Chương 113: The Unbreakable Bond of Sisterhood (and Exponential True Damage)

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 23, 01: 50 PM [Location]: Gaia Dimension · The Sky Sea Archipelago The accommodation site was situated on a natural grassy plateau jutting out from the midpoint of a massive, floating mountain. Behind the plateau, carved into the rock by ten thousand years of slow geological patience, gaped the entrance to a crystal cavern radiating its own ambient glow. It was a pure crystal cavern.

Not the meticulously cut, geometrically stabilized gems displayed behind glass in the high-end boutiques of the White City. A raw, violently untamed primal crystal vein that spilled directly from the cavern walls in every direction, as if the mountain had simply given up on containing it. Old poverty instincts died hard. Hathaway's eyes swept the cave walls and her brain ran the numbers before she'd consciously decided to: a high-purity mana vein of this scale, somewhere between 500, 000 and 800, 000 Solars.

Just sitting here, exposed to the open air like a casual backdrop. Living within this glittering, half-million-gold crystalline ecosystem was a highly peculiar local species: Ghost Lantern Cats. Semi-transparent and spectral in form, harmless to Witches, they had clearly spent their entire evolutionary cycle soaking in raw, unadulterated mana. As a result, they vibrated with a perpetual, hyperactive kinetic energy. What struck Hathaway most, however, was their tails. They weren't normal cat tails.

They functioned as miniature single-blade propellers, spinning rapidly and continuously behind them to achieve levitation, producing a faint, mechanical whirr that made the entire ecosystem sound vaguely like a very cute industrial facility. Hathaway couldn't help herself. As one drifted lazily past her face, she reached out and aggressively pet it mid-air. The tactile sensation was genuinely bizarre—fluffy, yet weightless, like petting a cloud of static-charged cotton candy with a body temperature.

The ghost cat didn't resist at all. It simply throttled its propeller tail down to a contented idle hum, narrowed its faintly glowing eyes, and emitted a very soft, deeply satisfied"myaoo." Hathaway's fingers remained buried in incorporeal fur for approximately three seconds longer than was strictly necessary.

While Hathaway was conducting this highly rigorous field research, Tasia turned around and issued her AFK farming instructions with the casual energy of someone reading a grocery list:"Enter from here and step directly into the water. I carved a viewing port in the outer rock face so you can watch the Sky Sea if you get bored." A brief pause.

"I will come to pick you up when the ritual is complete." Hathaway watched Tasia turn to leave. Wait— The highly specific sensation of a toddler being ruthlessly dropped off at daycare by an overbearing parent settled over her with tremendous force. She was going to be left alone in an unfamiliar, alternate-dimension folded space?

She had heard that undeveloped folded spaces were legally ambiguous wildlands—no central jurisdiction, no established rules, potentially full of unknown biological threats— Then she thought about it for one full second. This entire sky island is Tasia's personal territory. An Arch-Witch has undoubtedly already sterilized this grid of anything even remotely dangerous. What exactly am I worried about? Furthermore: she was a High Witch. She had a Legendary staff. She had a resurrection mechanic.

Her raw mana pool was so outrageously vast that she could achieve a tactical nuclear carpet-bombing effect simply by chain-casting basic Fireballs. If something wanders in here, it is not entirely clear who would be hunting who. Reassured by her own capacity for violence, Hathaway watched Tasia's silhouette vanish at the cave entrance and then walked alone into the depths of the spring. The interior of the cavern was not dark at all.

The high-purity mineral veins refracted the ambient glow of the hot spring's steam into a full, kaleidoscopic spectrum—iridescent light playing across every crystal surface in slow, hypnotic waves. Hathaway shed her outer coat, hung it on a crystal protrusion, and carefully lowered herself into the water. The temperature was perfect. Within minutes, a fine sheen of sweat had beaded on her forehead and neck.

