Chương 1: When the Lightbulb Dies, the Lion Learns to Stealth

[Time]: Year 2004 of the Witch Calendar, a sunny morning. [Location]: Milan'thir · The White City · Ludwig Manor · The Cloud Suite When Hathaway von Ludwig woke up, her very first sensation was hunger. Not the "I could go for a croissant" kind of hunger. It was as if every cell in her body was blaring a famine warning, like ten thousand starving ghosts banging gongs and drums inside her stomach. She felt like she could swallow a whole cow, or to use the local parlance, a whole dragon. Then came the lightness.

It was a strange sensation. She remembered, though she wasn't sure where this memory came from, that this body used to feel heavy, like carrying a backpack full of water. But now, gravity seemed to have taken a fifty percent cut. She merely twitched her fingers, and the friction against the air produced a faint, electric zzzt.

"What the hell?" She struggled to crawl out of the four-poster bed. It was ridiculously large and soft enough to be a cloud. Her memory felt like a ball of yarn a cat had absolutely demolished. She was a transmigrator, but now she was Hathaway. There was no painful soul fusion or lingering resentment: just a sudden traffic accident on the spiritual plane. A cosmic-level screw-up had snatched the original soul away and jammed hers into this insanely luxurious shell without warning.

Panic was probably the standard response. But Hathaway just lay there, staring at the silk canopy, letting the sheer, impossible softness of the mattress absorb her weight. Her last memory from Earth wasn't a heroic sacrifice or a speeding truck. It was the harsh blue light of a dual-monitor setup at 4: 00 AM, the sharp, final pain in her chest after her sixth consecutive year of game dev crunch time, and the crushing irony of dying at her office desk to build someone else's magic world.

Compared to a fatal cardiac arrest in a cubicle, a cosmic server migration into an aristocrat's body wasn't a crisis. It was the ultimate severance package.

"Fine," Hathaway muttered, sinking deeper into the pillows.

"Best bug I've ever encountered. I'm here, might as well roll with it." Hathaway rubbed her temples. She didn't know where the original soul had been yeeted to. She hoped, in some small corner of her chest she wasn't quite ready to examine, that the girl had landed somewhere with better hours. She crossed to the full-length floor mirror. The mirror reflected a young girl. Silver hair flowed like liquid mercury, messy, but with an effortless, lazy beauty.

She wore a silk nightgown with so much intricate lace it made one suspect the entire year's tailoring budget had been blown on sleepwear. Typical, she thought. The original Hathaway always wore her most "combat-ready" luxury pajamas when staying at the Main Estate, desperate to not be outshined by the furniture. Then, she looked into her own eyes. They were deep crimson pupils. The irises held precise geometric patterns, like a bottomless ruby maze.

With every turn of her eye, the patterns seemed to rotate, breathtakingly magnificent. But Hathaway frowned and leaned closer to the mirror.

"Crap." She touched the corner of her eye, brow furrowing. They aren't glowing. You have to understand, the Ludwig family's red eyes were infamous sources of light pollution. In their default, resting state, they bled a constant, diffuse scattering of roughly 150 lumens: enough to act as a permanent, all-weather table lamp. But when a Ludwig got emotional or locked into combat focus, that scattered ambient light condensed. It stopped diffusing and shot straight out of their pupils like twin laser pointers.

Dim eyes were a severe tactical disadvantage against their arch-rivals, the Wellingtons. The Wellington women were practically blind, relying on passive [Mystic Eyes]. They couldn't even wear glasses to fix it. Focusing their terrifying gaze through lenses would instantly animate the glass into an alchemical creature that would proceed to eat their eyeballs like jelly. So, a standard Ludwig tactic was simply standing in front of a Wellington and letting their suddenly-focused "High Beams" blind the enemy.

But now... Hathaway paused, tapping her temple with a frown. How do I know all this specifically about the Wellingtons? If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. My soul was definitely from Earth, but it felt like the previous owner's brain was a hard drive that hadn't been fully formatted. There were... residual files left behind. Ghost data.

Knowledge about rival families and social etiquette popped up like autocomplete suggestions whenever I focused on a topic. Gross. But useful. Hathaway looked at the deep, dark, completely non-luminescent eyes in the mirror.

"Great," Hathaway stroked her chin.

"My 'Tactical Flashbang' function is busted?" Without these headlights, wouldn't she be down a natural weapon if she ran into anyone from the Wellington family? However... Hathaway thought about it, looking at her reflection which seemed to melt into the shadows.

"Look on the bright side. I can't blind them instantly anymore, but at least... when I sneak into the kitchen for a midnight snack, I won't get caught by the Head Maid for being a walking searchlight." Hathaway walked to the desk. There sat an alchemy device that looked offensively expensive: the [Mana Wave Detector (Ludwig Custom · Platinum Edition)]. It was a torture device her mother had bought specifically to monitor her tragic magic growth.

