Origin Witch - Recipe of Origin
The vellum page she’d hunted for two weeks finally curled into her hands under the vault’s cold air.
Corinne settled onto the low stone slab, a brass oil lamp throwing a long yellow shadow across the ancient arches, and spread the page flat with both palms.
Beside her knee lay five open books, their pages overlapping like a paper puzzle. Basic Glyphs. Basic Mana Circuitry and Array Geometry. Basic Mineralogy. Basic Alchemical Potions and Decoctions. Thane’s master pigskin journal. And floating three inches above the open books was the Elven Monarch.
The S-Rank butterfly fluttered its broad green leaf-wings silently, shedding a continuous delicate rain of emerald pollen across the yellowed parchment. Through Corinne’s Spectacles of Discernment the glowing pollen lines didn’t just illuminate the ink. They reconnected the broken encrypted geometric symbols Thane had scrawled in his margins fifty years before his death.
Corinne held a piece of charcoal between index and middle fingers, thumb smudged black as she copied a complex twelve-sided array onto a fresh sheet of thick paper. “It isn’t a recipe,” she rasped, eyes narrowing behind her wire frames. “It’s an equation.”
For thirty-nine days she had been doing standard alchemy. You took physical plant matter, Bitter-Grass roots, Yellow-Tail petals, wolf bile, sulfur dust, chopped it, boiled it in Anseic water, and used your own mana to bind the plant’s dormant ether into liquid. The herbs gave the material body. The magic gave the spark. No herbs, no potions.
Thane’s final masterpiece, the secret research he’d hidden behind three layers of encrypted rune locks in his underground tomb, was completely different. Origin Alchemy. The ability to bypass physical plants and minerals entirely. To take raw unrefined atmospheric ether, the wild violent energy filling Kaelum’s air, water, and soil, and force it through a multi-layered geometric matrix until the pure energy condensed directly into physical matter. Transmutation from nothing.
“He couldn’t finish it,” Corinne whispered, fingers tracing a broken node on Thane’s final diagram. “He had the geometry, but he didn’t have the base water.”
Thane had tried ordinary well water as his physical anchor. The raw unrefined atmospheric ether overwhelmed the ordinary fluid, shattering his array bases and blowing his cauldrons in his face, the exact explosive failure that had buried his original estate in mud decades ago.
Corinne didn’t have ordinary well water. She had the S-Rank the Anvil of Repose sitting in her Spire’s water tank, generating hundreds of gallons of pure high-density Anseic spring fluid every day. And she had an S-Rank Elven Monarch shedding green ether-vision pollen directly over her array plates.
She rose off the slab onto her weightless lift, bare soles hovering just above the damp earth, left knee holding solid as she carried the yellow paper diagram toward her worktable. “Let’s try it,” she said.
She set a flat twelve-inch slab of black obsidian onto the workbench. Using her Moonstone Carver she carved Thane’s master Origin Array directly into the dark volcanic glass. Not a single circle with a triangle inside. A dense six-layered concentric web, twelve outer containment nodes, twenty-four inner circulation paths, and a central deep-drilled core socket shaped like an inverted pyramid. Her Strength-plus-thirty enchantment made the crystal blade slice the hard obsidian smoothly, but the precision required for the microscopic circuitry lines beaded her forehead with cold sweat. One mistake and the array would short out.
Ten minutes. Twenty. An hour.
Corinne blew a cloud of black obsidian dust off the finished slab. The array was complete, a dark razor-sharp geometric web etched permanently into the volcanic glass. She set her dark blue star-metal cauldron, the Abyssal Meteorite Cauldron, flat across the three obsidian legs of the array. She opened her wooden spigot, filling the pot with five liters of crystal-clear glowing Anseic water from her stone well.
No herbs. No Bitter-Grass. No Yellow-Tail petals. No wolf hearts. No sulfur dust. Just pure untouched spring fluid.
Corinne stepped up to the workbench, bare feet hovering firm above the floor, hands resting flat against the dark outer rim of the meteorite pot. She focused her spirit. Activate Origin Array.
