Origin Witch - Ghost in the Canopy
A camera flash bloomed white against the far oak trunk. Corinne froze halfway through the hatch, then grinned thin and mean – whoever was filming her from the lower canopy was about to learn what the “green wraith” actually dropped.
It was twenty square meters of pristine pale timber.
Unlike the dark enclosed feeling of the ground floor, the entire southern wall of the second floor had been replaced by a massive semi-circular sliding door made of thick heavy glass. The glass wasn’t entirely clear, it had tiny air bubbles trapped inside from the melted sand, but it let the pale moonlight flood the room in a wash of silver.
She slid the heavy glass door open. It moved with a quiet smooth shhh sound along its wooden track.
Outside lay a vast crescent-shaped wooden terrace that extended twelve feet out from the tree trunk. The balcony was surrounded by a sturdy chest-high railing made of woven vines and polished branches, and directly overhead, a natural porch roof crafted from living green vines curved out from the bark, creating a shaded canopy that blocked the rain while leaving the view completely open.
From up here, thirty yards off the ground, the forest looked infinite. The tops of the giant oaks rolled away into the night sky like a sea of dark green waves, rustling softly in the cool wind.
“Not bad,” Corinne whispered.
She drifted back inside, grabbed her mattress, her folded white cotton dress, her stasis crate, her books, and her magic lantern from the lower level, and hauled them all upstairs to the new bedroom.
She laid her mattress flat beside the glass sliding door, set the lantern on a small wooden stump near her pillow, and sat with her dead legs folded limp beneath her.
She picked up her new reward book, Basic Alchemical Potions & Decoctions, and flipped open the pigskin cover.
As her eyes scanned the first five pages, a cold drop of sweat rolled down her temple.
Her jaw slowly tightened.
I’m an idiot, she thought, staring at the clean printed diagrams. A complete lucky idiot.
The textbook laid out the precise scientific requirements for brewing a standard Grade-E Mana Potion. As she read through the chapter on Apprentice Errors, she realized she had committed no less than six fatal mistakes during her eight-hour marathon brew the night before.
First, she hadn’t used an alchemical array to stabilize the thermal circulation, relying instead on a crude wood fire that cooked the herbs unevenly.
Second, she hadn’t injected her own spirit into the liquid during the brewing process to bind the plant properties to the solvent.
Third, she had used raw creek water without neutralizing the environmental impurities first.
Fourth, she hadn’t filtered out the boiled leaf dregs and fibrous sediment, leaving the fluid thick and murky.
Fifth, she hadn’t washed the dirt off the Bitter-Grass roots before throwing them into the pot.
And sixth, the most absurd mistake of all, her liquid dilution ratio was completely insane. A standard recipe called for a 10:1 solvent-to-herb ratio, meaning twenty liters of water should have yielded two full liters of clean potion. Instead, she had boiled twenty liters down into one messy hyper-concentrated liter of syrup because she was terrified of the pot boiling dry.
She had basically boiled dirt, grass, and lake water over an open campfire, dumped the mud into glass tubes, and sold it to fifty desperate outcasts as high magic.
Corinne slammed the book shut and covered her face with both hands, letting out a dry breathy chuckle that sounded half like an embarrassment and half like a snort.
“Well,” she muttered into her palms. “It sold out anyway. No refunds.”
She set the book down beside her pillow, pulled her Moonstone Carver from her waist, and checked her spatial bag.
It was pitch black outside now. The moon had climbed high into the sky, casting long dark shadows across the forest floor.
During the daytime, finding supply crates was a nightmare because the sun washed out their faint ambient light. But at night, those green indicator strips on the crates glowed like neon signs in a dark alley.
She slid the Moonstone Carver into her belt, strapped the empty green stasis crate to her back, and floated out onto the second-floor balcony.
“Let’s go hunting,” she said.
She pushed off the vine railing and plunged into the dark canopy.
Zephyr Float held her weightless. She glided through the cool night air like an owl, her dark hair flying wildly around her face.
Because her legs were completely paralyzed, her flight posture was distinctly strange. Her upper body was angled forward, perfectly horizontal as she steered with her hands, but her lower half hung limply beneath her, her dead legs dangling in a stiff, deadweight tangle. Her dirty white striped hospital gown fluttered in the night wind, making her look like a ragged white sheet drifting between the colossal trunks.
