Chương 66: There Are No More Cats

[Time]: 2: 20 PM [Location]: Dormitory [Golden Bough] · Room 302 They walked into the dormitory. The air was cool and silent. Victoria headed straight for the living room, picking up her new book on Chromatic Layering. She ran a gloved finger over the cover of the gag spell, sighed with profound, aristocratic reluctance, and gently pushed it to the far edge of her desk.

She then opened a massive, blank grimoire, her blue eyes narrowing with the ruthless focus of an engineer about to manually compile a custom API interface from scratch.

"I will be downstairs," Victoria said, already dipping her silver quill into the inkwell.

"The soundproofing between floors is absolute, as you know. So, if your mental construct collapses, or if you accidentally drink the mercury before the resonance frequency is aligned... I won't hear you. Please try not to die quietly. Ideally, trigger the fire alarm so I know when to come up and call the cleanup crew." Hathaway paused at the foot of the stairs, clutching the heavy wooden box and the blue velvet book. She smiled wryly.

"Thanks for the vote of confidence, Roomie. I'll try to keep my internal organs on the inside."

"It's not confidence," Victoria murmured, her quill scratching the first sharp, geometric line onto the pristine parchment.

"It's just efficient property management." Hathaway climbed the stairs. The wooden steps creaked softly under her boots. She walked into her room and closed the door. Click. She placed the heavy box of reagents—the Spider Eyes and Mercury—on her alchemy table. She didn't open it. Those were for Monday. She walked to her desk and lit the mana lamp. She sat down and placed the thin, blue velvet booklet in the center. [Amora's Analytic Vision] Hathaway washed her hands.

She treated this moment with the solemnity of a religious ritual.

"Daytime belongs to Nino," she whispered, picking up her quill.

"But the Night belongs to Amora." She opened the first page. And immediately, her game designer brain suffered a critical rendering error. There was no text. The entire first page was a meticulously hand-drawn, three-dimensional geometric shape slowly rotating on the parchment. The ink shifted between violet and ultraviolet depending on the viewing angle. According to a tiny footnote, forty percent of the structural lines were completely invisible without a mana-infused light source.

Show-off, Hathaway thought, turning to the second page. The core Model Design Instructions. The "ReadMe" file of the software. It read:"Place the blind crow before the third lens. Let the three-legged black cat swallow the reflection of dusk, and use the refracted Four Attributes as the absolute cornerstone of the pupil." Hathaway read it once. She read it twice. She read it four times, mouthing the syllables, hoping the physical act of pronunciation might somehow force the meaning into her brain. It did not.

"What kind of API documentation is this?!" Hathaway hissed at the empty room, her hands gripping her hair.

"What network node is a 'blind crow'? What wavelength of mana is the 'reflection of dusk'? And why in the name of the multiverse does a three-legged black cat represent a focusing lens?!" She slammed a hand against her desk.

"Just because our species has the biological processing power to casually memorize a thousand conflicting variables, doesn't mean we should compile our spells using encrypted animal riddles!" She took a deep breath. Grabbed a fresh quill. Aggressively turned to page three. Fine. I'll start from the absolute basics. I will decompile this garbage from scratch. The Hell of Fours She needed to understand the "Four Attributes" mentioned in every other line.

Hathaway pulled out a blank notebook and began trying to untangle the foundational logic of Witchcraft. Ten minutes later, she was staring into the abyss. The Witch civilization possessed a clinical, pathological obsession with the number Four. If a Witch stubbed her toe, she would categorize the pain into four distinct elemental quadrants and publish a peer-reviewed paper on it. Every major school of thought had its own "Four." Every single one contradicted the others.

No Witch had ever published a reconciliation paper on this, presumably because admitting your "Four" contradicted someone else's "Four" was an act of treason. By the time she hit Layer 5, Hathaway was looking at twenty different variables, three overlapping nodes, and at least two direct contradictions that would cause a standard Earth compiler to instantly self-destruct. She looked at the bottom corner of the parchment. She was on page 6. The book had 214 pages.

