Chapter 945: The New Witch Group, Part II
To put it simply: Azima could locate a whole through one of its parts.
Hold a fragment of anything, and she could trace it back to the source — or forward to the greatest concentration. A drop of fresh water became a creek, a lake, a river bend. A fruit kernel recovered from animal droppings became the tree, its distance, its approximate size. On Sleeping Island this had been survival craft — a way of keeping a moving group fed, watered, oriented. It was also how she’d built her reputation among the Eastern Region witches, why they had gathered around her leadership, why they trusted her.
In Roland’s reckoning, Source Tracing was the finest natural resource survey tool available to him — more capable across most practical scenarios than Sylvie’s Eye of Magic.
The comparison was not a slight to Sylvie. It was a question of physics. When Sylvie pushed her perception underground, her magic expenditure climbed sharply and her effective range compressed. She could mark ore beds in the North Slope Mine area reliably. But veins buried deep — or formations she had no prior reference for — were at the edge of her ability, and what she could detect she could rarely identify. She knew something was there, not what it was.
Azima could identify. More usefully, she could quantify: not just presence but reserve. And if her ability could be combined with Lucia’s purification — the ability to isolate individual elements from complex mixtures — Roland could imagine, without too much optimism, something approaching a full resource atlas of Graycastle. The periodic table, laid over geography.
Even if Azima refused to help, the loss was tolerable. Resources didn’t move. Given enough time and enough effort, the mines would be found through conventional means.
Doris was not tolerable to lose.
His research on magic power had been hobbled from the beginning by bad observation tools. The witches themselves were his primary means of studying the force that underpinned everything he was building — and even they could only describe what they experienced from the inside. Theory moved slowly. Progress was measured in carefully designed joint experiments and cautious inference.
Doris’s enchantment changed the picture.
Wendy’s notebook entry described it as follows: the ability to attach magic power to a dead object to enable self-recycling, dramatically slowing depletion and making the object function as if alive. The notation “dead object” was witch convention — a way of saying that the object had no native magic of its own and would ordinarily exhaust any stored charge from the outside with no compensation.
Roland had reservations about that convention. The joint experiments between Isabella and Agatha on God’s Stones of Retaliation had complicated it. God’s Stones, when observed carefully, showed faint magic residue on their surfaces — residue that no external party had injected. The stones were generating it, or rather: cycling it. Agatha’s working hypothesis was that God’s Stones maintained a continuous equilibrium — bleeding magic, and simultaneously absorbing it from ambient sources, the way a sun-warmed stone releases heat through the night while also absorbing whatever warmth the night provides. The balance wasn’t perfect, but the cycle was real. This would explain why Isabella could restructure a God’s Stone’s nature without destroying its form — she was ending the cycle. After her intervention, the stone was ordinary rock.
Agatha called it death. Roland found the metaphor useful, even if he’d frame the physics differently.
What it meant for his thinking on enchantment: “magic cannot inhabit inert matter” was an approximation. A useful one for most purposes. But not a law.
Setting the theory aside: the practical effect of Doris’s ability was to perform something analogous to the God’s Stone’s self-sustaining cycle on any object she treated. An enchanted object absorbed ambient magic to compensate for the charge it was spending. The compensation wasn’t perfect — losses outpaced gains — but the ratio was startling.
Dawn I, fully charged, ran for five days. When Mystery Moon maintained it with Broken Sword, the runtime extended by ten days — but Mystery Moon’s magic was the engine. Every minute she sustained the current was a minute she spent. Even at peak hypothetical capacity, she could run a handful of Dawn I units at once. That was barely enough for the factories.
A Dawn I enchanted by Doris ran itself. Mystery Moon could be redeployed from maintenance to generation. The electricity supply — stable, extended, no longer requiring constant management — could reach beyond the factory walls. Witches with minor enchantment abilities, previously assigned to low-value tasks because their output was too small to matter independently, gained new utility as parts of a system. Agatha and Isabella gained a supply of test subjects that functioned like God’s Stones — objects with magic cycles they could study without consuming limited natural reserves.
