Origin Witch - Iron and Rust
A hangnail caught on the edge of Thane’s ledger and split. Corinne sucked the sting, then flipped the page with a blood-tipped thumb. The parchment smelled of cold cellar dirt and dried ox gall, and the diagram under her eyes was not a recipe but a dare.
Can I actually do this?
The thought crept in quietly, cold and heavy. Five years ago, when the SUV smashed her life into wet splinters, she was fifteen. She hadn’t even taken high school chemistry. Her entire formal education consisted of middle school algebra, three semesters of basic world history, and whatever paperback thrillers her mother bought at gas station discount racks. Since the accident, her universe had shrunk to the four walls of a sterile hospital ward and whatever digitized textbooks she could download on a cracked tablet until her aunt cut the Wi-Fi off.
A crippled girl who didn’t finish eleventh grade trying to learn medieval chemistry from a dead man’s diary in a giant hollow tree.
It sounded stupid.
She flipped the page back to the entry on Bitter-Grass. According to Thane’s scrawled notes, the plant was a common forest weed with long serrated leaves and thick fibrous roots. When crushed and boiled alongside the flat yellow petals of Yellow-Tail, its sap released a weak unrefined mana charge.
She reached out to grab her half-empty water bottle, intending to head for the door, when a bright crimson symbol flashed violently in the corner of her vision.
The small panel on the Magic Desk was blinking. A thick red exclamation mark pulsed against the glass.
Attention, Earth Transfer: The Starter Tool distribution period will expire in 9 hours, 51 minutes. Select your designated tool immediately, or forfeit your allocation.
Corinne stared at the blinking red light, her mouth dropping open slightly.
She had forgotten about it. Between waking up floating in mid-air, nearly getting her toes bitten off by timber wolves, and unearthing a dead alchemist’s notebook from a pile of rotten wood, the system’s initial freebie had slipped right out of her head.
“Nine hours,” she grumbled, nudging her floating torso closer to the screen with a light tap of her toe against the floor. “Right. Blame the dead guy for writing a textbook.”
She tapped the exclamation mark. The screen expanded into a giant grid filled with black-and-white line drawings of medieval equipment.
Swords. Axes. Morningstars. Heavy iron pickaxes.
She scrolled past the weapons without a second glance. A three-foot broadsword was just dead weight if you couldn’t pivot your hips to generate torque.
Down in the lower sub-categories, under Agricultural and Domestic, her eyes caught a small icon.
Gardening Trowel (Grade-E) Function: Used for garden maintenance, loosening soil, and delicate excavation. Note: Small, but sharp enough to be useful. Unfussy.
Thane’s ledger had emphasized one rule above all others when it came to harvesting raw ingredients: Never snap the main taproot of a mana herb with bare fingers. Metal breaks the earth; skin bruises the spirit.
“Trowel it is,” she said, tapping the icon.
A soft pop echoed in the quiet room.
A piece of cold steel materialized on the wooden desk, bouncing once before settling against the edge. It was roughly nine inches long. The spade head was forged from dull gray iron, shaped like a flat palm on one side and split into three sharp fork-like prongs on the other. The grip was wrapped in dark leather, heavy and cold in her hand.
Corinne slid the trowel’s leather handle into the waistband of her hospital pants, cinch-tying the drawstring tight so it wouldn’t slip.
She picked up her empty green supply crate, tied two thick lengths of cut vine around its plastic corners, and strapped the box to her back like an oversized awkward backpack.
Zephyr Float.
Her dead legs lifted off the straw. She drifted through the open door, catching the edge of the outer wooden platform to stabilize her momentum, and looked out over the vast sunlit forest.
Finding herbs was surprisingly easy once she knew what to look for.
During her morning flight, she had treated the ground like a green blur. Now, floating ten feet above the roots, her eyes scanned the forest floor with surgical precision.
Twenty minutes out, tucked beneath the exposed roots of a massive white pine, she spotted a cluster of long dark green leaves with sharp saw-tooth edges.
Bitter-Grass.
She angled her upper body downward, letting her reduced mass glide smoothly through the air until her bare hands rested against the pine bark three inches above the dirt. Her legs dragged softly across the damp leaf mold, limp as hollow hoses.
She drew the gardening trowel from her waist. Using the three-pronged fork, she jammed the iron deep into the black soil surrounding the plant’s base, leveraging her shoulder weight to pop the earth open.