The Compiler Pipeline By 6: 30 PM, Hathaway hit a wall of absolute despair. She stared blankly at the chaotic web of terms she had mapped out on her scratchpad. Sanguine Sulfur at the Midnight Node of Fate using Spiritualized Salt. It was poetry. It was madness. Unless... Her posture shifted. The slouch of a defeated student straightened into the razor-sharp focus of a Lead Systems Architect looking at legacy code. Witches don't write poetry when they invent spells, Hathaway realized.

They are arrogant, ruthless scientists. They wouldn't tolerate this much fluff unless it actually served a structural purpose. She looked at the overlapping layers again. What if they weren't contradictions? What if they were... abstraction layers? Her quill began flying across the paper, frantically re-mapping the entire occult paradigm into terms her Earth-brain could process: Layer 5 (Humors) = INTENT (What kind of analysis do I want?) Layer 4 (Direction) = SCOPE (Where in spacetime am I searching?) Layer 3 (Alchemical) = MEDIUM (Which data bus carries the signal?) Layer 2 (Witch) = PROCESSOR (Which cognitive function handles the output?) Layer 1 (Occult) = PHYSICAL ANCHOR (The hardware peripherals required to run the script.) Hathaway dropped her quill. It was a Compiler Pipeline. She flipped back to the agonizing gibberish on Page 2:"Place the blind crow before the third lens, let the three-legged black cat swallow the reflection of dusk..." Suddenly, the matrix decoded itself.

The 'blind crow' was a null-targeting variable—a scope set to passive reception. The 'third lens' was the spatial processor. The 'black cat' was the solar constant absorbing the 'reflection of dusk'—the decay metric of the ambient mana! This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

"This isn't poetry," Hathaway whispered, a savage grin spreading across her face.

"This is API documentation. Written in the worst naming convention in the history of the multiverse." The horrifying truth suddenly crystallized in her mind. This chaotic, seemingly suicidal academic standard had worked for 2, 004 years without crashing. And the only reason it hadn't collapsed was that Witches were fundamentally, biologically broken. Every single one of them was a natural-born cryptographer, a hyper-competent engineer, and an obsessive scholar.

Their brains could effortlessly hold thousands of contradictory namespace definitions and translate them on the fly without stuttering. But what truly infuriated Hathaway's pragmatic corporate soul was why they did it. Witches possessed a bizarre, deeply nerdy romanticism about cryptography. They didn't write in convoluted ciphers just to protect their intellectual property. They did it because they genuinely wanted to leave an insanely complex, potentially lethal treasure hunt for the next generation.

To a Witch, a perfectly encrypted, poetic developer log wasn't bad documentation—it was an invitation to a game. It was the ultimate academic flex. They were a civilization of overpowered, immortal nerds. She grabbed her quill, violently crossing out her previous notes, and wrote a single, deadpan conclusion at the top of the page, underlining it three times: Witchcraft isn't magic.

It's a 2, 004-year-old legacy codebase maintained by arrogant, nerdy sociopaths who treat API documentation like an escape room and refuse to write patch notes. Academic Blood Feuds [Time]: 8: 30 PM By 8: 30 PM, she had cracked forty-one pages and hit the first external reference. She booted up her student terminal and accessed the Great Library's digital archives to pull up the referenced paper. What she found permanently altered her understanding of Witch Academia.

[On the Folding of Light Through Non-Euclidean Membranes] Author: Arch-Witch Seraphina Blackwell Below the title, where a normal Earth academic paper would have an abstract, there was a section labeled: [Dedicatory Preamble].

"This paper is dedicated to my esteemed colleague, Arch-Witch Morana Duskhollow, whose monograph on membrane permeability was so catastrophically, irredeemably wrong that it inspired me to write a correct version out of sheer moral obligation. Morana, if you are reading this: retire." Hathaway blinked. She put a diss track in the dedication?!

