Chapter 944: The New Witch Group, Part I

The news came through, and Roland felt the tightness in his chest release.

The rescue mission had succeeded. The Kingdom of Dawn hadn’t been taken by conquest — the original plan had fractured somewhere along the way — but the outcome was acceptable: the Moya family deposed, the Quinn family installed, stability more or less preserved. Before the Quinns consolidated their hold, they’d remain Graycastle’s most dependable ally. And with Andrea in Neverwinter, that alliance could hold through the next generation, perhaps beyond.

The third Battle of Divine Will would not take a century. He was confident of that much.

Andrea and the God’s Punishment Witches were estimated to return to the Western Region within a month. Roland intended to use the interval well. With the destruction of Timothy’s remnants, the internal opposition had gone quiet, and the kingdom was unified in name at least. The City Hall networks in the secondary cities would take time to function with real authority, but he could begin laying groundwork now. When the machinery caught, Graycastle would be operating on a different level entirely from its neighbors.

The key was the witches.

Everything Neverwinter had built rested on their abilities. He knew this and had stopped being self-conscious about it.

Within the first two weeks after Anna’s return, the castle had been reorganized almost without ceremony. His desk was now twice its former size. Arrayed across it were more than ten wind-up telephones — connecting to the Witch Building office, the City Hall, the barracks, the Third Border City, Longsong Stronghold. No more runners sprinting across the castle grounds in an emergency. The first public telephone in the central square linked the city to Misty Forest, extending its reach as the railways did, allowing workers months away from home to speak with their families. The fare was time-based, access scheduled in advance, and for those who found it expensive there were always carrier pigeons or written letters — which, thanks to the spread of basic education, were increasingly common.

A new department had been formed to operate all of it: the Ministry of Communications. Its mandate covered every step of the process, from carrier pigeon care to home delivery, and it had grown enormous almost immediately. Nearly a thousand positions. Almost every recent graduate from Neverwinter’s schools had been absorbed.

Roland could see, in its shape, the faint outline of something much larger.

And that was purely from Anna’s contribution.

The problem now in front of him was the witches from Sleeping Island.

The second batch of migrants had brought the Sleeping Spell total to ninety-six. Testing their abilities had nearly broken Wendy and Scroll — not every witch was cooperative, and the first pass at data collection had been rough going. Tilly’s authority and Wendy’s patience had carried the registration through, but only barely.

The black notebook on Roland’s desk was the result: ninety-six witches, preliminary examinations, abilities catalogued.

He had read it over many times in the past few days. Most of the abilities he’d parsed for their practical applications. In the process, he’d decided that the old classification system — intensifying, summoning, attaching — was too crude. It said nothing about what a witch could actually do. He was reclassifying them by work assignment: manufacturing, cultivating, undetermined. That way the City Hall could see at a glance how many witches were available for production work.

This batch had also given him a clearer sense of just how wide the range of abilities truly was. Some witches could coax flowers out of cracked stone. Others could construct Magic Servants large enough to move structural beams. It was no wonder the Union had struggled to sustain losses — replace a combat witch with her particular gift, and you might wait a decade for a match.

The most reliable place for most witches was the factory floor. This was simply logistics.

Among the ninety-six, four had pulled his attention.

No. 26, Darkcloud. No. 43, Azima. No. 44, Doris. No. 89, Slimwrist.

Darkcloud’s ability was dyeing. She could change the color of any material she touched to whatever she wanted, without altering the material’s underlying properties. Technically this was attaching magic, and it was subject to the usual constraints: time limit, consumption scaling with target size, no effect against God’s Stones of Retaliation. But Darkcloud’s version was unusual. Her effective duration was extraordinarily long — probably because changing color required minimal interference with an object’s fundamental nature, and therefore minimal ongoing expenditure. Extended past her magic reserves, a dye she applied could last a century.

The size constraint remained. She couldn’t saturate the sea blue on a single breath, the way Hummingbird could compress an instant’s work into a burst. Objects beyond her magic capacity simply wouldn’t take. Wendy had measured her effective area at roughly one and a half square meters — the span of two outstretched arms in each direction.

That was enough. An object could be divided. A divided object could be dyed in sections and reassembled.

What Darkcloud offered Neverwinter was something it had not had: reliable dyes.

