Origin Witch - Tier-2, Built
Five years ago, after the surgeon came out of the operating room with his mask pulled down around his neck, he had sat beside her bed and talked in a low practiced voice about adjusting expectations. He told her that her spine was broken, that her lower nervous system was dead, and that her world was going to be flat from now on. No stairs. No ladders. No steep inclines. A flat mattress, a flat wheelchair, a flat plywood ramp running down to a flat concrete driveway.
For four years after that, she had spent her afternoons lying on a narrow vinyl cot in her aunt’s guest room, staring out a dirty window at a sixty-story residential tower rising across the drainage canal. The tower had a blinking red light on its roof to keep low-flying police helicopters from hitting it at night.
She used to sit there for hours, her hands motionless in her lap, wondering what the wind felt like on top of that red light. What the city looked like when you were looking down at the traffic instead of staring up at the undercarriages of delivery trucks from the sidewalk.
The sharp ping-ping-ping of incoming system notifications rattled against the timber desk like a fistful of tossed gravel. Corinne didn’t open her eyes immediately. She sat floating four inches above her straw pile, letting her head rest back against the rough oak wall while her fingers picked at a dry scab on her knuckle. The air in the treehole tasted of old copper and boiled weeds, a heavy metallic humidity that stuck to the back of her throat every time she took a deep breath.
The vials were moving again across her store, and the system kept logging each sale. The pings meant cores. She opened her eyes and wiped her nose with her sleeve.
The storage grid on the small screen was flashing a bright neon-green indicator over the ninth and tenth slots. Ten purple jagged crystals, each roughly the size of a walnut, glowing with a faint pulsing violet light, lay stacked inside the digital inventory.
She pulled up the shelter interface.
Treehole Shelter (Tier-1) Upgrade Requirements: Wood: 2,500 / 2,500 (Complete) Stone: 100 / 100 (Complete) Vines: 500 / 500 (Complete) Grade-E Monster Core: 10 / 10 (Complete)
A bright golden button flared to life at the bottom of the wood-grained screen: [Upgrade Shelter].
Corinne didn’t press it right away. Her hand hovered over the glass, her thumb twitching slightly.
She tapped [Upgrade Shelter].
A prompt window popped up over the screen:
Please select your Tier-2 architectural expansion path: Option 1: Expand current single-floor footprint by 300% (Horizontal Layout). Option 2: Expand current single-floor footprint by 100%, and add a vertical Second-Floor Level (Vertical Spire Layout).
Corinne’s left hand closed into a tight fist against her thigh.
“Option two,” she said aloud. Her voice was flat, devoid of hesitation.
The moment her thumb hit the glass, the entire treehole shuddered.
It wasn’t a gentle vibration. It was a violent teeth-rattling spasm that groaned deep within the core of the giant oak. The dark timber walls bulged outward with a heavy wet crunching sound, as if the ancient tree was drawing a massive breath. The deep-green sap patterns carved into the wood flared blindingly bright, pouring a warm emerald illumination across every surface.
Corinne didn’t drop to the floor. Zephyr Float kept her suspended in mid-air, her body bobbing like a cork on rough water while the floorboards beneath her stretched, slid, and expanded.
The twenty-square-meter room swelled outward until the curved walls pushed back twice as far. The ceiling groaned, rising from eight feet to nearly twelve.
To her right, near the rear corner of the chamber, the solid wooden ceiling split open with a loud crack. A rectangular hatch revealed itself overhead, and a braided rope ladder woven from thick living green vines unrolled from the dark space above, tumbling down until its bottom rung dangled two feet above the floorboards.
The shaking stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
The dust settled, smelling heavily of fresh sawdust, wet moss, and warm sap.