The Author's Introduction was a single, unbroken 112-word run-on sentence listing every title, medal, and grievance the author possessed, including being "twice robbed of the Axiom of the Water Dragon by political hacks." The actual content was brilliant and mathematically flawless. But every four pages, like clockwork, Blackwell interrupted her own high-level derivation to insult Morana Duskhollow. Page 12:"The reader will note that this result directly contradicts Duskhollow's Theorem 3.

7, which is unsurprising, as Theorem 3. 7 appears to have been derived while intoxicated." Page 22:"For completeness, I include Duskhollow's original equation in Appendix C. I have also included a list of its errors in Appendix D. Appendix D is longer than Appendix C." Curious, Hathaway searched for Duskhollow's eventual response paper. She found it instantly. Title: [A Rebuttal to Blackwell's Inflammatory and Technically Adequate Paper on Membrane Permeability, with Corrections] Hathaway stared at the screen.

"Technically Adequate." She slowly put her quill down, physically wincing at the sheer, unadulterated academic violence. It was the most vicious, devastatingly passive-aggressive sequence of words she had ever seen. Suddenly, a memory from her first week at Yggdrasil surfaced. She remembered Victoria standing in the dorm, her back turned, her voice hitting like a steel nail on ice:"Academic debates between Witches often end with one party in the ICU.

The more profound the theory, the more firepower is needed to support the argument. In this ivory tower, Truth is only valid within shooting range." At the time, Hathaway had thought Victoria was just employing colorful, aristocratic hyperbole. Now, staring at the glowing screen, she believed — with absolute, crystal-clear certainty — that these two Arch-Witches had engaged in a spectacular, crater-forming magical shootout over membrane permeability.

And looking at the title of the rebuttal, Hathaway knew exactly who had won the firefight. Blackwell won. Hathaway could perfectly picture the horrifyingly petty scene: Duskhollow getting absolutely obliterated by a high-yield optical laser, waking up in the Netherworld's Springs of Eternity, and immediately harassing an overworked Civil Servant from the Afterlife Bureau for a waterproof desk and a quill.

She had probably sat right there in her "Mandatory Spa Leave," drafting her response paper just to deliver an immortal academic middle finger from beyond the grave. She silently flipped to the back of her notebook and created a new glossary: Rule #1 of Witch Academia:"Technically Adequate" translates to "You literally killed me in the gunfight, but I will continue hating your math from the afterlife."

The Namespace Disaster [Time]: 11: 30 PM Returning to Amora's log, Hathaway hit the section on"Symbolic Encryption Key." Here, Amora defined her variables using the traditional Witch method: Cats. Black Cat = Solar Constant White Cat = Lunar Variance Sleeping Cat = Null State Cat On Fire = Critical Resonance Failure Just to be safe, Hathaway cross-referenced this with two other developer logs. Witch B's paper stated: Black Cat = Lunar Constant, White Cat = Solar Variance. (They were completely reversed!) Witch C's paper stated: Black Cat = Thermal Equilibrium, White Cat = Entropy Gradient, Grey Cat = Schrödinger State.

"A namespace collision," Hathaway muttered, massaging her temples.

"A complete, catastrophic namespace disaster." It wasn't just cats. The entire magical framework of this species ran on pure, unfiltered "WAAAGH!" logic. As long as a Witch possessed enough raw processing power and aggressively believed her personal pet metaphor made sense, the universe just sighed and compiled it.

Ravens meant "death" in Northern notation, "dawn" in Eastern notation, and "the postal service" in one deeply eccentric paper from District 8 where the author appeared to have been writing about her actual pet bird. Roses meant "love" in pop culture, "corrosion" in alchemy, and "classified military intelligence" in a Void Expeditionary field manual. But the absolute breaking point was the Number 7. In most traditions, 7 meant "completion." In Nordenheim Runes, it meant "catastrophic instability."

