Chương 114: 100% Absorption Rate

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 24, 02: 50 AM [Location]: Gaia Dimension · The Sky Sea Archipelago · Crystal Cavern Her gacha anxiety cured by the sheer tactical violence of this hypothetical family synergy, Hathaway drifted to the edge of the pool. The cavern was still quiet, the high-purity crystal veins humming with a soft, iridescent glow. She grabbed the towel draped at the pool's edge, dried her hands meticulously, and pulled out her most prized and carefully waterproofed possession.

[Mana Wave Detector (Ludwig Custom · Platinum Edition)]. She pressed the scan button. Beep— A line of glowing numbers appeared on the screen. Hathaway's eyes locked onto them, and she stopped moving. [Current Mana Reading: 46, 550] She had effortlessly crossed the 45, 000 threshold—the Arch-Witch barrier. The terrifying metric wasn't the number itself, but the timeline. She was eighteen years old.

She had only just cleared her first biological growth phase, with two more guaranteed [Growth Spurts] still waiting in her future. To breach the Arch-Witch domain this early in the progression tree was a fundamental mutation of her innate talent ceiling. A monumental milestone. The kind that warranted a three-day banquet in any other context. But that was not what had frozen her. Before entering the cavern, her mana had been precisely 42, 550.

Alucard had told her, in the dining room, using the unquestionable tone of an Arch-Witch conducting a professional resource assessment: this Encounter would yield approximately 3, 000 M-Units. The detector read 46, 550. One thousand M-Units over the maximum projected yield. Hathaway stared at the number. She was not bad at math.

And she did not believe that in the rigorous numerical calculations of an Arch-Witch, 1, 000 M-Units of high-purity base mana was a rounding error that could be casually absorbed into "approximately." It was like winning the grand prize lottery and having the system deposit a second-place payout into her account as a clerical mistake. This made no sense under any recognized law of physics. Where exactly did the extra 1, 000 M-Units come from?

She was still staring at the detector, spiraling productively into this question, when a faint sound of footsteps echoed from the cave entrance. Tasia walked in. She was wearing the same light-grey loungewear as when she'd left. The Frost Lantern Cats in her hair were clinging to exactly the same positions as ten hours ago. She looked precisely as serene and unhurried as someone who had been on a pleasant neighborhood stroll and happened to arrive at the exact moment the ritual concluded. Tasia stopped.

Her grey vertical pupils lowered slightly, coming to rest naturally on the glowing readout of the platinum detector in Hathaway's hand. She saw the 46, 550. Tasia went still for a moment. Then she slowly folded the silver wings at her back, walked forward until she was a few feet from Hathaway, and crouched at the edge of the pool.

"Your absorption rate," Tasia said softly, "is much higher than Alucard anticipated." She stopped. She simply remained there, grey eyes focused with unhurried attention on Hathaway's face. The steam drifted between them. Hathaway's fingers tightened briefly on the detector. To speak, or not to speak. The secret of her eyes—Constitution converting into mana—was her absolute bottom line. Since discovering the mechanic a month ago, she hadn't breathed a word of it to anyone.

She had guarded the exploit with the instinct of a player who knows exactly which cards to keep hidden. But. Since transmigrating, she had watched the truly unreasonable things that walked around in Witch skin. Irene, who existed as the unquestionable, terrifying apex of the magical food chain. Wei Changqing, whose evasion builds were so fundamentally disgusting they would cause a live-service game studio to issue emergency patch notes.

And Tasia herself—a pure stat monster who could face-tank a Tier-8 Evocation bombardment using nothing but her physical body and raw mana, a feat that fundamentally broke the universe's damage-scaling equations. They were apex predators. Walking natural disasters. None of them cared about hiding their absurdities. In the upper echelons of the Witch World, having a game-breaking cheat wasn't a taboo that would get you dissected—it was the minimum entry requirement.

If you didn't have a ridiculous, logic-defying exploit running in the background, you couldn't even call yourself a top-tier Witch. In a world where this is the baseline, "my eyes can eat stat points" probably does not get me dissected. And right now, I need someone standing at the apex of Witch academics to tell me what is wrong with my own body. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings. Hathaway exhaled once.

"It's my eyes," she said. Tasia's gaze sharpened slightly, but she didn't interrupt.

"They have some kind of passive function." Hathaway pointed at her own face.

"They intercept energy that would otherwise convert into Constitution—the kind that normally accumulates as physical growth—and redirect it into pure mana instead. I always assumed that was the full mechanism. Simple conversion." She looked at the detector.

"But 1, 000 M-Units from a pure mana environment, with no Constitution-type energy present, tells me my math was wrong." When Hathaway finished, Tasia lowered her eyes, running it against something. Then she looked up.

"You have the causality backwards." A slight pause, to let that land.

"That is not a function of your eyes," Tasia said, her voice echoing faintly in the crystal chamber.

"It is the fundamental nature of your cells. Your eyes are merely the outlet—a filtration valve that evolved to manage an underlying biological state." Hathaway blinked.

"What underlying state?"

"Your cells," Tasia said, with the precision of someone cutting to the center of a problem, "exist in a permanent condition of absolute mana starvation. Every single one of them.

"The moment your body encounters any compatible energy, regardless of its origin or form, they make a greedy, unconditional demand for it and convert it. Your eyes didn't appear as an independent cheat code—they evolved to satisfy that systemic hunger. They are the same mechanism. Two names for one thing." Hathaway opened her mouth. Nothing came out.

"If your mechanism truly converts all Constitution gains into mana," Tasia continued, "then your absorption and utilization rate for any potion or Encounter source energy has reached a level that exists only in theoretical academic models. Something that cannot, under normal biological parameters, actually occur." She looked directly at Hathaway.