Against all of that, the drawbacks were real but proportionally small. Enchantment took time to apply. Its efficiency was limited. A God’s Stone of Retaliation would disrupt the cycle. These were engineering problems — constraints to work around, not barriers to the ability’s value.
Roland had made his decision before finishing the notebook. The only question was how.
The sugarcoated bullet, he thought. I have found no instrument more reliable.
The last witch in his notes was No. 89, Slimwrist — the name, as it turned out, was exact.
She was a jeweler’s daughter. The craft had started before her awakening: fine tools, small scales, the discipline of working in a medium that punished every tremor. After her Day of Adulthood, what had been practiced dexterity became something more — her hands were faster, more precise, and she could carve patterns into any material she chose. Anything. Not just the soft metals and gemstones of her training, but iron, glass, ceramic, hardwood.
Anna could do similar work with her Blackfire, but Anna was a different order of thing entirely — a Senior Witch with two evolutionary thresholds behind her, the kind of anomaly the Union had measured its wartime losses against. Comparing them was beside the point. The useful question was: what could Slimwrist do that she couldn’t do without?
The answer: she could give Anna’s schedule back to Anna.
Precision work was never finished in Neverwinter. The demand was constant and expanding. There was no ceiling on how many capable precision crafters the city could absorb, and each addition freed the others for the tasks only they could do. On Sleeping Island, Slimwrist had used her gift to polish jewelry for nobles who could afford such things. In Neverwinter, Roland intended to give her something larger to work on.
Chapter 945: The New Witch Group Part II
Translator: TransN Editor: TransN
Simply speaking, Azima’s ability could trace an entire object through a piece of it, or through a microelement to trace its concentrated spot.
Undoubtedly, for a Sleeping Island witch, this was a type of survival ability. For example, holding a drop of fresh water, Azima could find a creek or a lake; or judging from the kernel of a fruit from an animal’s feces, she could estimate the fruit tree’s location and size.
Due to the contribution her ability made to the team, quite a few Eastern Region witches gathered together under her leadership and made a tight group out of themselves.
In Roland’s eyes, Source Tracing was undoubtedly the best way for discovering natural resources, whose general purposes were even broader than Sylvie’s Eye of Magic.
The logic was simple. When Sylvie looked through the ground, her magic power consumption would drastically increase and her perception of distance would greatly decrease. She was totally qualified for marking ore beds in the North Slope Mine area, but perceiving mineral veins deeply buried was beyond her ability. Even for resources in superficial layers, she could barely tell their category or scale. She could only tell something was underground, but not what it was.
Roland did not worry about Azima in this aspect. She could not only know a single resource’s exact location, but also its reserve. If her ability could be combined with Lucia’s ability of purification, Roland might be able to mark the entire periodic table of elements on the map of Graycastle.
When Roland learned geology, what impressed him the most was a colorful national map marked with resources. Now that Graycastle had united under his banner, he should aim at broadening his raw material sources to the entire country, or even to the Kingdom of Dawn, the Fertile Plains, etc.
Even if Azima was unwilling to help, it was not disastrous to Neverwinter. After all, the resources were not going anywhere. Given enough time, he could eventually succeed in his goal.
Yet Doris’s enchantment ability was not the same.
Since he lacked good observing methods, Roland’s research on magic power did not have a good start, which left the witches as his only source to harness magic powers.
Enchantment was an incredible ability.
In her notebook, Wendy described as the ability attach magic power to a dead object to recycle, thus greatly slowing down the object’s exhaustion process and makes it look lifelike.
Roland had reservations about her ability description. He knew it was only the witches’ customary expression that a dead object could not have magic power. Under most circumstances, this rule applied, with only one exception —the God’s Stone of Retaliation.
