Chapter 259: The Witches from Sleeping Island (Part 2)
Back in the office, Roland spread the five ability records across the desk and read through them in order.
“How were they?” Nightingale materialized from the corner with her chin propped on one hand, leaning on the doorframe between the visible world and whatever she carried with her when she stepped back into it. “Anyone you particularly like?”
“They’re all good,” Roland said, without looking up.
A short silence. “All five of them?”
He gave her a look. She stuck out her tongue and went back to the fish in her hand, nibbling with an expression of deliberate innocence.
He started with the two whose utility was most immediate.
Lotus first. The ability to reshape terrain at will, within a five-meter radius, consuming magic proportional to the compactness of the soil and the ambition of the transformation — she was the answer to a problem he had been accumulating for months. The fieldstone-and-cement walls he had been planning to build around Border Town’s next expansion would require enormous material stockpiles and extended construction time. Lotus could raise an earthen wall in a fraction of that time, using the ground itself as the material.
He unrolled a rough site map across the desk and marked the sector: the narrowest gap between the North Slope Mountain and the Redwater River, the natural bottleneck that made the smallest defensible perimeter possible. It was tight enough that the wall could realistically be completed before the Months of Demons began, and small enough that it would not overextend the defensive line. The new perimeter would include a portion of the Concealing Forest — an asset in itself, that forest, and already encroaching on the town’s awareness — and would double the current area of the settlement.
Doubling the defensive perimeter meant doubling the demand on the First Army. This was manageable: the weapons generation that had seen off the past two Months of Demons was already substantially more capable than what the town had fielded the winter before last, and the next round of improvements would push it further. He could designate the demonic beasts’ traditional approach routes, build batteries and bastions at the chokepoints, and position the expanded troops to respond rather than simply stand and hold.
And Lotus could do something else for him — the path through the southern mountains. A direct route from Border Town to the coastal shoal, through rock that currently had no passage. Transforming stone rather than loose soil would drain her faster and produce results only as good as her current capacity, but the project was feasible across several months. When it was complete, Border Town would have its own natural harbor, and the Fjords trade would become as simple as walking down to the water.
Candle and Anna together, meanwhile, would work on the next generation of machine tools — the production apparatus for firearms and other mechanical components. The gains from Candle’s state-preservation ability would compound: Anna freed from the most repetitive aspects of direct production, the tools themselves held at optimal performance, the quality floor of the output raised regardless of raw material grade.
Sylvie’s assignment was already clear from the moment he had understood what she could do: exploration. The North Slope Mine was a natural cave system with more than a hundred channels, most of them unexplored. Twenty had been opened and assessed. The remainder was an unknown that bothered him more than the uncertainty itself warranted — there were stories among the older miners, vague accounts of sounds in the deep channels, of passages that connected to something that had been, once, something’s home. He wanted a complete map. He wanted it done by someone who could see through the walls without being in the passage at all.
Lotus would follow Sylvie’s surveys and improve the passageways, increasing the efficiency of extraction as they worked. Between them, a single season could establish what the mine contained and begin developing it properly.
Honey was the most open-ended case, and Roland found himself genuinely interested in the possibilities. He had no radio, no telegraph, no mechanical signaling system worth the name. The message networks he relied on were slow by any standard he had grown up with, dependent on human riders who could be delayed or intercepted or simply lost. Carrier pigeons were traditional for a reason, but traditional carrier pigeons were trained through weeks of patient conditioning and could be confused by distance and weather. What he needed was a network of birds trained and maintained by a witch who could speak directly to their instincts.
Honey could not make birds smarter. She could not give them knowledge they lacked. But she could command them with a directness and reliability that no conventional trainer could match, and she could use the animal messenger ability to build chains of relay animals that would bring messages faster than a rider could travel. It was not a radio. But in a world where a dispatch from King’s City took days, it was not nothing.
He closed the ability record book.
“How were they?” Nightingale asked again, from the couch, having relocated herself at some point while he was thinking. She had her legs tucked under her and the dried fish balanced on her knee.
“I just told you. They’re all good.”
“You said that before.” She pulled a face. “I meant which one is your favorite.”
“Lotus and Candle are the most immediately useful.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“That’s what I’m choosing to answer.”
Nightingale gave him the flat look of someone who had decided she was not getting anywhere with the current approach, and went back to the fish.
