Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 1072: Underground Breeding Farm

Roland did not look away from the sky until the Seagull had become nothing — a gray dot, then the suggestion of one, then gone.

“Sometimes I think we should build a command post,” he said quietly. No one in particular. “Somewhere visible. Something the histories can point to when they describe the Battle of Divine Will.”

“If you want to be recorded in history,” came a voice from the empty air to his left, “you’ll first have to survive Wendy and Scroll lecturing you until you surrender and do whatever they’ve been asking. I’ve endured it. It’s not something ordinary people can tolerate.” A pause. “Give them fewer reasons to start.”

Roland conceded this with a small nod. “You’re probably right.”

The battle would last months. Possibly years. He would have to make peace with that arithmetic, fold it into the daily work the way engineers folded tolerances into a design — not as failure, but as constraint.

He glanced toward the guard waiting at a respectful distance. “Get everyone assembled. We’re going to the Third Border City.”

“Yes, Your Majesty!”

Kyle Sichi had sent a report. New progress on the rubber worms. Time to see what that meant.

The breeding operation had changed faster than Roland’s mental model of it.

He had expected common laborers — with proper lighting schedules, shift rotations, a psychological welfare protocol he would eventually be pressured into establishing. What he had found instead was that nobody with common blood could sustain long-term work underground with the worms. The sound alone was enough: the worms moved constantly, a dense wet rustling that pressed on the mind from every direction, relentless as water. Even rational men began to fray after a week. Two weeks and they stopped sleeping. Three and they stopped making sense.

The Taquila witches had simply taken over.

It was, Roland admitted, a better arrangement. He had underestimated how far claustrophobia and sound could reach into a person. The common workers now handled shipment and processing — outside, in daylight, with fresh air. The underground work belonged entirely to the witches of the God’s Punishment Army. Prius Dessau — the Chicken-and-Duck Knight, whose engineering instincts Roland had come to trust unreservedly — spent his days writing breeding manuals and refining production sequence. The rubber that reached the Ministry of Chemical Industry was already graded, cleaned, and correctly packaged.

The expansion had given the testing program enough samples to proceed. That was what mattered.

Underground, the air was cool and carried a trace of something organic — damp stone, fungal earth, the faint sweetness of worm secretion. Roland followed Pasha through the main passage.

“Welcome, Your Majesty.” Her main tentacles moved in the Taquila equivalent of a bow. “Your chemists are in the laboratory. Should I announce you?”

“No need. Just take me there.” He paused. “I heard Celine finished a new breeding facility. Larger than the previous ones?”

“Considerably.” Pasha began moving. “It incorporates the Quest Society’s latest research and draws on several ideas from Dream World. Would you like to see it first?”

“Lead the way.”

They turned down a long corridor and came to a large iron fence — the kind built to contain rather than exclude — with a small gate set into its corner edge. Pasha opened the gate and Roland stepped through.

He stopped.

The cave was enormous. The ceiling disappeared into a dimness where the bioluminescent plants on the rock walls couldn’t quite reach, their light spreading in overlapping circles of soft blue-green, enough to see by but not enough to define edges. Water moved somewhere — a designed system, channels cut into the stone floor, quiet and purposeful. Giant mushrooms carpeted the ground, caps wide as wagon wheels, their pale undersides faintly luminous. Rubber worms moved among them in dense slow clusters, white bodies catching the blue light, the sound of their feeding a dense continuous murmur that Roland felt in his back teeth.

Thousands of them. Tens of thousands.

He had been picturing a few expanded chambers. This was something else.

“This is at the edge of the Impassable Mountain Range,” Pasha said, “roughly level with Neverwinter’s surface. If you opened a shaft from the south face, you’d be less than a kilometer from Kingdom Main Street.”

One wall. That was all that separated this from the city above — one wall of stone, and beyond it, the temporary housing districts for the migrants.

“The extraction corridor?” Roland said.

“Exactly. Look at the southern end.”

He followed her gesture. Cut into the base of the far wall was a long deep trench, running horizontally, narrowing as it went — deliberately, by design.

“What is it?”

“Celine’s extraction system,” Pasha said. “The worms are sensitive to specific vocalizations. She arranged the corridor geometry so that it narrows toward the far end, and positioned a sound source there. When the tone is broadcast, they crawl toward it — they can’t help it — but the corridor is only wide enough to permit their front halves. They get stuck. Bodies in the passage, heads past the lip.”

“And then?” Nightingale’s voice came from somewhere behind Roland’s left shoulder.

“Then we activate the magic core at the far end,” Pasha continued. “It’s been calibrated to the cyclone’s razor mode — the setting typically used in narrow defensive corridors, where you need to cut through whatever is blocking the aisle. The core emits a magic light that fills the passage from end to end. Anything caught in the passage is sectioned clean through.” She let this settle. “The bodies fall away. The secretion drains through lateral grooves into collection pools. Workers enter from the far side of the extracting area — from outside the mountain — and see nothing except drainage trenches and collection pools. No worms, no bodies, no process. Easy to work, and unlikely to cause distress.”

”…”

Roland was quiet for a moment.

Would using a magic core and Celine’s lifetime of research as a butchering instrument count as mediocre?

Even without the Chosen One and the Instrument of Divine Retribution, that was perhaps an extreme form of self-application.

He shook the thought away. The design was clean. Thorough. It had accounted for every stage — breeding density, collection rate, worker safety, and the psychological problem he hadn’t solved in months. Celine had solved it in a corridor.

“How many worms will this farm hold at capacity?”

“Approximately one hundred thousand. Given their reproduction rate, it will take about a year to reach that number.”

“And the bodies? Post-extraction?”

He had seen a documentary once, in his previous life, about a large-scale chicken facility. A thousand birds produced a staggering volume of waste daily; the facility’s survival had depended entirely on how well its disposal systems worked. Scale any production operation and the edge cases became the main case. Dead worms in an enclosed underground space, multiplied across tens of thousands of extractions per cycle, would produce a waste problem that could collapse the entire operation if handled carelessly.

“Don’t worry, Your Majesty.” Something in Pasha’s tone suggested she found the question predictable. “Fran and several of the other witches are quite willing to come. The God’s Punishment Army’s worm-carriers are remarkably thorough when they’re motivated to dig. And they find the diet genuinely agreeable.”

”—” Nightingale made a sound. A small involuntary sound, somewhere between a swallow and something worse.

Ah.

Roland looked at the gate — the small one, set into the corner of the large fence. The fence was certainly large enough for a person. Or, he supposed, for a person carrying a very different body inside the Punishment Army’s form.

The fence was for keeping the worms in.

The gate was for the witches’ dining access.

He kept his expression neutral with some effort.

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