Chương 110: Ride the Train First, Buy the Ticket Later

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 23, 12: 30 PM [Location]: Royal Rosas Club · The Revolving Restaurant The Regional Qualifiers were officially over. For all the professional clubs that had successfully advanced to the Grand Masters Main Tournament, what followed was the most physically and mentally therapeutic segment of the entire competitive calendar: Settlement Day.

The long banquet table in the Royal Rosas revolving restaurant was laden with top-tier, air-freighted ingredients, but at this moment, not a single person's eyes were on the food. Floating above each plate was a semi-transparent golden holographic screen, scrolling with the luminous pages of the [Club Point Exchange Catalogue]. Outsiders might find this puzzling.

The starting lineup of Royal Rosas consisted of the Co-Ruler of the Milan'thirskaya, the apex predators of the Ludwig House, and the most terrifying analytical mind the Lucent family had produced in a generation. The club was, effectively, their parents' shared property. Why would women who could reshape national economies bother staring at points like corporate wage-slaves? Because they were actually lacking. The items in this catalogue weren't mass-produced goods you could purchase with gold on the open market.

These were out-of-print, heavily monopolized resources that the Ludwig, Milan'thirskaya, and Lucent families had excavated from their respective private vaults specifically to incentivize the team. In practice, this point exchange system was a perfectly legal, tax-free internal channel for three ancient dynasties to quietly swap their hoarded eccentricities and premium assets. If your own family's vault was missing something, you could simply buy it here with enough combat merit. Hathaway sat down with her tea.

The moment she did, her eyes locked onto Tasia at the head of the table, and refused to unlock. Tasia had finished her point exchange early. The evidence was currently living in her hair. Clinging to Tasia's golden hair, nestled between her paired deer-dragon horns, and conducting what appeared to be a small-unit mountaineering expedition across her shoulders, were over a dozen [Frost Lantern Cats].

An exceptionally rare miniature subspecies from the distant Frost Fairy Empire—premium merchandise the Lucent family had contributed to the pool this year. These creatures were built differently from the cowardly native Lantern Cats that vanished at the first sharp noise. They were the size of magical sprites; one hand could cup them entirely.

When comfortable, they curled even further inward, collapsing into pure white furballs no larger than a thumbnail, shimmering with faint ice-blue light and possessing round golden eyes that looked exactly like melting arctic snow. Most fatally of all, they radiated a pleasant, self-sustaining magical current—a built-in miniature air-conditioner, one per cat, no assembly required. And they were clingy. Impossibly, catastrophically clingy.

One had claimed the summit of Tasia's left dragon horn and dug its minuscule claws in like a triumphant mountaineer, emitting a soft, milky"Myaoo". Another had burrowed so deep into her hair that only a pair of golden eyes was visible, watching the dining room like a surveillance installation. A third had fallen asleep across the bridge of Tasia's nose and was, apparently, being tolerated. Tasia sipped her black tea. Her expression was stern. Her grey vertical pupils were serene.

The Frost Cat on her nose rose and fell with each slow breath. Hathaway felt as if her heart had been struck by a blunt instrument labeled Moe. She couldn't stop staring—she stared, looked away, stared again, looked at her plate, stared a third time. Who designed this. Who approved this. A palm-sized kitten that generates its own air-conditioning and purrs into your hair. That is a S-tier summer companion with zero weaknesses.

She forced her eyes to her holographic screen and swiped with mechanical precision straight to [Special Summons: Frost Lantern Cats]. [Item Sold Out. Purchaser: Anastasia von Milan'thirskaya.] Hathaway's finger froze mid-air. She read it twice. The grey notification box was calm, clinical, indifferent to the violence it had just inflicted. She slowly raised her head. Tasia glanced up from her tea, registered Hathaway's expression, and blinked back with unflappable composure.

The Frost Cat that had been asleep on her nose yawned, revealing a row of tiny white teeth, and resettled. Hathaway sucked in a sharp breath, snapped her head down, and stared with extreme focus at the roast on her plate. Fine. Fine. There is no justice in this world. Moving on. She channeled the grief productively and began calculating with the focused efficiency of someone who had exactly one chance to spend correctly.

As a substitute, her allocated points couldn't approach the accumulated totals of the full-attendance starters—but Regional Qualifiers, substitute appearance bonuses, specific match bounties, and the team merit multiplier—the number was still substantial. Enough to matter. She ran the ROI analysis methodically. Spellbooks? The underground library at the Ludwig estate had volumes stretching from Tier 1 through Tier 7. She also had Irene's channel—if she needed something obscure, the 5th Seat could source it.