Fifty yards from her Spire, she spotted a soft green light pulsing beneath a clump of wild ferns.
Corinne swooped down, her hands skimming the rough bark of a giant root. She scooped the wooden crate into her arms without her dangling feet ever touching the mud, shoved the box into her Pouch of Preservation, and pushed off the trunk to shoot twenty feet back up into the high leaves.
Smooth. Fast. Silent.
She spent forty minutes patrolling a half-mile radius around her shelter, snatching up seven supply crates from the dark underbrush without coming within twenty feet of the ground.
Meanwhile, three hundred yards to the east, in a small wooden cabin built into the fork of a twin pine, a young man named Zhao Dulai was standing near his round glass window.
Zhao Dulai was twenty-one, a junior track athlete from an Earth university who had been snatched right off a barbecue stand in Shanghai. He was holding a plastic bottle of stale water, staring out into the pitch-black canopy, trying to calm his nerves before going to sleep.
Suddenly, his eyes went wide.
“Holy crap,” he gasped, dropping his water bottle. The plastic container hit the floorboards with a loud thud.
Through the dark tangled branches thirty yards away, a white figure was drifting through the night air.
It didn’t have wings. It didn’t make a sound. It floated smoothly through the high leaves, its dirty white dress fluttering in the wind. Its long dark hair covered its face completely, and its legs hung down in a strange unnatural broken angle, like a bent pipe dangling from a ceiling.
The figure suddenly dipped downward, snatched something from the dark bushes below, and then flew straight upward into the trees, disappearing into the dark leaves.
Zhao Dulai’s hands were shaking so hard he could barely tap his Magic Desk screen. He pulled up the camera capture function on his small screen, aimed it out the window, and snapped a photo just as the white shape glided past a moonlit gap between two trunks.
Ten seconds later, the public [Regional Chat] was in absolute unadulterated meltdown.
[Zhao Dulai]: [ATTACHMENT: IMAGE_0091.JPG] [Zhao Dulai]: GUYS! I GOT PROOF! I TOLD YOU THERE WAS A GHOST IN SECTOR 666! LOOK AT THIS SHIT!
The chatroom exploded.
[Lin Feng]: WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK IS THAT?! [Wu Gang]: JESUS CHRIST! IT’S FLOATING! [Karapo]: Look at the dress! It’s wearing a white hospital gown! And its legs, oh god, why are its legs bent like a number 7?! [Asang Singh]: IT’S A WRAITH! IT’S A CANOPY DEMON! I KNEW THIS FOREST WAS CURSED! [James Bellman]: Look at its hands! It’s holding a glowing green box! It’s stealing supply crates in the dark! [Victor Capone]: Is that a mob monster? Or a player skill? [Zhao Dulai]: It doesn’t have a face! The hair covers everything! It flew over my cabin at thirty miles an hour and didn’t even make a footstep! [Elodie]: Whatever it is, it’s airborne. Physical weapons won’t reach it easily if it stays in the canopy. [Unknown User 5512]: MOMMY I WANT TO GO HOME! THE TREE GHOST IS COMING FOR US! [Lin Feng]: Everyone lock your doors! Do not go outside at night! The Green Wraith is hunting!
Inside her sunlit high-ceilinged second-floor bedroom, Corinne was sitting on her new mattress, chewing slowly on a piece of dried pork sausage she’d pulled from her seventh crate.
Her Magic Desk was open beside her pillow.
She tapped the attached image file in Zhao Dulai’s post.
The photo opened.
It was a grainy low-light shot taken through a dirty glass window. In the center of the frame, illuminated by the pale moonlight and the green glow of a supply crate under her arm, was a figure floating between two giant oak trunks. Her dirty white hospital gown was billowing in the wind, her long messy black hair was hanging over her face, and her dead paralyzed legs were dangling limply beneath her in a stiff, awkward sprawl.
Corinne stared at the photo for ten full seconds.
Slowly, she raised her right hand and slapped her palm flat against her own forehead.
“The Green Wraith,” she whispered into the empty room, her shoulders shaking with a silent exasperated sigh. “The terrifying canopy demon haunting Sector 666 is literally just me in my dirty laundry.”
She closed the chatroom, turned off her magic lantern, and pulled her thin blanket up to her chin.
Outside the glass sliding door, the wind hummed softly through the high leaves of The Spire, carrying the distant terrified shouts of outcasts locking their windows for the night.
— Origin Witch —