Er Mu - Release that Witch

Another matter that made him jubilant, was that the castle would soon step into the era of tap water.

The towering water tower stood tall and upright in the castle backyard. Its body and framework was made out of welded iron, giving it a triangular shape. Attached to the top of the tower — with a diameter of two meters and a height of three meters— was an iron bucket. The water valve within the bucket made it very convenient to control the water level. The tower was welded by Anna and afterward covered by a rust-proof coating by Soraya, and finally, with the help of Hummingbird’s magic, they eliminated most of the weight in order to install it on the previous erected cement base.

Due to the height of the castle, the water tower in the castle backyard was even higher than Redwater River’s river bank, with a height of 12 meters it was almost level with the castle’s peak. In order to prevent the tower from collapsing, Roland surrounded the tower by a wall and in this way connected the tower with the castle.

The steam engine was set up outside the backyard and used to supply the water tower with water by pumping up water from the well in the castle’s back garden. Taking a closer look, it could be seen that it was already the third generation of the steam engine, with the biggest improvement being the great reduction of the working noise.

At each connection point of the steam engine, a spacer was equipped — the light blue spacer was drawn with Soraya’s sky coloring, making it soft while also being very though, significantly reducing the machine’s vibrational noise. The inside of the cylinder and the piston’s edge were covered with a grass coloring, which lessened the leakage while at the same time also improved the operational efficiency. Components that were prone to tremors, such as the exhaust pipe, had been entirely replaced with coated hoses.

In order to prevent that the steamer from getting scorched and drenched by sun and rain, as well as for further noise reduction, Roland built a small house around it, and had Soraya coat all of the inner walls with a honeycomb design, which was used like a porous sound-absorption material. The practical test showed that even during the night, the noise of the machine would be so faint that the people sleeping inside wouldn’t be woken up.

However, Roland’s attempt to automatically feed the steam engine failed. He originally envisaged that the steam engine would be regulated by a fly ball which would control the valve in the wood box. As the steam pressure dropped, the fly ball was meant to open the valve, so that the firewood in the wood box would roll into the furnace, but that way the regulator would have to do a lot of work, otherwise with the weight of the fly ball alone it couldn’t drive the valve.

After a lot of deliberation, Roland finally decided to give up. At the beginning, the wood box would have to be filled to the maximum, and when it was used up it had to be filled again by a workforce anyway, in that case would be better to arrange for staff to just fill the water tank with water each day.

The final step was to install the water system into the castle — which included faucets, showers, pipes and the corresponding drainpipes.

The castle wasn’t like the brick houses of the newly constructed district, the holes, roofs and walls built out of stone caused the transformation of the castle to be very inconvenient. So this step had taken nearly a week, but in order to live a happy life, Roland personally directed Karl to change one room on the second and the third floor into a bathroom.

For this, Soraya’s new ability once again played a vital role, after the drainage pipes on the ground were paved with cement; she painted a thin layer of grass over the ground, not only making it waterproof, but in this way walking in the bathroom was like also as comfortable as walking on grassland. When she’d done this, Roland directly permitted her to coat the whole room. Turning the ceiling into a blue sky and clouds, while on the surrounding walls far-off valley and grassy areas could be seen and the walls of the bathtub became crystal clear, just like a jewel.

On the day at which the water system was working, the Prince called all of the witches to the bathroom to let them finally experience for themselves this wondrous achievement.

The water tank in the backyard was filled with water, so when he turned on the faucet, the water rushed out of the pipe.

“From now on, there is no longer the need to get the water from the well,” Roland proudly proclaimed. “It is not necessary to use the same bathwater for three days. You only have to stand under the shower and pull the lever.”

“Where does the water come from?” Lightning stuck out her tongue and tasted the water, “It’s sweet.”

From below Lighting, Macy stretched out her head and followed her example, “Very sweet goo!”

Seeing a third one trying to taste the water, Roland stopped Nana, “Those who want to drink water, can only do so after it has been boiled. The water from this can only be used for hand washing and bathing.”

“This is… the siphon principle, right?” Anna looked to Roland, her lake like blue eyes flashed with intelligence.

“What is that?” Hummingbird asked as she raised her hand.

Under Scroll’s teaching, every witch in the class had gotten used to the habit of raising their hand whenever they had a question.

” ‘Elementary Physics’ says when the level in two containers is not equal, and if the two tanks are connected by a pipe, no matter what shape the pipe has, under the force of gravity the liquid will always level out.” Anna explained what she remembered, “Our current position is lower than the water tower, so the water will continue to flow to here.”

“That’s entirely correct,” Roland praised. Being able to link the learned knowledge with the reality, really was worthy of a talented person.

“What about this?” Nightingale asked, curiously pointing to the shower, “Why does it have so many holes in the bottom?”

Roland turned the valve open, letting thin water droplets spray out, “It’s for the purpose of making it easier for people to take a bath. Just by standing under the shower, an individual can easily clean their body.”

“So that was the reason you were rolling around in the castle this whole week, to make it more comfortable to take a bath?” Lily curled her lips and whispered, “It’s really worthy of the luxurious life of a Lord.”