But in one foundational, heavily cited paper written by a legendary Grand Witch, 7 was defined as "Lunch." The footnote simply read:"I always take my meals at the 7th hour. Thus, 7 is the temporal constant of consumption. This is self-evident, and I will not debate it." Hathaway put her forehead on the desk. A Grand Witch. Defined a global integer as "Lunch." Because of her personal dietary schedule. And other scholars actually cited it. Honestly, if her CPU wasn't currently melting, she would have grabbed popcorn.

In two hours, alongside the actual optical formulas, she had accidentally decoded three blood feuds, two stolen grant proposals, and one highly illegal magical duel disguised as a debate on thermodynamics. Witch academia wasn't a field; it was high-stakes reality TV mixed with a gang war. She sat up. Cracked her neck. Grabbed her ruler. Fine. If nobody else is going to build a unified data dictionary for this feline gibberish, I will.

She drew a massive, uncompromising grid on her parchment, systematically scrubbing every single animal from Amora's equations. Black Cat became Var_A. White Cat became Var_B. Blind Crow became Node_Null.

"Standardized," Hathaway declared to the silent room, violently crossing out a drawing of a burning cat and replacing it with ERROR_STATE. She looked at her clean, brilliantly soulless grid, feeling the profound, twisted satisfaction of a Lead Game Designer finally forcing a rogue development team into compliance.

"Your puzzle is officially deprecated," she muttered to the phantom generations of Arch-Witches.

"You are welcome, you stubborn, hopeless nerds. Even though I know you'd absolutely hate it." The Replacement Hardware [Time]: Day 35, Saturday, 01: 00 AM The manic frustration burned away, replaced by the deep, silent hum of the 'Zone'. The rhythm of the work took over. As Hathaway mapped the normalized variables back into Amora's geometric framework, her compilation speed skyrocketed.

And as the full architecture of [Amora's Analytic Vision] finally revealed itself, Hathaway felt a profound, chilling sense of awe. This wasn't an analytical spell. Standard detection magic was a HUD—an overlay projected on top of normal vision to highlight weaknesses. Amora's spell wasn't an overlay. It replaced. It hijacked the brain's visual processing pipeline at the neurological level, severing the optical nerve's connection to raw reality and rerouting it through Amora's custom rendering engine.

She didn't build a HUD, Hathaway realized, the magnitude of the engineering hitting her like a freight train. She built a replacement GPU. And the installation process is drinking mercury-laced spider juice to physically flash my own BIOS. Terrifyingly invasive, but mathematically beautiful. She also discovered Amora's worst developer habit: skipping steps. Whenever Amora reached a foundational piece of logic she considered "obvious," she would just write"As is well known..." and skip straight to the conclusion.

One of those "obvious" jumps took Hathaway forty minutes and a dozen pages of scratch paper to reconstruct from scratch. You are a genius, Amora, Hathaway thought, crossing out another derived equation. But you are also exactly the kind of Senior Developer who writes 'This is trivial' in the codebase and leaves the Junior Engineers crying in the server room for three days. The Night Belongs to the Code [Time]: 3: 47 AM The fourth quill snapped. Hathaway stared at the mangled feather in her ink-stained fingers.

She didn't reach for a fifth. Her brain was effectively running on zero percent mana and pure caffeine. She looked at her notebook. 168 pages of incomprehensible cat-gibberish had been brutally translated into clean, cold, executable logic. Forty-six pages left, her dying brain calculated. I'll finish compiling tomorrow night. She checked the clock. 3: 47 AM. She had exactly ten hours before she had to go scrape the Leviathan for Nino Lucent. Hathaway didn't change her clothes. She didn't turn off the lamp.

She just face-planted directly onto her mattress, her boots hanging off the edge of the bed. As the darkness of unconsciousness swallowed her, her final thought wasn't a profound realization about the beauty of magic, or her place in this universe. It was the pure, unadulterated, universally understood relief of a programmer who had finally fixed the syntax error. There are no more cats.