Chapter 130: Evolution

Anna heated her bathwater the way she always did — a cluster of green flame dropped into the bucket, held at a steady temperature until the surface steamed — and thought about molecules.

The other witches came to her room when they wanted hot water. Before Roland, they had used the kitchen, which meant sending someone down three flights and back up again with a pot that had half its heat by the time it arrived. Anna understood why they preferred the shortcut. What she still hadn’t worked out was why he had seemed so surprised the first time she’d explained the arrangement — genuinely surprised, as if the idea that twelve people might share the same bathwater in sequence was somehow unusual rather than obviously practical.

She undressed and lowered herself into the bucket. The water was exactly the temperature she wanted because she had made it exactly the temperature she wanted.

He grew up somewhere different, she thought. Not just a different city. Different assumptions about what’s ordinary.

She’d read enough of his books to know that his knowledge came from somewhere she couldn’t locate on any map she’d found in his shelves. Not from travels — he spoke of the things he knew the way someone spoke of things they’d grown up with, not things they’d studied. The steam machine, the mathematics, the invisible particles he’d described tonight: not discoveries he’d made, but memories he carried.

She dried herself with flame — safer and faster than linen, and she’d been doing it since her ability first manifested — and sat at her desk.

The textbook Scroll had loaned her was a duplicate, held in illusion for the permitted hours. She opened it near the end, past the sections she’d read twice already, to the chapter on heat.

Temperature is not a property objects possess. It is a description of how fast their component particles move. A flame is matter moving fast enough to emit light.

She read the paragraph again, then set the book flat on the desk and looked at her right hand.

Her fire came from somewhere in her chest, answering a question she hadn’t spoken aloud. She held out her palm and let it come: a cluster of green flame, familiar as breathing, hovering above her skin without burning it.

What if the flame isn’t a thing? she thought. What if it’s a description?

She closed her eyes. The image she built was his: countless particles, too small to see, spaced exactly as he’d described — not touching, not random, but arranged by forces she didn’t yet understand. Each one moving. Temperature as motion. Fire as motion past a threshold.

She held that image and let it touch the flame.

The flame changed.

It didn’t flare or shift color. It narrowed — first to a ribbon, then to a thread, then to something so fine she could barely perceive it even in her own awareness of it. The light in the room didn’t change; the thread she’d made was too narrow to illuminate anything. But she could feel that it was there, and she could feel that it was hot.

Hotter than before.

She reached for the next part of the idea: the spacing. If particles weren’t touching — if there was distance between them — then the cutting edge she was making wasn’t solid. It was a series of points, closely spaced, bridged by force. Not a wire. A row.

She let the image come apart.

Something shifted inside the construct, a sensation like a seam opening, and the thread in her palm fragmented into what she could only perceive as scattered points of heat in the darkness of her closed awareness. Too hot to touch. Too many to count. And between them — space, and the forces connecting them, and the sense that those forces were something she already understood, because they were made of the same thing her fire was made of.

Temperature is activity.

The thought arrived like a key turning, and the scattered points began to move.

She opened her eyes.

The green flame was gone. The room was dark except for the blue moonlight through the window, and she needed a moment to let her eyes find the shapes of her desk, her wardrobe, the iron ingot she used for training exercises.

In her perception, in the space between her and the world, a black filament hung in the air.

She knew it wasn’t visible. She knew what she was perceiving was internal — the position of her own magic in space, tracked through her awareness of it. But she could move it. She reached with her mind and it moved, and she could feel its edges, and its edges were as thin as she wanted them to be.

She picked up the training ingot and held it steady.

The filament wrapped itself around the ingot in accordance with her will, tightened, and pulled.

The iron parted as though it had always been two pieces and was only now being told.

Anna held the two halves in her hands and looked at the cut surface. Mirror-smooth. No heat damage to either face — the cut was too fast, too narrow, too precisely targeted to spread. She pressed her fingertip against the cut and felt the faintest residual warmth and nothing else.

She reassembled the ingot in her mind, then stood it upright on the desk.