What she lacked wasn't spellbooks. It was time to sit down and actually learn them. Wand? She had [Star Orbit]. A custom-forged Legendary staff tailored perfectly to her exact mana resonance. The idea of trading it for anything in this catalogue was genuinely funny. Tactical gear? The standard-issue Royal Rosas combat uniform already outperformed 99% of what the open market sold in terms of defensive enchantments, mana conductivity, and self-cleaning capability. Not custom Legendary-grade, but more than adequate.

Her gaze locked onto the final category with the certainty of someone who had already known the answer and was just eliminating distractors. [High-Tier Feat Training & Knowledge Engraving]. This was the real play. The most devastating feats required thick, encyclopedic manuals just to record the exact training regimens and complex mana circulation models.

It demanded brutal, high-intensity drilling and a supporting infrastructure of absurdly expensive potions and ritual materials to physically restructure a Witch's mana pathways. Outside of Royal Rosas—which pooled the foundational resources of three ancient families—Hathaway couldn't find a second platform capable of providing that comprehensive ecosystem. Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

She scrolled the feat listings and her brain began doing what it always did in skill-tree screens: lighting up like a holiday display and making terrible financial decisions. [Double Casting]. [Quadruple Casting]. [Spatial Compression]. [Time Theft]. She had watched these deployed in the finals like weapons of selective extinction. Rationality acknowledged two immutable facts. First: she simply could not afford them.

The price tags on these endgame feats were astronomical, designed to drain the accounts of full-time starters, not a substitute. Second: even if she miraculously bypassed the paywall, mastering one required an entire competitive season of agonizing physiological conditioning. But Rationality was not in charge of this purchase. A person had to have dreams. If you didn't spend fifteen minutes coveting obviously broken endgame skills from behind the paywall, could you even call yourself a gamer?

"Decided what to buy?" Rhode slid a plate of Golden Mountain Goat-Dragon tail meat onto the table and dropped into the chair beside her with the posture of someone who had already spent everything and was now enjoying the post-consumption serenity of an empty wallet. Her deep red eyes skimmed Hathaway's point balance.

"Feats," Hathaway said.

"But the high-tier ones are all above my budget." Rhode glanced at the screen. Reached out. Tapped three names in under three seconds.

"Take these: [Silent Cast], [Echo Casting], [Spell Chain]." Hathaway stared at the combination. Then at her point balance.

"Cousin. I would have to run the entire Grand Masters Regional Qualifier a second time just to afford this combination." Rhode flashed the Ludwig smile—the one that appeared specifically when someone had technically correct legal concerns about a technically incorrect plan.

"You have exactly enough, as long as you list me and Bella in the instructor column. Half the cost of high-tier feats is just the instructor's premium. As your family, we are waiving our fifty percent entirely. Your points will strictly cover the club's potions, ritual infrastructure, and hardware usage. The math works.

"Bella teaches you [Echo Casting]. I handle [Silent Cast] and [Spell Chain] personally." Rhode cut a piece of the meat, gesturing with the fork.

"Now shut up and listen, because I'm only explaining this once.

"First. [Silent Cast]." She held up a finger.

"The obvious application is dirty play—opponents can't read your casting wind-up or spell model through standard mana fluctuation analysis, so they can't land a clean Counterspell on you. But here's the real mechanic: Silent Cast is essentially an advanced, internalized application of [Dispel Magic]." [Dispel Magic] is incredibly plastic," Rhode explained.

"It has absolute priority to interrupt a sustained cast or counter an incoming one. If you meticulously use Dispel Magic to selectively erase only the excess mana overflow of your own spell, you achieve a Silent Cast.

"It's literally using one spell to eat the aftershocks of another. You only just learned Dispel during the qualifiers, but learning to fold it inward like this will force you to understand the core foundation of magical construction and spell essence." Hathaway nodded.

"Second." Rhode's expression gained a specific quality—the conspiratorial warmth of someone about to share a family recipe that technically violated several laws. She lowered her voice." [Echo Casting]."

"As everyone knows, the techniques enchanted into high-tier wands are black boxes. Someone else's patented IP. You can't learn them by observation alone. That's the official rule." Rhode met Hathaway's eyes.

"That isn't an absolute rule.

"For a Witch with strong enough [Perception] —and you qualify—you can fire your own mana into the residual trajectory immediately after someone else casts. The spell has already fired, so there's no interference.

"What you're doing is recording the ghost of it: the underlying mathematical model, the mana frequency signature, the sensory feel of the release. Your circuits log it automatically, like a video camera that doesn't ask permission.

"Accumulate enough of those recordings, drink a single channeling-solidification potion, and you'll find that you've—ah— naturally acquired the spell in question." Rhode sat back, cutting another piece of the meat with the composed expression of a woman who had never heard of the word incarceration.

