Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 425: The Utilization of Energy

On the afternoon of the fifth day, the electric motor stopped.

Five consecutive days of continuous operation from a single Dawn I. If the motor ran intermittently rather than without pause, that duration could be stretched further. When the copper column’s magnetic effect was exhausted, it could be recharged with magic power — a cycle that was, in principle, clean and perpetual.

The flaw was equally obvious.

Recharging a Dawn I required all of Anna, Mystery Moon, and Spear’s magic power, burned to the bottom. At that consumption rate, the three of them together could sustain perhaps five continuously running motors. And Anna was not available to spend her days charging batteries. Fine machining, steel smelting, the maintenance of machine tools without which revolving firearm production would immediately collapse — all of it ran through her. He had distributed as much manufacturing work to ordinary craftsmen as he could manage, but Anna was still the load-bearing wall. The same was true for the 152mm Longsong Cannons, the new-style light weapons, the dozen other projects that existed so far only as notes in his notebooks.

Roland leaned back in the wing chair and exhaled.

Two paths forward. The first: increase the duration of each Dawn I. That meant more witches feeding magic power into the charging process, which meant Spear’s passage would have to handle more inputs simultaneously. She had mentioned in passing that her channel could connect more than two people at once — but the experiment with Anna had nearly collapsed her. She might grow into it. She had spent her years as a lord managing her territory rather than refining her ability; there was likely room she had never had occasion to find.

The second path: substitute other witches for Anna in the charging process. Anna, Soraya, and Agatha were perpetually occupied with production work. But most of the union’s other witches — the ones whose abilities had limited direct manufacturing applications — did not exhaust their magic during the day. Their surplus sat unused. If the total combined volume did not exceed Anna’s, Spear should be able to manage the transfer.

He wrote this down. The question of how much surplus each witch generated per day, and how to allocate it sensibly, was not a question he needed to answer himself.

Wendy would be perfect for it. Everybody trusted her.

That left the second problem: what to do with the power the Dawn I produced.

He had three or four terminal conversion machines he could realistically sustain given the available magic supply. Steam engines could be produced at four or five per month and ran as long as there was water to boil. Dawn I motors were different — each one depended on a charging cycle that consumed witch hours. Every application he chose was a choice against other applications.

He went through the list.

As a replacement for steam engines: electric motors were genuinely superior in stability of rotation speed, ease of control, and potential for automation. But the steam engines he had were adequate for current production demands. He had also imagined electric vehicles — carriages running between Longsong Stronghold and Border Town without horses, or electrically powered airships accessible to ordinary passengers. But the cost was prohibitive. Running either would require Anna or one of the other core witches to pause their production work for an entire day of charging. The math did not favor it.

Boiling water: a boiler and firewood solved the problem adequately. The few workers needed to tend a steam setup cost far less, in real terms, than magic power that could be applied elsewhere.

He drew a circle around light bulbs.

It was not the most dramatic application. Airships and electric carriages were the kind of thing that made people feel civilization had taken a leap. A light bulb was just a light that didn’t flicker. But that was exactly the point. Stable, clean light after dark would let people read without straining against candlelight after a full day’s work. It would extend productive hours in the factories — three-shift operation became possible once you could see what you were doing at midnight. And there was something else, harder to quantify but real: capturing what the old stories called “thunder power” and putting it in a glass tube that ordinary people could hold in their hands — that was the kind of thing that changed how people thought about what was possible. More directly useful than airships, and more comprehensible.

He set down the pen. The technical problems remaining — light bulb manufacture, line construction, power supply routing, the whole question of introducing electricity to people who had never seen it — were real but tractable. That was a different day’s thinking.

He called for Wendy.

She listened to the plan without interrupting: gather the daily surplus magic power from the witches whose abilities didn’t require full expenditure, exclude the combat witches with fixed mission duties, channel it through Spear’s passage to Mystery Moon for charging.

“Do you think it could work?” Roland asked.

“Hummingbird and Echo would be glad of it,” Wendy said, and her smile was precise rather than warm — the smile of someone who had already thought through the second-order effects. “They’ve always wanted a way to be as useful as Anna.” She paused. “How would we measure the surplus?”

“The Stone of Measurement. The standard the Union used before.”

“Yes, Your Highness.” She dipped her head slightly. Then: “One other thing. Today is the Day of Adulthood for Lucia. Should the union gather to accompany her?”

Roland stopped. “I had almost forgotten.”

“You have a great deal to remember.” Her voice held no reproach — it was simply true. She reached into her satchel and produced a small notebook. “I’ve kept each sister’s milestones recorded here. Nothing gets missed.”

After Anna’s Day of Awakening, Lightning, Nana, and Echo had all passed their own second birthdays in succession. But the Day of Adulthood was something different in kind. It fell on the same calendar date as the Day of Awakening for each witch, but the bite of magic power it carried was several times stronger. Without the ability to absorb or suppress the surge, the Day of Adulthood could be a matter of survival.

Those who passed through it came out changed. The abilities stabilized and strengthened, sometimes acquiring derivative capacities that had not been present before — evolutionary steps that had no equivalent in ordinary human development.

“I’ll arrange a proper dinner tonight.” Roland said it quietly, with the intention he meant it to carry. “Not just the union. I’ll be there with her.”

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