Er Mu - Release that Witch

But then again, living in a house cave was much better than living in a wooden sheet with air leaking in all over the place. At least in winter, with a brazier and a kang[9], this house cave would become warm. So, in case he wasn’t able to build enough brick houses before the arrival of the Months of Demons, he could still temporary use those cave houses.

The last part of the test was the summary of the examination — Lotus’ ability belonged to the summoning type, she possessed no branching ability, and her ability to shape the terrain was effective within a five-meter range. During her casting, it was easily affected by the power of a God’s Stone of Relation, but the moment the land had been transformed it wouldn’t shrink back after.

“How is her magic level?” Roland asked.

“It looks like a brown cyclone, with a very dense center, compared to the other witches, her magic level is superb,” Nightingale said, “It is relatively close to Leaves’.”

“Consumption?”

“When raising the ground level it isn’t bad,” she said while looking towards the bulging stone wall at the food of the North Slope Mountain. “However, when using her magic to transform the earth it rapidly declines, I’m afraid she will only be able to maintain it for one or two double hours.

Roland nodded, Leaves’ amount of magic power was the third most within the Witch Union, second only to Anna and Soraya. After all, having enough magical power was the premise to continually putting one’s ability to use — of course, there was also cases like Nightingale and Lightning, who had abilities with a low power consumption and thus even with a small magical source they could still activate their ability during the whole day without facing any difficulty.

After recording the information within a book, Roland began the test of the second witch.

“Who wants to be next?”

“Me- me- me!” Honey raised her hand.

Seeing her enthusiasm, Roland smiled, “Alright, then let me see your ability first.”

The girl named Honey was of a similar size, even somewhat shorter than Lotus. She had passed her day of adulthood just in the previous winter and seemed to have a very lively temperament. She had a head full of short fluffy curling brown hair, which resembled some fried dough twists. Her skin was slightly darker, and around her neck, wrists, and ankles she wore chains of animal teeth.

Her primary ability was called “beast tongue”, which allowed her to tame all animals inside her range. With it she could tame animals from all species that would carry out her orders afterwards. However, the extent of the command wasn’t allowed to go over the ability of the animal and after the task was fulfilled the taming effect would automatically be lifted, or it could be lifted beforehand out of her own initiative.

Furthermore, Honey also had a fascinating branch ability: “animal messenger”. With it she was able to pass the taming command from one animal to another until it reached the target animal — for example, if there was only a bird around her, she could let it seek for a more powerful animal to serve her. Perhaps a grown cat, maybe a ferocious eagle, this process couldn’t be controlled by her, making the final result somewhat uncertain.

However, no matter if it were her primary or her branching ability, both were directly influenced by the God’s Stone of Retaliation. Especially animal messengers, a God’s Stone of Retaliation would immediately erase the instruction so that the animal would be set free. And also, the bigger the animal she tried to tame was, the more magic she would have to spend. According to her own words could she control a dozen birds at the same time, while in the event that her target was a cow, she would only be able to manage two or three at a time.

The third witch to be tested was Evelyn, she was about twenty-five to twenty-six years old, with an accent that typically came from the people of King’s City, which gave her immediately a somewhat familiar feeling.

According to Tilly’s list Evelyn was able to change low-quality wine’s flavor and style entirely according to her preferences, as long as she had tasted it previously before — from the beginning the reason that Roland had chosen this witch was evident, that was to get pure alcohol. Since she can change diluted ale into a delicious wine or fruit wine, liquor shouldn’t be a problem for her, right?

For this regards, Roland had carefully prepared a few bottles of good wine, with a concentration from 50 % until 95 %. Even though they were a bit spicy and burned, but as long as you only drank one or two mouthfuls of it, there shouldn’t be a big issue. The crucial point was to let her agree that the transparent liquid that burned the throat was indeed a type of wine.

But here in the countryside and under the scorching sun wasn’t really a good place to taste wine. They had no access to delicious side dishes not any ice nor any crystal-glass cups. Furthermore, if he was to directly take out the white spirit with its strong burning scent, it was possible that the other side would misunderstand and think it was poison, because of this he thought that it would be subtler to act during the dinner. So just after asking Evelyn a few simple questions, Roland immediately moved over to the next witch.

The fourth to be tested was Sylvie.

Whenever he faced the witch, Roland always felt a bit uncomfortable. It really wasn’t because Nightingale had told him she lied too much, in modern society, with the exception of speaking to relatives and good friends, not even a dozen people could speak bluntly. Since long ago, he was already accustomed to hearing all kinds of flattering and rumors.

He just felt that he had no possibility to hide anything from her. Even worse, he knew that it wasn’t an illusion, but the other’s ability. Being able to ignore all visual barriers, as long as she wanted, wearing clothes in front of her was completely useless. But within a dark corner of his mind, Roland lamented not having this kind of ability himself, while also involuntarily changing his sitting position by tilting his legs.

