Chương 90: Thank the Stars for Poverty

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 2, Dawn to Afternoon [Location]: Townhouse 107 Hathaway had a very precise internal classification for her living space. Room 302. She'd been calling it that since returning home. Never mind that "Townhouse 107, second floor, leftmost bedroom" technically described a dynastic luxury suite. To Hathaway, square footage was irrelevant. A room was simply a spawn point with a desk. Room 302 habits died hard. Room 302's lights had not gone out since Thursday night.

The moment she got her hands on those three custom-printed grimoires—freshly stamped with the Patent Spell's authorization runes—she had shifted into a mode that had no polite name. Full cognitive commitment. Zero-allocation social awareness. Pure Glass Cannon territory. Diving headfirst into the one spell that could keep a Glass Cannon alive: [Anti-Spell Domain], Tier 5, Abjuration, formally "not her style" and absolutely non-negotiable.

A pure-offense build needed exactly one safety net: a defensive ward capable of shrugging off a lethal hit. The difference between a skillful tactician and a very fast corpse. Tomorrow was the opening ceremony for the Grand Master's Tournament Qualifiers. The official start of the glorious, chaotic midsummer she had been waiting for.

She was going to stand on that stage—even if just as a substitute—and she absolutely needed this defensive spell cracked before she returned to the Royal Rosas Club to collect the potion. She was going to crack it before then. That was that. By breakfast, her body had technically arrived at the dining table. Her brain had not.

[Time]: 08: 30 AM [Location]: Dining Room The geothermal spring water continued its reassuring babble beneath the crystal deck—a permanent acoustical reminder that the Ludwig estate had geological opinions. The mechanical maids served a lavish spread. Hathaway picked up a fork. She ate without tasting anything. In her left hand, the fork: shoveling an exorbitantly expensive piece of fried egg into her mouth at regular intervals, on autopilot, without joy.

In her right hand, a quill: sketching mana-flow diagrams on a napkin with the focused abstraction of a woman who had forgotten napkins were not parchment. Her eyes were locked on the grimoire propped against a cream pitcher. Crimson light flickered and pulsed in the depths of her pupils—four threads running at maximum load, zero allocated for anything as inefficient as acknowledging the physical world. Margaret, across the table, was mid-story about an architectural dispute in Fusang.

She described a stained glass window controversy in vivid, passionate detail. Butter knife raised for emphasis.

"—and I said to her, that is not what azure means in any tradition I've ever encountered—Hattie. Hattie, are you listening to me?" Nothing. Hathaway shoveled another forkful. Anna set her napkin down. Elegant. Precise. The specific gesture of a woman performing a silent calculation before an intervention.

"She hasn't blinked in forty minutes," Anna said, looking at Margaret with surgical calm.

"At this intensity, her cognitive threads are going to burn out."

"I knew the Wellington family's nerdy habits were contagious." Margaret slammed her hand against the table with enough conviction to shake a Glacier Purity fruit loose from the attached greenhouse. A distant, muffled thump confirmed its landing.

"Hathaway." She pointed.

"Since you are home, you will patrol the territory. Right now. This instant. You will go outside, breathe air, and monitor the estate's ecological environment." She leaned forward across the untouched citrus display.

"Unplug your data cable." Hathaway looked up. The spell model faded slowly, geometric afterimages dissolving across her vision like clearing static. Patrol the territory. Right. Four hundred acres. The backyard. Forest, mountains, custom biomes. A stretch that would've qualified as a minor national park on Earth, casually designated as a "backyard" simply because Margaret and Anna operated on a fundamental family policy of extreme residential overkill. Her temples throbbed.

She'd been at it for twelve hours straight. Fine. A walk it was. [Time]: 02: 00 PM [Location]: The Estate Study By early afternoon, the theoretical parse of [Anti-Spell Domain] was complete. The last conceptual segment had clicked into place mid-lunch, between bites. She'd announced it to the table with a quiet "got it" and returned to her soup. Anna had paused with her teacup halfway to her mouth.

"Did you just crack a Tier-5 Abjuration paradigm between the salad and the bisque?"

"It's just math," Hathaway had replied, already building the execution sequence. Margaret had simply beamed, ordered the kitchen to bring out the premium dessert tray to celebrate, and then immediately enforced the outdoor patrol. Now: the walk. She pulled a crystal ball from the bottom drawer of her desk—roughly the size of a fist. A few syllables, spoken low. Command words carrying real activating weight. The crystal ball bloomed white—then immediately collapsed inward.