The soil gave way with a soft tearing sound. She lifted the plant out by its stem, careful not to crush the thick pale taproot.
No bruise. Intact.
She wiped the excess mud against her cotton gown, tossed the herb over her shoulder into the open crate on her back, and pushed off the pine root to hover toward a patch of bright yellow blossoms twenty yards to the east.
Yellow-Tail. Flat oval petals, pale as lemon peel, growing in tight clusters along mossy rock faces.
For two hours, the forest was quiet except for the steady metallic clink of her iron trowel striking dirt and stone. She dug up thirty roots of Bitter-Grass and two dozen stems of Yellow-Tail, filling her wooden crate nearly to the brim.
By the time she leaned back against a tree trunk to rest, her arms were caked in dry black mud up to her elbows, and the hem of her hospital gown was stained dark green from crushed leaves.
She looked up through the thick canopy. The sunlight was shifting, turning from bright gold to a deep warm amber.
I’m back at the ruined shack, she realized, looking at the massive wall of tangled green vines fifty feet ahead.
She hadn’t intended to return so soon, but her foraging path had led her a wide circle.
The mound of green vines looked identical to how it had appeared that morning, a thick impenetrable tent of leaves hiding the collapsed timber frame where she’d found Thane’s ledger.
Thane’s notes had mentioned a workshop. A proper workspace with proper stone foundations, built beneath the ground to hide his volatile experiments from the wandering beasts of Kaelum.
Corinne pulled her trowel from her waist.
“Let’s see what else the old man left behind,” she muttered.
She floated directly into the mouth of the vine tent, pushing the heavy leaves aside. Inside, the rotten wood smell was thick enough to make her nostrils sting.
The roof of the outer room had completely caved in, dropping heavy moss-covered beams across the dirt floor.
Corinne didn’t bother trying to lift the beams by hand. She raised her right palm, targeting the thickest rotten plank wedged across the floorboards.
Matter Extraction.
A dull gray light flashed from her leaf-mark.
The rotten beam shrieked as its structural integrity dissolved, turning into twenty neat blocks of lumber that rolled down the debris pile with a heavy thud-thud-thud.
The sudden removal of the beam created a hole in the collapsed floorboards.
Dust billowed up, thick and gray, catching the amber light streaming through the vine canopy. Through the hazy air, Corinne caught a glimpse of something dark below, a set of steep stone steps leading straight down into the earth.
She didn’t hesitate. She adjusted her center of gravity, slanting her floating torso forward, and drifted down the dark stone stairwell.
The air shifted. The warm pine scent of the forest disappeared, replaced by the heavy damp chill of subterranean earth, old copper, and stagnant rot.
Corinne reached out, her fingers brushing against the rough stone walls. They were cold and slick with moisture.
At the bottom of the stairs, the darkness was absolute until her eyes adjusted to a faint eerie blue glow emanating from the far corner of the basement.
Luminescent mushrooms. Dozens of them, their pale blue caps as wide as dinner plates, growing out of the damp cracks in the stone floor and climbing up the thick ancient tree roots that had burst through the cellar walls.
The room was massive, at least two hundred square meters in size.
Huge serpent-like roots traversed the ceiling, breaking through the stone arches and dropping chunks of masonry onto the floorboards. Broken glass vials, rusted iron stands, and waterlogged books lay scattered across the mud in a tragic silent mess. Time and the relentless growth of the giant trees had crushed Thane’s underground sanctuary into a damp tomb.
“Well,” Corinne whispered, her voice echoing strangely off the low stone ceiling. “It’s a dump. But it’s my dump now.”
She floated three inches above the wet stone floor, avoiding the muddy puddles, her eyes scanning every shadow.
Hanging from a thick twisted root directly above a collapsed oak desk was a small dusty pouch. It was roughly the size of her hand, made of coarse unbleached burlap, tied shut with a dry leather thong.
Corinne drifted over, reached out, and untied the pouch.
The material was rough under her thumb, dry despite the dampness of the cellar.
She slid her hand inside. Her fingers passed through the small opening and kept going. Her entire forearm sank into the hand-sized pouch up to her elbow before her knuckles touched a dry empty wooden bottom.
“Spatial storage,” she gasped, her eyes widening.
She pulled her arm out and placed the small burlap pouch onto her screen interface to appraise it.
Item Appraised: Pouch of Preservation (Grade-C) Function: Contains an internal spatial volume of 1 cubic meter. Requires mana injection to open. Organic plant matter stored inside will not lose efficacy over time. Note: Originally possessed a much larger internal volume, but long-term mana starvation has shrunk the spatial anchor. Continuous nourishment with pure mana may restore its former capacity.
