Rewrite That Witch
CH789 · Rewrite

Chapter 789: A Guess on the Soul Transfer

Phyllis finally slowed down after eating for what Roland estimated was a significant fraction of a normal person’s daily caloric intake in a single sitting.

Passersby slowed to study the table. Three people — two of them slender young women who did not, by any visible measure, seem capable of the damage in front of them. The stacked boxes of hamburger wrappers, egg tart trays, and empty cups reached a height that would have been embarrassing in a larger party. The conclusions drawn by people glancing through the window settled, by the logic of proximity and gender, on Roland. He accepted this. He had made his peace with being thought a glutton.

He caught Zero’s eye across the table. “Wipe her face.”

The little girl took out a wet wipe without commentary and carefully removed the tear tracks and oil from Phyllis’s face. Whatever compassion Zero kept concealed under her general suspicion of adults had made an exception. This might have been the first person she had met whose circumstances were obviously bad enough that a KFC meal had moved them to open weeping.

Phyllis sat back. The last egg tart disappeared, and she exhaled — long, complete, the sound of someone laying down something they had carried for a very long time.

“Awfully delicious,” she said.

“Good.” Roland slid the ice cream cones across the table. “Before you eat those — the Dreamland. Before you entered it, was there anything unusual?”

Phyllis glanced at Zero.

Roland blinked. She understood.

“This was long ago,” she said. “Let me think. No — nothing unusual. I simply leaned against the wall and disconnected myself. It’s a way to restore strength without becoming fully unconscious. I stop controlling the body and release my awareness into the dark. Even in that state, I can sense nearby danger — not see it, not hear it, but something makes me aware of it. Celine calls it a subconscious connection. Only inside a soul container do we become truly insensible.”

Zero’s mouth tightened. “Who’s Celine?”

“A physician.” Roland gave her a flat look. “Adults talking. If you’re bored, the park’s right there. Watch people fly kites. Don’t go far.”

She took her ice cream cone and left with the pointed dignity of someone who has decided that departure is the better option.

Roland watched her through the window until she reached the park’s edge. Phyllis watched him watch her.

“Is it safe?”

“Yes. This is a safe era, and she’s not easy to deceive.” He turned back. “Go on.”

“Once I’m in deep sleep, there’s nothing — no light, no sound, nothing at all. Just drifting.” Phyllis paused, her gaze going somewhere interior. “But this time, in that darkness, I saw your residence here. Your apartment. Your rooms. When I realized where I was, I was — I can’t describe the astonishment. And then I saw you.”

Roland considered. “The only thing different about your sleep this time was where you slept.”

“Yes. Just that. I was in your castle.”

He watched the last ice cream cone vanish. Phyllis heaved a long, satisfied sigh.

Beams of light, he thought, and it arrived in his mind with the particular clarity of something that has been waiting to surface.

“You told me,” he said slowly, “that when I fall asleep, there’s a yellow-orange beam above me — as wide as the city wall.”

Phyllis looked up. “Yes.”

“And you carry a beam too.”

She understood before he finished. “You mean our beams overlapped?”

“Yes.” He pressed his hands flat on the table. “The castle is just stone — ordinary stone, no inherent power. Only the beams could open a passage here. But the overlap alone can’t be the full explanation, or Anna, or Nightingale, or any witch who’d ever slept within range of mine would have come through before now.” He paused. “You disconnected your consciousness. You cut the tether voluntarily. That’s what opened the door.”

It settled him somewhere below thought. And then something else came loose alongside it.

The Taquila witches used the word soul as a practical term — not a metaphor, not a philosophical conceit, but a thing that could be extracted and placed elsewhere. They had moved souls into God’s Punishment Warrior bodies and into the carriers left by the underground civilization. They did it routinely, as a matter of institutional survival. But no one, in all the conversations Roland had had about the process, had ever explained to him what a soul was. Not what it did, or where it went, or what medium carried it.

He had assumed it was pattern. Thought and memory as electrical arrangement. Something that generated in a living body and ceased to exist when that body ceased. He had attributed the soul core’s apparent contradiction of this to magic, which was the category he assigned to things he couldn’t currently explain.

But what if it wasn’t a contradiction?

What if the Bloody Moon was the medium? What if beams of light were the transmission passage, and a soul was simply a person’s pattern of thought and memory as stored in the Bloody Moon — accessible to the soul core because the soul core knew how to activate the connection? What if the soul didn’t cease when it left the body; it returned to where it had always been kept?

The thinning of the God’s Punishment Witches’ beams after the soul transfer made sense on that model: transmitting a pattern of cognition and memory required less bandwidth than transforming magic power into physical effect. His own beam was as wide as a city wall because this world — built from the entire architecture of his memory — required a proportionally larger passage to sustain.

When Phyllis had cut her consciousness loose inside the range of his beam, her pattern, stored in the Bloody Moon, had found the nearest available structure and flowed into it. This world. His dream.

Which meant this world was not only in his memory. It existed, in some sense, as part of the Bloody Moon itself — built through Zero’s Soul Battlefield into the divine domain of magic power.

He was about to speak when the window beside him shattered outward.

The restaurant next door. Screaming, then the structural sound of something failing fast, then the flood of bodies through every exit — shoppers, diners, bystanders, all moving away from whatever was inside. Phones already recording. The street emptying with practiced speed.

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