The light deepened, darkened, became vast and soothing in the way deep water is soothing: the magnetic pull of something immense that could hold you without effort. Ripples spread across its surface, and a sweeping bird's-eye view of a snowfield materialized in its depths. Four hundred acres of Eternal Winter. The Ludwig estate. This was the [Tower Monitoring System]. Exorbitantly expensive, purely mana-driven. Its greatest feature was a single architectural commitment: absolute local operation.

No external network. No ley-line tap. No third-party nodes. Just the user's own mana, looped back into itself—an absolute Local Area Network in a world where information was leverage and leverage was survival. She pulled up the environmental panels and ran her standard sweep. [Thermometer]. Surface temperature: well within normal snowfield parameters. Nothing alarming. [Hygrometer]. Hathaway frowned. The ambient moisture had spiked. Dramatically.

The kind of reading that had absolutely no business appearing in a freezing high-altitude snowfield. That's why the air outside felt wrong. Dense humidity stripped body heat at a rate the thermometer alone couldn't account for. Temperature: fine. Air: not fine. She pulled The Nest Effect from the reference shelf. For a standard-tier Witch, this read like occult folklore. Weird anecdotes about creatures that shouldn't exist. For a High Witch with territorial management obligations, it was mandatory reading.

The author was Mary Ankaton—legendary ecologist, and the same woman who had invented the monitoring system currently glowing on Hathaway's desk. She found the Siren-type ecology chapter.

"Siren Witches are innate masters of the conceptual mana of blizzards and the deep ocean. In terms of ecological modification, their territories precipitate extremely pure rainfall; in low-temperature regions, this manifests as pure snowmelt."

"The core characteristic of their nests is [Hyper-Evolution]. Through continuous environmental cooling and cultivation of pure-water mana, the territory gives birth to bizarre creatures that defy conventional biology. Examples include: Giant Tree Squids, Sea-Tree Tyrant Octopuses, etc." Hathaway paused. Read it again. Temperature drop induces hyper-evolution. Humidity shift restructures the local ecology.... This is Darwinian adaptation theory. Running on ambient mana.

These supposedly irrational idealist lunatics were just—doing materialist biology. She'd studied similar frameworks before transmigrating. Introduce a strong enough environmental pressure and organisms adapt along predictable vectors. A Witch's nest altering local temperature and mana flow wasn't categorically different. It was just running at magical scale, with the bonus side-effect of generating Tree Squids. Deeply scientific and completely insane. A combination she was learning to consider normal.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere. The book also recorded the famous macro case: In ancient times, before Sky-Cable Buses, the primary maritime routes between the Middle Continent and the Eastern Archipelago were permanently buried under a chaotic death-zone storm system. Torrential rain. Perpetual hail. Zero safe passage. Which happened to be the ideal habitat for Siren Witches. So they moved in.

Decades later, the overlapping Nest Effects of hundreds of Sirens—doing nothing but existing, passively radiating mana—had collectively neutralized the entire storm zone. The death-route transformed into a stable, abundantly-precipitated rainy tidal region. They hadn't planned it. They hadn't tried to fix anything. They simply lived there. Hathaway stared at the page, letting the sheer scale of it settle. Sirens didn't need subjective intent to preserve or destroy an ecology.

They didn't need to cast massive terraforming arrays. Just by existing, they permanently rewrote the environmental logic of an entire continental plate, inevitably becoming the living core of a brand-new ecosystem.

"A species that becomes the weather," Hathaway said quietly to the page.

"What a supreme, tailored romance for a natural-disaster subspecies." She closed the book. She flipped to the [Phenomena and Ecological Bases] index, located the Siren-induced phenomena chapter, cross-referenced "abnormal atmospheric moisture increase," and quickly locked onto a match: [Ice-Snow Fluorescent Coral Tide Land] — Stage 1 Characteristics: Significant atmospheric humidity increase. Accompanied by proliferation of bioluminescent mushrooms in permafrost.

Rising water levels in geothermal springs beneath snow cover..." Several ecological chains could produce humidity spikes. Very few started specifically with this kind of massive, atmospheric surge. She locked onto it. Used a spell to copy the diagnostic steps into her field notebook. Troubleshooting a Witch's territory was structurally identical to repairing a broken appliance on Earth: check the cheap, obvious parts first before tearing into the expensive components. Surface flora first. Deep mana veins last.

