Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 515: The Magic Painting

“Good morning, Miss Soraya!”

Jilly came up the moment Soraya stepped into the bicycle factory. “You’re early today.”

This made Soraya feel a pang of guilt. She’d stayed up late playing Fight the Landlord with Mystery Moon and Lily, and had woken half an hour behind her usual time. Without Wendy around, everyone slipped a little—everyone except Anna and Agatha. Those two set an example that the rest of them could only admire from a distance, especially Agatha, who arrived first and left last without apparent effort.

“Is the material ready?” Soraya asked.

“Yes. Please follow me.”

Jilly had been in the first graduating class, and had become Soraya’s assistant after graduation—tracking her schedule, relaying information, keeping the days organized. A year ago Soraya would never have believed that ordinary people and witches could work alongside each other so naturally.

“Are those the finished bicycles?” She had noticed something different about the factory floor: the steam machine stood silent, and the workers had all gathered to stare at a row of gleaming new vehicles.

“Yes—the first batch.” Jilly smiled. “Twenty in total. They weren’t easy to make, especially the chains and wheels. The finished-product rate came in below fifty percent.”

That’s the truth. The factory had been built the previous autumn, but since then it had run into one obstacle after another—equipment not ready, workers in short supply. Compared to the steam assembly plant and the chemical plant next door, this place was clearly the lower priority. Both neighbors ran three shifts, day and night without pause. The bicycle factory only ran days. Once, Jilly had complained quietly that her friend at the chemical plant earned three times her wages, while she herself had gone months without ever seeing a finished bicycle.

Now Jilly had one.

Soraya walked to her office and found the floor already covered in a sheet of white paper—roughly forty square meters, the surface as clean and blank as new snow.

“Sorry to disturb you,” Jilly said from the doorway. “Today’s piece is the inner tire.”

“All right.” Soraya nodded. “You may go.”

“Call me if you need anything.” Jilly laughed. “I’ll be right outside.” She disappeared, practically vibrating with the desire to get on a bicycle.

Soraya shook her head, smiling, and took off her shoes before stepping onto the tiled paper floor.

She usually painted the inner tires, outer tires, and bicycle frames according to each batch’s requirements. Her painting speed outpaced the factory’s production line, so there was always excess stock waiting for the workshops to catch up. Since her magical power grew every day, it would have been wasteful not to use it; so she came every three days to complete her portion.

She recalled the coating the inner tire needed and lifted her hand to summon the Magic Pen.

As a film material designed to contain gas, it had to be light, soft, and ductile—and stable under heat. Through hundreds of tests, she’d settled on the shaving coating method. Sky coating was too flexible; ripple coating was too heat-resistant. The right material had come to her while she watched carpenters at work: the wood shavings they left behind, thin and curved. That was the color she’d mapped.

Unlike Lucia, she couldn’t break substances into elementary components and mix them in arbitrary ratios. She had to understand materials by painting them—by holding their essence on the tip of the Magic Pen. She couldn’t memorize thousands of properties, so she’d built color cards instead. Any material she’d worked with was there: a reference she could flip through and match to a need.

For inner and outer tires, she no longer needed the cards. That coating came to her as naturally as handwriting.

The Magic Pen widened gradually as she worked until it spread to six meters across. It could reach ten, but at that scale it became difficult to control—the fine work suffered. She preferred to spend the extra time and preserve the quality.

Within two hours the forty square meters of paper wore a smooth skin of wood-shaving coating. Not real wood shavings, of course—much as her steel painting was not real steel. The material that emerged from the Magic Pen had the properties she needed: the correct ductility, the correct heat resistance. A thing could never be simultaneously hard and perfectly ductile; she had long since accepted that constraint and worked within it.

Within the coating, she inscribed her name. An artist’s signature.

She had started signing at the lower right corner of each piece, as painters traditionally did—until she realized that when the coating was cut into strips for individual inner tubes, her name would appear in only one of them. So she signed everywhere, woven into the pattern itself. No matter how the cutting went, someone would see: Soraya’s work.

The first time Roland noticed it, she’d braced for criticism. Instead he’d called it a watermark, and praised her for inventing it. She hadn’t understood what a watermark was, but the praise had kept her warm for days afterward, and she’d decided to keep doing it.

With the painting complete, the next steps belonged to other hands: burn the paper on one side of the coating to extract the raw material, send it to the cutting room, weld the strips into tires with hot iron. Soraya only prepared the material. The rest of the chain ran without her.

Today’s work had consumed roughly a third of her magical power—enough to remind her that training still mattered. A year ago this much effort would have exhausted her entirely. Now she still had energy when she said goodbye to Jilly and walked up alone toward the North Slope Mine.

The approach was heavily guarded: sentries posted every hundred meters, bunkers and watchtowers flanking the entrance, tighter than any lord’s keep she’d seen. The soldiers at the yard gate saluted as she passed.

Inside, Anna was bent over a set of strange components, cutting with total concentration. Soraya felt a faint echo of shame—and then, immediately, admiration. Anna was this city’s most gifted witch, and she worked like she had no ceiling.

“Hey, Sister Soraya—you’re here!” Lucia’s voice rang out.

Anna looked up and waved. “Some copper wires need coating,” she said, and gestured toward a neatly arranged stack. “When you have a moment.”

“Of course.” Soraya smiled and walked toward them.

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