The Lamp That No Longer Shines: A LitRPG Action Comedy Chapter 112: A Nuclear-Yield Healing Fireball

[Ti]: Sumr Break, Day 23, 01:10 PM

[Location]: Royal Rosas Club · The Revolving Restaurant

"Before we discuss what you are about to receive," Nino said, folding her hands on the table, "you need to understand the underlying logic. We will start from the beginning."

For Witches, the architecture of lifelong mana growth was ruthlessly rigid: biological [Growth Spurts] handled seventy to eighty percent of total capacity, and the rest accumulated slowly through decades of grinding complex spell models.

Between the surges lay the long plateau phases—periods where, unless you had decades to spare or biology's explicit permission for your next phase, the ceiling was effectively sealed.

"An [Encounter] is the only chanism capable of forcibly breaking that ceiling."

Nino tapped the holographic projection and dropped a set of statistical records.

[Historical Record: Among currently registered High Witches, 250,000 had mana reserves that barely cleared the diocre threshold of 4,000 after two developntal phases. Of these, 30,000 possessed a re 2,000 base mana even after their second growth spurt—a figure that, in a competitive arena where tens of thousands of units was the opening bid, amounted to arriving at a knife fight with a butter spreader.]

"They are now High Witches," Nino said flatly. "Every single one of them did the sa thing: they possessed the extre courage to step first into the uncharted.

"An Encounter is the concentrated accumulation of World Source Energy. But a Witch's body cannot directly digest foreign energy." Nino's finger traced an aggressive arc on the holographic screen, one circle swallowing another whole.

"The Inner Sea of Stars must first forcibly dock with the target dinsion. Only when our universe has swallowed the underlying laws of that foreign world will its stored Encounters be rewritten into a format we can rapidly absorb."

She swiped to pull up a new infographic.

"The rewards vary by world—so permanently augnt physical constitution, so increase mana regeneration, and others purely inject raw mana. But the resource the club has secured for you is an exceptionally high-tier variant. It provides a massive mana injection and triggers a secondary chanic: a [Spell-like Ability]."

"The bonus ability," Nino continued, "is drawn directly from the grand spell library of the Inner Sea. The World's Will sets a fluctuation range of no more than two tiers up or down based on the Encounter's attributes, and then deals the hand."

Hathaway sat in her chair and felt the impact arrive approximately one full second after the sentence ended.

That explained everything. Witches spent every waking hour tearing open portals, funding colonization fleets, and declaring war on alternate dinsions over territorial access.

This wasn't conventional expansion. This was [Server Assimilation].

The Inner Sea of Stars was a ravenous super-server—the mont it devoured a new dinsion, it laundered all that world's accumulated rewards and God-tier loot through its own source code and redistributed it to the vanguard players. What civilization could possibly resist a system that permanently buffed your base stats just by expanding the map?

"Regarding the specifics." Nino shifted slightly, handing over the floor. "Alucard will brief you."

At the far end of the table, Alucard set down her teacup.

As Co-Ruler of the Milan'thirskaya, she was the resource provider, and her tone was strictly business. Zero posturing. Zero ceremony. No "you should be grateful." No "the family extends this generously."

She read from a supply manifest that happened to contain items capable of reshaping destinies.

"The Encounter resource allocated to you today originates from an ultra-large folded space our family recently excavated—the [Gaia Dinsion]. The specific location is a [Crystal Cave] in Gaia's deep stratum."

She pulled up a holographic photograph.

The cavern glowed with a slow, bioluminescent blue—the color of sothing that had been accumulating in the dark for ten thousand years and had finally run out of room.

"This cave contains high-purity energy and precipitated Luck Principles. Guided by a supplentary ritual, it acts directly on a Witch's cellular mana units, forcibly remodeling the mana pathways in an occult sense. You need only remain in the core of the ritual for approximately ten hours."

Alucard looked at Hathaway.

"Your base mana reserve will permanently increase by an estimated 3,000 units. Simultaneously, at ritual completion, you will receive one draw from the spell library locked to the cave's determined attributes."

At the head of the table, Tasia sat with both hands wrapped around her tea, saying nothing.

The Frost Lantern Cats distributed across her hair and shoulders maintained a faint ambient operation: two soft sounds from the crown of her head, a brief repositioning along her left shoulder, a small white tail adjusting its angle near her ear. None of them looked up.

"The cavern's determined attributes," Alucard concluded, "are: Water, Fire, Ti, Space, and Crystal."

