Origin Witch - Brewing Bitter
Corinne kneeled on the wooden platform beside the cauldron, rolled up her hospital gown sleeves, and placed both palms flat against the cold rusty iron sides of the pot. A quiet wind hummed through the high branches outside, carrying the cold wet scent of night rain that hadn’t yet fallen. On the screen of her Magic Desk, the [Regional Chat] was scrolling so fast the white text blurred into a continuous streak of static.
Sector 666 Population: 9,968 / 10,000.
Another five gone since sunset.
[Zhao Dulai]: I’m telling you guys, I wasn’t hallucinating! Me and my buddy saw it again from our window! It was floating right past the upper branches, glowing with this eerie green light!
[Garrett Thorne]: Shut up about your ghost, Zhao. If you have time to look at the sky, go cut more stone. The protection period ends in five days.
[Victor Capone]: Anyone who finds iron ore bring it to Sector 666 South. My boys are setting up a perimeter. We pay in dried bread.
[Elodie]: Capone, your boys tried to steal my supply crate two hours ago. Tell the skinny one with the eye patch that if I see his face near my tree again, I’ll put an iron bolt through his throat.
[Lin Feng]: Hahaha! Capone’s mob getting handled by a woman! Love to see it!
[Victor Capone]: Watch your mouth, Lin. This forest isn’t big enough for you to hide forever.
[Asang Singh]: Does anyone have clean water?! I drank two gulps from the creek an hour ago and my stomach feels like it’s being ripped apart by hot needles! I’m shivering!
[Unknown User 1102]: Don’t drink the creek water! The system says the mana concentration in the surface streams is over 300%! Human bodies can’t process unrefined ether! It’ll burn your guts out!
[Asang Singh]: NOW YOU TELL ME?! I’m dying here! Someone trade me a bottle of mineral water! I’ll give you fifty units of wood!
[James Bellman]: Fifty units? Make it a hundred and I’ll drop a half-empty bottle from my window. Take it or leave it, dying man.
Corinne watched the exchange with a cold unblinking glare.
The creek water was toxic to normal humans because of the raw mana content.
She tapped her chin with her index finger. Unrefined ether.
Her eyes shifted from the screen to the open pages of Basic Herbalism lying beside her on the floorboards.
Chapter two explicitly stated: All alchemical brews require a base solvent capable of holding mana charges. Standard spring water must be neutralized using the practitioner’s own spirit before herbs are introduced, or the raw ether will destroy the plant’s delicate spirit.
The creek water wasn’t useless. It was actually better than pure water, provided you knew how to tame it.
“They’re starving on a mountain of gold,” she whispered.
She closed the chatroom window, pulled up her personal storage, and spent 10 units of wood to purchase a simple wooden bucket from the system store.
A heavy dark-oak bucket materialized on the desk with a soft clunk.
Corinne grabbed the iron handle, floated out through her door, and dropped silently down toward the sparkling creek thirty yards below.
The night was pitch black beneath the lower canopy. Down here, among the massive mossy roots, the air was thick with the smell of wet silt and decaying fern leaves.
She lowered herself until her bare toes hovered two inches above the rushing water.
She dipped the bucket into the stream. The water was icy, heavy, and sparkled with tiny swirling flecks of pale green light under the moonbeams.
She filled the bucket to the brim, roughly forty pounds of fluid.
With her base Strength of 2, lifting forty pounds would have snapped her wrist. But with the Moonstone Carver tucked into her belt granting her +30 Strength, her arm barely registered the weight. She hoisted the heavy bucket under her left arm like a sack of feathers, pushed off the bank with her right foot, and shot straight up into the high branches.
Five minutes later, she was back on her wooden platform outside her treehole door.
She set four flat thick stones she had picked up from the creek bank onto the wooden platform, arranging them into a crude square hearth.
She set the rusted iron cauldron flat across the four stones.
Next came the water. She poured twenty liters of the sparkling creek water into the pot, filling it to the halfway mark.
Then came the hard part.
Channeling.
She closed her eyes and focused on the pool of cold clear energy sitting deep within her chest, her Mana.
She pushed the energy out through her arms, forcing it through the thick iron of the cauldron into the water inside.
Bzzzz.
The creek water inside the pot began to hum softly. The pale green flecks of raw ether swimming in the fluid violently agitated, spinning into tiny vortices before dissolving into the clear liquid, turning the entire batch a subtle pale blue.
Mana Points: 30/80.
Fifty points of mana drained in a single five-second surge.
Corinne gasped, pulling her hands back as if she’d been burned. Her head throbbed with a sharp dull ache behind her eyes, the sudden shock of losing more than half her mental energy at once.
“Jesus,” she muttered, wiping cold sweat from her forehead with her sleeve. “That takes it out of you.”
She pulled her spatial pouch from her pocket and dumped her harvest onto the timber floorboards.
Thirty roots of Bitter-Grass. Twenty-four stems of Yellow-Tail.
She didn’t have a scale. She didn’t have a measuring cup.
Thane’s ledger called for ten grams of dried Bitter-Grass root and ten grams of Yellow-Tail petals per standard hundred-milliliter dose.
“Guess we’re eyeballing it,” she grunted.
She grabbed a handful of Bitter-Grass, stripped the dirt from the pale taproots with her thumb, and used her Moonstone Carver to chop the roots into small uniform slices against a clean piece of wood. She did the same with the yellow flower petals, crushing them with the flat side of her crystal blade until they formed a sticky fragrant paste.
