Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 642: First Exploration

Roland slammed the door and held still.

The snow that had blown in melted against his skin in slow cold runnels. He breathed. The shock was not the place itself — he’d understood, intellectually, that dreams were variable, that the Dream World could contain anything. Understanding it and standing at the edge of a snow-buried foreign country were different registers of knowledge.

He walked to the lumber-room window and looked at the outer wall. Smooth. Unbroken. Not a seam, not a repair line, not any sign that the wall had ever been touched. The door hadn’t been retrofitted. It had been placed there from the beginning — from the moment the apartment was built.

Is it only in room 0825? Or in every flat?

If every unit had one, where did the others lead?

The question lit something in him. He turned to the wardrobe.

The winter clothes he found were wretched — a coat with most of its feathers gone, a knitted scarf unraveling at the ends. He had no better options. He pulled them on. The summer heat outside had already soaked him in sweat; now the coat added its own oppressive weight, and within minutes he was breathing the hot interior of a walking furnace.

He pushed through anyway. Kicked off his flip-flops, laced up a pair of green leather shoes, and opened the door again.

Cold struck at every gap — collar, cuffs, the thin strip of wrist between sleeve and glove. The sweat on his skin turned ice-cold on contact. He sneezed so hard it bent him forward.

Then he noticed: the door, left open behind him, was venting cold air into the summer apartment.

A free air conditioner. No power cost.

He wondered what Zero would make of this.

He rubbed his nose and looked around. The door opened onto a slope where low storehouses stood half-buried in snow — the kind farmers or merchants built outside a city, utilitarian and plain. All of them unguarded. The whole campsite had a suspended quality, as if everyone had simply stopped mid-motion and vanished.

What stopped Roland was not the campsite. It was the view a few hundred meters beyond it.

He could see where the world ended.

The snowfield was cut — abruptly, cleanly, as though something had taken a blade to it — and beyond the cut, rubble floated weightless in a gap of churning air. Violent cyclones tore through the void. Darkness swallowed the space past them. At irregular intervals, scarlet lightning cracked across the border, flooding it with brief red light, revealing the edge and then letting darkness have it back. The void stretched past the range of sight.

Appalling. Also extraordinary — a lone island drifting in nothing, bounded by storm and ruin. He traced the border until it vanished into the storm on each side. There had to be another edge on the far side of Holy City, but it was too far to see from here.

A memory fragment remaining in Zero’s mind. This is what it looks like from outside.

He didn’t approach the boundary. The wind that shredded loose rock was not something he wanted to test. And Holy City itself was at least half an hour’s walk across the snowfield — longer in ankle-deep drifts. He needed preparation before he went near it.

He turned his attention to the campsite instead.

Storehouses, dwellings, tents. Nothing living in any of them — not a sound, not a footprint in the fresh snow. It was exactly like the Soul Battlefield: a stage built from memory, not a world that still ran. Holy City would be unmanned as well.

But the storehouses were stocked.

A frozen inventory — everything preserved at the moment the memory split off. He found the lock on one basement door and simply twisted it free with a wrench from a nearby shed. Inside: cured jerky, dried fillets, sacks of wheat, and — improbably, impossibly fresh — a small half-box of grapes. He placed one in his mouth. Cool sweetness, the skin yielding cleanly. They must have come from the old Holy City far below, carried up before everything ended.

His biggest discovery was an iron box in a hidden compartment of the same basement — not because he searched carefully, but because the compartment had been left open, an oil lamp still burning beside it, as though the person who’d been placing valuables inside had simply ceased to exist mid-action. The box held more than ten gold royals and several translucent gemstones of obvious quality. Roland pocketed all of it without hesitation.

He confirmed the test: items from the fragment passed back through the iron door. Then he got to work in earnest.

Two hours in the snow. He moved everything of value through the door and into the lumber-room — food stores, suits of armor, short swords, crossbows — until the room was full and he could fit nothing more. He locked the door with genuine reluctance.

He stood in the living room and looked at what he’d accumulated. The satisfaction was simple and total: treasure gathered at zero cost, from a world that had no further use for it.

And this is only the campsite. Holy City itself waited — an entire city’s worth of wealth, untouched.

He laughed. A short, genuine sound.

He was still laughing when the dizziness arrived — sudden and absolute, the room tilting without warning. He grabbed for the tea table and didn’t make it. The floor came up. Darkness.

He woke on his bed, aching in every muscle like a man who’d run a long race and then been beaten afterward.

The blinds showed darkness. Hours had passed — more than one or two.

Overexertion. Heatstroke from the alternating cold and heat. He should have rested first. But what struck him now, lying still in the dark, was how little feeble he actually felt. Something moved through him — a warmth that ran in slow circuits, unhurried, thorough — and wherever it passed, his senses sharpened. He could feel the grain of the sheets. The temperature gradient from the center of the room to the window.

A breath near his pillow. Faint, steady.

He turned his head.

Zero sat slumped beside the bed, a wet towel in her hand, half her face caught in moonlight. Her eyelashes trembled slightly with each exhale. Her dress was damp through — the room must have been stifling — and her arms were dotted with small beads of sweat. The scent that came from her was clean, somehow, despite everything: something faintly herbal.

She’d dragged him in from the living room. She’d worked to cool him down. When he smacked his lips, he tasted the faint residue of patchouli liquid. She’d found a way to get it into him while he was unconscious, and he decided not to ask how.

He got up with care, lifted her, and carried her to the bed. She barely stirred — arms loose, head heavy. Her bedroom was always immaculate, and she’d never go to it unwashed; she’d sat vigil until sleep took her before she could manage the bathroom. He left her on his bed. It was dirty enough already.

He returned to the couch and lay flat, watching the warmth continue its circuit.

Not imagined. Something real.

He reached into his trouser pocket and found the gold royal he’d brought back from the fragment. Held it in his open palm. Turned his attention inward — toward the warmth, toward wherever it gathered — and tried to push it down through his arm into his hand.

He closed his fist.

When he opened it, the gold royal had been folded into a half-moon.

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