Hathaway processed the sheer scale of the resource, and then her brain finally caught up to the tiline.

"Wait." She looked from Nino to Alucard. "I reported the intelligence at ten-thirty this morning. It is currently one in the afternoon.

"In exactly two and a half hours, you evaluated its strategic weight, bypassed the club's board of directors, allocated an ultra-large-scale dinsional resource, and cleared the administrative paperwork for my entry?"

Alucard paused her teacup halfway to her mouth.

"Hathaway," Alucard said, her voice terrifyingly gentle. "We are the board of directors. And as the person who personally processes seventy percent of the administrative filings for this institution, I assure you: I would rather manually pave a road to Gaia than generate one more piece of paperwork for my own desk."

Right. Hathaway closed her eyes. I forgot. Not oligarchic arrogance. Chronic overwork.

Rhode didn't wait for an invitation.

"Ti and Space are the only correct answers." She knocked twice on the table with the authority of soone who had already concluded the analysis and was now presenting findings.

"Any ability from the spaceti school doubles your survivability and positional advantage at the competitive tier. Absolute best outco. Crystal is also acceptable—it typically carries extre physical resilience or penetration properties. As for Water and Fire, those depend entirely on RNG."

Hathaway nodded, absorbing Rhode's breakdown.

Her ga designer brain had already run the translation: five attribute banners, two of them glowing with the specific gold of [Limited Rate-Up: Ti/Space] in large flashing text. Three of them considerably less exciting.

An inexplicable nervousness settled into her stomach.

The original Hathaway had possessed luck so catastrophic it functioned as a curse. This was, after all, the sa girl who had failed the basic Fireball potion ritual three consecutive tis purely because the weather had stubbornly refused to provide a clear, sunny dawn at exactly 6:00 AM.

Hathaway perford a rapid ntal inventory of her own experiences since transmigrating.

First and foremost: her starting spawn point. She had opened her eyes in this world as Hathaway von Ludwig, unconditionally caught by the terrifying safety net of her bloodline. The absolute, unreasoning Ludwig support had been the ultimate salvation of her second life.

And then ca the cascade of perfect RNG.

She had bumped into Heidi in the cafeteria and received a casual reading list that sohow cascaded into securing Victoria as her tutor and landing a job in Nino's lab. She had wandered into an underground black market strictly to buy a doujinshi, and accidentally walked out with one of the most operationally valuable pieces of intelligence of the tournant season.

My pull rate is actually SSR. I pulled the ultimate starting faction, and every ti the situation required it, the right person arrived. She gripped this analysis firmly. The original's curse ended with the original. I am a different transmigrator. The data supports this conclusion.

"Cousin." She turned to Rhode, locating the opening she needed. "Have you ever been through one of these?"

Rhode's analysis stopped mid-breath.

Not slowed—stopped. The two-second pause that followed was occupied by the usually unstoppable Ludwig Vanguard sitting statue-still, her deep red eyes executing a highly uncharacteristic evasion maneuver toward a point approximately four ters to the left.

"...Healing Fireball," Rhode said. Very quietly. To the wall.

Three full seconds of silence fell over the dining table.

"Pardon?" Hathaway said.

"Healing. Fireball." Rhode bit each word out separately, jaw tight, her gaze returning to center carrying the specific fury of soone who had accepted a personal wrong from the universe's underlying code and had not let it go.

Hathaway's facial expression managent experienced a systemic failure.

A Healing Fireball.

Rhode conjures a nuclear-yield fireball. Maximum kinetic energy, maximum thermal output, maximum destructive intent. It connects. It detonates. The explosion clears. And in the roiling aftermath of the flas—the enemy's cracked ribs knit back together, their chronic arthritis dissolves, their HP bar refills to full.

Not an attack. An enthusiastically administered field clinic. The most aggressive charity operation in competitive Witch history.

No wonder. No wonder Hathaway had watched every qualifier match and never once seen Rhode deploy a Spell-like Ability. Using that wouldn't be fighting. It would be running a healing service with an extrely violent bedside manner, and the opponent would co out of it structurally improved.

Hathaway bit down fiercely on her lip. Her shoulders were shaking. She was holding it inside by willpower alone.

"What are you laughing at." Rhode's voice had achieved the flat, dangerous register of soone who had moved through humiliation, through fury, into sothing that had calcified into a matter of pure principle.

Just then, a pale hand in a black lace glove placed sothing beside Hathaway's plate.