She exhaled—a long, slow breath that felt like it was releasing two months of accumulated tension in a single column of steam. Every inch of her musculature simply... let go. The relief moved through her in a wave from her feet to her shoulders. The strangest part was her eyes. They had been perpetually dry—overworked from continuous, intensive spell model parsing, the specific kind of neurological fatigue no sleep could fully address.

In the warmth of the cavern, they now felt an unprecedented, almost ridiculous soothing comfort. It was as if countless tiny, warm hands had taken up highly professional positions directly against her eyeballs and were administering a perfectly calibrated deep-tissue massage. The description was anatomically bizarre. It was also exactly accurate. Even the low-level neuralgia that had settled into a permanent resident behind her retinas quietly dissolved and evaporated.

Above her, the ambient mana concentration was so outrageously high it had physically condensed. Droplets of almost-liquid pure energy gathered at the tips of the stalactite crystals overhead and dripped into the warm water in slow, luminous plips —each one sending a visible ripple of blue across the surface. As the water enveloped her, that high-purity energy permeated inward: domineering, methodical, expanding her mana circuits from the inside out.

Hathaway released all physical restraints and let her massive, deep-sea-vortex of a mana pool drink its fill. Ten thousand years of accumulated crystal-cavern nutrients. Flowing directly into her cells. This is exactly what a loot goblin feels like when it finally sits down at a royal banquet and realizes the kitchen never closes. She leaned back against the smooth stone edge, let her chin rest on her arms, and stared out through the viewing port Tasia had carved into the outer wall.

The Sky Sea stretched to the horizon—layered, luminous, shifting through a dozen shades of blue under the afternoon sun. Her thoughts began to drift, unconstrained for the first time in months. No one to deal with. No Alice with a manuscript that constituted a weapons-grade hazard. No tactical evaluations to produce. No Greed Umbrella formations to ruthlessly dismantle. Just warm water, crystal light, and absolute silence.

She lasted approximately three minutes before her brain's background processes uncontrollably spun back to life. Current mana absorption rate per minute—approximately how much? If the net gain lands at 3, 000 M-Units, total base pool clears 45, 000. Arch-Witch threshold. So, how do I allocate my study time moving forward? Do I finally sit down and patch the massive utility gaps in my build? My Evocation is functional, but my Divination, Necromancy, and Illusion repertoires are virtually blank.

A PvP build with shortboards that extreme is a tactical liability. Or... do I just ignore the utility gaps entirely and start parsing my first Tier 6 spell to push my burst ceiling as high as it will go? Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. Frantically running budget spreadsheets while sitting in a S-tier luxury spa was, apparently, a passive skill a hardcore game designer could never toggle off.

After finishing her math, Hathaway's gaze drifted to the cavern itself. She was currently sitting inside an open-world map she had personally rated a 9. 5 out of 10. The stalactite mana-drip, the thermal water, the ghost cats casting spinning light patterns across the crystal walls—it was all load-bearing. Whether it was ancient deliberate engineering or a miraculous coincidence of natural law, whoever shipped this map had known exactly what they were doing. Sandbox Map. Extremely good taste. Full marks.

Time passed. Then, at a certain moment—with no warning, no transition—the four threads in Hathaway's brain that were forever calculating, forever simulating, forever spinning their separate spreadsheets... went quiet. All at once. In the warm, drifting mist. Hathaway looked at the distant Sky Ocean. She thought of Victoria. If only she could come here too. Sit under that maple tree and watch this together.

Hathaway submerged half her face in the water and blew a slow string of bubbles— glug, glug —not sure why that particular thought had surfaced now, in this particular moment. The thought rose quietly in the steam and then drifted away on its own, like a leaf picked up by wind. Then she thought of Margaret, currently radiating at approximately 180 lumens. Anna, who floated barefoot through hallways with the serenity of someone who had personally defeated gravity.

