Rewrite That Witch
CH1275 · Rewrite
☕ Support

Chapter 1275: The Pharmaceutical Industry in Neverwinter

Two days after the new witches arrived, Wendy brought Roland the test results.

“Their abilities are very… complicated,” she said, setting the reports on his desk. “More variables in a single ability than I’ve encountered before. This is only part of the data — another few days for the full picture.”

Roland set down his work. He turned through the report with real interest. “The Taquila witches are already curious, I’d imagine.”

“They asked Phyllis to run the Chosen One test immediately.” Wendy’s voice was careful. “The light beams of both witches are quite weak. Neither is a key to the Instrument of Divine Retribution.”

Something loosened in Roland’s chest. He had just approved the nationwide electricity plan; all the magic cores were currently being routed into Mystery Moon’s power supply. If a Chosen One had materialized now, Celine would have had grounds for genuine resentment — watching the Instrument sit dormant for decades while the electrical grid consumed what it needed was nobody’s idea of a good time.

He had heard from Honey that the Senior Witches from Taquila had lately developed a strange new habit: emerging from the cave at night and lying in the field until sunrise. Carriers couldn’t tolerate direct sunlight, so they generally stayed hidden; the sudden interest in something as domestic as a pre-dawn sky was puzzling. Roland didn’t understand it. But their stillness had a different quality now — the particular stillness of people who were, for once, not afraid.

That was enough.

He turned to the last page.

Thylane’s ability acted on emotion, and it activated through ingestion. Like most attaching-type magic, it faded over time, its duration governed by how much magic she had invested and the nature of what it was attached to. The “magic pill” — as Wendy had taken to calling it — could alter any emotion a person was capable of feeling: happiness, pain, fatigue, anxiety, fear. All of them. When the power faded, every suppressed emotion returned at once.

Roland turned this over in his mind. The mechanism mapped, loosely, onto certain modern drugs — nerve blocks, delayed hormone transmission, the temporary suspension of neural signals without addressing their source. The side-effect profile was the key difference. Modern pharmacological analogues were addictive and damaging with prolonged use. Thylane’s pills left no residue he could identify.

The weak light beam, then, was almost beside the point. What Thylane had was not a weapon but a market: the pharmaceutical industry didn’t run on spectacle, it ran on reliability and scale. If she could be trained to target specific emotions rather than scattering her ability across all of them, the applications extended in every direction Roland could think of.

Mental illness was intractable precisely because it was invisible — symptoms layered on symptoms, no clean boundary between disease and ordinary suffering. Thylane couldn’t cure; she could delay. But delay, applied correctly, was itself therapeutic. A patient who could sleep without the weight of anxiety flooding in, whose body had the quiet to repair itself — that was not a small thing. The negative emotions would surface during sleep, absorbed into rest rather than waking life. The clinical implications were serious.

For trauma cases: consciousness lost to pain was often the difference between a soldier who treated his wound in time and one who didn’t. If a pill could hold the pain at bay for thirty minutes, long enough to apply pressure, to stay lucid, to reach the medics — the mortality numbers from the First Army’s campaigns would look different. The paramedics could then manage the shock and the aftermath, rather than arriving to find the patient already gone.

There were others, too. Della on the Sleeping Island, who could alleviate pain. Hero from the Witch Union, whose ability transferred diseases between living beings — she might be able to carry negative emotional states the same way. But neither of them could operate alone. Neither was available everywhere. Thylane’s pills could be distributed; they could be carried in a pack; they didn’t require a witch present to work.

This was the gap they could fill.

Wendy’s report noted the limitation clearly: Thylane affected the full register of emotion without precision. She could not, yet, choose which emotion to target. That was a training problem — patient, methodical, with Agatha and Wendy guiding her. Roland trusted them to solve it.

He reached the appendix.

Nightingale had evidently been reading over his shoulder. She looked up at Wendy with something unsettled in her expression. “Are you certain this is accurate?”

“The sample is small — two days isn’t enough to be definitive. I’m confident in the direction of the findings. The exact numbers will shift.” Wendy paused. “What I’m certain of is that the number can decrease. And increase.”

The number Momo saw was a remaining lifespan — the years left to a person at their current trajectory. The color indicated direction: whether the trajectory was worsening or improving.

Wendy had surveyed Neverwinter residents and the refugee population in the temporary housing areas. The pattern was stark. Neverwinter’s numbers ran significantly lighter in color — healthier, longer — than the refugees’. She had tracked one refugee from the Kingdom of Wolfheart whose number rose from five to seven years after drinking the Cleansing Water. Whatever disease he had been carrying had been treated, and the number had recalibrated accordingly.

Wendy’s working hypothesis: color represented cumulative stress to the body — hunger, disease, environmental damage. Dark color, low number. She’d provided the example as her strongest evidence.

“It’s better than we might have feared,” Roland said, setting the report down. He looked at Nightingale, who hadn’t spoken. “The number goes up. That means intervention works.”

Wendy seemed to weigh whether to say something. She didn’t.

Roland turned back to the data. The difference between districts was sharp. The North Slope Mine recorded the lowest average numbers in the city. Refugees ran somewhat higher. The Witch Building and the Sleeping Spell both showed lifespans ten to twenty years above the city average — which confirmed what intuition had suggested: awakened witches lived longer than ordinary people. Not dramatically, but measurably.

And measurable was the point.

He read the report a second time, building a different structure in his mind — not pharmaceutical, but statistical.

The whole page of the appendix opened out into something larger.

Discussion

Suggest a change