The joint experiment carried out by Isabella and Agatha showed that God’s Stone did have magic power, or… it at least had the ability to attract magic power, which was originally exclusive to the Awakened. When Isabella smoothed the area under the disturbance of a God’s Stone, she could see extremely tiny magic power residues on its surface, although for only a few seconds. Throughout the entire process, no third party had injected more magic power into it, so those magic power residues must belong to the God’s Stone itself.
In another word, unlike what he had expected, the God’s Stone of Retaliation did not have high-density magic power which could disable other magic powers. But it did have magic power, only the amount was very little. As to
how it isolated the effects of magic powers was to be discovered. One thing he could be sure of was that “magic power was incompatible with dead objects” was not entirely true.
Considering a God’s Stone could soon become a common stone after Isabella’s adjustment, Agatha made a bold speculation: The magic power of the God’s Stone of Retaliation would keep on running out, but it would also constantly absorb new magic powers as a living entity did, which formed a magic power circulation. Just like sand on a beach, which absorbed heat from sunlight and raised its temperature during the day and released the heat at night. This could explain why Isabella could completely alter the nature of a God’s Stone without interfering with its structure.
Agatha also believed that Isabella “killed” the God’s Stone.
Wendy’s description was obviously made based on Agatha’s conclusion.
Roland did not mind it. He still believed that the mineral vein of God’s Stones was indeed dead objects. Whether an object could take in or push out magic power was not connected with whether it was dead or alive. The reason that they could not explain its working theory was that they knew too little, much like before the invention of the microscope, mankind knew nothing about the microworld.
In his eyes, enchantment was, in a manner of speaking, a kind of “conversion to God’s Stone”.
Of course, disregarding the theory, this ability was undoubtedly effective. According to the tests, it could take effects on targets as Magic Stones, Sigils, objects of enchantment, etc. Magic powers injected into them could be supplemented by itself, and create a circulation.
For instance, when Dawn I was fully injected with magic power, it could generate electricity for five consecutive days, but when Mystery Moon held Broken Sword, Dawn I’s working time could be prolonged by 10 more days. No matter what, the magic power injected in the bronze stick was constantly running away and would not stay forever in an enchanted object.
That meant even if Mystery Moon’s magic power could reach the same level as Anna’s, it could only sustain a few more Dawn I at the same time. It could barely satisfy the needs for the factory’s illumination and the equipment’s operation, let alone be put to use on a larger scale.
And a Dawn I enchanted by Doris could absorb the ubiquitous magic powers to compensate for its magic power consumption, therefore keeping the magnetic poles working. Although its loss and gain of magic power were not entirely equal, the improvement was still astonishing for a short-term enchantment.
It meant Mystery Moon could be relieved from the maintenance work of energy charging and become an energy manufacturer.
It also meant that, besides the factories, many other places could get stable electricity supply.
At the same time, many enchantment abilities, which were originally of little value, would gain purpose.
Additionally, Agatha and Isabella could get a pile of test targets similar to God’s Stones, which would greatly help their research on magic power.
As for the issues with enchantments, such as taking too long to take effect, low efficiency, magic power circulation could be broken off by God’s Stones, etc, were nothing compared to the ability itself.
So no matter what, Roland needed to keep such a witch.
After thinking it over, he felt the only strategy that could work was the sugarcoated-bullet.
—after all, in the art of tempting people, he had found no one who could do better than himself.
As for the last witch, No.89 Slimwrist, she was just like her name.
She was the daughter of a jeweler and was born to be good at carving. She not only had slim wrists but also flexible fingers which enabled her to carve
complex patterns. After her awakening, her gift was greatly improved. Not only could she carve much faster, but could also carve on anything.
On first glance, Anna could easily do that with her Blackfire, but she was a genius who had gone through two revolutions. Even in the Union, she was among the top Senior Witches, a completely different level than Slimwrist.
What Roland liked about Slimwrist was that she could take some workload off of Anna. Besides, there could never be too many precision manufacture practitioners. Back on the Sleeping Island, she could only be a top craftswoman polishing jewelry for nobles, but in Neverwinter, she could propel the advancement of society together with the other witches.