The heavy bronze pendulum clock standing in the ground-floor hall had not yet struck midnight, yet outside the shuttered windows of the keep, the frontier night had already plunged into an icy purgatory capable of freezing an unarmored man to death in twenty minutes.
Out on the southern perimeter, William had just handed over the night-watch command to Deputy Commander Iron Axe and stepped down from the concrete rampart.
Even though the one hundred and sixty credits he had poured into his Endurance parameter the morning before had raised his physical constitution to a formidable Level 14—densifying his skeleton to withstand impacts that would bend iron and turning his core into a biological furnace—his body was still made of living flesh and blood. After standing atop an exposed stone wall for nearly sixteen continuous hours in the middle of a sub-zero mountain gale, the relentless thermal drain of the Months of the Demons was beginning to seep through his sweat-dampened wool lining. He was far tougher than any mortal knight, yet he wasn't completely immune to prolonged hypothermia.
Fortunately, he hadn't needed to trudge the half-mile road back to the castle through knee-deep snowdrifts alone.
Right as his boots had cleared the bottom of the wooden access ramp behind the barracks, a familiar gloved hand had slipped out of the freezing air to take his fingers, pulling him straight through the invisible curtain of the Mist World.
Walking side by side through Nightingale's parallel dimension, the howling blizzard and the pitch-black snowfields were reduced to a silent, monochromatic landscape of shifting grays, whites, and soft black outlines. Bypassing locked courtyard gates and drifted paths as if they were smoke, the journey from the outer rampart to the heated interior of the main castle keep took less than four minutes.
When they reached the quiet, torch-lit landing of the second-floor western corridor, Nightingale released his hand and dispelled her veil.
Instantly, color and sound rushed back into their senses. The dry, radiator-like warmth of the castle's stone heating ducts and the comforting aroma of resinous pine logs burning in the hearths wrapped around William's chilled shoulders like a heavy blanket.
As William rolled his stiff neck and turned to thank his escort, however, he noticed that Nightingale's expression didn't match the warmth of the hallway at all.
Standing beneath the orange glow of an iron wall sconce with her white hood pushed back, the twenty-two-year-old assassin looked unusually pale. Her striking blue eyes—which had shone with such warmth and embarrassed laughter across the kitchen table the night before—were currently shadowed by a deep, haunting apprehension, and she stood with both gloved arms folded tightly across her chest as if bracing for a physical blow.
— "William..." — Nightingale began, her husky voice sounding uncharacteristically tight in the empty stone passage. — "Before you turn in for the night, we need to go down the hall to Anna's room. Based on the fluctuations I felt in her Magic Core when I checked on her an hour ago... I am almost certain that midnight tonight will mark her eighteenth birthday."
William stopped unbuttoning the top clasp of his snow-crusted cloak, his expression sobering immediately as he gave a slow nod.
He knew the exact weight of that milestone: what the witches of this world dreaded as adulthood, and what the readers back on Earth had known as the Day of Awakening.
Seeing that he didn't immediately walk toward the door, Nightingale hesitated for half a heartbeat, her gaze dropping to the flagstones between their boots as dark, unwanted memories surfaced behind her eyes.
— "During my years with the Witch Cooperation Association, I have stood beside a bed on a night like this more times than I care to count, William," — Nightingale whispered, her voice faltering slightly as her fingers dug into the sleeves of her cloak. — "It is never clean, and it is never quiet. I have watched girls I grew up with scream in agony until their vocal cords tore open and blood poured from their mouths. I have held their hands while their own Magic Power boiled their organs from the inside out and twisted their bones until their hearts gave up and they dissolved into black ash right in front of me."
A faint, involuntary tremor ran through her slender shoulders at the memory of those cold mountain tents.
— "Even when a sister is strong enough to survive the threshold, watching the Demonic Bite tear through a human body is a horrific, traumatizing thing to witness," — she continued softly, looking back up at him. — "You've already fought on the wall for sixteen hours today. If you want to go straight back to your quarters in the eastern wing and avoid watching what might happen in that room... I will completely understand. Nobody will blame you."
William didn't take a single step toward the eastern gallery.
Instead, he closed the two paces between them, looking down at the feared killer of Graycastle—who was trembling not for her own life, but out of terror for the seventeen-year-old girl waiting behind the door down the hall.
Slowly, an expression of immense, unguarded tenderness softened the hard lines of William's wind-burned face.
