Chương 115: A Middle Finger to the Multiverse

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 24 — 03: 30 AM [Location]: Gaia Dimension · The Sky Sea Archipelago · Mid-Mountain Plateau By the time Hathaway dried her hair and stepped out of the crystal cavern, the camp had already been established on the grassy plateau. It was not a flimsy nylon dome propped up by a few aluminum poles.

It was a [Heavy Witch Tent] —a structure so fundamentally massive that Tasia had been forced to lay down a foundation of weight-reduction-enchanted wooden planks just to deploy it safely without crushing the terrain. In the Witch camping ecosystem, tents fell into three mainstream categories: the portability-focused Lightweight Tent, the Levitating Tent beloved by travel photographers and sightseers, and the behemoth Tasia had brought today. The physical weight was staggering.

Its interior was treated with spatial expansion magic, making it absurdly spacious and fully equipped with an integrated wooden bathroom. The structural frame utilized some unknown alchemical alloy engineered specifically for camping on floating islands and in abyssal trenches. Relying on its terrifying base weight and foundational enchantments, you could sleep through a Category 12 typhoon without once worrying about going airborne. The high-speed jet streams common to sky islands?

They couldn't even make the door flap flutter. It was, without exaggeration, the [Maus Tank] of the camping world. Furthermore, the inner and outer canvas layers were inscribed with high-tier [Absolute Soundproofing Arrays]. Even if a hurricane was tearing the island apart outside, the interior remained in dead silence. Because of this unparalleled combination of absolute privacy and absolute security, this specific model had earned a second tag in the Witch Marketplace:"The Couples' Model — Extremely Beloved."

As this piece of product trivia registered in Hathaway's mind, her movements paused. She turned her head and surveyed the empty plateau in the cool night air. Just one tent. Then, discreetly, she turned to look at Tasia, who was standing in front of the structure adjusting the wind-guy lines with unruffled calm. Two women. Cohabitating. A soundproof tent beloved by couples. My first camping trip in an alternate dimension. On a sky island.

And the companion is an incredibly beautiful, absurdly powerful Dragon Witch who could flatten a mountain range on her lunch break. Stack these tags together in any light novel and the upcoming plot would require a mosaic censor. However. Hathaway looked at Tasia's expression—which possessed all the romantic warmth of a marble sculpture left outside in January—and felt the actual atmosphere in the air with both hands. It was so aggressively devoid of tension it was almost funny.

The accurate classification for this scenario was: a very strict, highly competent parent taking a kindergartener on a supervised wilderness field trip.

"Inside," Tasia said mildly, holding the flap open. The interior was a pleasant surprise. The entire floor was covered in thick, plush mats—visually similar to tatami but vastly softer, essentially a single massive continuous bed you could roll across freely. Suspended from the high ceiling by an elegant pulley system was a small solid-wood table, currently raised flat against the canvas so it wouldn't obstruct the sleeping area.

A modest wooden door to one side opened onto a steamy shower room built from fragrant cedar. It had the dense, cozy atmosphere of a summer hideout where close friends hole up for an entire day eating snacks and refusing to be responsible adults. Since Hathaway had been AFK in the crystal cavern for over ten hours without a drop of water, Tasia had prepared a late-night supper. With a casual wave, she summoned a non-combat magical servant from her spatial pocket. A [Chef Hamster]. Standing roughly 1.

4 meters tall—nearly the height of a human child—it was wearing a crisp white chef's hat and a neat apron, its two fluffy paws already moving with practiced, professional efficiency. Over the next half hour, it produced a lavish Gaia-style feast on the lowered table: Appetizer: plump native oysters, still carrying a faint trace of the Sky Sea's ambient ether.

Main course: a bizarre local ingredient that looked like a common scallop but, upon biting into it, exploded across the tongue with the rich, creamy sweetness of top-tier sea urchin. Following that: [Dragon Meat Three-Way] — sashimi, pan-seared, and charcoal-grilled. Finale: a steaming black pepper venison consommé, deeply savory, served exactly hot enough. Even by the famously bottomless standards of a Witch's appetite, this left Hathaway's stomach taut and round.

She slumped against the cushions with zero remaining dignity. After eating, she comfortably cradled a cup of digestive tea. Her gaze drifted lazily across the tent and landed on the Chef Hamster in the corner, which was scrubbing the frying pan with intense, single-minded dedication. She looked at that plump, round, fluffy posterior.

I wonder, her brain whispered, heavily influenced by three months of being fed increasingly exotic high-calorie otherworldly meat in the name of mana replenishment, if you brushed it with honey and cumin, would the meat be tender? She studied its meat-to-bone ratio with the focused professionalism of a food critic. Tasia, who apparently possessed supernatural radar for the specific brand of predatory insanity that Witches were prone to, didn't even look up. She simply snapped her fingers. Poof.