She let the filament spread flat — horizontal, perpendicular to the ingot’s length — and bent its ends down at right angles, driving them through the ingot and down into the desk. Then she let it rotate, slowly, around the center.

The mathematics he’d taught her: a point at the center, a radius, a full rotation. Area equal to radius squared times the constant. She let the rotation complete, and lifted the cylinder out of the ingot with her hands.

The cylinder’s wall was as smooth as the flat cuts had been. She could see a distorted reflection of the moonlight in it. She turned it over in her hands, feeling the weight of it — the weight of something that had been solid metal ten minutes ago and was now precisely hollow at its center.

She set it down.

This is what heat does when it’s narrow enough.

She looked at her hands and then at the window and then at the filament in her perception, still present, waiting where she’d left it. She hadn’t used more magic than usual — perhaps less. The refinement didn’t cost more. It only required a different picture.

The candle stub on her desk had burned to its last centimeter. In a few minutes the illusion-book would fade and the pages would go transparent in sequence and then there would be only the moonlight and the darkness and the work she’d already done.

She looked at the cylinder again. Picked it up. Set it down.

Then she blew out the candle and went to bed, and the textbook faded quietly in the dark.

Chapter 130 Evolution

After the lesson, Anna returned to her own room. She threw a cluster of green flames into a big bucket filled with water, heating the water to a comfortable temperature.

When the water was finally hot enough, she stripped naked and lowered herself into the bucket.

Every witch that wanted to clean their body would first come to Anna to ask for her help with heating the water. After all, getting hot water from the kitchen up to their rooms was a very troublesome procedure. When His Royal Highness got to know of this arrangement he was quite surprised; it seemed it was difficult for him to accept that they would repeatedly use the same water.

Remembering the expression he made back then, Anna still had to let out a laugh. For the civilian population, it was already very hard to clean their bodies for even once a month, and even then, they would still use the same water several times.

It seems he hadn’t even noticed how much our lives have already improved since he accepted us witches and gave us a new home to live in. Anna shook her head, His Royal Highness, Roland Wimbledon seems to be well learned in many areas, but in other areas, he is just… clumsy. From the stories she had read in her books, shouldn’t a prince have participated in every kind of banquet, social activity, and walked through a sea of flowers since his childhood? As a prince, he is allowed to be without learning or skills and can be cowardly and timid before a fight, but at least he should be good at his communication.

However, this kind of thought unexpectedly made her feel at ease.

His head seems to be filled with a lot of wondrous knowledge, such as the creation and usage of machines powered by steam, and how to calculate the right size of stone that is able to float on water. There was also today’s course, where he taught us that the world was actually composed of numerous tiny balls which are all so small that you would need to magnify them thousands of times before you could see them with the naked eye. Because they are all so small, they are everywhere, whether it is a solid material, gas, liquid, people, flowers, or stones, when decomposed to their smallest state they are all made out of the same material.

That’s just incredible, Anna thought, how can it be that His Royal Highness knows of these things?

Instead of wiping her body dry, she just used her own flame to vaporize the water droplets on her body. She then put on her clothes and took a place at her desk.

In the middle of the table there laid a textbook that was written by Roland.

Taking advantage of Scroll’s ability to create illusions of books for a period of time, Anna had borrowed a copy of his textbook every night so that she could read a little before she went to bed.

Within it was all kinds of information, it began with the simplest phenomena in life, like a step by step instructional on how to strip an onion, which was in some places even accompanied by some lively and interesting pictures, to the unheard of novelty knowledge at the later parts in the book. So, the moment Anna opened it and read the first page it was nearly impossible for her to stop.

But in front of the content is also more obvious, the further she came to the end of the book the harder it was for her to understand. For example, in one section he had written that even the temperature of objects, in other words whether they were cold or hot was decided by the activity of these small balls he had talked about today. The higher their energy became, the more actively the balls would become and the more heat they would release. If what His Royal Highness had written was right, then it means that my own green flame gets amplified by the motion of these small balls?

Over the time the candles were gradually burned down, then reaching their end, the flame just shook twice before they went out. At the same moment the illusion of the book also reached its time limit, the pages and the writing gradually turned transparent, until they disappeared without a trace.