And Rory, who was undoubtedly waiting on the living room rug right now for Hathaway to come home and play. The rest of them were back in the White City. Home. Safe, noisy, full of life. Hathaway held that image in her mind with tremendous, satisfied deliberateness. There it is. That's what all of this was for. At some point, she realized she had lost track of time entirely. No phone. No clock on the wall. Even the sun angle was unreliable in an alternate dimension.

She spent approximately two minutes determining whether a basic Chronometry spell could be configured as a countdown timer. Result: yes, easily. She then spent a further half-second recognizing that floating a glowing magical alarm clock above her head while soaking in a top-tier otherworldly spa was genuinely atmosphere-ruining and possibly a sign of psychological damage. Then her min-maxer instinct crushed aesthetics flat. She set the ten-hour countdown. No regrets. She leaned back into the water.

It was the specific, heavy drowsiness of a long train ride or an intercontinental flight: body alert, environment monotonous, consciousness simply switching off on its own. The ritual was running. The mana was absorbing. The process was genuinely, undeniably boring. She was out within minutes. Beep—Beep—Beep— The spell alarm detonated punctually and without mercy. Hathaway's eyes snapped open. She focused on the countdown panel suspended in her periphery.

[Time Remaining: -2: 57: 14] She had slept two hours and fifty-seven minutes past the ten-hour mark. Despite having consumed nothing—no food, no water—since before entering the cavern, the massive influx of high-purity mana had bypassed her digestive system. Zero hunger. Zero fatigue. She felt like she could, if the occasion demanded, punch a building. The ritual had reached its core settlement phase.

An ancient, grand magical pressure surged from every direction of the cavern, wrapping around her—a living thing, inquiring through resonance rather than language, directed simultaneously at her hands, her feet, her eyes, her heart: Upon which will you anchor the core principle? Hathaway did not hesitate. She lunged for her coat on the shore, dug into the interior pocket, and pulled out the small blue flower accessory Bella had given her. [False Fortune].

She gripped it in both hands and flooded it with everything she had—the full accumulated mana of ten hours of crystal-cavern absorption, poured in one continuous, unregulated stream. Don't ask questions. Max it out. Pay-to-win the pity system right now. As for the anchor point. She locked the Source Energy's guidance onto her eyes without a moment of deliberation. Obviously.

When a player possesses a piece of proprietary hardware that is already actively breaking the game balance, they pour all their premium resources into it and forcibly patch it to the latest version. The blue flower dissolved into powder against her palms. The grand magical pressure—its trajectory warped by some invisible hand of fortune—converged entirely into her eyes. An intense, icy-cool sensation struck. Bracing, clean, like mint directly on the optic nerves. Hathaway opened her eyes. The world had changed.

It wasn't just colors and contours anymore. In the steam rising from the hot spring, across the flickering crystal surfaces of the cave walls, even in the drifting particles of the air—everything had been deconstructed. Strings of underlying spell code, dense and complex and continuously restructuring, visible in absolute clarity. The true foundational architecture of the world. The thing that an ordinary Witch could spend her entire lifetime never once perceiving with the naked eye.

And the moment she saw it, the thought arrived fully formed, like an instinct carved into her DNA rather than something she had reasoned toward: I can rewrite this. The World's Will completed the Encounter's settlement. The Spell-like Ability that had just bound itself to her soul: Tier 7. [Cold Justice]. [Spell Decryption: Cold Justice] Spell Model: Presents as an "anthill structure"—dense, infinitely correlating model nodes layered across three dimensions.

Visualizing the architecture induces mild cognitive vertigo. (Roughly comparable to an arts student having advanced calculus and micro-topology equations slapped in their face without warning.) Effect: Upon activation, the caster's eyes emit potent crystalline energy. A singular biological target locked by the caster's gaze suffers an extreme-difficulty Will save.

Failure results in: massive morale reduction, catastrophic increase in casting and combat error rates, high probability of triggering uncontrollable Fear and Mental Tension. Core Special Effect (Conceptual Rewrite): Simultaneously channels terrifying magical force to forcibly rewrite the underlying spell code surrounding the target, inflicting the mandatory negative status [Fear of Winter] for 5–10 minutes.