Outside, the sun was past its peak and the courtyard was cooling into late afternoon. Somewhere in the castle, five witches from Sleeping Island were learning the arrangement of the corridors, and the location of the kitchen, and the name of the cook who kept dried plums in his pocket and would share them if you knew to ask. Small navigations. The beginning of belonging somewhere.
Roland leaned back in his chair and looked at the map pinned to the wall beside the window — Border Town’s current extent, with the projected expansion marked in charcoal, the North Slope Mountain shaded in, the route to the southern coast still a dotted line through solid rock.
For now, a dotted line. A few months from now: a road.
He was still thinking about that when Nightingale, apparently finished with her fish, said, “You know, Anna’s going to eventually want to know why you’re always smiling like that when you look at the map.”
“I’m thinking about engineering,” Roland said.
“That’s what you always say.”
“It’s always true.”
She pulled the empty bag inside out, found nothing remaining, and folded it carefully. “Whatever you’re planning — just don’t get anyone killed this winter.”
The familiar weight of it — not accusation, just reminder. He nodded, and meant it.
Chapter 259 The Witches from Sleeping Island (Part 2)
The fourth to be tested was Sylvie.
Whenever he faced the witch, Roland always felt a bit uncomfortable. It really wasn’t because Nightingale had told him she lied too much, in modern society, with the exception of speaking to relatives and good friends, not even a dozen people could speak bluntly. Since long ago, he was already accustomed to hearing all kinds of flattering and rumors.
He just felt that he had no possibility to hide anything from her. Even worse, he knew that it wasn’t an illusion, but the other’s ability. Being able to ignore all visual barriers, as long as she wanted, wearing clothes in front of her was completely useless. But within a dark corner of his mind, Roland lamented not having this kind of ability himself, while also involuntarily changing his sitting position by tilting his legs.
Speaking of appearances, she could be considered as the most unique of the five witches: with aquamarine hair that dropped straight to her shoulders, slender eyebrows, and the fringes of her hair seemed to have the appearance of someone that had just stepped out of a picture. Especially her amber colored pupils, which were so transparent that they had almost no depth, as if they were mirrors that reflected all incoming light. Looking at them for a while, Roland felt as if a red beam could come shooting out at any moment now.
Sylvie’s ability was very easy to understand, using her inner sight, she was able to see everything – even the area behind her back was not an exception. Furthermore, her vision could penetrate all barriers, the specific depths of the penetration depended on her own desire. She also possessed a similar branch ability as Nightingale did: She could see the gathering and dissipation of magic.
Which itself was somewhat surprisingly to Roland, for the branch abilities to be so similar, then what about the primary ability? When he asked Sylvie this question, the latter first hesitated, but then said that from the hundreds of witches on Sleeping Island, there were no witches who had the same ability. He then felt a soft pinch on his left side coming from Nightingale, he knew that this sentence was the truth.
The reason for this is probably because the sample is just too small, Roland thought.
The last witch to be tested was Candle.
She and Anna had both experienced their day of adulthood when this year’s Months of Demons was happening. When she was still a minor, her ability could only be used for lighting candles, oil lamps, torches and the like. But after her day of adulthood when her magic had also become more stable, this effect had also been significantly enhanced. Furthermore, after that day, she had gained the ability to preserve an object’s characteristics for a brief moment – for example, after casting her magic on an ice cube, it wouldn’t melt even after placing it in the hot sun. Instead, it would still send out bursts of cold.
At first glance, this ability seemed to be simply incredible. With it, Roland would be able to do many things he couldn’t achieve using conventional means. But after several rounds of testing, Roland had to acknowledge that in the end, her ability wasn’t as perfect as he had imagined it to be. First, it belonged to the category of enchanting abilities, which meant that she needed to have direct contact with the target. This limitation made it difficult for Candle to preserve high-temperature objects.
Thereupon his attempt to obtain a liquid drop of steel which would forever keep its incandescence state in that way providing the blast furnace with an everlasting heat source broke apart. With the exception of Anna, no one else would ever dare touch something that was as hot as a thousand-degrees with their bare hands. And in case the metal was turned into a long and thin iron wire, allowing Candle to keep hold of one end while enchanting the other also led to another problem.
Which was that the more the object’s state surpassed what was considered as its normal state, the greater the magical consumption would be, and the duration of the effect would also become shorter.
