[Time]: Day 3 of Enrollment, 2:15 PM
[Location]: Yggdrasil Academy · Dormitory [Golden Bough] · Room 302
If the first forty-eight hours of Hathaway’s new life were a comedy about a fish out of water, then Day 3 was a psychological horror documentary titled "Overclocking the Primitive Soul."
Director: Victoria Wellington.
Test Subject: Hathaway von Ludwig.
Objective: To force a brain evolved for checking emails, drinking coffee, and scrolling social media to run high-fidelity magical calculations usually reserved for supercomputers.
The room was submerged in the signature [Silent Black] of the Wellington family. It was a sensory deprivation tank designed to filter out the "noise" of reality.
The only light came from the ghostly blue aura of four floating spellbooks and the faint, rhythmic pulse of runes rotating in the air.
Hathaway sat at the obsidian desk in the center of the room. She looked like she was conducting a solemn séance, but her expression suggested she was trying to defuse a nuclear bomb with a pair of chopsticks.
"Process."
Victoria’s voice resonated inside Hathaway's skull through a telepathic link: cold, frictionless, and unforgiving.
Hathaway’s brain felt like a CPU whose cooling fan had died. Four independent threads, running at once, on hardware rated for one.
The first thread lived in her left hand: a crystal pestle grinding a wrinkled, ugly root in a heavy stone mortar, a [False Mandrake] off the Academy's standard training shelf.
Grind. Grind. Pause.
The ache in Hathaway’s chest was pure Inefficiency. She had bought a crate of these roots from the Academy Supply Store that morning with her startup capital, fifty Solars a root: pricey for a vegetable, pocket change for a magic material, and an insult every time she ruined one. She knew what the ugly thing represented. It was the cheap, mass-produced cousin of the True Mandrake.
The False Mandrake in her mortar could not resurrect a fly. What it had inherited, in full, was the hypersensitive temperament of the real thing.
If you ground it too fast? It spoiled.
If you ground it too slow? It woke up and screamed.
Maintaining rhythm... 60 beats per minute... Focus, Hathaway. You have 30,000 Solars in the bank, but that's for equipment, not for making trash.
The second thread sat behind her eyes, building a twelve-sided Dodecahedron Rune Model out of the A1 General Rune Manual and rotating it along the Z-axis at forty-five degrees per second, because Victoria had named the axis and the rate the way other people name a coffee order.
Don't drop the model. Keep the lines straight. Don't let the vertices collapse.
The third thread ran out of her right eye, which twitched as it scanned a floating page of A1 Universal Alchemy Standards, calculating in real time the molar mass of Dragon Blood (Type-4) needed to neutralize Red Mercury.
Formula: M = (ρ * V) / n... Carry the Mana Coefficient...
The fourth thread took her left eye and most of her conscious soul, and it was pinned to the thickest, heaviest book on the table:
A1 International Standard: The Ruthless History (Page 342)
The text she was reading was gruesome. It described the "Angel Wing Harvesting Techniques" of the 13th Century.
[Excerpt: Celestial Resource Management]
"Angels possess high-purity Light Element structures (Wings/Halos). However, their mana evaporates instantly upon death.
Extraction Protocol: The subject must be kept fully conscious. Use [Nerve Stimulation Spells] to prevent fainting. The brighter the Angel screams, the higher the purity of the extracted feather."
Hathaway’s "Human Operating System" flared up.
Kept conscious? Stimulate the nerves? That's torture.
How can they do this? They are sentient beings!
The spike was a fatal error in a multi-threaded system. It ate the fourth thread's bandwidth, that thread panicked and demanded more, and the brain, following emergency protocols, took what it needed from the second one.
CRASH.
In Hathaway's mind, the spinning Dodecahedron Rune fell. It was a phantom sensation, but it felt real, like dropping a heavy glass sculpture inside her skull.
Vertigo.
A wave of intense dizziness hit her. The world spun, and the first thread lost its rhythm.
Her hand slipped. The pestle ground too hard against the side of the mortar.
Skrrrt!
The semi-dormant False Mandrake Root felt the irregular pressure. Its ugly, wrinkled face contorted in pain. It opened its mouth.
"SCREEE—!!!"
A sonic blast, sharp as a needle, pierced the silence of the room.
Hathaway flinched violently, dropping the pestle. She clutched her head, the combined assault of mental vertigo and auditory damage making her gag.
"Fail."
