Rewrite That Witch
CH799 · Rewrite
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Chapter 799: Changes

Driving lessons had been the fashion during his university years. He had signed up without strong feeling, more because his friends were going than because he had any expectation of using the skill. He had never thought the first time he touched a steering wheel after passing his test would be inside a dream.

The car smelled of leather and cold air.

“Your Majesty — what was that creature?” Faldi’s voice came from the back seat, still faint. She had taken the worst of the initial blast alongside Dawnen; half of her violet curls had been torn away, one side of her hair lying limply where it had once spiraled. Her face and torso were largely unharmed. “A Fallen Evil shouldn’t be able to accumulate that kind of power in such a short time. Theoretically, it makes no sense.”

The fact that she had survived with mostly cosmetic damage said something. Even a witch who was not primarily combat-trained had spent centuries optimizing her reactions against things that wanted to kill her. She had chosen the right direction, the right speed, the optimal angle of retreat. All of the Taquila survivors had. This was why the pioneering operation had come back at all.

Roland didn’t yet know what happened to someone who died in the Dream World. He intended to never find out.

“Did the Union ever encounter anything like this — power that directly converts into destructive force, without a body to anchor it?”

“What we call biting,” Faldi said slowly, “is what happens when a body absorbs too much magical damage. As a witch develops her capacity through practice, her tolerance increases, her recovery improves. Whether it’s us, or demons, or hybrid beasts — power is accumulated gradually, through sustained effort.” She exhaled. “I have never, until tonight, seen a living thing that was purely formed from magic power. I only had a framework for flesh-and-bone life. It was natural that I couldn’t categorize something entirely outside that framework.”

Roland himself had no such difficulty. The moment the shell dropped away and he saw what was inside, he had thought: spirit, elemental, something like that. If a body was formed from magic, it followed that conventional magic attacks would simply be absorbed. His own conjecture was not necessarily correct — he had watched the creature’s mood and consciousness visibly decline as the blue light gained the upper hand, which suggested that sufficiently overwhelming force could alter even a magical body’s coherence, pushing it back toward something more conventional. But the mechanics remained unclear.

“I don’t know what it was,” he said at last. “What I can confirm is that it was not a Fallen Evil.”

Silence for a moment from the back seat.

“Are there many like it in the Dream World?” Ling’s voice was smaller than usual. She had come back from the shadow to sit between Dawnen and Faldi, and she sat very still, as if loud movement might attract attention. “When the shadows were covered by that red and black void — I felt something watching me. Not like facing a Senior Demon. Facing a Senior Demon, you at least know it might die. Whatever was in that room felt like it was observing me from somewhere I couldn’t see, and that it had always been there.”

“There can’t be many of them,” Roland said, with a steadiness that was partly genuine and partly for her benefit. The Martialist Association could manage Fallen Evils, even the more dangerous varieties — but against the creature they had just faced, twelve martialists might still not be enough. If such things were common in the Dream World, the association would have been overwhelmed long ago.

The thought drew a thread back toward something he had been avoiding.

He could now confirm, in retrospect, what Garcia had told him months ago: the corruption of the Dream World was inseparably tied to the Bloody Moon. Those spiked tentacles emerging from the red-black void — he had seen something like them before, in the context of the Divine Domain. The connection was real.

But the questions it raised were harder. Why would the Bloody Moon corrupt the Dream World? Isn’t this world embedded within it? Who is the “Lord” the creature spoke of — a deity, or something more like a source of magic power? Why did it tolerate his contact with the divine relics, if it truly opposes him here?

The “Bottomless Land” nagged at him too. The phrasing was structured the same way as other continental designations in the Land of Dawn — Divine Land, similar meaning, different form. As if the creature had absorbed the language through proximity and was using it without quite understanding the architecture beneath the words.

If the Bloody Moon perpetually watches the real world because of the Battle of Divine Will — is what it reveals an actual continent? A place with geography?

Questions for explorers. Not for tonight.

In the front passenger seat, Phyllis had already put the battle behind her. She was watching Roland’s hands on the steering wheel with the focused attention of someone memorizing a technique they intend to replicate. When she had ridden in the taxi, she had been required to stay silent. Now there was no one to perform silence for.

“You want to learn to drive?” Roland asked. The smile came easier than he expected, once he let himself go with it.

Phyllis nodded with the promptness of someone who had already decided.

“A few more jobs first.” He let the promise sit in the air between them. “Once we have proper resources, you’ll have your own room, your own vehicle. Cuisine you haven’t imagined yet.”

“Better than KFC and hotpot?” Faldi’s voice had recovered some of its color.

“Those are entry-level. With enough money, you could eat something different every day for the rest of your lives and never reach the end of what this world offers.”

He didn’t turn his head. He could feel the change in the air behind him — the quality of attention shifting, brightening.

“When Duncan is recovered,” Faldi said — and now there was intention in her voice, not just faintness — “we can proceed to the next location. I’ve already marked it.”

“I’m fine,” Duncan said, small and clear from her corner. “A night’s rest will do it. This injury won’t slow us down.”

Even Ling, who hadn’t quite stopped being frightened, had something new in her eyes when Roland caught her in the rearview mirror. Not the frozen look of trauma. Something warmer.

Roland felt something settle in his chest.

Boosting morale turns out to be straightforward.

He didn’t drive back through Tongzi Street. The police might swing past, and the car would raise questions. Instead he parked beside the Clover Association’s construction site on the neighboring block — the demolition had left a blind spot in the surveillance network — and led the group down the small pathway to the rented warehouse.

Then: the reckoning.

The safe held roughly a hundred thousand in cash, which was less than he had hoped. The jewelry was more substantial — jades and pearls, quantities that resisted easy valuation. And there were, to his considerable surprise, several solidified Forces of Nature tucked into a box in the corner.

Is cash already considered old-fashioned among people like this? Are Forces of Nature functioning as currency?

He held one in his palm. Heavy for its size. Warm.

It was half past eleven by the time he climbed back to Room 0827. He opened the door quietly and found the parlor lights on.

Zero was curled by the tea table, her back arching gently with the rhythm of deep sleep. Her textbooks were spread open in front of her, pencil box beside them. She had been doing homework while she waited for him, and the waiting had outlasted her.

There was supposed to be only a landlord-tenant arrangement between them. Something had gone sideways with that plan without either of them noticing.

Roland lifted her carefully — she was lighter than he remembered every time — carried her to her room, slipped her shoes off, and covered her with the quilt.

Then: the textbooks.

If she woke up tomorrow and couldn’t find them, she would blame him.

He gathered them from the tea table and brought them to her desk. Stacking them, his eyes caught the cover of the topmost one.

Junior High Math Olympiad.

He set it down. He had avoided Math Olympiad at that age, treating it as an unnecessarily elevated form of something he was already uninterested in, and spending his summers on sketching and calligraphy instead. He had no idea what the course contained.

He didn’t know why he opened it.

His breath was shorter than it should have been.

He sat down at her desk, in the small pool of light from her lamp, and turned to the first page. Neatly arranged examples, each one annotated in Zero’s precise, elegant hand.

He began to read.

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