Chapter 429: Element Separation
The wind was still howling when Lucia pushed through the door into the North Slope Mountain yard. She shut it behind her quickly, sealing out the cold.
Wooden sheds had gone up around the yard after winter set in — a ring of them, sacrificing some of the light in exchange for keeping the snow off the work. A bonfire burned at the center, and even from the doorway she could feel its warmth against her face. She pulled off her gloves and held her frozen hands toward the flames.
“Are you cold?” Anna looked up from her workstation. She tilted her head. “Come here.”
Lucia crossed the yard at a trot. A moment later, green fire surrounded her — not burning, just warm, impossibly so, sinking through her coat and her skin until she felt it in her bones. Like the castle’s bathing room, except all at once and everywhere.
This ability. She could not stop a pang of envy. She’s never afraid of the cold.
“Better?”
“Yes.” Lucia nodded vigorously, already embarrassed by how relieved she sounded. “What are you making?”
“Parts for a new kind of gun.” Anna lifted a long steel tube with a piston assembly and drew it back and forth in a smooth, testing motion. “His Highness isn’t certain the mechanism will hold on the first shot. It needs repeated trials.”
The parts were beautiful in the way well-made precision work was beautiful — surfaces polished to a shine, rolled steel with no pit marks or irregularities, the kind of finish that would have been impossible to imagine before Lucia came to Border Town. She had contributed to producing them. The pure materials that made work like this achievable were hers.
She let herself feel pleased about that, briefly, before putting the feeling away.
“He said he’d be along later,” Lucia said, answering the unspoken question she saw forming in Anna’s expression. “He had something to finish first. He told me to start getting familiar with the new ability on my own.”
“So.” Anna withdrew the green fire and turned to face her fully, with that particular focused attention that was her version of enthusiasm. “What does it look like now? After the evolution?”
Lucia scratched the back of her head. “I couldn’t have come through it without you and Lady Spear.”
“You thanked us. That’s done.” Anna waved it off. “Show me.”
Lucia nodded. She drew on her magic power and felt the familiar strangeness arrive — the world dissolved at the edges, everything resolving into small squares, each one a color, grouping with others of the same shade into patches and blocks. The first time this had happened it had been terror. Now she had the space to look.
She picked up one of the processed parts from the workstation — it had been smooth and bright when she last saw it, but under the magic it was something else. Seven or eight distinct color blocks lived in it. The largest was cyan. They were arranged with no visible logic, like pigments scattered carelessly across a floor, except that each color patch had clean, definite boundaries. They did not bleed into each other.
She examined this for a long moment. Then she set the part down.
These aren’t the particles His Highness described. The blocks were far too large — she could feel it intuitively, the way you feel when a category is wrong even if you can’t name the correct one. These are something larger. Elements, not particles. Small particles combine into larger ones by different patterns, and the patterns determine the properties. That’s what I’m seeing — the element level, not the particle level.
This was not a conclusion she could have reached six months ago. But Roland’s courses had given her a framework, and the framework fit what she was seeing now with the precision of a key in a lock.
She described it to Anna — what she saw, what she thought it might mean.
Anna was quiet for a moment. Then: “It might be a derivative skill.”
“A derivative—”
“A rare talent. Only a few adult witches in the union have one.” Anna spoke with care, as if she had thought through these distinctions before. “According to Agatha, they only emerge at adulthood — if it doesn’t appear then, it never does. I think they’re related to the primary ability. They supplement it, strengthen it. Soraya’s magic brush — without it, she’d have to mix ordinary pigments into her paint. Scroll’s Book of Magic — she told me once that she could memorize texts quickly even before adulthood, but couldn’t share their contents with others because she had no way to reproduce the pages.” Anna tilted her head. “Your primary ability is separation and restoration. I think these color blocks are a derivative that lets you separate specific elements accurately — lets you target them precisely rather than operating on the material as a whole. Try it. See if you can pull out a single color block.”
Lucia turned to the pig iron ingot resting on the workstation.
She reached into it with her magic — not the broad separation she had used before, but something finer, a filament thread of it that she pushed carefully toward the cyan blocks. It was harder than anything she had done before. Her magic power had always felt abstract, a force that acted on things. Now it felt like a hand — like her fingers, extended and made of something without weight. She could feel the individual blocks, feel the resistance of the ingot around them.
More filaments. She added them patiently, spreading the grip.
The cyan squares began to loosen. They shifted, pulled toward her direction, and then came free — sliding out of the ingot as the surrounding blocks reacted to the vacancy. Their boundaries began to waver. The ingot lost cohesion and collapsed inward, and when she withdrew her power and straightened up, two things sat on the workstation: a small box-shaped iron block, and a crystal the size of half a fingernail, green and yellow and slightly luminous.
She pressed the back of her hand against her forehead. The sweat was remarkable.
She looked at the crystal under normal vision and then under the magic. Under the magic, the iron block showed the silver-white of pure iron. The crystal was still many-colored — a compound, she thought, of the elements she had not extracted.
“What is this?” She lifted it. It was not heavy. It caught the firelight in unexpected ways.
“Probably a compound of the other elements in the pig iron.” Anna was staring at it with the particular brightness in her eyes that came before the most interesting conversations. “I’m not certain, but I can test it.” She paused. “Do you understand what this means? If I’m right — you can separate specific elements from a material and reorganize the remainder into something purer. Any low-quality raw material, any ore with too many impurities to work with — you could refine it.” She looked up from the crystal. “Almost any useless material could be made usable with your power.”
Chapter 429: Element Separation
Translator: TransN Editor: TransN
Accompanied by howling wind and raging snow, Lucia entered the backyard of North Slope Mountain and closed the door, shutting the chill out of the room.