She dumped the chopped roots and flower paste straight into the blue neutralized water.
Now she needed fire.
She unlocked her Magic Desk, opened the trading interface, and typed a quick broadcast:
Corinne: Trading 1x Large Instant Noodle Pack + 1x 500ml Canned Beer for 1x Kerosene Lighter or Flint Striker. Direct trade only.
Within three seconds, her private inbox lit up with forty notifications.
Food and alcohol were king in Sector 666. Most people were living on dry hardtack and stale water; a hot noodle packet and a cold beer was a luxury fit for a king.
She ignored the messages begging for charity and clicked the top offer:
Garrett Thorne: I have a Zippo. Full of fluid. Send the trade.
Corinne clicked Confirm.
A heavy brushed-chrome Zippo lighter appeared on her small desk screen. She picked it up, flipped the top open with her thumb, and struck the wheel.
A bright steady yellow flame burst to life.
Corinne smiled. “Fair deal, Garrett.”
She gathered a pile of dry pine twigs and wooden blocks she had harvested earlier, stuffed them beneath the four stones supporting the cauldron, and set the pile ablaze.
The dry wood caught. Yellow flames licked up the dark rusty sides of the Abyssal Meteorite Cauldron.
The water reached a rolling boil within ten minutes.
Corinne hovered over the pot, holding a three-foot-long oak branch she had trimmed with her knife.
Rule One of Brewing: Thane’s handwriting echoed in her memory. Stir clockwise. Never stop. The moment the liquid settles, the plant spirits settle with it, and your brew becomes mud.
Clockwise.
She pushed the wooden stick into the boiling frothing blue water and began to stir.
One turn. Two turns. Three turns.
Five years in a bedpan-free hospital had not prepared her for this: no bathroom, no running water, and a body that could not be carried to either. She had learned to hold it, to time the long floats to the creek, and to scrub herself raw with a rag and icy bucket water that left her teeth chattering. The brew did not care. The brew kept boiling.
The steam rising from the pot smelled horrifyingly sharp, a mixture of boiled grass, raw earth, and bitter lemon, thick enough to make her eyes water.
An hour passed.
Her arms, backed by 32 Strength, didn’t tire, but her eyes grew heavy. The continuous hypnotic motion of the swirling liquid, combined with the steady gurgle-gurgle of the boiling water, pulled at her consciousness like a heavy weight.
To stay awake, she pulled her copy of Basic Herbalism from her gown pocket with her left hand, propping it against her knee while her right arm kept the wooden stick moving in slow steady circles.
By the fourth hour, the moon had reached its peak in the night sky.
The fluid in the cauldron had shrunk significantly, evaporating from twenty liters down to less than two. The pale blue color had darkened into a deep glossy turquoise, thick as warm syrup.
By the seventh hour, the sky in the east began to turn a pale bruised purple.
BRRRRRRRRING!
The mechanical wind-up alarm clock she had traded twenty wood units for earlier shattered the quiet morning air from its perch on the window sill.
Eight hours. Exact.
Corinne’s right arm froze. She lifted the wooden stick out of the pot.
The turquoise liquid inside the cauldron suddenly flared with a soft brief flash of golden light, a subtle pulse that vanished as quickly as it had appeared.
The steam stopped smelling like bitter grass. It smelled sweet now, like rain hitting hot stone.
Corinne let out a long breath she hadn’t realized she was holding.
“Is it done?” she whispered.
She grabbed a crude wooden bowl she had bought earlier, dipped it into the thick turquoise syrup, and scooped out half a cup.
She let it cool for two minutes, watching the steam drift away into the morning air, then tilted the bowl to her lips and took a small sip.
It tasted terrible.
A sharp metallic tang hit her tongue first, followed by an overwhelming bitterness that made her throat seize up. It was like drinking liquid rust mixed with crushed aspirin.
She swallowed it down anyway.
Instantly, a tiny cool stream of energy burst in her stomach, spreading rapidly through her chest and up into her temples.
She pulled up her personal status panel.
Mana Points: 31/80… 32/80… 33/80…
Her mana was ticking up by 1 point every single second.
She opened the small screen on her Magic Desk, filled a glass test tube with ten milliliters of the turquoise fluid, plugged the top with a cork stopper, and laid it flat against the glass panel for appraisal.
Item Appraised: Crude Mana Potion (Grade-E-) Effect: Restores 1 Mana Point per second for 10 seconds (Total: 10 MP). Note: A horribly diluted, metallic-tasting disaster of a potion. It is genuinely impressive that someone managed to cook something this weak using genuine magic herbs. The volume is wildly imprecise. Suggest sending the brewer back to the furnace to be re-forged.
Corinne stared at the appraisal screen for five long seconds.
Then a quiet wheezing laugh escaped her throat.
“E-minus,” she chuckled, running her thumb over the warm glass test tube. “Re-forged, huh? Screw you, system.”
Thane’s notes said a proper apprentice mana potion restored 50 Mana Points in ten seconds. Hers restored ten. It was weak, it tasted like boiled nails, and it was wildly inefficient.
But it worked.
In a world where ten thousand desperate dying outcasts were trapped in a dark forest with no water, no medicine, and empty mana bars, she held the only liquid magic in Sector 666.
Corinne picked up the glass test tube, turned it against the morning sunlight, and watched the turquoise fluid swirl behind the glass.
“Let’s see how much wood this disaster is worth,” she said.
— Origin Witch —