A new facility customization panel popped up on the Magic Desk:
Tier-2 Facility Customization: You may select THREE specialized room additions to build within your expanded sanctuary: – Bedroom: Wood * 500, Animal Pelts * 20, Sand * 10 – Storage Room: Wood * 300 – Kitchen / Stove: Wood * 30, Stone * 50 – Fireplace: Stone * 300, Sand * 100, Water * 20 – Bathroom (Includes 10L External Water Tank): Wood * 50, Stone * 10, Sand * 6, Iron Ore * 10 – Large Second-Floor Terrace (Includes Glass Sliding Doors): Wood * 200, Vines * 20, Sand * 300 – Apprentice Alchemy Workshop (Includes Iron Array Base): Wood * 50, Stone * 50, Sand * 10, Iron Ore * 30
Corinne scanned the list, her eyes lingering over the word Iron Ore.
She didn’t have iron. Not a single lump.
She immediately opened her private messaging thread with Jasper Finch.
[Corinne]: Got iron ore?
The response came back in less than four seconds. Jasper was clearly sitting right in front of his Magic Desk, likely monitoring the market listings like a hawk.
[Jasper Finch]: Always. How much do you need, Miss Mercer? [Corinne]: 40 units. [Jasper Finch]: Iron is scarce. The outcasts near the southern ridge are fighting over the shallow veins with copper picks. 40 units will cost you 300 basic material units. Wood or stone.
Corinne didn’t even bother to type a counter-offer. In a world where she could turn boiled weeds into liquid silver, quibbling over three hundred logs was a waste of breath.
[Corinne]: Send the trade.
She deposited 300 units of wood from her inventory grid. A second later, a heavy burlap sack filled with forty rough dark-red chunks of iron ore dropped onto her desk screen with a loud metallic thump.
She turned back to the facility customization menu and locked in her selections:
Bathroom (With Water Tank)
Large Second-Floor Terrace
Apprentice Alchemy Workshop
The moment she tapped Confirm, her materials vanished from her storage grid.
A thick gray fog billowed out from the corners of the room. From inside the mist came a surreal symphony of sounds, invisible hammers striking iron, wood being planed, stone sliding against stone, and the sharp hiss of hot metal being quenched in water.
Corinne hovered near the ceiling, her Moonstone Carver resting in her lap, watching the smoke swirl around her.
Ten seconds later, the fog cleared.
To the left of the Magic Desk, a small enclosed five-square-meter room had been partitioned off by smooth pine planks. Inside sat a stone basin, a crude metal showerhead connected to a pipe in the wall, a copper-rimmed mirror, and a ceramic squat toilet.
In the opposite corner, a ten-square-meter section had been walled off with heavy oak planks, fitted with a thick wooden work table, several storage shelves, and a heavy flat iron plate embedded directly into a stone workbench.
System World Announcement: Ding! Global Notice: Sector 666 individual ‘Corinne Mercer’ has become the FIRST transfer student to successfully upgrade to a Tier-2 Shelter! Reward Allocation Unlocked. Please choose your bonus category: [Tools] [Spells] [Items] [Knowledge]
The announcement banner pulsed three times in bright golden lettering across every single screen in Sector 666.
Corinne didn’t need to look at the public chat to know what was happening. The regional channel was undoubtedly exploding with a mixture of terror, envy, and blind rage.
She stared at the four reward categories.
[Tools] would probably give her a steel weapon or a better bucket. [Spells] might give her a weak fireball or a localized light trick. [Items] was an unknown gamble.
Her finger moved without hesitation. She tapped [Knowledge].
Tools break. Spells consume mana you might not have. Items get stolen. But once a piece of information enters your brain, nobody can pry it out without cracking your skull open first.
The screen flickered, and a thick dark-brown book bound in rough pigskin materialized on the small desk screen.
On the cover, written in clean sharp gold lettering, was the title: Basic Alchemical Potions & Decoctions.
A secondary prompt appeared over the desk screen: Please name your Tier-2 Shelter. (Note: Once named, it cannot be changed).
Corinne looked up through the new rectangular opening in her ceiling. Above her lay the second floor, and beyond that, the high canopy of Kaelum reaching toward the clouds.
She tapped the keyboard.
The Spire.
— Origin Witch —