Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 840: Black Blood

Back in the castle, Roland still could not settle.

The saying went that people cried from joy. But he did not think that was the whole of it — not for Hero. What had come out of her in that medical room was something that had been held in far longer than this morning, longer than the healing sessions, longer even than the loss of her legs. It was everything poured out at once: the unfair treatment, the pain, the years of false accusations that had preceded all of this. The hard face she had kept was not indifference. It was a mask over everything she couldn’t afford to let out, not yet, not while there was still something that needed surviving.

She had done extraordinarily well. A girl barely of age when the worst of it had come down on her, holding herself together through sheer will. The tears were not weakness. They were the proof that the worst was done.

The treatment had succeeded. She would regain full use of her feet, though after this long without walking, it would take rehabilitation before her body remembered how. The nerve signals were already present — she had felt the feet move, they had moved — which meant the connection between new and old tissue was complete. The rest was time.

The session had also given Roland something to think about regarding Broken Sword’s ability.

Every witch operated within limits. Hummingbird’s weight-reduction ability had a ceiling on the volume of objects she could affect, on how long the effect lasted, on the degree of reduction achievable. Push past any of these thresholds and the magic cost scaled up steeply — exponentially, by his estimate. She could not make a mountain weightless, and could not sustain any significant effect indefinitely.

Nana was the same. The magic required to regenerate a severed limb was categorically beyond her limit — not marginally, but by an order that made it impossible to approach, even with Leaf’s supplemental power feeding her.

Broken Sword’s ability expanded those limits. Narrowed the gap between what was possible and what had previously only been theoretical. With Broken Sword in the chain, a witch didn’t have to attempt the full task at once — they could apply their ability in passes, each pass recovering a small increment, the accumulated total eventually reaching what no single effort could have managed.

Roland drew out the folder of Wendy’s test reports from the desk drawer and spread the sheets across the surface.

The numbers were consistent. Mystery Moon’s Dawn I enchantment, which had previously lasted five days, now held for two weeks with Broken Sword’s augmentation. For Neverwinter, where mass electricity generation remained out of reach and lighting was already a bottleneck against plant expansion, two weeks versus five days was not a minor improvement — it was the difference between a system that strained and one that held.

Candle’s consolidation effect on machine tools lasted longer as well. With green workers flooding the plants, worn or broken boring cutters were a daily occurrence; Candle’s enchantments slowed the rate of failure, and Broken Sword made those enchantments last. Fewer breakdowns, longer service intervals, steadier processing quality.

Soraya, Agatha, Lucia, Paper — each of them touched work in the industrial park, and each of them produced more with Broken Sword in support. The industrial development of Neverwinter had always been exceptional given the primitive production conditions and limited labor, but it had always run on the edge of what the witches could sustain. Broken Sword didn’t remove that edge. She moved it outward.

His final note on the report: Broken Sword would become one of the busiest witches in Neverwinter.

He set the quill down.

That afternoon, his guard Sean appeared at the doorway with the quiet deliberateness of a man who has measured his timing. “Your Majesty, the Minister of Chemical Industry — Sir Kyle — requests your presence at Lab Four. He says there’s been progress on what you asked for.”

Roland’s eyes sharpened. “Rearrange the schedule. I’ll go now.”

Lab Four was no longer the humble bungalow it had been when Kyle Sichi first began his distillation experiments. With the acid plant and nitration plant now established nearby, the entire compound along the Redwater River had been enclosed by new walls, fitted with guards and a logistics team, and the buildings themselves renovated — the exterior walls repainted cream, the interior reorganized around proper research functions. It had become, without being formally named as such, the genuine research center of Neverwinter.

Kyle did not appear at the gate. Only his vice minister Chavez stood there, looking vaguely apologetic. Roland waved it away. He had known Kyle long enough to understand that whatever held the Chief Alchemist’s attention at a given moment held it completely, and the social obligations of greeting a king were simply not on the same level of priority as a beaker that was doing something interesting.

He found Kyle at the long laboratory table, eyes fixed on the condensation dripping from a glass pipe into a beaker below. Amber liquid, transparent, collecting in slow drops. Around it, other beakers in a row, each holding liquid in a slightly different shade.

Roland drew a slow breath.

The smell was unmistakable. He hadn’t encountered it in a very long time.

Gasoline was not the right word for what was in that beaker — this was crude, rough, incomparable to the refined fuel of the modern world, and still a long way from being a reliable energy supply. But the scent was the same scent. He recognized it the way you recognize a language you once spoke fluently, even after years of disuse.

Kyle noticed him and straightened, pressing a hand to his chest. “Your Majesty. You were right. The Blackwater from the Southernmost Region contains multiple liquid components. I followed the procedures in Intermediate Chemistry and confirmed that they can be separated by distillation. But—” He gestured toward the line of beakers. “If the sample is distilled further, the components don’t show much variation between them.”

“That means you’ve done it correctly,” Roland said, with the calm of someone who had already known the answer. They were all hydrocarbons, every one of them; Lucia would have reached the same result independently. “Anything else?”

“All of the components are combustible.” Kyle reached for the amber beaker and tilted it carefully. “And the uppermost fractions from the distillation are highly volatile. This one—” He gave the beaker a small shake. “It practically explodes when ignited. Your Majesty, are you planning a new explosive?”

Roland looked at the old alchemist and felt something close to affection. Kyle had finally arrived, after years of careful tutelage, at the instinct that defined a real chemist: when you see something combustible, you think about what it could be made to do. The association between flammable material and useful energy was no longer foreign to him.

It was the Blackwater from Endless Cape that had started all of this.

From the beginning, Roland had suspected the so-called underground fires burning constantly at the cape were the surface expression of oil seeping up from underground — igniting where it met air, burning where it pooled. Oil was a large family. In his old world it had been the energy source that shaped the twentieth century, and he had read enough about it to know that oil from different sources varied as widely as the people who lived above it. The oil of the eastern and western continents differed in color, viscosity, and composition to such a degree they might almost be classified as different substances entirely — ranging from golden and transparent to black and thick as tar, from water-thin to barely pourable, from highly flammable to nearly inert.

The technical definition was broad: any mixture of hydrocarbons, regardless of its exact makeup or origin, could reasonably be called oil.

So classifying Blackwater as oil was not a stretch. And whether Blackwater precisely matched what he had known in his previous life was beside the point. What mattered was whether combustible fractions could be reliably extracted from it. Clearly they could.

He had even heard predictions, in his youth, that the world’s oil would be exhausted within fifty years. Those predictions had not aged well. Every year, newly discovered reserves had grown faster than consumption. The total of all confirmed reserves had long since exceeded what the biogenic hypothesis — oil as compressed ancient biomatter — could plausibly account for. The origin of oil remained genuinely unresolved, even to people far better equipped to investigate it than anyone in this room.

Roland did not need to resolve it. He needed the fuel.

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