Raising his large, calloused right hand, he reached out with extreme gentleness and rested his palm atop Nightingale's head, lightly ruffling the soft silver-blonde waves at her crown the exact way he might comfort a frightened younger sister—or a girl he cherished.
— "Man... I know your entire history backward and forward, Veronica, yet sometimes I still can't figure you out at all," — William murmured, his deep baritone rumbling with quiet, unmistakable affection in the dim corridor. — "Tell me something: how is it legally possible for one woman to be this lethal with a blade, this gorgeous, and this ridiculously cute all at the exact same time?"
Nightingale blinked twice, her breath catching as the gloomy, funereal dread hanging over her head was punctured in half a second.
A familiar, rosy warmth crept instantly up her pale cheeks, chasing away the ghostly pallor of her trauma. She opened her mouth to tell him to take the situation seriously—yet just like at the kitchen table the night before, the sheer warmth in his dark eyes robbed her of her sharp tongue for two full seconds.
Sliding his hand gently down from her hair to rest a warm, steady palm on the curve of her shoulder, William looked her dead in the eyes:
— "Listen to me, Veronica: take those ugly memories out of your head and lock them in a drawer," — William said, his voice ringing with absolute, ironclad certainty. — "First of all, there is zero chance I'm going to bed while one of our people is going through a crisis. And second... Anna is not going to die tonight. In fact, she isn't even going to scream. Arthur and I have had her preparing her Magic Core for this exact midnight since the week we walked into this castle. She is going to sail across this threshold without a single scratch, I guarantee it on my life. Come on—let's go watch a miracle together."
His unshakeable, larger-than-life confidence acted like a warm salve over an old wound. Letting out a long, steadying breath through her nose, Nightingale felt the cold knot in her stomach loosen, and she gave him a firm nod as the two of them walked side by side down the passage toward Anna's chamber.
When William pushed open the heavy oak door at the end of the western hallway and stepped inside behind Nightingale, the first thing that struck him was how thoroughly the room had been sealed against the winter.
The thick wooden storm shutters over the window had been bolted tightly from the inside and covered over with two layers of heavy, floor-length velvet draperies to block every trace of the sub-zero draft. Across the stone floor, the wide hearth was piled high with blazing birch and pine logs, while two thick tallow candles stood in iron holders on a small table at the foot of the four-poster bed, bathing the chamber in a rich, steady amber glow.
More striking than the temperature, however, was the stark contrast between the scene in front of him and the canonical story William remembered from Earth.
In the original plot of Release That Witch, Anna's eighteenth birthday had arrived right on the heels of the first Hybrid Beast attack. Because she had been forced to burn every last drop of her stamina and mental willpower trying to hold back the breached wall in the original timeline, she had collapsed into a coma of total physical exhaustion—spending her entire Day of Awakening unconscious on a sickbed while Roland and Nightingale watched in helpless terror.
Here, the butterfly effect orchestrated by the two friends had rewritten the board completely.
Because Arthur had intervened from the rear watchtower with Level 10 Telekinesis and thirty-six steel needles the day before, the wall hadn't cracked, and Anna hadn't suffered magical exhaustion on the battlefield.
Instead of lying unconscious like a dying patient, seventeen-year-old Anna was currently sitting upright against a stack of clean linen pillows on her bed, dressed in a comfortable wool nightgown with a thick quilt pulled up to her waist. Her cheeks carried a healthy flush, and she was speaking in a calm, quiet voice with Prince Roland, who had pulled a wooden chair right up to the left side of her mattress.
Down at the right corner of the bed sat thirteen-year-old Nana Pine, her small legs tucked beneath her skirt as she held Anna's right hand between both of her own in silent, unwavering moral support.
Hearing the door latch click shut, Roland raised his tired gray eyes from the bedside toward the two newcomers.
— "You're back early from the wall, William," — the Prince said, his voice low as he glanced at the snow still melting off the hem of the Commander's cloak. — "How does the southern perimeter look tonight?"
— "Quiet as a graveyard out there, Your Highness," — William replied, walking over to lean his broad shoulders comfortably against the warm stone wall near the foot of the bed while Nightingale stepped quietly to the bedside. — "After the beating we handed those afternoon packs—and the crater that twenty-pound powder box left in the eastern trench—the common beasts haven't dared stick their snouts out of the treeline since sunset. Iron Axe has twenty marksmen rotating by the braziers, the few recruits who took bruises yesterday are already back in the ranks, and the boys' morale is high enough to melt the snow."