[Time]: 03: 30 PM [Location]: The Estate — Small Snowfield Notebook tucked in her coat, Hathaway pulled on snow-proof hunting gear rated for deep-powder mobility, pushed through the glass greenhouse doors onto the garden terrace, and bounded over to the Lantern Cat Hut hanging from a massive cedar branch. The world outside was blazing with starlight—the Inner Sea of Stars offering plenty of celestial ambiance and essentially zero functional ground illumination. The freezing, damp air hit her face.

Pure Siren ecology—built for blizzards and for Rory, not for Human Witches. She wanted a space heater. She pulled off her leather glove, flexed her fingers, reached into the Lantern Cat Hut, groped around, and yanked. She pulled out two Lantern Cats that looked exactly like empty cat pelts—like someone had drained the concept of "cat" out of them and left only the fur-shaped suggestion behind.

They emitted faint, rhythmic purr-snores, their oversized ears twitching in mild annoyance at the sudden temperature change. Glow-orbs: entirely dark. She knew what this was. Not a medical emergency. Premium, weaponized laziness. They simply didn't want to get out of bed.

"Time to work." She carried them toward the [Dry-Sauna Fully Automatic Charging Barrel] with the practiced ease of a technician handling delicate equipment. As she walked, she reached behind her head and tugged. Two strands of mana-reinforced silver hair—four meters each, concealed by habit, available on demand like magical zip-ties—came loose. She knotted one around each Lantern Cat's tail with the efficiency of someone who had done this enough times to develop a system.

She opened the barrel lid, dropped both flat cats inside, and hit the maximum-output button. BZZZT—"MEOOOW!!!" The two previously formless lumps of fur instantaneously inflated to full volume and ejected themselves out of the barrel like projectiles that had reconsidered the projectile approach and committed to hot air balloon instead. Their bodies ignited—furnace-warm orange light blasting outward, pushing back the dark in a crisp ten-meter arc. The hair-leashes snapped taut.

Hathaway yanked them back to eye level. She rubbed their heads—they had just performed a service—then dug a small packet of premium orange fluorite powder mixed with dried fish and deep-sea shrimp from her pocket and shoved it into their glowing maws. Nom. Nom. Nom. Light output surged another magnitude. Walking space heaters, fully buffed, professionally motivated. They floated ahead down the slope without any prompting, sufficiently bribed to preemptively illuminate the next five meters of terrain.

Hathaway used [Mage Hand] to grab her multi-purpose backpack and enchanted folding shovel from the storage shed, exhaled a comfortable puff of white breath, and jogged after them down the hill. The hot spring zone at the estate's lower slope was not, technically, a zone anymore. It was a river. The origin story of this river was, in Hathaway's considered opinion, one of the most conceptually unique crimes she had ever witnessed. The Ludwig estate's biome installation had been handled by Madame Vosh.

Hathaway remembered the tall, stunning Siren Witch from a video call over a month ago. A masterful contractor. A filthy, brilliant capitalist. A silver-tongued artisan who had already weaponized the pseudo-science of "visual buzzing" and a single "free" fruit sample to drain their liquidity once before. She had looked at Margaret and Anna—two intelligent, discerning High Witches with terminal parental perfectionism—and talked them into purchasing three [High-Tier Ecological Cores] when the job required exactly one.

She'd framed it as "highest-standard ecological redundancy for a developing infant." She'd catastrophized the consequences of inadequate thermal safety margins. She'd essentially held the concept of "The Best" hostage, appealing to the Ludwig family's aesthetic sensibilities and their entirely reasonable desire to not have their backyard collapse. And it had worked. Flawlessly. But here was the part she still hadn't fully metabolized: Every single one of those three ecological cores had been delivered at tier.

Perfectly authentic. Installed without a single corner cut, without a single material substituted, without a single specification fudged. The goods were top-grade. The workmanship was flawless. Madame Vosh had absolutely, unambiguously conned her mothers into spending triple the necessary budget—and had then delivered triple the necessary product at full quality. Schrödinger's Swindler. The kind who opened the box and it was genuinely, simultaneously both: robbed, and delivered to.

One hundred percent swindled on the volume. One hundred percent authentic on the goods. This was fundamentally alien from the contractors back on Earth who took the money and quietly disappeared, or swapped premium materials for cheap substitutes. Witch contractors operated on a principle that Hathaway was still in the process of accepting: I will absolutely take as much of your money as I can convince you to hand over. And I will absolutely deliver exactly what I promised.

The consequence of all three ultra-premium ecological cores running at maximum overkill was currently steaming forty meters ahead of her: a wide, tumultuous hot spring river, carved into existence when the geothermal pressure exceeded the design specifications of a "pool" by approximately three hundred percent.