The Chef Hamster, mid-scrub and blissfully oblivious to how close it had just come to the menu, was instantly unsummoned back to its servant dimension. In its place, two chibi-dragon golems the size of fists materialized and began aggressively washing the dishes with tiny streams of water and cleaning foam. Tasia slowly turned her head. She looked at Hathaway with the exact expression of a deeply exhausted parent warning a gluttonous toddler not to put an unidentified insect in their mouth.

"Chef Hamster meat," Tasia said, enunciating every syllable with calm finality, "is stringy. And it gets stuck in your teeth." Hathaway wisely closed her mouth. She very deliberately did not ask the obvious, horrifying follow-up question: How exactly do you know what it tastes like? She also, belatedly, recalled from her library reading that [Chef Hamsters] with top-tier culinary skills were exceptionally rare support servants. There were perhaps only a few thousand of them in the entire Inner Sea.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences. Right. Braising an apartment that knows how to julienne vegetables is indeed a bit excessive. Hathaway's body was relaxed but her mind was wired. She felt like she'd downed three liters of iced Americano. Not a shred of sleepiness. Fortunately, Tasia showed no immediate intention of sleeping either. After the chibi-dragon golems finished clearing the table and dissolved into light, Tasia pulled the tent flap halfway open.

The two of them leaned back against the soft mats, letting the cool night breeze drift in, and looked out at the Sky Sea. In the pre-dawn hours, Gaia's Sky Sea was breathtaking in a different register from its daytime blue. The water itself emitted a dreamy, pale auroral luminescence—enormous currents intersecting in the void like slow-moving ribbons of cold light. Beneath it all, a low, deep hum rolled through the air, as if the planet itself was breathing steadily in its sleep.

Hathaway was just beginning to wonder if she should find some atmosphere-appropriate small talk—maybe whatever absurd new magical artifact Irene's latest suitor had tried to deliver to the Golden Iris headquarters, or recent real estate prices in the White City—when Tasia spoke first.

"Your Spell-like Ability." She didn't look over. Her gaze stayed on the distant sea. Hathaway scratched her cheek, her expression shifting into something deliberately complicated.

"Crystal attribute. Ocular activation. The core effect is stripping the target's cold resistance."

"You didn't pull a high-dimensional Ability like [Time Stop] or [Spatial Fold]?" Tasia shook her head slightly, her tone carrying the mild, understanding regret of an expert consoling a newcomer whose gacha pulls had underperformed.

"That's expected. Those involve the world's underlying laws. Even from an exceptionally high-tier Source Energy environment like Gaia, the probability of them manifesting is infinitesimally small." She paused, running a rapid internal search through her mental catalogue of crystal-attribute gaze spells.

"Which specific spell did it solidify into?" Tasia offered the most likely candidate.

"The Tier-4 [Frost Brand]? The effect is to mark a target with a gaze, temporarily lowering their cold-attribute casting resistance. Its fatal limitation is that it only affects superficial magical shielding." Before Hathaway could answer, Tasia offered a second option.

"Or perhaps you were a bit luckier and acquired the Tier-5 [Glacial Imprint]. That one forcibly strips a layer of the target's elemental resistance for a short duration. Considerably stronger than Frost Brand, though it still struggles to penetrate high-tier equipment."

Listening to Tasia walk through the standard, unremarkable drops with calm professional authority, it was the specific guilt of a player who had just pulled the server-exclusive limited weapon while their companion was earnestly explaining the standard loot box system. But I AM a lucky player, she reminded herself. I burned the most expensive rate-up catalyst on the market. Pulling a god-tier item is just... natural. Right? She hesitated for a full second.

Then she confessed in a voice that was, objectively, a bit too quiet for someone delivering good news.

"It's neither." Hathaway looked at Tasia.

"It's [Cold Justice]." The air in the tent went dead still. Tasia's hand, which had been raising her teacup, stopped moving. Her grey vertical pupils contracted sharply, fixing dead on Hathaway. For three full seconds, her expression was completely unreadable. A profound, absolute stillness settled over her features, freezing her into a flawless marble statue. Then, very deliberately, Tasia turned her gaze back to the Sky Sea. Hathaway sat very still.

In all the months she had known Tasia—through tournament finals, through high-stakes strategy sessions, through facing Greed Umbrella's complete roster in a tactical debrief—she had never seen her go that quiet. Did I accidentally pull some industry dark history? Is this spell a classified war crime? Is it a felony just to have it in my skill tree? Tasia set the teacup down with a faint, precise clink. When she spoke, her voice was barely above a murmur.

"That is... Ovelia's spell." Hathaway's brain blue-screened. Ovelia. Before she could even begin to process the implications of that name, Tasia had already started explaining—her tone quiet, almost detached, as if recounting something from a very old archive.

"The original underlying architecture of that spell is a Holy-attribute Divine Spell— [Gaze of Justice]." Hathaway rapidly searched her memory. She had read about it in a massive encyclopedia of divine spellcraft back in the Ludwig library. The effect descriptions overlapped significantly with [Cold Justice] —the gaze debuff, the resistance reduction, the fear and morale effects.