Roland gave a brief, grateful nod, a flicker of relief passing across his face before his gaze was pulled straight back to the young woman on the mattress. Even knowing Arthur and William's theory about the "pressure valve," Cheng Yan couldn't completely hide the mixture of scientific fascination and protective dread tightening his jaw as the final minutes before midnight ticked away.
As the quiet conversation continued around the bed, William's eyes drifted toward the far, shadowed corner of the chamber away from the fireplace.
Sitting alone in a high-backed wooden armchair, with one leg crossed smoothly over the other and his hands resting calmly on the armrests of his immaculate dark-gray wool suit, was Arthur.
Physically, the twenty-four-year-old strategist was sitting in Anna's room to observe the milestone; mentally, however, his dark, unblinking eyes were focused on the empty air six inches above the candle flames—his mind operating a hundred miles away from Border Town.
To Arthur, the medical drama unfolding on the bed was already a solved equation.
Four Weeks ago, he had diagnosed the biological mechanics of the Demonic Bite; two weeks ago, he had put Anna on a strict daily schedule of draining her Magic Core into the backyard kilns before sleep; and yesterday morning in the corridor, he had personally verified that she was emptying the "bucket" down to the last drop. Because her survival and evolution tonight were a ninety-nine-point-nine percent mathematical certainty, spending mental energy worrying about her pulse was redundant.
Instead, while everyone else stared at the bed, Arthur's Intelligence: 14 brain was coldly laying out the geopolitical architecture of the spring campaign.
Once the four Months of the Demons end and the snow melts along the Redwater River, Longsong Stronghold will fall in less than a week, Arthur calculated in the silence of his mind, his gloved index finger tapping an almost imperceptible rhythm against the dark wood of the armrest. With Ambassador Petrov having returned empty-handed from the wall and Timothy's royal summons on the way from King's City, Duke Ryan and the Six Great Families will inevitably muster their feudal levies and march east to crush Roland by force.
Against thirty flintlock rifles, the revolving-cylinder carbines Roland was currently sketching, and four twelve-pounder field cannons fueled by corned black powder, Duke Ryan's armored knights wouldn't even survive the opening twenty minutes of the battle.
Winning the battle is trivial; the true strategic question is who manages the territory afterward, Arthur mused, his dark eyes narrowing slightly in the dim light.
He recalled the exact administrative mistake Prince Roland had made at that juncture in the original webnovel. Because Roland didn't have enough trained civil servants in Border Town to directly govern a massive population center like Longsong Stronghold while simultaneously defending against King Timothy's eastern armies, Roland had taken a shortcut: he had installed Ambassador Petrov Hull as the acting puppet governor of the Western Region to appease the surviving local nobility.
To a corporate restructuring specialist like Arthur, putting Petrov Hull in charge of Longsong Stronghold was a masterclass in administrative incompetence.
Petrov was a vain, indecisive middle-management opportunist whose spine turned to jelly under pressure—and worse, he remained constantly compromised and blackmailed by his own greedy father and the Honeysuckle family backroom deals. Leaving Longsong's vast iron foundries, tax revenues, and agricultural estates in Petrov's trembling hands had resulted in months of bureaucratic drag, corruption, and delayed troop mobilization.
Should I step in and claim the governorship of Longsong Stronghold for myself once Duke Ryan's head hits the dirt? Arthur weighed the option on an internal balance sheet. As 'Count Arthur,' I already hold the noble rank required to rule a stronghold without triggering a revolt among the minor lords. Backed by Level 14 Telekinesis to quietly assassinate any nobleman who drags his feet, and applying modern corporate auditing to their estates, I could purge the Six Families root and branch and turn Longsong Stronghold into an industrial juggernaut in under six months.
For ten seconds, the prospect of commanding his own private city-state was deeply tempting.
Then, with cold objectivity, Arthur examined the flip side of the ledger.
No. Taking the governorship of Longsong in person is a trap, Arthur concluded, rejecting the move. Governing a conquered feudal city forty miles upriver would tie me down with sixteen hours a day of mundane municipal administration, peasant tax disputes, and noble babysitting. More importantly, it would physically remove me from Border Town—separating me from the laboratory where Roland's advanced weapons are born, and pulling me away from the incoming witches of the Association right as their powers evolve.