The river had even naturally evolved its own indigenous fauna—small, fuzzy aquatic creatures, entirely harmless, that Margaret had taste-tested and declared possessed the texture of premium salmon when eaten raw. Hathaway crouched at the riverbank and checked the depth gauge staked into the shore. Ever since the "pool" had exceeded its containment parameters and become a "river," this gauge was their early-warning system for flooding.

If the thermal output melted too much surrounding snowpack, the water level could rise catastrophically.

"Water level is... 13 centimeters higher than last month." She stood. Drew the folding shovel. Stepped back from the bank, selected an entirely ordinary-looking patch of snow, and dug. SHHHHK. The moment she cleared the mud layer, the ground lit up. A dense cluster of grass-like coral materialized beneath her blade—pulsing, slow and rhythmic, as if breathing—radiating multicolored fluorescence into the freezing air. The light was hypnotic.

She held her breath and stared at it for three full seconds before she remembered to cover it back up. She walked ten meters. Dug again. Another eruption of light. This time: massive clusters of fist-sized fluorescent mushrooms glowing deep blue, their roots trailing filaments of multicolored fluorite powder through the mud like scattered stardust. The mushrooms were metabolizing the hot spring's ambient mana and secreting refined fluorite as a byproduct. Small quantity. Staggering luminosity.

Hathaway stood up straight. The text from The Nest Effect superimposed itself across everything she was looking at. [Ice-Snow Fluorescent Coral Tide Land]. Not a swamp—though technically classified as one. The entire subterranean foundation of this snowfield had been silently converted, by three overperforming ecological cores running continuously, into a circulating underground mineral sea of alternating hot and cold currents.

Unique mana-gas formations in the subterranean layer maintained structural pressure, holding the surface snow rigid. Preserving the illusion—from above—of solid, frozen ground. But when the mana tide surged each night, the underground transformed. A warm sea. Fluorescent corals swaying in secret currents. Giant glowing mushrooms rooted in pure mineral substrate. A hidden ocean, existing two feet below every footstep she'd taken across this snowfield since returning home. When dawn came, the tide receded.

The surface returned to hard permafrost. Not a mark. Given time, this ecosystem would produce alchemical materials of immense commercial value. Hathaway stared at the snow beneath her boots, fully aware of what was under it. She exhaled. Then she remembered [The Familiar's Den]. A few weeks ago. That ridiculously fluffy, Rubik's-Cube-solving [Polar Siege Bear Cub]. She had seriously considered dropping 3, 000 Solars on it.

But her entire 9, 600 Solar net worth had been strictly earmarked for spell models and potion materials—a project budget she was actually 700 Solars short on anyway. That crushing financial reality, combined with her absolute refusal to become a "long-distance pet parent" paying for a premium JPEG subscription, had forced her to walk away. Thank the stars for poverty, she thought, pressing a hand to her chest. And for my stubborn gamer principles.

Once again, her brutally tight budget had accidentally saved her from a decision that would have been visually spectacular and ethically catastrophic. Because if she had shipped that cub home to this "perfect winter habitat," a heavily armored Polar Siege Bear confidently bounding across the morning snowfield would have encountered the subterranean warm sea approximately 0. 3 seconds after its first stride.

Sure, it was only a cub right now, but siege-class species were notoriously dense, and it was destined to become a three-ton behemoth. Surface crust: not rated for heavy-armor mounts. Structural failure: instant. Bear—plus whatever premium accessories she would have inevitably bought to spoil it—straight through the crust and directly into alternating hot-and-cold mineral currents. The view from down there would have been extraordinary. Fluorescent coral. Glowing mushrooms. The magical glow of a secret ocean.

The bear would also have caught a severe, life-threatening cold. Extreme thermal shock applied to an organism that had not consented to a spa treatment. That constituted, in Hathaway's legal assessment, a felony-level offense of familiar abuse. She'd have been signing the paperwork.

"Territory patrol: complete." She brushed the snow off her gloves and looked down. The two Lantern Cats had wandered to the edge of their four-meter leashes and were industriously attempting to excavate glowing mushrooms from the mud with their front paws. Their tails glowed with single-minded concentration. Their harvest was, so far, zero mushrooms and one extremely confused worm. A completely helpless, entirely satisfied warmth settled somewhere in her chest.

"Let's go home," Hathaway said. Her breath plumed white. Day one incoming.

"Tomorrow I have the opening ceremony. And a potion to pick up." The Lantern Cats looked up. They had not understood a single word of that. But they were warm, full, and lit up like small portable suns. Close enough.