Corinne let out a long slow breath.
One cubic meter. That was enough space to hold over a thousand pounds of fresh herbs without them rotting, drying out, or losing their magical potency. And it weighed less than a dry orange in her pocket.
“Old man Thane,” she muttered, clutching the bag to her chest. “You were a paranoid hoarding bastard, and I love you for it.”
She tucked the spatial bag into her gown pocket and continued her search.
In the far corner of the basement, half-buried under a mound of wet clay and rotten bookshelf planks, she found three pieces of dark heavy metal.
A wide-bellied cauldron, roughly twelve inches tall and twelve inches across at the rim, alongside a heavy iron mortar and a matching stone pestle.
All three items were covered in a thick layer of reddish-brown rust. But as Corinne rubbed her thumb against the rim of the cauldron, she noticed a distinct color line. The bottom third of the metal was stained a dark iridescent blue-black beneath the rust, while the upper half was a dull ordinary iron gray.
It looked like someone had boiled corrosive fluids in it for decades, permanently altering the metal’s structure.
“Works for me,” she said, picking up the mortar. It was surprisingly heavy, nearly fifteen pounds. “If nothing else, I can scrub the rust off and use the pot to boil instant noodles.”
She swept the remaining piles of rotten timber with her eyes.
Beside the broken bookshelf, a glint of clear light caught the blue mushroom glow.
Corinne drifted closer, using her trowel to lever away a rotten oak plank.
Lying in the dirt was a knife.
It didn’t look like an iron blade. The nine-inch blade was forged from a single piece of semi-transparent pale-blue crystal, its surface rough and chipped along the spine like a piece of hand-flinted obsidian, but its edge was impossibly thin, practically shimmering in the dim light.
Corinne picked it up by its leather-wrapped hilt.
The moment her fingers closed around the grip, a warm heavy jolt rushed up her arm, straight into her chest and shoulders.
She blinked, pulling up her status screen.
Moonstone Carver (Grade-C) Effect: Damage +50, Strength +30. Note: A blade crafted from raw moonstone, forged by a master artisan. Extremely sharp. Long-term mana starvation has degraded its physical enchantments. Can be restored through continuous mana nourishment.
Strength +30.
Corinne stared at the screen, her heart slamming against her ribs.
Her base Strength stat was a 2. A miserable crippled 2.
She flicked her wrist casually, testing the knife’s balance. The blade swung through the damp air with a sharp high-pitched whistle.
Her arm felt solid. Heavy. The persistent weak tremor in her shoulders that had plagued her since she woke up on the straw mattress was gone, replaced by a dense coiled power.
She tested her strength by poking the wooden tip of a fallen oak beam with the pommel of the knife. She didn’t mean to hit it hard, but her arm moved with sudden explosive force.
The charge went off with a flat, concussive bang that rattled the tin walls.
The four-inch-thick oak plank snapped cleanly in half, sending wood splinters flying across the stone floor and smashing into the far wall with a loud crash.
Corinne froze, her mouth hanging open, staring at the shattered timber.
“Holy shit,” she whispered.
She brought the crystal knife up to her face, blew on the transparent blade to clear a speck of wood dust, and wiped it reverently against her sleeve.
“You’re staying right on my belt.”
She slid the Moonstone Carver into her waistband beside the gardening trowel, making sure the cinch cord was tied double-tight.
She spent another twenty minutes digging through the dirt mounds, finding a well-preserved book titled Basic Herbalism resting inside a hollow root cavity, its thick paper still smelling of dried ink.
By the time she gathered her haul, the book, the mortar, the crystal knife, the spatial pouch, and five luminescent blue mushrooms she plucked from the wall for light, the amber sun outside had sunk below the horizon.
The basement stairs were pitch black.
Corinne dropped the glowing mushrooms into the iron cauldron, tied the pot to her back with vines, grabbed her wooden crate, and floated up the stone steps into the dark canopy.
The night air was cold and heavy.
Far below, deep in the black valleys between the giant tree roots, the rhythmic bone-chilling howls of the timber wolf pack echoed through the canopy once again.
Corinne didn’t look down. She adjusted her spatial bag in her pocket, tightened her grip on her wooden crate, and glided through the high branches toward the warm amber glow of her treehole door.
— Origin Witch —