What was it like to live in a cell behind the Chanis Gate?
For most unaffiliated Extraordinaries, this was a question they'd spend their lives hoping never to answer. For Ais, the answer was: manageable.
During the day, meals were delivered by the Chanis Gate's internal wardens — three times per day, as promised, and genuinely decent. The food was clearly from a proper establishment.
While astonished that even a prisoner apparently got something like takeout, Ais couldn't help wondering whether she'd end up paying for it herself. Surely the church's benefits package didn't extend to covering a prisoner's meals.
Though the wardens even brought a newspaper along with the food — she couldn't really complain.
The only legitimate source of complaint was the wardens themselves. Perhaps the stone walls dampened her perception; perhaps the wardens gradually merged with their surroundings as they spent time inside the gate. Either way, she could just barely detect the breakfast delivery in advance. But the wardens delivering lunch and dinner seemed to materialize behind her stone door without any warning whatsoever.
In this place — quiet as the afterworld — a knock with no prior indication, from someone who never spoke, had a way of making Ais feel each time as though her end had come.
At night, although the area beyond the stone door still gave Ais the uncanny sensation of being watched, the eerie, fear-inducing stillness behind the Chanis Gate also grew more intense. So as long as she used meditation to return both mind and body to calm, she could sleep perfectly well even in this unusual environment.
As for physical conditions — despite only a rectangular, flat piece of stone to serve as a bed, Ais's circumstances were far from truly austere.
On the first day of her imprisonment, she discovered the reason why the ice she created as a Witch didn't freeze her own flesh: her flesh carried the same kind of spiritual energy as the ice.
In other words: as long as she wrapped the surface of her conjured ice in her own spiritual energy, it was no different to the touch than stone. As long as she didn't deliberately direct the ice to break through that spiritual barrier, it could coexist peacefully with anything.
What could this ability do for a prisoner? Quite a lot, as it turned out.
First: a chair with a proper backrest materialized — actually more comfortable than a bare chair, even though Ais's ice was every bit as hard as stone. Next: a pillow. Then the bed stopped being hard. And if she found the provided utensils inconvenient during meals, she could conjure her own complete set — bowls, pots, ladles, chopsticks, anything she needed.
She also discovered that even without deliberate control, as long as the spiritual energy wrapped around the ice surface remained intact, the ice showed no significant deterioration from the ambient temperature — or from body heat. Even a hot meal couldn't cause the ice right next to it to visibly melt. Only the spiritual energy within the ice itself diminished slightly.
This suggested to Ais that what the ice absorbed wasn't heat in itself — it was the spiritual energy containing the heat. Which also led her to a theory about why the Witch potion provided cold resistance: her own spiritual energy, reshaped by the potion, could similarly absorb heat. This reduced her body's heat loss, and so she no longer felt cold. Her spiritual energy simply wasn't as efficient at it as the ice's.
More importantly: a full day of doing this consumed a great deal of spiritual energy — but still less than a single use of Mirror Double. Less than an hour of rest was enough to restore it.
Unreasonable as it was, Ais found it extremely useful.
The one ongoing inconvenience: the spiritual energy coating the ice surface slowly dissipated over time. Under normal conditions she could monitor and replenish it as needed. But every morning when she woke, she had to spend considerable time carefully extracting herself from the ice bed without damaging her clothing.
As for boredom — Ais wanted people to understand that she was fundamentally a homebody. No phone, no computer, no internet, no games — but she could sleep. And there were the newly acquired abilities and knowledge, and the changes to her own body, to explore.
In practical terms: for the rest of the first day and the following night — except for the time she was startled awake by the dinner knock — Ais simply lay down and did nothing.
Day two.
With the attitude that life had to go on and self-ending was not an option, Ais finally got off the ice bed and began studying the Mirror Illusion she'd previously dismissed as low-value.
The Witch stage Mirror Illusion was fairly simple: it used the reflection in a mirror to substitute for a target, making the target appear somewhere else within the mirror's range. For instance, making a subject disappear from observers' sight by using an empty image, or misleading opponents about a target's true position.
The reason she'd written it off was that Mirror Illusion could only deceive vision — it did nothing against an Beyonder's Aura Vision. And if any part of the target wasn't reflected in the mirror, that part wouldn't be affected. A person with only their head in a mirror's reflection would find only their head invisible or repositioned.
That said, Mirror Illusion could also be cast without a subject, making a mirror image appear in someone's sight from thin air. Once that image left the mirror's view, the illusion persisted regardless.
The spiritual energy cost was minimal. The symbols needed were simple. The visible effect of casting was very faint — difficult for another Beyonder's inspiration to detect. So Mirror Illusion was both quick and subtle to release.
What use she could make of it was up to her own imagination. Thinking it over, she concluded it could at minimum force an opponent to keep Aura Vision active throughout a fight — not entirely worthless.
After turning the idea over for a while, she started playing with it. Since Mirror Illusion deceived the caster's own vision as well — though she could sense whether it was still active — the results were a little unsettling.
Once the novelty wore off, Ais's attention drifted to her own reflection and she noticed something about her body that didn't seem right.
She'd been struck by her reflection earlier, when her face still only read as a plain face to her. But she now realized: even after more than a day, her hair retained its luster and her skin showed no change.
Her hair was still black and smooth. Waking from sleep, it wasn't particularly tangled — an ice comb ran through it without effort. She'd used a divination to confirm that not a single strand had fallen out anywhere in the room.
Her skin remained flawless. Even without water to wash. No blemishes anywhere.
If all of that could still be attributed to "not enough time yet," what was happening with her feet was genuinely remarkable:
After more than a day inside shoes, her feet were still pale, flawless, and soft — and when the shoes came off, there was no trace of any odor. The shoes themselves showed none either.
Ais had never previously considered herself someone who understood foot aesthetics. She knew her own feet from before — and even accounting for women being generally different, she hadn't expected the difference to be that large.
But looking at her feet now, Ais suddenly understood. And she couldn't help marveling at what supernatural power could produce — something that should only exist in two-dimensional art, now physically present.
A Witch's charm doesn't fade. The more she examined her feet, the more she understood what that phrase was actually worth.
Author's Note (this chapter): A Witch's charm doesn't fade. The more she examined her feet, the more she understood what that phrase was actually worth.
茶凉可续_ee · Zhejiang · 03-12 21:37 Mmmm, the Witch experience really is something.
恆指針 Does this mean foot enthusiasts can't be enchanted?(reply) 乄乄是我1741537451: Probably changes the endocrine system.