A true shadow architect didn't sit on a regional throne in the provinces where everyone could see him; he stayed right beside the King's ear in the capital center.
Let Petrov Hull keep his puppet title in Longsong for a few months as a useful public lightning rod, Arthur decided, locking the spring strategy into place. I will simply place two of my own audited clerks inside his treasury to siphon the stronghold's wealth straight into Border Town, while I remain right here in the shadows of the castle—free to harvest System credits and monopolize the real power.
Before Arthur could move on to calculating the naval logistics for the eastern river campaign, a sharp, urgent voice sliced straight through the quiet bedroom:
— "It's starting!" —
Nightingale stood rigid beside the head of the bed, her gloved hands hovering an inch above the mattress as her blue eyes dilated with intense magical focus.
Instantly, the conversation around the bed died, and even the air inside the hermetically sealed stone chamber seemed to drop ten degrees in a single heartbeat.
To Roland, William, and Arthur, nothing visible had yet changed on the outside of the blanket. Inside the hidden frequencies of Nightingale's magical sight, however, the tranquil, pale-white mist of energy that normally drifted calmly through Anna's veins had suddenly begun to churn.
The clock downstairs struck the first deep, muffled chime of midnight.
Right at the center of Anna's chest, the invisible vortex of her Magic Core abruptly contracted—pulling every wandering thread of ambient magic throughout her bloodstream inward at breakneck speed until it formed a dense, spinning cyclone of blinding light no larger than a closed fist.
The dreaded Demonic Bite of the eighteenth birthday had arrived.
Sitting in the wooden chair beside the pillows, Prince Roland's breath stopped in his chest; completely ignoring the sweat on his palms, he gripped Anna's left hand firmly in both of his, while little Nana squeezed her right hand at the foot of the bed. Beside them, Nightingale braced her muscles to pin Anna's shoulders down against the mattress before the girl could thrash and break her own spine from the impending neurological firestorm.
One second passed.
Three seconds.
Five seconds.
The bloodcurdling scream of agony that Nightingale had braced her soul to hear never came.
Propped up against her pillows, Anna didn't arch her back off the mattress, blood didn't boil out through her pores, and her eyes didn't roll back in her head.
Instead, the seventeen—now eighteen-year-old—witch simply knitted her eyebrows together in a slight, concentrated frown, let out a single, low grunt in the back of her throat as if someone had pressed a thumb firmly against her sternum, and squeezed Roland's fingers tightly for two heartbeats.
Just as Arthur and William had promised from the very first day in the dungeon, the "curse" of the Demonic Bite wasn't the devil claiming a soul—it was pure fluid mechanics.
Because Anna had faithfully stood in the backyard drying shed for two hours earlier that evening, pouring every single drop of her Magic Power into baking cement clinker until her internal "bucket" was completely dry, the sudden, violent expansion of her maturing Magic Core met zero stagnant pressure inside her meridians!
With no backed-up energy to rupture her nerve endings or boil her blood, the surging tsunami of adult power simply flooded smoothly into the empty, pre-conditioned channels of her body. Anna felt only a brief, sharp twinge of internal heat beneath her ribs—and instead of fighting the surge in terror as untrained witches did, her calm, scientific mind welcomed the flow and guided it straight into her core.
While her physical body remained completely unharmed, however, the sheer density of the magical evolution taking place inside her chest began to warp the physical laws of the sealed bedroom around them.
Down on the small table at the foot of the bed, the yellow-orange flames of the two thick tallow candles—which had been burning straight and motionless in the draftless air—suddenly began to dance and whip violently from side to side as if caught in a localized whirlwind.
Over in the stone fireplace, the roaring pine logs abruptly stopped crackling.
Slowly, surrealistically, the bright amber light filling the chamber began to dim. The long shadows cast by the bedposts and the chairs stretched across the flagstones, leaning inward toward the center of the bed as though the very photons of light and thermal energy in the room were being sucked backward into the candle wicks and toward Anna's chest.
And then, right before the wide, astonished eyes of Prince Roland, Nana, and Nightingale, the spectrum of the fire inverted.
Fwoooosh.
Without a single pop of resin, both the two candle flames at the foot of the bed and the entire blazing hearth across the room lost every trace of red, yellow, and orange—turning in the blink of an eye into a breathtaking, incandescent emerald green.