The telepathic link cut off. The silence returned, heavier than before.
Victoria, who had been floating cross-legged in the air behind Hathaway, descended. She didn't look angry. She looked... bored.
It was the look of a scientist watching a lab rat fail a maze for the tenth time.
"Your geometry thread collapsed first," Victoria diagnosed clinically, her unfocused blue eyes staring at the empty air above Hathaway's head where the mana turbulence was still dissipating. "The collapse of the visual model caused a vestibular system error (Vertigo), which disrupted your motor control."
Victoria floated closer, her pale hand reaching out to pick up the screaming False Mandrake. She squeezed its throat casually, choking the scream back into a whimper, and shoved it back into the mortar with the indifference of someone closing a noisy window.
"But the geometry did not collapse on its own. It was stable." Victoria turned her head, her blurry gaze trying to lock onto Hathaway's face. "Something pushed it. A surge of chaotic emotion originating from your Reading Task."
She rapped the open History book with one knuckle.
"Did you find a typo? Or did the text confuse you?"
Hathaway hauled in air, forehead slick, brain sitting in her skull like a bruise.
"It... it says they were kept conscious..." Hathaway swallowed hard, her voice trembling. "It says we stimulate their nerves to make them scream brighter. Isn't that... isn't that cruel? They feel pain."
Victoria froze.
She tilted her head, as if she had misheard, and for a long minute the room held its silence.
Then she let out a sigh: the sigh of an heiress discovering that her investment had feelings.
"Cruel?" Victoria repeated the word as if tasting a piece of rotten meat. "Hathaway."
Victoria’s voice was soft, but it cut deeper than any shout.
"Are you truly a Ludwig? Or did your mother accidentally drop you on your head when you were an egg, damaging your cerebral cortex?"
Hathaway froze. "W-What?"
"I thought you were analyzing the efficiency of the extraction method. But you..." Victoria circled Hathaway, her voice dripping with academic disdain. "You were feeling Pity for the raw materials?"
"Your processing architecture is not just inefficient; it is Mortal."
Victoria leaned down, her face inches from Hathaway's. Her eyes were beautiful, deep, and utterly devoid of human empathy.
"You read data. You feel an emotion. You stop processing to digest that emotion. Then you react. Linear. Slow. Pathetic."
Thump.
Hathaway’s heart missed a beat.
"Mortals have singular, linear brains because they are short-lived weaklings," Victoria continued, unaware of Hathaway's internal panic. "They waste their limited lifespan agonizing over 'Ethics' and 'Feelings' because they lack the capacity to see the Big Picture."
"But you are a Witch. You will outlive three of their empires. Why is your brain running on Mortal Hardware?"
Victoria poked Hathaway's temple hard.
"Is your mind so filled with Ludwig muscle fibers that you can't run a simple parallel separation? It's embarrassing. You are processing reality like a village girl who has never seen magic, gasping at every little detail."
Hathaway sat there, frozen. Cold sweat trickled down her back.
She doesn't know.
She thinks I'm just stupid. She thinks I'm a "Muscle-Brained Ludwig" who is bad at math.
But Victoria's insult, "You are processing like a Mortal," was the accidental truth.
I am thinking like a human.
I am letting my Earthling logic clog the system.
If I keep acting shocked by this world... if I keep clutching my pearls at every 'Cruelty'... she will eventually realize it's not stupidity.
She will realize it's Alien Logic.
"I... I apologize, Teacher." Hathaway lowered her head, hiding the panic in her eyes. "I was... distracted. It won't happen again."
"Suppress it," Victoria commanded, floating back to her throne. "Treat the text as data. Treat the False Mandrake as a variable. Treat the Angel as a resource node."
"Do not 'Feel'. Process."
"If you fail again, I will assume your brain is defective and apply [Shock Therapy] to jumpstart your synapses."
Hathaway swallowed the bile in her throat.
She picked up the crystal pestle. Her hand was shaking, but her eyes were hardening.
Process. Don't feel.
Kill the Human inside. Boot up the Witch.
"Restarting..." Hathaway whispered.
[Time]: 8:15 PM (Six Hours Later)
This time, she held it.
The first thread was a metronome. Grind. Grind. The second held its shape and kept spinning. The third solved the equation. The fourth read the atrocities and filed each one under Inventory.