Speaking of appearances, she could be considered as the most unique of the five witches: with aquamarine hair that dropped straight to her shoulders, slender eyebrows, and the fringes of her hair seemed to have the appearance of someone that had just stepped out of a picture. Especially her amber colored pupils, which were so transparent that they had almost no depth, as if they were mirrors that reflected all incoming light. Looking at them for a while, Roland felt as if a red beam could come shooting out at any moment now.

Sylvie’s ability was very easy to understand, using her inner sight, she was able to see everything — even the area behind her back was not an exception. Furthermore, her vision could penetrate all barriers, the specific depths of the penetration depended on her own desire. She also possessed a similar branch ability as Nightingale did: She could see the gathering and dissipation of magic.

Which itself was somewhat surprisingly to Roland, for the branch abilities to be so similar, then what about the primary ability? When he asked Sylvie this question, the latter first hesitated, but then said that from the hundreds of witches on Sleeping Island, there were no witches who had the same ability. He then felt a soft pinch on his left side coming from Nightingale, he knew that this sentence was the truth.

The reason for this is probably because the sample is just too small, Roland thought.

The last witch to be tested was Candle.

She and Anna had both experienced their day of adulthood when this year’s Months of Demons was happening. When she was still a minor, her ability could only be used for lighting candles, oil lamps, torches and the like. But after her day of adulthood when her magic had also become more stable, this effect had also been significantly enhanced. Furthermore, after that day, she had gained the ability to preserve an object’s characteristics for a brief moment — for example, after casting her magic on an ice cube, it wouldn’t melt even after placing it in the hot sun. Instead, it would still send out bursts of cold.

At first glance, this ability seemed to be simply incredible. With it, Roland would be able to do many things he couldn’t achieve using conventional means. But after several rounds of testing, Roland had to acknowledge that in the end, her ability wasn’t as perfect as he had imagined it to be. First, it belonged to the category of enchanting abilities, which meant that she needed to have direct contact with the target. This limitation made it difficult for Candle to preserve high-temperature objects.

Thereupon his attempt to obtain a liquid drop of steel which would forever keep its incandescence state in that way providing the blast furnace with an everlasting heat source broke apart. With the exception of Anna, no one else would ever dare touch something that was as hot as a thousand-degrees with their bare hands. And in case the metal was turned into a long and thin iron wire, allowing Candle to keep hold of one end while enchanting the other also led to another problem.

Which was that the more the object’s state surpassed what was considered as its normal state, the greater the magical consumption would be, and the duration of the effect would also become shorter.

Roland used ice to verify this point — after solidification, he cut a block of ice into two equally large sizes. One he put onto the scolding hot ground while he threw the other into a basin filled with water. The former only persisted for an hour before it quickly began to melt, while for the other, besides cooling the water’s temperature still maintained its original form.

This meant that when the effect was placed on red hot iron or steel, it would only become more inefficient.

Finally, the volume of the object was also a factor which restricted Candle’s ability. Like Hummingbird and Mystery Moon, the greater the size of the object was, the more magic Candle needed to spend. According to Nightingale’s observation, Candle’s amount of magic was placed within the lower to middle ranks. It looked like a golden mist, which had yet to form a dense cyclone.

But even with all these restriction, the somewhat introvert looking girl was still Roland’s biggest harvest of this group of witches. In the field of industrial construction, being able to solidify an object’s state could be considered as an utterly priceless treasure. The key lied in the word “normal state”. The constant heating and cooling, friction, or any other kind of force which influenced the material would cause the metal to fatigue, which would lead to the deformation of the overall structure. But now he no longer had to worry about drills becoming too hot due to friction, and would no longer need to be concerned with a tools daily abrasion. If the key parts of the machines could be kept in a “normal” state all of the time, it would mean that the machines could always maintain their state of maximum efficiency and could work at the best possible accuracy.

In other words, Candle could effectively improve the mechanical strength of inferior materials.

…

Back to the castle’s office, Roland took out the ability record and skimmed over them once again, and then started planning their future work.

“How were they?” Nightingale stuck her head out of the fog, “Are you fond of any of those five in particular?”

“They are all pretty good,” Roland casually agreed.

“What?! You like all of them?”

He threw her a glare, while the latter stuck out her tongue and then further nibbled at the fish in her mouth.

Obviously, at present, the ones that were the most useful to him were Lotus and Candle.

With her ability to transform the landscape, he could easily build a new earthen wall outside of the current city wall — instead of having to build another fieldstone cement wall, in this way conserving materials and accelerating the construction process. As for the location she would work in he had selected the smallest sector between the foot of the North Slope Mountain and the Redwater River. It should be small enough that it could be completed before the arrival of the Months of Demons, while at the same time also limiting Border Town’s westwards expansion. In the wake of the unceasing increase of population, it was only a matter of time before those pieces of wilderness and the Concealing Forest would be developed.