“Lily!” Scroll scolded with a frown.

“Never mind,” Roland waved his hand, indicating that he did not mind her words, “The pursuit of enjoyment is one of the biggest sources of human progress, and I am not an exception to that.”

Not long after the Prince returned to his office, Scroll, following after him, also entered the room.

“Your Highness, I’m sorry, Lily, that child… it was not on purpose.”

“I don’t mind what she said,” he smiled, “After all, she is still a little girl.”

“Only His Highness is so tolerant of us,” Scroll sighed. “At first, she wasn’t like this, but after she was deceived, it is hard for her to believe in ordinary people again.”

“Are you speaking about something that happened to her before she joined the Witch Cooperation Association?” Roland asked. “If I remember it correctly, it was one year ago that she had joined you.”

“You already know that I can feel the existence of magic, the closer I come to the source the more intense the feeling will become. Though it is not like Nightingale’s sense, that allows her to directly see the shape and color of the magic, I can atleast use it to detect new witches. So whenever we reached a new town, I will go to the local shelters or orphanages and pretend to be an aristocratic wife who wants to adopt a child, looking if I may be able to find an awakened sister,” she paused, “I found Lili in a shelter in a remote village, but when I expressed my intention of wanting to adopt her, I was rejected by the owner of the shelter, who declared that he would only sell the girls after they have become adults.”

“Why?” Roland already had his doubt. The last chance for a girl to awaken as a witch is on her day of adulthood, is that the reason?

“We were also surprised at that time, so we had Nightingale sneak into the shelter and search for books, records, and related information. Fortunately, the shelter was far from town so we could stay there for a long time.

“With Nightingale’s ability, why didn’t you just take Lili away, with her ability it shouldn’t have been too difficult, right?”

“It wouldn’t have been difficult,” Scroll nodded in responce, “With the exception of the God’s Stone of Retaliation that the operator wore, there was no other stone within the whole shelter, but we still couldn’t do that, after all, there was a precedent for that.”

“What precedent?” The Prince filled a cup of tea and handed it to Scroll.

“Thank you,” Scroll took the teacup. “At first, as soon as we detected a witch, we would take her by force, but after what happened in the Seawind Region we had to change our way of thinking. They thought of us as evil, so when we brought them to the camp of our Witch Cooperation Association, they wouldn’t listen to us or accept our explanation and would instead try to attack us. In the end, two of our sisters died, they were killed by Cara’s magical snake, ‘Death’. And since then, we would always carefully observe the witch over a period of time, and determine her situation and get to know her beliefs before we would take action. In case we were chased by the Church and had to act urgently, we… had no other choice than to give up on them.”

“So, the meeting between Nightingale and Wendy wasn’t by accident?”

“Of course not,” Scroll took another sip of her tea, smiled and shook her head, “The interval of becoming aware of Nightingales existence until Wendy made contact with her, more than one month’s time had passed; during which we also recruited other sisters, such as Red Pepper and Windseeker…” Speaking until here her expression turned blank, “Unfortunately, they are now buried in the wild lands. At that time, if we had only chosen to settle in Border Town, they could still be alive today.”

Roland also felt quite sorry for them. If the Witch Cooperation Association had decided to settle down in Border Town and had brought their more than 40 witches with them, I think it is entirely possible that we would already have entered modern life by now.

“But right now we weren’t speaking about them,” Scroll took a deep breath, “we were talking about Lily. During the search of the shelter as well as following the host’s tracks, we discovered an astonishing fact — the small country house was neither a real shelter, nor was it an establishment to screen for witches.”

“Then what was its purpose?”

“Its only purpose was to satisfy the owner’s selfish desire.” Even for a person with a good self-control like Scroll, when speaking these word her facial expression became somewhat dreary, “Every week the owner would go to the slums of Redwater City, abducting those vagrant girls, and deceive them by saying that he was a kind and selfless aristocrat, who had opened up a shelter in the suburb. Furthermore, his shelter would often be visited by powerful nobles who were looking for girls to be adopted as daughters. As long as they were selected, they would no longer need to worry about food and clothing for the rest of their life. Of course, not everyone would be deceived by his sweet words, but… after ten years of running, in addition to the 66 who still lived in the shelter, there were still several hundreds of names written in his books.”

“So many?” Roland frowned. “But you said that it was not such a big shelter.”

“Hundreds of them now only remain as names in those books. Most of them were already… dead,” she whispered. “During the last ten years, he had discovered three witches, who were all sold to the Church. While the other girls — who had better appearance— got dressed up nicely and then sold to people, who had a need of them. However, those for those who no one had any interest in were killed and buried in the woods behind the shelter.

“…” Hearing her story, the Prince didn’t know how to respond. At that moment he suddenly felt from his back, someone gently place their hands on his shoulders.

“The chances that a girl awakens to become a witch is not high, so after reducing the living cost, within all the years, he hadn’t earned more than 20 gold royals, based on the data we were able to gather from his accounting book. Because of those 20 gold royals, more than 300 women had lost their life in the woods, filling the pit in the woods with corpses.