Release That Witch

After returning to her room, Anna threw a cluster of green flames into a wooden barrel filled with water. The water would be soon heated up.     

She took off her clothes and stepped into the wooden barrel.     

When witches wanted to clean their bodies, they came to Anna to help boil the water. After all, it was troublesome to fetch water from the kitchen. Roland was surprised when he found out. It seemed like it was difficult for him to accept the repeated usage of bath water.     

When Anna thought of this, she found it funny. For a commoner, it was difficult enough to clean his body once a month. Thus, it was very common to use bath water several times.     

He was not even aware of the great improvements in the witches' living conditions after he took them in. Anna shook her head. His Highness Roland Wimbledon seemed to be erudite, but in some places, he was... slow-witted. She had read many stories where the princes would participate in various banquets and parties since his childhood. They would be familiar with all kinds of women. A prince could be ignorant and cowardly, but he should at least be good at socializing.     

However, this feeling made her feel inexplicably secure.     

His Highness' head was filled with much knowledge that took her breath away, such as the steam-operated iron machine and floating stones on the water by calculation. And today's lesson—the world is made up of little balls, so tiny that they need to be magnified thousands of times so the naked eye can see them. Because of this, they are everywhere. Either for solid, gas, and liquid or for people, flowers, and stones, when broken down, at their core, they are all basically the same material.     

Anna found all these unbelievable. But how did her Highness knew all these?     

After wiping herself, she dried the dripping water on her body with fire. She put on her clothes and sat at her desk.     

In the center of the desk was a textbook written by Roland.     

There was a period of time before the Book of Illusion was finished, so Anna borrowed this textbook. She wanted to read it for a bit before going to bed.     

The book began with the common phenomena in life, before unfolding gradually like a peeled onion. Some pages were even illustrated with vivid and interesting drawings. Anna was so immersed in absorbing all the novel knowledge that she found it hard to stop after turning to the first page.     

While the pages in the first part were relatively simple, the latter became more and more difficult to understand. Take the chapter on temperature, for example. It said that the cold and the heat are the active reactions of those tiny balls. The more energy those tiny balls get, the more actively they move. From a macro perspective, the temperature would rise. If what His Highness said was true, would her green flames become many active tiny balls after being magnified?     

The candle burned to its end as time went on. After the flames wavered twice, it went out. Just then, the Book of Illusion was completed. The pages and handwriting became gradually transparent before disappearing altogether. Darkness engulfed the room until a green flame blossomed from Anna's fingertips, lighting up the whole room.     

Looking at the empty desk, she felt somewhat disappointed.     

Holding up her right hand, the dark blue magic was like a cluster of fluorescent lights, motionless on her fingertips.     

She wanted to give it a test. If everything was made up of tiny balls, could it be as tiny as a tiny ball? Anna closed her eyes and visualized the image of countless particles that made it up.     

The flames started to change.     

It changed from a droplet-like shape to a thin line. It became thinner and longer, before finally resembling a hair.     

Anna noticed the change, but it was not enough for her. She thought the hair was still much bigger than a tiny ball. It could become much thinner.     

Even though she thought so, it seemed difficult to transform the green flames again. The light became dim and the thin green light started to tremble.     

Perhaps they could not be stacked, but can be linked... Her Highness had once said that there was a fixed chain between the tiny balls. Maybe she could reshape them.     

The particles imagined in Anna's mind shook twice, and with a bang, the links were broken up. The fire particles were no longer connected to each other, but flew apart like stars in the sky. The green flames may have disappeared, but in her mind, they still existed in a different shape. In the vast darkness, after most of the stars fell, the rest of the particles reunited slowly. They lined up one by one, eventually forming a filament composed of stars.     

Temperature was an active matter, she thought.     

As soon as she got this thought, the filament began swinging, as if someone was holding a corner of it and shaking it. After the shaking, the undulation of the filament seemed unstoppable and ripples were unfolded along it.     

There seemed to be ripples in her world, where there was no clear outline between things jumping along this ripple, so was her magic power. She even thought that the first ripple plucked by her fingers was magic power itself.     

When she opened her eyes, everything was quiet again. The green flames were gone. When her eyes were adjusted to the dark, the desk, the wardrobe, the candlestick... the furniture of her room showed their shapes from their shadows one by one. The pale blue moonlight poured onto the floor through the window, mirroring a small part of the grayish white. Everything appeared to be the same as usual.     

But in her eyes, the world had become completely different. A dark filament floated in the air—Anna knew that she did not really see it with her eyes, but rather a different kind of perception.     

She pulled out an iron ingot from under her desk and placed it in front of her.     

The black filament abided by her will and wrapped itself around the iron ingot, quickly gathering. Like a hot knife cutting butter, the filament easily embedded into the iron ingot. Under the will of Anna, the temperature produced by the filament was several times higher than the green flames, but was limited to a very narrow range. Iron ingot soon broke into two. She picked up one half of it and saw the smooth cut. She could even feel its remaining warmth.     

Then she placed the iron ingot vertically, placing the black filament on the top of it. She then split a horizontal filament, making them perpendicular.     

This was a mathematical knowledge taught by His Highness in his lectures. With one point as the center, a precise circle could be drawn up using a tight line around the center. The area of the circle was equal to the line's length multiplied by itself and a constant.     

Anna controlled one end of the horizontal filament to bend down and form a right angle, traversing through the iron ingot to the desk. She then made it gently rotate around the center line. The shape and whole temperature of the black flames could now be adjusted, and those black flames composed of particles could be turned into any shape. The temperature of various parts could also be controlled respectively.     

After making a circle, a standardized cylinder was cut and shaped.     

Due to the fact that the joints were shaped too closely to each other, Anna spent a lot of efforts to beat it out of the iron. Just as the section before, the surface of the iron cylinder was quite smooth. Against the moonlight, she could even faintly see her elongated face reflected on it.