Hathaway had entered a "Flow State." Her conscious mind floated somewhere above her body, watching her own hands work, and underneath all four of them, in whatever space was left over, something had begun drafting a review. Punishing tutorial. No difficulty slider. Instructor unhinged, possibly the best content in the game. Ten out of ten, would install again.
She was finally reading A1 International Standard: The Ruthless History as intended.
"Report on the fourth thread," Victoria commanded, sensing the stabilization. "Subject: Resource Acquisition. Subsection: The Heavenly Plane. Summarize."
Hathaway didn't stutter this time. Her voice was flat, mechanical, efficient.
"In the Witch's perspective... Heaven and Hell are not religious destinations. They are... Open-Pit Mines."
"Continue."
"We invade Hell primarily for Rubies and High-Energy Demon Blood. These are essential catalysts for Destruction Magic. Rubies from the 7th Layer of Hell have the highest mana conductivity. To acquire them, Witches typically... exterminate the local demon population to clear the mining shafts."
"Correct. Demons are renewable resources; they respawn like weeds. And Angels?"
Hathaway looked at the anatomical diagrams again.
Angel Wing Dissection. Halo Energy Extraction.
The images were grotesque. But this time, under the multi-threading protocol, she didn't feel nausea. She saw Data. She saw Value.
"Angels..." Hathaway recited. "Unlike Demons, who are ugly and purely functional... Angels are aesthetically pleasing to the Witch's eye. Therefore, they are categorized as 'Luxury Goods' and 'Rare Materials'."
"Specifics?"
"Angel feathers make excellent quill tips due to their light-affinity. Their blood is a vintage delicacy for banquets."
"However, the most valuable resource is their 'Emotional Spectrum'." Hathaway read the text that had sickened her earlier, but now her voice was steady. "To take a creature of pure good, corrupt its mind, shatter its faith, and turn its tragedy into a stage play... this generates a unique frequency of 'Despair Mana' that is highly sought after for Enchantment spells."
"Teacher," Hathaway asked. Her voice was calm, but the question was genuine. "Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why do we do this? Is it... hate?"
Victoria paused. She floated to the front, her face inches away, blind eyes aimed a few degrees wide of Hathaway's, and the gaze stripped her to the bone anyway.
"You are still looking for 'Human Logic', Hathaway. That is your Ludwig weakness showing again."
Victoria tapped the cover of The Ruthless History.
"We don't hate Angels. In fact, we love them. We love them like a gourmet loves a rare bluefin tuna. Or a silkworm. Does a human hate the silkworm when they boil it alive to get the silk?"
"No. They just want the silk."
Victoria spread her hands, encompassing the thousands of books in the room.
"Witches are an arrogant, long-lived species. We stand at the top of the food chain. We do not have 'Human Rights' treaties with our food, nor do we sign peace accords with our livestock."
"This book, Hathaway..." Victoria declared coldly. "Do not read it as a record of morality. It is not a bible."
"This book is a Shopping Catalog."
"It teaches our descendants: When you need a Ruby, go to Hell. When you need a feather, go to Heaven. When you need labor, go to the Abyss."
"History is simply the log of where we found the best materials, and which species we had to exterminate to get them."
Hathaway stared at the book.
The title The Ruthless History made sense now. Ruthless as in ledger. The cold indifference of a Player scrolling past the NPCs of a server she happened to own.
Angels drop Feathers. Demons drop Rubies. Elves drop wood.
That's it. That's the world.
"I understand," Hathaway whispered.
And terrifyingly, she realized she truly did.
She looked down at the book. Her finger traced the next chapter title. The ink was red. The font was jagged.
[Chapter 22: The Purge of the Faceless]
The textbook of this world had queued up her own execution as the next chapter.
Ice-cold sweat slid down her spine. The air went thin, as if the tome were burning the room's oxygen to fuel its own history.
"Good," Victoria nodded, satisfied with the lack of empathy in Hathaway's eyes. "Since you have mastered the art of 'Dehumanization', let us proceed to the next case study."
Victoria’s voice became softer, almost amused.
"This one is my favorite. It details how our ancestors dealt with a species that tried to... imitate us."
Hathaway’s finger froze on the page.
A cold shiver, far worse than the False Mandrake's scream, crawled up her spine.
"Imitate... us?" Hathaway asked, her voice tight.
"Yes. Thieves who wore our faces. Parasites who hid in plain sight."
Victoria smiled. It was a beautiful, serene smile that promised absolute annihilation.
"Turn the page, Hathaway. Let me show you what happens to Imposters in this world."