[Time]: Year 2004 of the Witch Calendar, a sunny morning.
[Location]: Milan'thir · The White City · Ludwig Manor · The Cloud Suite
When Hathaway von Ludwig woke up, her very first sensation was hunger.
Not the "I could go for a croissant" kind of hunger. It was as if every cell in her body was blaring a famine warning, like ten thousand starving ghosts banging gongs and drums inside her stomach. She felt like she could swallow a whole cow, or to use the local parlance, a whole dragon.
Then came the lightness, and it was strange: she remembered, though she wasn't sure where the memory came from, that this body used to feel heavy, like carrying a backpack full of water. Now gravity seemed to have taken a fifty percent cut. She merely twitched her fingers, and the friction against the air produced a faint electric zzzt.
"What the hell?"
She struggled to sit up in the four-poster bed, which was ridiculously large and soft enough to be a cloud.
Her memory felt like a ball of yarn a cat had absolutely demolished. She was a transmigrator, and now she was Hathaway, and the whole thing had gone through with the brisk indifference of a traffic accident on the spiritual plane: a cosmic-level screw-up had snatched the original soul away and jammed hers into this insanely luxurious shell without warning.
Panic was probably the standard response. But Hathaway just lay there, staring at the silk canopy, letting the impossible softness of the mattress absorb her weight.
Her last memory from Earth was the harsh blue light of a dual-monitor setup at 4:00 AM, the sharp final pain in her chest somewhere in her sixth consecutive year of game dev crunch, and the crushing irony of dying at an office desk to build someone else's magic world.
Compared to a fatal cardiac arrest in a cubicle, a cosmic server migration into an aristocrat's body read less like a crisis and more like the severance package six years of crunch had never gotten her.
"Fine," Hathaway muttered, sinking deeper into the pillows. "Best bug I've ever encountered. I'm here, might as well roll with it."
Hathaway rubbed her temples. She didn't know where the original soul had been yeeted to. She hoped, in some small corner of her chest she wasn't quite ready to examine, that the girl had landed somewhere with better hours.
She crossed to the full-length floor mirror, which reflected a young girl: silver hair flowing like liquid mercury, messy, but with an effortless lazy beauty, wearing a silk nightgown with so much intricate lace it made one suspect the entire year's tailoring budget had been blown on sleepwear.
Typical, she thought. The original Hathaway always wore her most "combat-ready" luxury pajamas when staying at the Main Estate, desperate to not be outshined by the furniture.
Then she looked into her own eyes, deep crimson pupils whose irises held precise geometric patterns like a bottomless ruby maze, the whole structure rotating breathtakingly with every flick of her gaze.
She leaned closer, thumb at the corner of her eye.
"Crap."
They aren't glowing.
You have to understand, the Ludwig family's red eyes were infamous sources of light pollution. In their default, resting state, they bled a constant, diffuse scattering of roughly 150 lumens: enough to act as a permanent, all-weather table lamp. But when a Ludwig got emotional or locked into combat focus, that scattered ambient light condensed. It stopped diffusing and shot straight out of their pupils like twin laser pointers.
Dim eyes were a severe tactical disadvantage against their arch-rivals, the Wellingtons, who were practically blind and stuck that way, running on passive [Mystic Eyes] for life.
So, a standard Ludwig tactic was simply standing in front of a Wellington and letting their suddenly-focused "High Beams" blind the enemy.
But now...
Hathaway paused, tapping her temple with a frown.
How do I know all this specifically about the Wellingtons?
My soul was definitely from Earth, but it felt like the previous owner's brain was a hard drive that hadn't been fully formatted. There were... residual files left behind. Ghost data.
Knowledge about rival families and social etiquette popped up like autocomplete suggestions whenever I focused on a topic. Gross. But useful.
Hathaway looked at her reflection, which seemed to melt into the shadows.
"Look on the bright side. I can't blind them instantly anymore, but at least... when I sneak into the kitchen for a midnight snack, I won't get caught by the Head Maid for being a walking searchlight."
On the desk sat an alchemy device that looked offensively expensive: the [Mana Wave Detector (Ludwig Custom · Platinum Edition)].
It was a torture device her mother had bought specifically to track her magic growth, back when there was still growth to track. The first spurt had closed out at 8,200 M-Units, and the needle had been parked there ever since.