Roland used ice to verify this point – after solidification, he cut a block of ice into two equally large sizes. One he put onto the scolding hot ground while he threw the other into a basin filled with water. The former only persisted for an hour before it quickly began to melt, while for the other, besides cooling the water’s temperature still maintained its original form.
This meant that when the effect was placed on red hot iron or steel, it would only become more inefficient.
Finally, the volume of the object was also a factor which restricted Candle’s ability. Like Hummingbird and Mystery Moon, the greater the size of the object was, the more magic Candle needed to spend. According to Nightingale’s observation, Candle’s amount of magic was placed within the lower to middle ranks. It looked like a golden mist, which had yet to form a dense cyclone.
But even with all these restriction, the somewhat introvert looking girl was still Roland’s biggest harvest of this group of witches. In the field of industrial construction, being able to solidify an object’s state could be considered as an utterly priceless treasure. The key lied in the word “normal state”. The constant heating and cooling, friction, or any other kind of force which influenced the material would cause the metal to fatigue, which would lead to the deformation of the overall structure. But now he no longer had to worry about drills becoming too hot due to friction, and would no longer need to be concerned with a tools daily abrasion. If the key parts of the machines could be kept in a “normal” state all of the time, it would mean that the machines could always maintain their state of maximum efficiency and could work at the best possible accuracy.
In other words, Candle could effectively improve the mechanical strength of inferior materials.
…
Back to the castle’s office, Roland took out the ability record and skimmed over them once again, and then started planning their future work.
“How were they?” Nightingale stuck her head out of the fog, “Are you fond of any of those five in particular?”
“They are all pretty good,” Roland casually agreed.
“What?! You like all of them?”
He threw her a glare, while the latter stuck out her tongue and then further nibbled at the fish in her mouth.
Obviously, at present, the ones that were the most useful to him were Lotus and Candle.
With her ability to transform the landscape, he could easily build a new earthen wall outside of the current city wall – instead of having to build another fieldstone cement wall, in this way conserving materials and accelerating the construction process. As for the location she would work in he had selected the smallest sector between the foot of the North Slope Mountain and the Redwater River. It should be small enough that it could be completed before the arrival of the Months of Demons, while at the same time also limiting Border Town’s westwards expansion. In the wake of the unceasing increase of population, it was only a matter of time before those pieces of wilderness and the Concealing Forest would be developed.
The new earthen wall would be extended to the outer parts of the Concealing Forest, while it would already include some part of the forest. This expansion would double the current area of the town. As for lengthening the defensive line, this problem could be resolved through the expansion of the troops and by leading the demonic beasts to attack predetermined areas. However, compared with the previous years wooden pikes and flintlocks, today’s First Army’s firepower and rate of attack had undergone earthshaking changes. Furthermore, building batteries, bastions or similar defense measures was still possible after completing the new city walls.
He also intended to let Lotus open up a path through the southern mountain, and in that way connect Border Town to the shoal. And as a result, the town could get its own natural harbor, which would also make trading with the Fjords much more convenient. Taking into account the huge amount of magical power she would have to spend to transform the rock, Roland estimated that this project could take up to several months’ time.
As for Candle, Roland planned, that she would work together with Anna and Lucy to create a new generation of machine tools for the production of firearms and other mechanical equipment. Another good point coming from this would be that Anna could also be freed from the tedious production process.
Sylvie’s task was very clear, her mission would be to explore the North Slope mine and the Concealing Forest. According to the stories from the miners, the North Slope Mine was a natural cave with a hundred or more channels, from which no one knew where they would end up. By now only twenty of them had been exploited and cleaned up, even though many kinds of ore had already been discovered. In the end, Roland still felt very curious about the credibility of the rumors that the mine was an ancient monster lair.
Now that he had gotten hold of a witch who had the ability to see through walls, he desired the completion of exploration of the North Slope Mine together with drawing a detailed map. As they explored, Lotus could also adjust the terrain and in doing so increase the mining’s efficiency.
As for Honey, Roland didn’t have a lot of ideas, except for maybe asking her to help him to strengthen his information transmitting system, in this era without any radios. For this, he needed a lot of well-trained birds which could serve as carrier pigeons. It wasn’t necessary for them to be as smart as Maggie, it would already be good enough if they could forward the messages as quickly as possible.