Current methods pulled color from natural sources — plants, minerals, animal derivatives. The results were uniformly poor. Too many impurities. Colors faded within seasons. Oxidation resistance was negligible. The variety was narrow enough that only nobles could afford genuinely saturated cloth, and even noble fashion ran mostly on gold and silver threadwork to compensate. Dyes mattered far beyond textiles: in education, printing, chemistry, biology. In almost every direction Roland looked, the ability to apply precise, stable color on demand opened doors. Darkcloud could also reduce the demand on Soraya, who had been stretching to fill too many roles at once.

Witches 43 and 44 were a different problem.

Azima and Doris had made their feelings clear in the first meeting: they disliked Tilly, they wanted to leave Neverwinter as soon as possible. Scroll had temporarily convinced them to stay, but the fracture was real. Whether either of them would agree to work remained an open question.

This was unfortunate, because their abilities were unlike anything else in the notebook.

Azima’s power was Source Tracing — find the whole through a fragment, locate a concentration through a trace element. Hold a drop of river water, and she could sense the nearest lake or creek. Examine seeds from animal droppings, and she could estimate the host tree’s location, its size, its health. On Sleeping Island this had kept people fed and supplied. Here, it was the most powerful natural resource survey tool Roland could imagine.

Sylvie’s Eye of Magic had real limits underground. The deeper she looked, the heavier the magic expenditure, and her precision fell off sharply. She could mark known ore beds in the North Slope Mine area without difficulty, but perceiving deeply buried veins — or distinguishing what a vein contained — was beyond her. She could detect presence, not identity. Azima could do both. More: she could estimate the scale of a reserve, not merely confirm it existed.

Combine that with Lucia’s ability to purify elements, and Roland could envision a completed resource map of the entire kingdom — not a rough survey, but something close to a periodic table overlaid on geography.

Even if Azima refused to cooperate, that loss was survivable. The ore wasn’t going anywhere.

Doris was a different calculation entirely. Her ability — what Wendy had recorded as a kind of demonification — opened a door Roland had not expected to see opened: the possibility of putting magic power to work on a truly large scale.

Chapter 944: The New Witch Group Part I

Translator: TransN Editor: TransN

Roland felt relieved while he received the message that the rescue mission had succeeded.

Although they failed to take control of the Kingdom of Dawn as a conqueror, after a little deviation from their original plan, the neighboring country at least overthrew the Moya Family’s rule and basically maintained stability. Before the Quinn Family could thoroughly gain a firm foothold, it would remain Graycastle’s most faithful ally.

Besides, Andrea was also in Neverwinter. If everything went smoothly, the alliance with the Kingdom of Dawn could at least last until the next generation.

Roland did not believe the third Battle of Divine Will would last for a century.

Andrea, along with the other God’s Punishment Witches in the expedition, was estimated to return to the Western Region in about a month. Roland intended to make use of this time to make a sound plan for Graycastle’s future development.

After all, with the destruction of Timothy’s remnants, the counterforce had temporarily disappeared and the kingdom was integrated in name. Although it would take some time before the secondary City Halls in the various cities to take effect and make Graycastle a highly efficient authoritarian country, he could already start to prepare for it. When the time came, the strength of Graycastle would enjoy an unprecedented leap, lifting it to a whole different level from the other three countries.

The key point in his development plan was to put the witches’ abilities into full play.

After all, they were the reason for Neverwinter’s high productivity.

Within half a month after Anna’s return, the city had enjoyed a series of changes, with the most prominent ones happening in the castle. His mahogany desk was double its former size; on the desk were over 10 wind-up telephones connecting with the Witch Building office, the City Hall, the barracks, the Third Border City, Longsong Stronghold, and so on. In case of emergencies, the guards did not have to run to deliver messages anymore.

Furthermore, the first public telephone appeared in the central square, connecting the city with Misty Forest. It extended with the building of railways and satisfied the workers’ demand to communicate with their families as they could not meet face to face over a long period of time.

Of course, the fare for using this telephone was time-based, and the number of people to use it was limited and application must be made in advance. If one found it pricey, one could choose to use carrier pigeons or railways to deliver their messages. Thanks to the popularization of preliminary education, text-based communication in Neverwinter had become increasingly popular.

In charge of the operation of these systems was the Ministry of Communications, a newly established department in the City Hall.