Hathaway skillfully placed her hand on the detector's obsidian sensor sphere.
VROOM—!!
The sensor sphere blazed to life with a blinding red light, roaring like a turbocharged engine.
Hathaway stared at the needle on the dashboard. The needle, which should have been sitting dead on the 8,200 mark, acted like a wild horse breaking its reins. It whipped past the 20,000 mark, the watershed for a High Witch, and kept soaring.
Finally, it slammed hard against the edge of the Red Zone, trembling as it came to a halt.
[Reading: 42,150 M-Units]
Hathaway's pupils constricted.
She looked at the prominent mark on the far right of the dashboard: 45,000.
Next to it, a line of small gold text read: [WARNING: ARCH-WITCH THRESHOLD].
Is this machine broken?
According to the cached data in this brain, 8,200 was where the first eighteen years had left her, and the second stretch of growth due in her late twenties would land her, eventually, exactly where both her High Witch mothers already stood. Every doctor had said so in the same reassuring tone. The original had found it perfectly easy to live with.
So why am I nearly ripping the needle off the gauge?
"Forty-two thousand..." Hathaway sucked in a cold breath.
Witches were an all-female race of apex predators and arrogant atheists, on one simple ground: mana was omnipotent, which made every failure in the world a budget problem.
And right now, Hathaway's blue bar was obscene.
"Let's test this..."
Hathaway extended a finger, pointing at a crystal vase on the desk. She attempted to cast the most basic [Illumination].
Just a little light will do.
Zzz— BOOM!
A ball of blinding white light detonated at her fingertip. The spell library called it Illumination. The military would have called it a flashbang.
CRASH!
The expensive crystal vase was shattered into powder by the shockwave of overly dense mana. The thick red diary on the desk was blown onto the floor, pages fluttering wildly.
Hathaway stared dumbfounded at the messy desk.
The same spell used to be a flashlight; now it was a laser cannon.
She picked the surviving diary off the floor. It had fallen open somewhere near the middle, and her eyes caught three words in a round, unhurried hand before she shut it: a good day.
She put it back on the desk, face down.
"So this is what real power feels like."
Hathaway glanced once more at the dashboard needle, still pinned in the red zone. The finish line was right there.
In a world crawling with monsters, this tiny remaining gap was all that stood between her and the leverage she needed to survive. More importantly, it was the capital to achieve her ultimate dream: "being a happy, rich sugar mommy."
"Who said I can't be an Arch-Witch?"
Knock, knock, knock.
Three raps on the heavy mahogany door, evenly spaced, precisely three. Then the Head Maid's voice came through it, flat as a delivery manifest.
"Lady Rhode has sent word, Milady. She wishes to know whether you intend to 'inspect the territory' today, at the new dessert shop on Commercial Street."
A beat, and then, at exactly the same volume:
"She has asked twice."
Hathaway paused.
Rhode? The name triggered an instant emotional tag in her brain: [Rich Cousin / Walking Wallet / Surprisingly Nice].
And that phrase, "Inspect the territory"... The translation surfaced automatically: Slang. It means shopping.
Man, having access to someone else's local cache is convenient.
"Coming!"
[Mage Hand].
Almost subconsciously, the mana tentacles originally meant for fine manipulation formed. But the energy supply behind them had no ceiling, and those invisible hands manifested as heavy-duty bulldozers.
Crunch—Smash!
The glass shards on the floor were ground into crystalline dust by the brute force of the mana. Even the expensive handmade Persian rug was "clawed" with deep gouges, and the whole mess, dust and dirt included, was shoved violently into a trash can that twisted and deformed under the mana pressure.
Hathaway looked at the trash can full of "glass powder" and the brutalized rug. She wore an amused smile.
"Since I've inherited your body and these 42,000 M-Units..."
Hathaway glanced at her dark, unlit eyes in the mirror.
"I'll make good use of this 'Lights Out' feature for you."
But before that, she had an infinitely more urgent problem.
The hunger in her stomach wasn't just banging gongs anymore; it felt like a black hole threatening to collapse her from the inside out. Her newly rebuilt body was screaming for raw fuel.
"Breakfast," Hathaway muttered, staring at the door.
A standard croissant wasn't going to cut it. Her stomach was demanding something with a body count.
To use the local parlance: she needed to eat a dragon. Right now.