"One hundred percent." The words settled into the cavern's warm air.

"Every potion, every elixir, every high-energy resource that a Witch consumes produces two things," Tasia said.

"The active ingredient—which converts to mana and spell capacity. And a toxic residue. That residue settles into the muscular and skeletal tissue, manifesting as Constitution growth." Tasia's voice was methodical.

"It is merely a side effect. All medicine carries a trace of poison, and Witches generally ignore it—until that accumulation crosses a critical threshold and triggers [Residue Deepening].

"Take a basic Fireball potion, for example. Drink it, and your body might just feel warm. Exceed the dosage limit, and that warmth deepens into a heavy lethargy. Stack the deepening effects of multiple different potions, and the physiological reactions become complicated.

"We have a Witch in this club who suffers from such a complex multi-layered deepening that she has to freeze herself in a block of ice at the bottom of a lake just to safely absorb a new potion." Tasia looked at her own hands for a brief second.

"Even with my physical baseline as a Dragon Witch, I eventually hit a saturation limit. When that happens, I either have to stop and wait for my body to naturally metabolize the buildup, or go to the medical department to have my spine temporarily extracted so the marrow can be physically scrubbed clean." She gestured toward Hathaway's eyes.

"Your cells intercept that residue before it can settle anywhere. Before it can even begin its cumulative conversion into Constitution, your eyes seize it—crush it—and burn every last fraction into usable mana. You have zero Constitution because you have zero residue. Which means you also have zero toxicity accumulation." The logical chain locked closed. She had spent the last two months chain-learning spells and chugging potions back-to-back.

She knew what Residue Deepening was, theoretically, and knew it wasn't immediately fatal. So, having never experienced any physical discomfort or physiological pushback, she had made a reasonable assumption: she thought she hadn't hit her personal toxicity threshold yet. She hadn't realized she wasn't avoiding the threshold. Her body was simply incinerating the buildup as fuel before it could even register. The locked "trash stat" wasn't a glitch.

It was proof that the absolute conversion refinery was working perfectly. As this understanding settled in, something else surfaced—faint, imprecise, but distinctly present: a phantom sense of familiarity. This pattern. This description of cells in a state of relentless, self-overriding hunger, converting everything available into raw power. She had seen this shape before, somewhere. She couldn't locate the memory. The recognition hovered just beyond reach. She was still searching for it when Tasia went silent.

Without warning. Without transition. The methodical, clinical tone of academic analysis simply stopped, mid-thought. The ambient light from the crystal stalactites cast long, hazy shadows across Tasia's face, making her expression impossible to parse. Those grey vertical pupils seemed to lose their focus, looking past Hathaway, past the cave, past the present moment entirely. Then, barely above a whisper:"Ash." Hathaway's heart struck once, hard, against her ribs. Ash. The 3rd Seat of the High Council.

The Milan'thirskaya family's greatest monster. And [Mana Overload]. The text from the Witch Card materialized in her memory with stark clarity, the way things did when they had been read many times without being understood: [Passive Trait: Mana Overload (The Milan'thirskaya Curse)] Effect: The unit takes 1% Damage every turn (Autoimmune Rejection). Benefit: The unit gains +5% Mana Capacity and Spell Power every turn (Cellular Overcompensation). Lore:"Her body attacks her own magic as a virus.

To survive, her cells produce infinite power. She is dying every second, yet she is stronger than anything alive." Until this exact second. Looking at the quiet, uncharacteristic weight in Tasia's eyes, the lineage snapped into place. Ash. The eldest sister of Tasia and Alucard. Tasia was looking at her and seeing a mirror. The same bottomless cellular hunger. The same absolute conversion of everything into mana. The same biological imperative that refused to stop.

But in Hathaway's version—slower, milder, quieter—without the horrific price. No autoimmune rejection. No 1% damage every turn. A consequence-free mirror. When Tasia spoke Ash's name, there was no wistful nostalgia in her voice. Witches like Tasia did not make room for nostalgia—it was a luxury that implied regret, and regret implied she could have changed something. But in that single syllable, weightless and controlled, something overflowed anyway.

The two of them sat in the crystal cave—Tasia crouched at the pool's edge, Hathaway in the water—and the entrance framed the endless blue of the Sky Sea, and Tasia said the name, and then said nothing. Hathaway didn't speak either. Not because she couldn't find words. There were words—comfort, acknowledgment, the thing you were supposed to say. But she was acutely aware, in this specific moment, of what happened to certain things when you tried to hold them in language: they became lighter than they had been.

Some things, once spoken aloud, grow too fragile to carry. The weight of what Tasia was feeling didn't need to be reduced to something she could respond to. The silence stayed. Myaoo—bzzzzzzz— A Ghost Lantern Cat that had apparently been doing laps outside the cavern entrance buzzed cheerfully inward, propeller tail spinning at maximum enthusiasm, blissfully unaware that it was interrupting anything.

It seemed to register the Frost Lantern Cats on Tasia's head as a territorial incursion—let out a tiny, offended nyaoo —and dove directly at the nearest one. The Frost Lantern Cat batted it hard on the nose. What followed was approximately four seconds of an extremely undignified mid-air scuffle, complete with spinning tails and very small, very indignant vocalizations. Tasia extended one long finger and flicked the Ghost Cat precisely on the forehead, halting hostilities.

The emotional pressure in the cavern dissolved like the steam above the pool—all at once, as if it had never accumulated. Tasia stood. Her grey eyes cleared, returning to their usual unhurried, reliable stillness. She turned toward the cave entrance, her back to Hathaway, and her voice came out exactly as level as always:"Get dressed. The camp outside is ready." Hathaway looked at Tasia's back for one moment. Then she grabbed her towel.

"Coming," she said.