of her entire pool just to cut a handful of ropes.
Corinne frowned. That was steep. If she relied purely on magic to harvest building materials, she’d spend three-quarters of her day sitting on straw waiting for her mana bar to refill.
She hauled herself over to the Magic Desk and tapped the [Regional Exchange] tab.
The screen prompted her: Activate Exchange Store? Fee: 20 Basic Material Units.
Corinne picked up the bundle of cut vines from her floor, set them flat onto the small screen, and selected Deposit.
The vines vanished in a flash of dull green light.
Vines +20. ‘Corinne’s Store’ successfully activated. Storage Grid unlocked: 10/10 slots.
Corinne tested the system by transferring her empty plastic water bottle into the store and pulling it back out. It appeared and vanished in a fraction of a second, seamless and silent.
“Convenient,” she muttered. “At least the system isn’t completely useless.”
She turned back toward the open doorway, pulled her shoulders back, and drifted out into the open canopy once more. She needed to scout her immediate surroundings and find more supply crates before the afternoon heat set in.
Finding crates in the daylight was vastly harder than at night. The soft green glow that made them stand out in the dark was washed out by the bright morning sun. She had to rely on her eyes, scanning every bush, hollow root, and thicket from twenty feet in the air.
As she drifted lazily between the giant trunks, she kept a tight eye on her hand mark.
Ten minutes passed. Twenty minutes. Half an hour.
Her mana bar sat at a steady 60/80.
Corinne paused, hovering beside a clump of pale purple orchids growing out of a tree fork.
It hasn’t dropped, she thought, her eyes narrowing. Thirty minutes of active floating, and my mana hasn’t moved down by a single point.
She pulled up her talent description again in her mind. Zephyr Float: Consumes 1 Mana Point per minute.
Then she remembered her Spirit stat. Spirit 8.
If her natural mana recovery rate was exactly 1 point per minute, and Zephyr Float consumed 1 point per minute.
“They cancel out,” she whispered, a thin slow smile spreading across her face. “As long as I don’t cast other spells like Matter Extraction, I can float forever.”
That changed everything. It meant she wasn’t on a ticking clock every time her body left the ground. She was an airborne scout with infinite flight time, provided she kept her mana reserves untouched.
A dry crack split the air.
The harsh sound of iron striking hard timber rang out from the forest floor forty yards below her position.
Corinne instantly pulled herself up into the dense foliage of a high branch, peering down through the broad green leaves.
Two men were standing near a thick pine tree.
One of them was wearing a filthy gray tracksuit, sweating heavily as he swung an iron broadsword against the trunk. The blade bounced off the thick bark with a dull thunk, leaving only a shallow white scratch and sending a painful vibration up the man’s arms.
“Dammit!” Tracksuit yelled, dropping the sword into the dirt and rubbing his red palms. “This is impossible! The wood in this place is like solid copper! I’ve been hacking at this stupid trunk for an hour and I haven’t even got ten units!”
His companion, a thin guy wearing thick black-framed glasses and a torn flannel shirt, was leaning against a boulder, holding a rusted iron pickaxe.
“Stop whining,” Glasses said coldly, his voice laced with venom. “Your mana is empty, mine is empty. If we don’t gather three thousand units of stone and wood before the week is up, our shelters won’t survive whatever comes after this protection period. You think that system voice was joking?”
“I don’t care!” Tracksuit spat on the ground. “I should have picked the axe! Who the hell picks a longsword for a survival game? I thought I’d be fighting goblins, not playing lumberjack!”
“You’re an idiot, Marcus,” Glasses said, picking up his pickaxe. “A pretty decorative idiot. Now pick up your steel and keep swinging before.”
Glasses stopped mid-sentence. His head whipped up, his eyes wide behind his smudged lenses as he stared directly at the high canopy where Corinne was hiding.
A stray sunbeam had caught Corinne’s dirty hospital gown as she shifted her position, casting a distinct human-shaped shadow across the broad leaves above them.
“Did you see that?” Glasses whispered, his knuckles whitening on his pickaxe handle.
“See what?” Tracksuit grunted, picking up his sword.
“Above us. A shadow. Moving fast through the top branches.” Glasses backed up two steps, his eyes darting frantically through the green canopy. “There shouldn’t be anything up there. The system said high-level beasts won’t attack during the first week, but.”
“Screw this,” Tracksuit blanched, grabbing his sword and turning toward the south. “I’m not staying to find out if the system lied. Let’s move south, near the rock wall. There’s more stone down there anyway.”
The two men gathered their crude tools and hurried off through the brush, constantly glancing over their shoulders at the high trees.
Corinne watched them go, her face impassive.
They chose weapons instead of utility, she noted mentally. And they’re terrified of their own shadows. Good.
She didn’t follow them. She had no interest in making friends, and she certainly had no desire to share resources with two nervous men holding sharp iron.
She turned and floated back toward her treehole shelter, satisfied with her morning recon.
Once inside, she pulled the heavy door shut, latched it, and sat down in front of the Magic Desk. She unlocked the [Regional Chat] screen, letting the wall of public text scroll past her eyes.
The death toll in Sector 666 had ticked up again: 9,971 / 10,000.
Seventeen dead in less than thirty hours.
The chatroom was an absolute cesspool:
[Asang Singh]: LISTEN TO ME! Everyone watch out for a bastard named James Bellman! He traded me a rusted pickaxe for my starter iron axe yesterday, promised he’d swap back today, and now he’s blocked my private messages! He stole my tool!
[Lin Feng]: Shut your mouth, Asang. You were in prison for fraud two years back in Shanghai. Don’t act like a virgin in a brothel.
[Wu Gang]: Hahaha! Look who’s talking! Lin Feng, the illegal wildlife smuggler! How’s the forest treating you, brother? No cops out here to stop your trade!
[Victor Capone]: Keep barking, little dogs. Once I locate where your shelters are anchored, I’ll personally come by and collect the tax you owe my family from the Chicago docks.
[Unknown User 4412]: What the hell is this channel?! Is this a prison ward? Why am I trapped in a sector with murderers, mobsters, and con artists?!
[Unknown User 8891]: The World-Will put all the trash in one pile, obviously. Sector 666, the Canopy of Outcasts. We’re in a battle royale with every criminal on Earth!
[James Bellman]: @Asang Singh Cry more, scammer. A tool in hand is worth two in the bush. Anyone got water? I’ll trade an iron dagger for half a bottle.
[Zhao Dulai]: Hey, did anyone see a weird black shadow flying through the upper canopy around Sector 666 West? Me and my buddy saw something huge drifting over the giant trees.
Corinne leaned back against the wall, her fingers resting lightly on the wooden edge of the desk.
A Canopy of Outcasts, she thought, her lips curving into a dry cold line. Smugglers, fraudsters, mobsters, and thieves.
The system hadn’t randomly distributed humanity. It had sorted them. And her region, Sector 666, was filled with Earth’s worst rejects.
She looked at her shelter upgrade requirements glowing on the screen:
Treehole Shelter Tier-2 Upgrade Requirements: Wood * 2,500 Stone * 100 Vines * 500 Grade-E Monster Core * 10
Ten monster cores. That meant killing ten creatures like those timber wolves she’d barely escaped last night.
Corinne reached into her pocket, pulled out the small turtle-shell notebook she had pulled from the ruined workshop earlier, and laid it gently on the wooden desk.
Thane’s Ledger.
She looked at the cracked brown leather cover, her eyes cold and clear.
“If this place is full of wolves and criminals,” she whispered to the empty room, “then I guess I’d better learn how to make poison.”
— Origin Witch —