Hathaway remembered clearly that the last measurement was a pitiful 8, 200 M-Units. Hathaway skillfully placed her hand on the detector's obsidian sensor sphere. VROOM—!! The sensor sphere blazed to life with a blinding red light, roaring like a turbocharged engine. Hathaway stared at the needle on the dashboard. The needle, which should have been crawling around the 8, 200 mark, acted like a wild horse breaking its reins. It whipped past the 20, 000 mark, the watershed for a High Witch, and kept soaring.

Finally, it slammed hard against the edge of the Red Zone, trembling as it came to a halt. [Reading: 42, 150 M-Units] Hathaway's pupils constricted. She looked at the prominent mark on the far right of the dashboard: 45, 000. Next to it, a line of small gold text read: [WARNING: ARCH-WITCH THRESHOLD]. Is this machine broken? According to the "cached data" in this brain, this body was a diagnosed magical dud. The doctors said her mana cap was a pathetic 20, 000.

That was the "absolute truth" she had lived with for eighteen years. So why am I nearly ripping the needle off the gauge?

"Forty-two thousand..." Hathaway sucked in a cold breath. In this universe, Witches were an all-female race of apex predators. They were arrogant, absolute atheists for one simple reason: they believed Mana was Omnipotent. If she couldn't do something, it wasn't because some god forbade it. It was simply because... her blue bar wasn't long enough. And right now, Hathaway's blue bar was terrifyingly long. The cached metrics flickered into focus. Standard Witch: below 12, 000, clunky 3: 1 conversion.

High Witch: past 20, 000, a cleaner 2: 1. Arch-Witch: 45, 000. A different creature entirely. The original had been a "Combat Power 5" scrub, diagnosed by doctors as a magical dud destined to never come close to that threshold. But now, Hathaway stood less than 3, 000 M-Units away. This meant her blue bar hadn't just exploded by five times its size; the density and quality of her mana had taken a quantum leap.

"Let's test this..." Hathaway extended a finger, pointing at a crystal vase on the desk. She attempted to cast the most basic [Illumination]. Just a little light will do. Zzz— BOOM! No chant, no delay. A ball of blinding white light detonated at her fingertip. That wasn't Illumination; that was a Tactical Flashbang. CRASH! The expensive crystal vase was shattered into powder by the shockwave of overly dense mana. The thick red diary on the desk was blown onto the floor, pages fluttering wildly.

Hathaway stared dumbfounded at the messy desk. Is this the gold standard of a 2: 1 Conversion Rate? The same spell used to be a flashlight; now it was a laser cannon. She bent down, picked up the surviving diary, closed it, and tossed it back onto the desk. No need to read it anymore. This account was no longer the one described in the original's self-pitying logs.

"So this is what real power feels like." Hathaway glanced once more at the dashboard needle, still pinned in the red zone. The finish line was right there. In a world crawling with monsters, this tiny remaining gap was all that stood between her and the leverage she needed to survive. More importantly, it was the capital to achieve her ultimate dream: "being a happy, rich sugar mommy."

"Who said I can't be an Arch-Witch?" Knock, knock, knock. The heavy mahogany door was rapped. A voice full of energy (and high volume) pierced through:"Lady Hathaway! Are you awake? Lady Rhode sent someone to ask if you'd like to go 'inspect the territory' at the new dessert shop that opened on Commercial Street in the White City today?" Hathaway paused. Rhode? The name triggered an instant emotional tag in her brain: [Rich Cousin / Walking Wallet / Surprisingly Nice]. And that phrase, "Inspect the territory"...

The translation surfaced automatically: Slang. It means shopping. Man, having access to someone else's local cache is convenient.

"Coming!" [Mage Hand]. Almost subconsciously, the mana tentacles originally meant for fine manipulation formed. But because the energy supply was terrifyingly excessive, those invisible hands manifested as heavy-duty bulldozers. Crunch—Smash! The glass shards on the floor were ground into crystalline dust by the brute force of the mana.

Even the expensive handmade Persian rug was "clawed" with deep gouges, and the whole mess, dust and dirt included, was shoved violently into a trash can that twisted and deformed under the mana pressure. Hathaway looked at the trash can full of "glass powder" and the brutalized rug. She wore an amused smile. This violent, unrestrained mana output was something the original Hathaway's 8, 200 M-Unit body could never achieve (nor did she have the blue bar to squander).

"Since I've inherited your body and these 42, 000 M-Units..." Hathaway glanced at her dark, unlit eyes in the mirror.

"I'll make good use of this 'Lights Out' feature for you." But before that, she had an infinitely more urgent problem. The hunger in her stomach wasn't just banging gongs anymore; it felt like a black hole threatening to collapse her from the inside out. Her newly mutated, Arch-Witch-level body was screaming for raw fuel.

"Breakfast," Hathaway muttered, staring at the door. A standard croissant wasn't going to cut it. Her stomach was demanding something massive. To use the local parlance: she needed to eat a dragon. Right now.