Suddenly the whole room was engulfed in darkness before a green flame came to life on top of Anna’s fingertips, dispersing the surrounding night.

Seeing the empty desktop, a feeling of loss emerged within Anna’s heart.

She raised her right hand, looking at her magical green flame, which stood motionless at the top of her fingertips.

Suddenly she felt the urge to try it out, testing whether everything really was formed out of these small balls, if that was the case then could her fire get the same characteristics as those small balls? She closed her eyes, trying to form an image how her flame would look like if it was created by the accumulation of countless small particles.

Slowly the flame in her hand began to change.

It changed from its water-droplet like form into a string, becoming thinner and thinner but at the same time longer and longer until it looked like a long hair.

Anna could feel these changes, but it was still far from enough, she thought, comparing a hair to these balls, it was still much too large. I can still make it finer.

Even though her mind wanted it, it seemed incredibly hard to change the green flame any further, the light of her flame became dim, like a shivering long and slender light ray.

Perhaps not as a cluster, but instead a series of connections… His Royal Highness had said that between the balls that there is a fixed distance between them, perhaps I have to reshape its shape.

The flame in Anna’s mind fluttered and she could hear a sound like something becoming broken apart. Afterward the flame particles were no longer closely linked but instead were scattered like the stars. The slender green flame on her hand had also disappeared, but in her consciousness, the flame still existed, but it had no longer its initial appearance – in the boundless darkness, most of the stars had perished, the rest of them slowly reunited, one by one they formed a row of swath, until a filament of many stars was formed.

The temperature is equal to activity, she thought.

The moment she formed this thought, the line began to swing, like someone had pinched into a corner of it, it began to gently flicker. The moment it began to swing, the swinging of filament could no longer be stopped, one ripple followed after another.

It seemed as if she was within a world of ripples, there were no longer any clear outlines between objects, around her everything was excitedly rippling and there was no end in sight. The same could be said about magic, she could even feel it. When she extended her finger, pulling at one of the ripples, it was just like her own magic.

But when she opened her eyes, everything was calm. Her green flame had disappeared, and she needed a while until her eyes could adapt to the dark room, the desk, wardrobe, candlestick… their shapes emerged one after another out the shadow. Light blue moonlight fell through the window on the floor, giving everything a light grayish color. Everything seemed to be the same as always, there was no change.

But in her eyes, the world has become completely different. A black filament appeared in the air in front of her. However, Anna naturally knew that she couldn’t really “see” it, that it was only in her own perception.

She took one of the ingots she had always trained with and which laid still on her desk and placed it in front of herself.

The black filament wrapped itself around the ingot in accordance with her will, she then quickly pulled it together. Like a hot knife cutting through butter

her filament went through the iron ingot with ease. In Anna’s comprehension, the temperature produced by the filament was several times higher than that of her green flame but was limited to a very narrow range. The iron ingot was quickly cut into two parts, and when she took one of it into her hands she saw that the cutline was very smooth, and she could only feel a little heat when placed her finger against the cutline.

She then erected the iron ingot on her desk, placed her black filament on top of the ingot, and let it spread out until it was a completely flat string, perpendicular to each other.

This was the mathematical knowledge taught by His Highness, using a point as the center, and then use a quill connected to a string and then go one time around the center, they will be able to draw a precise circle. The area of the circle is equal to the length of the string multiplied by itself and multiplied by a fixed constant.

Anna controlled her horizontally spread filament and bended it downwards at the ends at a right angle, letting it penetrate through the ingot until it reached the top of the desk. And then she let it gently rotate around the point at the center – compared with her green flame where she could only adjust the temperature and whole body, the black flame composed of many particles could be turned into any shape and the temperature of each part could be controlled separately.

After one revolution, she had cut out the form of a cylinder.

Because the cutting line was so small, Anna needed to use a great effort to get the cylinder out. Like before where she had cut the ingot in two, the entire wall of the cut-out cylinder was also very smooth. In the moonlight, she could even see the reflection of her own face in it.