A pulse of cold ether rolled off the meteorite pot.
The twelve outer nodes on the black obsidian base flared to life, not the warm honey-colored light of her standard brewing arrays but an intense blinding white-blue glare that illuminated every stone arch in the underground vault. The five liters of Anseic water inside the cauldron began to hum. It didn’t boil. The liquid didn’t steam or bubble. Instead the water turned into a clear spinning vortex that pulled the very air inside the cellar downward. The ambient atmospheric ether, the invisible raw magical energy floating in the subterranean dampness, was drawn into the spinning water like iron filings to a heavy magnet.
Mana Points, eighty of eighty, sixty, forty, twenty.
Corinne’s mana bar drained at a terrifying rate, twenty points every five seconds as the array used her spirit as a bridge to tame the wild atmospheric ether. Her head throbbed with a sharp blinding ache behind her eyes. Sweat poured down her temples, stinging her eye sockets behind her spectacles.
“Hold,” she grunted through clenched teeth, knees shaking under her dark tunic. “Hold the loop.”
The Elven Monarch butterfly fluttered down from the ceiling, shedding a dense emerald cloud of glowing pollen directly into the center of the spinning water. The green pollen touched the clear liquid.
A soft concussive pop echoed inside the cauldron.
A soft concussive pop echoed inside the cauldron. The five liters of Anseic water vanished. Not evaporated into steam. It literally collapsed inward, its liquid mass condensing into a single dense point of physical matter at the bottom of the star-iron pot. The white-blue glare on the obsidian base died down, the golden glyphs fading into dull warm stone.
Corinne sank back onto her wooden crate, breath coming in ragged wheezing hitches, hands trembling violently as her mana bar hit absolute zero. She sat in the quiet yellow lamp light for two full minutes, chest heaving, waiting for her natural spirit recovery to tick up by one point so she could raise her head.
When her eyes opened she pulled herself up onto her weightless lift, leaning her chest against the workbench, and looked down into the dark blue interior of the Abyssal Meteorite Cauldron. The water was gone. Lying at the bottom of the star-iron pot was a single flawless thumb-sized crystal. Not a raw mineral picked from dirt. A deep translucent purple gem, perfectly six-sided, radiating a quiet steady high-density mana signature that cast soft violet reflections across the metal walls of the pot.
Corinne raised her black frames, blue-tinted vision zooming in on the crystal. Item created, Pure Grade-C Magic Core. Source, Origin Alchemy Transmutation, zero organic substrate. Composition, condensed high-density atmospheric ether, Anseic solvent anchor. Purity, ninety-nine point eight percent. Note, a masterpiece of foundational transmutation, physical matter synthesized directly from raw environmental magic, possessing zero organic impurities and usable as a universal energy source for Grade-C and Grade-B arrays.
Corinne reached into the cauldron with her gloved hand, picking up the violet crystal. It felt cold. Heavy. Perfectly smooth. A Grade-C Magic Core, an item that usually required a hunting war-band of twenty armored fighters to track and slay a Grade-C monster in the deep uncharted swamps, synthesized in her underground workshop out of five liters of water and thirty seconds of atmospheric air.
She held the glowing purple gem up to the brass oil lamp, watching violet light dance across her soot-stained fingers. Thane’s final masterpiece was real. She didn’t need to hunt. Didn’t need to buy monster carcasses from Garrett Thorne or depend on Piper Bell’s gatherers for every batch of potions. As long as The Spire stood, as long as the Anvil of Repose generated Anseic water, and as long as she had the geometry of the Origin Array, she was no longer just a merchant trading boiled herbs in a forest. She was the Origin Witch of Kaelum.
Corinne slipped the Grade-C Magic Core into her Pouch of Preservation, picked up her diagram notes, and climbed the cellar stairs on her own unsteady legs rather than drifting. She paused at the top, one hand on the cool timber frame of the hatch, and let the violet afterimage of the core settle behind her eyes. The supply chain was dead. From now on, she would make her own raw material. She closed the hatch and walked out into the sunlit world above.
— Origin Witch —