The entire stone bedroom was plunged into a vibrant, ghostly jade luminosity that looked as though they had all been transported to the bottom of a sunlit tropical sea. Around the bed, Roland, Nana, and Nightingale glanced from the green fireplace to each other's jade-lit faces in stunned, silent awe.
Against the pillows, Anna let out a long, deep, completely relaxed sigh—the last trace of tension melting out of her small shoulders as the roaring cyclone inside her chest settled into a serene, bottomless ocean of power.
As the emerald flames in the candles stabilized into a pure, hypnotic glow, Anna slowly opened her eyes.
Her crystal-clear blue irises reflected the brilliant green firelight of the room, shining with a calm, lucid tranquility that shattered four hundred years of terrifying Church legends once and for all.
— "Anna...?" — Roland whispered, his voice thick with overwhelming relief and sheer disbelief as he leaned over the edge of the mattress. — "Is it over? How do you feel? Does anything hurt?"
Anna didn't answer him with words right away.
Turning her head toward the Prince, she offered him a quiet, radiant smile, slipped her right hand gently out from Nana's grasp, and held her small, calloused palm open in the air twelve inches between their faces.
With a sound no louder than a soft, contented exhale, a dense sphere of emerald-green fire bloomed directly above the skin of her palm.
It didn't roar, it didn't spit sparks, and it didn't give off a single wisp of black smoke. Even more remarkably, unlike her old orange-green flame—which had always radiated a blistering wave of dry heat that made the air shimmer five feet away—this new jade fire swirled and danced over her fingers in complete silence, its energy condensed and locked within an invisible boundary of absolute molecular control.
Roland stared at the spinning emerald blaze six inches from his nose, the nineteenth-century mechanical engineer inside him completely captivated.
Even though his brain knew that green fire in Anna's old state could melt cast iron into soup in seconds, he couldn't feel a single degree of destructive radiation coming off her hand—and when his eyes met Anna's encouraging, unblinking gaze, he understood without a word being spoken that she was inviting him to test it.
Driven by an irresistible scientific curiosity, Roland hesitated for half a heartbeat. Then, moving slowly and deliberately while Nightingale gasped softly behind him, the Prince raised his right hand and pushed the tip of his bare index finger straight into the dead center of the emerald flame.
Across the room, everyone held their breath. Leaning against the wall near the door, William crossed his arms with a wide, knowing grin, while over in the shadowed corner armchair, Arthur finally returned his focus to the present, leaning his chin lightly on his gloved knuckles to observe the thermodynamic control in action.
The searing agony of blistered skin that any normal human instinct expected never occurred.
As the emerald-green fire wrapped completely around Roland's finger, the Prince's gray eyes widened in sheer amazement.
The evolved flame didn't just fail to burn him; it possessed an astonishing, almost tactile physical density. Moving his fingertip slightly inside the green core felt exactly like dipping his hand into a bowl of thick, velvety, spring-warm water—a gentle, thirty-eight-degree current of pure kinetic energy that caressed his skin with soothing warmth while obeying Anna's mental thermostat down to the tenth of a degree.
— "Incredible..." — Roland breathed, watching the jade ribbons curl harmlessly around his knuckle. — "Complete macroscopic separation of thermal energy and plasma density... You aren't just releasing heat anymore, Anna. You are dictating the exact velocity of every single molecule inside the field."
— "Because I emptied the bucket every night just as Sir Arthur and Commander William instructed, the new power didn't hurt at all when it arrived, Your Highness," — Anna said softly, her blue eyes shining with quiet pride as she closed her fingers and let the green flame vanish cleanly back into her skin. — "Now, I can make my fire as warm as bathwater... or hot enough to melt any stone or metal in this world without losing a single drop of heat to the air around it."
Standing behind the Prince's chair, Nightingale stared down at the unharmed eighteen-year-old girl on the bed, her gloved hand rising unconsciously to touch the center of her own chest as a wave of profound, breathtaking hope washed over her.
For four hundred years, every witch on this continent had lived under the shadow of a ticking executioner's clock, believing that their eighteenth birthday was a coin toss with hell itself.
And tonight, in a warm stone room in Border Town, two men from another world had turned that ancient curse into a harmless stepping stone—giving birth to the Heart of Fire, and handing the witches of Graycastle the key to their own salvation.