Chương 210: Chapter 189: You Grind Until the Server Forces You Out

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 50 — 9: 00 AM [Location]: Blazing Day Plains · The Sun Volcano Hathaway hit the surface of the magma lake. Liquid stone received her like partially cured cement, the sheer weight slamming against the pressurized mana layer she had packed around her skeleton and flaring it to a screaming white. Even through the full-body reinforcement, the ambient heat pressed against every exposed nerve ending like a blanket of scalding iron, prickling and insistent.

She fought through the initial shock, broke the surface, and dragged in a lungful of sulfuric air.

"Don't just float there!" Elder Frederica's voice boomed down from the caldera rim, cutting through the deep, concussive churning of the lake.

"Move your limbs! Force the mana to cycle under active resistance! Swim!" Swim. Hathaway angled into the current and threw her right arm forward. Her shoulder nearly separated from its socket. Every pull required a furious, deliberate expenditure of mechanical force. Every kick of her boots fought through a medium that moved like setting stone because it was, in a technical sense, setting stone. Her lungs burned. Her muscles screamed.

Her mana output meter, usually a background process, was now running at maximum priority and complaining loudly about it. Cardio, her developer brain compiled, clinging to the one processing thread that still had bandwidth. The activation parameter for a premium-tier constitution encounter is high-intensity interval training. My fitness tracker would spontaneously combust if I were wearing it. She gritted her teeth and began to swim in earnest. For the first ten minutes, it was pure geological punishment.

And then the environmental math began to shift. Her arm drove into the magma again and met measurably less resistance. She kicked; the liquid stone yielded with the thick, sluggish give of setting syrup. Three strokes later: heavy mud. Then, inexplicably, it parted around her with the easy, fluid grace of slightly mineralized water. The heat had stopped trying to breach her mana armor too; it was pooling against her skin instead, gathering density, filtering inward of its own accord.

She felt it: a deep, rhythmic siphoning drawing through her from every direction simultaneously. The encounter yields nothing once the physiology adapts, her logic engine calculated at frantic speed. But my capacity hasn't capped. The resistance is still feeding. The progress bar is still moving. In the ruthless calculus of a developer confronting an active, uncapped EXP multiplier with a visible hard-end timer, there was exactly one correct response. You grind until the server forces you out.

Panic over a sub-optimal yield flooded her system. Hathaway buried her face in the liquid fire and began to swim with the streamlined, ferocious intensity of someone who had just spotted the daily event window closing in thirty seconds. High above the rim, the four Ludwigs watched her go.

"She's cutting through that viscosity like a municipal lap pool," Rhode remarked, pushing her sunglasses up as Hathaway's pace increased to something approaching a competitive sprint.

"Her adaptation rate is spectacular." Frederica wasn't looking at Hathaway's swimming form anymore. The armored Elder had taken a half-step forward, her eyes locked on the thermal currents rising from the lake with the narrow, intensely focused expression of a researcher watching a volatile reaction proceed.

"The density shift in her mana envelope," Frederica said, the booming cadence stripped entirely from her voice.

"She's actively dismantling the spiritual substrate. The mana is being restructured before intake."

"Look at the stratified layers of the influx." Wilhelmina leaned forward over the rim, the heavy veil swaying as she tracked the subtle alterations in Hathaway's aura. Her voice dropped into the rapid, clipped cadence of someone assembling a puzzle too quickly to pause for punctuation.

"The thermal aspect is being partitioned from the raw geological density. Her Trait is converging. It has a direction, a specific evolutionary alignment. A few more data points and I can map the operational architecture—" Beside them, Bella stepped to the rim's edge, her cloak snapping in the updraft, her single visible eye blazing with the concentrated luminescence of cosmic revelation.

"The gears of destiny!" Bella cried.

"They interlock against the celestial anvil! The abyssal hunger awakens, its jaws closing upon the heart of the dying sun! The tapestry of eternal—""Bella," Wilhelmina said, without looking up. Bella's monologue collapsed mid-metaphor. She retreated two steps and redirected the remaining dramatic energy into a series of highly focused, inaudible incantations addressed to the sky. If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Below them, the blinding incandescent gold of the magma lake was dimming. The supernatural luminescence was bleeding away, reverting the divine gold into the heavy, sullen orange of mundane molten rock. The vigorous churning had smoothed into a slower, thicker roll. At the edges of the caldera, the ethereal, pulsing aura of the liquid stone was vanishing, leaving behind a strictly physical heat that spread steadily outward from wherever Hathaway had just swum.

The ambient spiritual density of the sacred ground was registering a steep, unbroken decline, the kind that signaled a system under sustained extraction rather than natural variation. Any rational administrative body would have immediately extracted the anomaly causing it.

"The intake architecture is doing something I've never seen before," Frederica murmured, leaning further over the edge. Rhode lowered her sunglasses and looked at the darkening lake, then at the other two. She can't possibly drain the entire node. The thought settled over the group like a shared, comfortable agreement. One more minute. We'll intervene if the readings drop too far. The minute passed. Then another.

Down in the crater, Hathaway executed a flip-turn off a solid chunk of obsidian and launched herself into a new lap, faster than the last. Wilhelmina's hands came together with a crack like a gunshot.