But the original [Gaze of Justice] didn't have the nested [Vulnerable to Cold] true-damage multiplier, and in its place came a devastating hard-crowd-control effect: a powerful Awe and Forced Paralysis mechanic. Which Ovelia had apparently deleted. So what's the actual problem with the original? Tasia answered the unspoken question." [Gaze of Justice] is an effective, highly dominant spell." A pause.

"Except."

"Its targeting mechanism," Tasia said, "only activates against entities classified under the [Evil Alignment] in the multiverse's alignment system." That's it. Hathaway remembered now—she'd seen the flaw annotated in red in that same volume. It was ten times worse than the famous danger of [Protection from Evil]. A Witch who miscast Protection from Evil at worst triggered a violent magical rejection, bouncing herself backward in an undignified heap. Embarrassing. Survivable. But [Gaze of Justice]?

The moment a caster carrying an [Evil Alignment] tag attempted to channel and release that pure law of Order—the spell's own alignment-detection mechanism would identify the caster immediately, generate a paradox backlash, and quite efficiently blow the Witch's own head off. Physically. No ambiguity. And simply by virtue of being a Witch, one's existence, under the strict and unreasonable alignment adjudication laws of the wider multiverse, was categorically, inescapably tagged [Evil].

Naturally, Witches felt deeply misunderstood by this classification. We just kill and conquer and occasionally destabilize entire planes, they would argue online with great sincerity. It's pure biological instinct! How is that different from a lion eating an antelope? Unfortunately, the multiverse's alignment laws were cold and unfeeling. The argument didn't hold.

This exact same reasoning was, incidentally, also frequently deployed by Green Dragons—who liked to treat princesses as emergency rations and were not considered sympathetic defendants either. [Cold Justice]. It wasn't a name. It was a statement. It was the Chief, sitting on the highest throne in the Inner Sea of Stars, delivering her personal sneering middle finger to the multiverse's alignment system. Justice won't serve Evil? Fine. I'll gut the code, rip out the alignment check, and keep the terror.

That is my Justice. Cold. Like winter. Tasia added the final piece.

"Ovelia compressed this spell down to Tier 7, making the mana cost almost identical to the original prototype's." Her voice was even.

"Yet its actual resistance-stripping and debuff effectiveness is 1. 4 to 1. 6 times that of comparable Tier-7 spells." A brief pause.

"Not everyone has the opportunity—or the qualifications—to pull a spell personally written by Ovelia from the grand spell library of the Inner Sea." Hathaway sat with this information for a long, careful moment. The tactical implications were stacking up faster than she could count them. Because Witches were Evil Alignment, no one expected anyone to have a functional version of this spell's underlying architecture. The intelligence gap alone was a weapon.

An opponent who had never seen [Cold Justice] in use would have no reference point for what was hitting them—a Tier-7 instant-cast gaze ability that conceptually stripped resistances, applied an exponential true-damage vulnerability, and crashed morale and accuracy in a single activation, all at the mana cost of a mid-tier spell. And it wasn't even a normal cast. It was a Spell-like Ability. Zero cast time. Zero setup. Eyes open, target locked, done.

Hathaway finally, fully decoded the expression that had crossed Tasia's face when the name fell. It was the very specific, barely-suppressed complex emotion of a veteran hardcore player—someone who had invested enormous resources and meticulous strategy and years of grinding—watching a rank-new account tap a single-pull ticket and drag a server-exclusive hidden item straight out of the standard drop pool.

The "unwilling to process this reality" silence of a thoroughgoing whale who had just watched a tourist accidentally outgacha them. Hathaway bit the inside of her cheek very, very hard. She pressed her lips together with extreme effort, desperately containing the corners of her mouth that were trying to reach her ears. I knew it, she announced to herself with maximum arrogance. False Fortune wasn't wasted. I didn't hit hard pity. I broke the table. Hidden pool. One pull.

Developer-exclusive hidden SSR, personally signed by the 1st Seat. Unmatched. The conversation reached its natural conclusion on this detonation. Tasia stood up. She did not look again at Hathaway's face, which was engaged in a losing battle against its own smugness. She smoothed her clothes with unhurried dignity—the dignity of someone unwilling to continue facing this disgustingly lucky player for one additional second—and said goodnight in a tone that was soft, level, and final.

"You can explore the surrounding safe zones tomorrow. If you see any glowing crystals, knock them off. Bring some local specialties back for your family." Then she walked behind the partition and was gone. Hathaway remained where she was for a while. She looked out through the half-open tent flap at the vast, quietly luminous Sky Sea. The pale light was beginning to shift toward dawn at the furthest edge of the horizon. She had 46, 550 M-Units. A Tier-7 Spell-like Ability locked to her eyes.

And somewhere in the White City, her family was waiting for her—including a two-month-old baby with [Eye of Eternal Frost] who was waiting for her to come home and play. Finally, perfectly content with her loot, she burrowed in and fell asleep.