A circle of wooden sheds was pitched in the yard after winter kicked in. Although the lighting was somewhat affected, the houses here would at least not be buried in piles of snow.
There was a bonfire in the yard, and Lucia could even feel the heat of its flickering flames by the door. She took off her gloves and put her freezing hands above the blazes to warm herself up.
“Are you cold?” Anna, who stood at the workstation, turned her head and beckoned. “Come here, I’ll warm you up.”
“Ah… thank you.” Lucia trotted to her. Soon bathed in warm green flames that gave her a languid and relaxing sensation from head to toe, she felt like she was soaking in the bathtub of the castle.
“Such a convenient ability…” Lucia thought enviously. “She’s never afraid of the bitter cold.”
“Are you warm now?”
“Yes!” she affirmed, nodding vigorously. “What are you making?”
“Some parts for new guns.” Anna grabbed a long slim steel tube with a piston in the middle and pulled it back and forth. “His Highness says he’s not sure if it’ll work with the first shot, so it needs to be tested repeatedly.”
These parts, bright and shiny from the outside, were apparently made from the best rolled steel and were carefully carved by the Blackfire. Before coming to the town, Lucia would have never thought that the surface of iron objects could be as smooth as glass, like artwork.
She had also made a contribution to their creation. Lucia could not suppress a smile at this thought. Both Roland and Anna had said that without highquality materials, the finished products would still be damaged goods, even with precise and refined processing methods.
“His Highness didn’t come with you?” asked Anna, who withdrew her green fire.
“He said that he still needed to take care of something and would come a little later. He asked me to first get familiar with my new ability,” Lucia answered, twitching her mouth.
“What does your ability look like after the evolution?” Anna inquired with great interest. “There’s probably no one in the Witch Union who created a bigger stir than you did upon entering adulthood.”
Lucia scratched her head, looking a bit embarrassed. “I probably couldn’t have made it without you and milord Spear.”
“You already thanked me, no need to worry about it.” Anna dismissed it with a wave. “Let’s see your new ability.”
Lucia agreed. She summoned the magic power in her body and again sensed the same odd feeling enveloping her heart—everything became strange and obscure, dividing into numerous tiny squares that grouped together by color, forming different color speckles. However, this time she did not suffer any pain from magic power bites, so she could calm herself down and carefully observe each single square.
She took one of the parts processed by Anna. There were lumps and bumps on its surface, which had been smooth and shiny earlier. With the help of the magic power, she could clearly see the color speckles on it—there were around seven or eight color blocks, the largest of which was cyan. As if an
artist carelessly spilled various pigments on the floor, there were no patterns whatsoever in their arrangement. The only difference, however, was that each color speckle had visible boundaries that prevented them from mixing with each other.
It occurred to Lucia that these were not the tiny particles His Highness had referred to. These “squares” and “color speckles” were just too big to be considered as the fundamental elements of everything.
There’s a larger classification than the particle, which is the element.
Small particles form larger ones in accordance with different patterns and rules, and these larger particles will exhibit entirely different properties due to their various structures.
Lucia used to have no idea about her own ability or its specific functions back in Valencia, but now she thoroughly understood the concept of elements. According to His Highness’ description and classification, she believed it was elements that she had just observed.
After hearing what Lucia saw and thought, Anna pondered for a while and said, “It may be a type of derivative skill.”
“Derivative… skill?”
“That’s a rare talent,” Anna explained, smiling. “There are only a few adult witches in the Witch Union who possess such a talent—according to Agatha, it only occurs on the Day of Adulthood. Once you miss it, you miss it forever. I believe it has a lot to do with the witch’s primary ability, or we can say, it supplements and strengthens the primary power. For example, Soraya needs to first mix pigments into paint if she doesn’t have the magic brush. The same applies to Miss Scroll’s Book of Magic. She once told me that although she could quickly memorize most of the books prior to adulthood, she couldn’t share the contents with others because she didn’t have any money to purchase pens and paper.”
Anna paused for a moment before continuing. “Your main ability is separation and restoration, so I reckon these color speckles may be assisting
you in accurately separating a specific type of element—you can give it a shot to see whether you can separate a particular color block or not.”
Lucia nodded. She started to once again apply her power to the pig iron ingot by the workstation. Unlike the separation earlier, this time she cautiously transformed her magic power into a filament to pull the cyan squares.
The whole process was much harder than she expected. Lucia had never manipulated her magic power in such a laborious manner, but she was delighted to see her progress. Compared with her confusion prior to adulthood, she was now able to truly feel the magic power, as if it had become her own fingers—even an extension of her consciousness.
As more filaments clung to the color speckle, the squares finally started to loosen up and wriggle out of the iron ingot. Meanwhile, the rest of the color speckles also changed—their distinct boundaries began to wobble, and the whole iron ingot collapsed and crumbled into a yellow green crystal as small as half of a nail, next to which appeared a box-like iron block.
Lucia withdrew her power and wiped the perspiration from her forehead. She noticed the crystal and the block displayed different colors under the magic power than with normal vision—the previous cyan speckle had turned silver white, which was a color usually seen among pure iron. Nevertheless, the crystal still remained colorful, but if she did not look at it using her magic power, it just looked like a polished gemstone.
“What’s this?” Lucia gently took the tiny crystal. Its size was not even close to that of the iron ingot, but it looked much more beautiful.
“It’s probably a compound formed by the other elements in the pig iron,” Anna suggested, her eyes glistening. “I’m not sure, but I can do a small experiment to verify it. If I’ve guessed right, do you know what that means? It means that you can separate some elements from an object and reorganize the rest of the elements, instead of breaking them up… Any useless, poor-quality materials can be reborn with the help of your power.”