Its work covered every link of the delivery process, from taking care of carrier pigeons to providing home delivery, as a result, its subdivisions instantly grew to a colossal size which was only second to the Ministry of Construction. It offered about a thousand jobs and almost all the newly graduated Neverwinter civilians were taken in.

Through this department, Roland could vaguely see the silhouette of a future large group.

That was merely the result of Anna’s own ability.

After solving the problem of demon’s attack, Roland put most of his efforts on the statistics work of the witches’ abilities from Sleeping Island.

With the arrival of the second batch of migrants, 96 witches had joined the Sleeping Spell. To test their abilities alone was stressful enough for Wendy and Scroll. Besides, not all witches were cooperative, which made the first step of data collecting quite difficult. Luckily, with Tilly’s prestige and Wendy’s conciliation, the registration work was more or less finished smoothly.

The black notebook in front of Roland was the result of the preliminary examinations of all the witches’ abilities.

He had read it over and over in the past few days and figured out the uses of most of the witches’ abilities.

Now he felt that the former way of classifying the witches’ abilities as intensifying, summoning, and attaching magic type was too rough and unfit for expressing their usages directly. Hence, he reclassified the witches by their work assignments. For example, witches good at processing were classified as manufacturing type; witches who were pro animals were classified as the cultivating type; witches whose abilities had not found a usage were put under the type of undetermined. Thus the City Hall could clearly see the number of witches which could be employed for production work.

Besides, this batch of witches had shown Roland how drastically different their abilities could be.

Although they were all Awakeneds, some of them could make flowers bloom from a crack in a stone and some could create big and tall Magic Servants. It was no wonder the Union could not withstand a long term war, because if a combat witch died, it would take years before the role she played could be replaced.

Obviously, the most reliable arrangement for a witch was to put her in a factory.

Among the list of nearly 100 witches, Roland put special emphasis on four of them.

They were No. 26 Darkcloud, No. 43 Azima, No. 44 Doris, and No. 89 Slimwrist.

Darkcloud’s ability was to dye. She could dye any object she laid her hands on into any color she wanted it to be, without changing its original nature.

Theoretically, it was an ability of attaching magic. Its effective time was limited, its consumption was closely related to the target’s size, and its effect was free from the influence of God’s Stone of Retaliation. But Darkcloud’s dyeing ability was so powerful that its effective time was strikingly long. This was probably because the change of color barely affected the object and she only needed to use a little bit of magic power for the dyeing effect to last for years. In other words, if Darkcloud exhausted her magic power, the dyeing effect could last for a century.

But the size of the object still mattered. She could not, like what Hummingbird did, release her ability in an instant and reduce its effective time, so if she ran into a large object beyond the upper limit of her magic power, her ability would not take effect. Things like changing color of the sea in one breath would be impossible for her.

In fact, according to Wendy’s test, Darkcloud could affect an area with the length and width of two arms-length, roughly 1.5 square meters.

To Roland, such an area was big enough.

After all, an object could be divided and combined.

In a manner of speaking, Darkcloud’s ability filled in a gap in Neverwinter— the dyeing technology. In the current era, the dyeing method mainly depended on extracting colors from nature, which in later ages would be a big selling point. But the truth was the performance of colors extracted from nature was terrible—too many impurities, fading easily, poor oxidation resistance, and too few varieties. As a result, only nobles could afford colorful clothes, and the colors mostly came from embedded gold and silver threads.

Dyes had a broad usage. Apart from the traditional textile industry, other areas like education, printing, chemical, and biology all needed them. To some extent, Darkcloud could reduce the burden on Soraya’s shoulders, which basically made her a great jack of all trades.

But witches No.43 and No.44 gave Roland a headache.

Azima and Doris were the kind of witches, according to Wendy, who were unwilling to cooperate. In the initial meeting, they had expressed their dissatisfaction about Tilly and wished to leave Neverwinter as soon as possible. Although this plan was temporarily put off by Scroll, the crack still existed. Whether the two wanted to be recruited and devoted to work remained unknown.

Unfortunately, their abilities were very peculiar—Azima’s ability was “Source Tracing”, although unique, yet not irreplaceable. But Doris’s ability of “demonification” enabled Roland to see the possibility of using magic power on a large scale.