"Neat trick, right?" Hathaway blinked. Let the mechanism process. Blinked again. That's an exploit. That is a hard exploit with no cooldown and no authentication required. A specific clause surfaced in her memory, flashing like a red warning banner: [Magical Intellectual Property Law, Article 74: Unauthorized individuals caught learning patented spell models via analytical decryption methods shall be sentenced to a minimum of 5 years in Astral Prison, in addition to astronomical civil penalties.]"Rhode," Hathaway said carefully.

"That mechanic is in the penal code." Rhode looked at her with the expression of a senior employee watching a new hire panic about a fire drill.

"Relax. The perception threshold for this technique is brutal. It relies entirely on raw talent. Worry about whether you can even pull off one successful recording before you start drafting your defense brief." She leaned over, close enough that only Hathaway could hear, with the profound gravity of someone imparting generational wisdom:"Some spells—if you manage to steal them, you've already won. Ride the train first. Buy the ticket later."

Hathaway's internal game designer, her internal risk assessor, and her internal reasonable adult all walked into a room and started arguing. Her internal unreasonable adult won by a significant margin.

"Third," Rhode continued, sitting back to her normal posture." [Spell Chain]. You watched Alucard and Tasia use it yesterday. Designate six spells per day to receive a compounded casting speed multiplier across your entire spell rotation.

"Mandatory infrastructure for the professional tier. Without it, high-tier opponents will simply out-tempo you before you finish your second cast." She shrugged.

"Non-negotiable." Hathaway's blood was running hot. That manic fever of standing in front of a top-tier skill tree with a platinum credit card pressed into her palm—she recognized it from her prior life and did not resist it this time either. She tapped [Confirm Package Selection] and watched her point balance drop to exactly zero with the clean, satisfying finality of a well-spent life. Perfect. She set her tea down and looked at her cousin.

"Cousin. You had considerably more points than me. What did you spend them on? New weapon? Enhancement potions?" Rhode leaned back in her chair, crossed her legs, and answered with the casual tone of someone describing what they'd had for breakfast:"Oh, nothing special. I redeemed a massive batch of [Mutated Servants] from a few remote alternate dimensions—bloodthirsty rare species, never catalogued on this market." She took a sip of wine.

"Plus a private land tile in a world that's in a state of [Absolute Dead Magic]." Hathaway's hand holding her teacup did not move.

"Dead Magic," she repeated.

"Not low-magic. Dead."

"Dead." Rhode's deep red eyes lit up with the specific light of a collector who had found the last copy of something priceless.

"A world where an advanced civilization was running at full capacity one afternoon, and then every form of energy simply stopped. Permanently.

"No mana regeneration. No ambient ether. No ambient anything. Just—" she waved a hand— "abandoned brass trains frozen on their tracks. Pitch-black subway tunnels with no end. Steel cities where the clocks all stopped at the same time." Hathaway's transmigrator soul experienced a profound, highly complicated moment of silence. No ambient ether. Subway tunnels. Steel cities.

To a Witch born into the Inner Sea of Stars, a highly advanced civilization operating entirely without ambient magic was a terrifying, exotic anomaly. It was a "Dead" world. To Hathaway, it sounded exactly like Earth. Rhode was currently treating a non-magical, industrialized planet like it was a priceless, limited-edition novelty. Hathaway, who had lived her entire previous life in exactly that kind of "dead" ecosystem, found her feelings on the matter profoundly conflicted.

Hearing your mundane homeland being described as an apocalyptic rarity was a very specific genre of psychological damage. She wisely kept this information to herself.

"These tiles are singular items," Rhode said happily.

"Low-magic worlds are everywhere. A civilization that developed to that level and then went fundamentally dark? You can look for thirty years and find two of them." Hathaway kept herself very still as the second half of Rhode's portfolio—that crate of rare, bloodthirsty, uncatalogued mutant creatures—hovered ominously in her mind.

"Rhode." Her voice was carefully measured.

"What are you going to do with a dead-mana wasteland and a crate full of bloodthirsty monsters?" Rhode's smile achieved its maximum width.

"I'm going to throw all of them in and host a Minion Battle Royale. Pure physical combat in the dark between creatures that have never met each other before. In a world where nobody can cast anything. Just teeth and claws and pure chaos." She picked up her fork.

"I'm going to sell tickets."

"..." Hathaway set her cup down. Rhode had bought a slice of Earth, and was now manually installing Resident Evil into it for pay-per-view entertainment. Right. She had done this before—extended a provisional trust in a Witch's entertainment sensibilities, forgotten history, suffered consequences. Never again. The data is conclusive. The sample size is sufficient. I am done generating hypotheses.

Desperate to cleanse her palate, she turned her eyes away from the architect of the apocalypse and looked down the rest of the banquet table, seeking the solace of a known rational actor. But in Royal Rosas, "rational" was a highly relative term. The nightmare of Settlement Day was only just beginning.