"Excellent!" the Matriarch declared, triumph blazing across her features.

"I have it. I can map the approximate architecture of what her Trait is going to become!" At the exact same moment, Hathaway broke the surface. She hauled herself up onto the basalt shelf at the lake's edge, shaking the last scorching drops from her boots. She stood up and felt, unmistakably, like a woman whose lungs had just been upgraded to the premium tier. She looked up at the rim, waving.

"What is it?!" The Sun Volcano was gone. Where a churning lake of incandescent gold had boiled for centuries, there was now only a mundane caldera of bubbling, thick red magma. It was still hot enough to incinerate a normal human in seconds, but the transcendent, divine presence was simply gone. The semi-translucent crystalline walls that had pulsed with living fire had clouded over into dull, opaque obsidian.

The massive thermal updraft was still rising, but it was just regular hot air now, stripped of its intoxicating spiritual pressure. Bella's hand flew to her heart as Frederica's veteran composure catastrophically failed.

"The site is completely drained?!"

"Frederica, shut your mouth!" Wilhelmina hissed, whipping around, the panic pitching her voice precisely loud enough to carry clearly down the crater walls. Hathaway's developer brain had already isolated the word drained, cross-referenced it against the de-powered environment's visual feed, and begun constructing a damage estimate. The calculation was not going well.

"W-What happens when it's drained?" Hathaway stammered, her voice echoing in the silent crater.

"You don't need to worry about a single thing!" Wilhelmina called down, maternal reassurance projected at maximum emergency amplitude.

"Our family has extensive liquidity reserves!" Rhode leaned over the edge and surveyed the grey expanse below with the candid, unvarnished efficiency of a battlefield auditor.

"It means the encounter is permanently dead," Rhode offered.

"And the Sun Ore vein with it." The blood evacuated Hathaway's face in a single, continuous drain.

"Why is it dead?" she whispered.

"When you strip a magical environment of its foundational spirituality," Rhode explained, with the mild, informational tone of someone describing a natural law, "the conceptual framework collapses. It's just a normal volcano now. Normal volcanoes make rocks." The Sun Ore vein. A continuously generating, premium, globally restricted conductive metal. A perpetual engine of generational wealth that had been quietly refining itself for centuries.

She had slurped the entire geological formation's magic dry like an overturned milkshake. The 560, 000 Solars currently sitting in her spatial ring suddenly felt like a parking ticket charged against a continental debt. Wilhelmina dropped from the rim and closed the distance in two strides, pulling Hathaway into a fierce, crushing embrace. She shot a look of concentrated, white-hot fury upward at Rhode's silhouette.

"What is wrong with you?!" Wilhelmina snapped. She immediately softened her voice, patting Hathaway's back with a heavy, soothing hand.

"Do not listen to your idiot cousin. This is entirely our responsibility. We fell into a diagnostic trance and failed to issue the extraction order in time. You did exactly what you were told to do." She smoothed Hathaway's hair back from her forehead.

"The asset is already gone. The only metric that matters right now is what you gained. And I swear to you on the Ludwig crest: you will not pay back a single Solar. Not one." Hathaway's soul was currently hovering approximately two feet above her physical body. Rhode descended to the basalt, entirely unbothered by the Matriarch's fury. She reached into her leather jacket and produced a sleek, platinum-plated device. [Mana Wave Detector (Ludwig Custom · Platinum Edition)]"Hold still," Rhode said.

She pointed the crystal lens at Hathaway's catatonic form and pressed the trigger. The device hummed. A holographic number materialized in the dead air above the mundane caldera. [51, 873] A collective, massive exhale moved through the four older Witches. The tension in their shoulders dissolved simultaneously.

"Good," Frederica said, settling against a bare rock with grim satisfaction.

"The volcano didn't drain for nothing." Wilhelmina's hand moved gently to Hathaway's hair. The theatrical bombast of the morning had faded completely. What remained in the Matriarch's expression was quiet, overwhelming, dynastic pride.

"With this number," Wilhelmina said softly, her voice carrying in the silent crater, "your talent has officially crossed the threshold of the Grand Witches." Hathaway blinked. The financial panic briefly stalled. Wilhelmina tapped the platinum screen in Rhode's hand.

"Lin Zhaojun entered the Grand Witch candidate roster in 1999 with a number just above fifty thousand. She was renowned for what she could do with it." The Matriarch's eyes locked onto Hathaway's. Centuries of bloodline ambition burned steadily in them.

"You have cleared only your first Growth Spurt." A pause.

"When you pass through your second and third Growth Spurts, one hundred thousand is a certainty. You will possess the absolute right to contest a Grand Witch seat." The terrifying, beautiful smile.

"And even if you do not claim the throne, a permanent place at the apex of this civilization is already guaranteed." Hathaway stood in the center of the drained volcano. She looked at the number hovering in the air. She looked at her hands, which had paddled through liquid fire for twenty minutes under the sincere belief that she was doing resistance cardio.

She looked at the vast, bubbling bowl of completely ordinary magma surrounding her, where a priceless magical geological landmark had been quietly sitting for centuries before she arrived. Her vocal cords, thoroughly overwhelmed by the escalating absurdity of her own existence, declined to produce a single word.