[Fear of Winter]: Erases all Cold Resistance from the unit on a conceptual level (regardless of equipment or bloodline source) and applies [Vulnerable to Cold]. [Vulnerable to Cold]: When the target takes any Cold-attribute damage, they suffer a massive true-damage multiplier. (A textbook nested debuff mechanic.) Hathaway sat in the water, processing the tooltip. Her expression was hesitant.

Forcibly stripping a target's resistances and hanging a permanent vulnerability debuff on them was clearly a S-tier mechanic in any boss fight. But she genuinely could not determine how good it was in context. It obviously wasn't Time or Space—the two attributes Rhode had spoken about with such reverence. It had conditional triggers, nested debuffs, and an unusual attribute. And given that she hadn't even learned a single Tier-6 spell yet, she had zero frame of reference for evaluating Tier-7 meta-viability.

At least, she told herself, this isn't Water or Fire. It's Crystal attribute, which leans heavily toward conceptual tampering. That's something. At least it proves my luck isn't rock bottom. I burned the most premium rate-up catalyst on the market as a pity safety net. It can't possibly be that my base luck stat is so abysmal that even with a sky-high buff I only scraped by with the hard pity guarantee... Ha. Haha. The corners of her mouth twitched once. Then, a secondary, highly practical thought surfaced.

A purist might argue that dropping an exclusive Cold-attribute damage multiplier onto an account that had exclusively spammed Fireballs since level one was a catastrophic build mismatch. But Witches didn't have elemental locks. Fire had merely been her starter build—cheap, efficient, and easy to aim. Admittedly, within the Evocation school, there was a strict, unspoken social hierarchy.

Because Witches fundamentally preferred things that were flashy, loud, and highly destructive, Fire magic was the undisputed royalty. In the eyes of a traditional Fire mage, Ice mages were basically provincial peasants begging for DPS scraps outside the city gates. The dynamic was entirely identical to the disdain a White City native held for someone from the Milan'thir outskirts. Hathaway looked at the Tier-7 conceptual defense-stripping debuff. She possessed zero class loyalty. Pride is a luxury for the weak.

I am abandoning the Fire nation immediately. I am a dedicated Ice mage now. She had just picked up Ice Storm a few days ago anyway, so the career transition was practically seamless. Furthermore, as her min-maxing brain processed the implications of the [Vulnerable to Cold] true-damage multiplier, a sudden, blinding realization hit her. Who in her immediate household possessed the most absurd, logic-defying Cold-attribute burst damage? Rory.

Her two-month-old baby sister, who had been born with the Siren bloodline's [Eye of Eternal Frost], which came pre-packaged with the near-Legendary innate spell [Frozen Sun]. The tactical synergy wrote itself. Hathaway steps up and applies the conceptual vulnerability debuff, stripping all resistances. The baby immediately drops a near-Legendary ice nuke onto the target for exponential true damage. A flawless, zero-counterplay, cross-generational one-shot combo.

Sitting in the warm crystal spring, Hathaway clamped a hand over her mouth. Two months ago, she had poked a warm, pulsing egg in the Ludwig living room and aggressively prayed to the universe for a Balor Witch. Give me the Fire, she had whispered. Big Sister needs a carry. Let us go conquer the world together. The universe had decisively rejected her element request and handed her a hyper-chilled Siren instead.

But as she visualized this perfectly synced, resistance-stripping tactical protocol, Hathaway realized the universe had actually answered her prayer to the letter. They didn't need Fire. With a synergy this broken, they genuinely could go conquer the world together now. Behold. The unbreakable, hot-blooded bond of sisterhood. She lingered in the warm water for another moment, letting the sheer satisfaction of a perfectly optimized build wash over her. The ritual was complete. The Tier-7 spell was secured.

There was only one final, routine piece of admin work left to do: checking the exact numerical yield of her ten-hour AFK farming session.