A small flower. Deep blue gemstone, small enough to sit in a cupped palm. It lay on the white tablecloth and emitted a faint, persistent vibration that felt, intuitively, like probability reconsidering its options.

Bella held her teacup, the eye not covered by her black eyepatch regarding Hathaway with the asured calm of soone who had already decided and was simply completing the transaction.

"[False Fortune]," she said, with the Gothic languor she applied to most statents. "When the wheel of destiny begins its judgnt, offer it a torrential sacrifice of your mana. It shall temporarily deceive the world's underlying laws, weaving a phantom veil of absolute luck across your soul."

A beat. She took a delicate sip of tea.

"Consider it a temporary cage around fate's arithtic. The abyss does not require a healing fireball."

Rhode produced a sound from sowhere in her throat.

Hathaway looked at the blue flower.

She had seen it in Bella's Settlent Day catalogue less than an hour ago, listed at the top of the most expensive tier. Because in the Inner Sea of Stars, equipnt capable of directly interfering with the Luck stat was so uniquely scarce that ancient families hoarded it like strategic cheat codes—not currency, not weapons. Cheat codes.

Right, the forr ga designer concluded with the quiet certainty of soone completing a proof. In this world, you can burn mana to adjust your gacha drop rates. Superstition won't save you, but pay-to-win will genuinely change your destiny. This is a fully operational, officially sanctioned pity chanism. I understand now.

She picked up the blue flower and tucked it carefully into her pocket.

"Bella. Thank you."

She looked around the table. "So. When do I leave?"

Tasia set down her tea.

She stood. With the movent, the Frost Lantern Cat at the crown of her head emitted a single soft protest, the two along her shoulders readjusted their positions with the weary professionalism of creatures who had accepted this as their life, and the one that had been asleep sowhere in her hair simply dug its claws in and refused to acknowledge the developnt.

Tasia waited the two seconds required for the colony to reach equilibrium. Then she looked at Hathaway.

"I will take you." The tone was the sa one she might use to say she would like more tea. "Now."

"Ah—"

Hathaway's mind went briefly offline. Now. As in: now. This is my first ti leaving the White City since transmigrating. I haven't packed a bag. I haven't prepared docuntation. I haven't even located the ntal loading screen that should precede a cross-dinsional departure.

Tasia did not appear to weigh any of these factors. She raised her right hand.

The air in the restaurant ignited.

Silver flas erupted without incantation, without preliminary fluctuation, without the normal gradual warming that preceded a spell model forming—just raw, absolute mana erupting from Tasia's palm at a scale that made the teacups ring.

The flas spiraled inward rather than outward, carving a roaring silver vortex directly into the spatial coordinates of the material plane.

"Taking the official portal involves queuing, mana signature verification, and approximately fourteen transit forms," Tasia said, looking at the vortex with the expression of soone considering a suboptimal route. "We will just smuggle ourselves in."

Hathaway stood stock-still.

"Smuggle," she repeated.

The word had arrived. It had not processed.

She turned her head and swept the table for a single functional representative of legal civilization.

Nino had pushed her holographic screen aside. "The military garrisons the official entry node. Standard cross-dinsional transit protocol requires over a dozen cross-border procedures and three quarantine verification checkpoints. The ti cost is prohibitive."

She paused, adding one highly comforting point of legal information: "If the Picket Guard detects the crossing, the penalty is a civil fine. A problem that can be solved with money is not a problem."

Alucard lifted her teacup in composed agreent. Rhode yawned. The Frost Cat that had been asleep on Tasia's shoulder opened one golden eye, assessed the vortex, closed it again.

Hathaway stood there and felt her relationship with lawful behavior chart a new, highly committed trajectory.

I have an illegal spell-mirroring technique with no cooldown currently queued for download. I am now about to commit unsanctioned cross-dinsional transit. I only joined this roster because Rhode explicitly told it was a legally sanctioned way to leech free resources. The gravitational pull these won exert on the penal code is consistent, docunted, and apparently contagious.

Tasia made a small "please" gesture. She stepped into the silver vortex without hesitation.

Hathaway took a breath, gripped the blue flower in her pocket, and followed her in.

The mont she crossed the threshold, all sensory coordinates dissolved.

No up. No down. No gravity. Ti stretched at the edges, unreliable, like a recording running at the wrong playback speed.

Beneath her feet: a path of silver light, Tasia's mana laid down through the void with the composure of soone paving a garden walkway.

Ahead: Tasia's silhouette, perfectly still within the coursing spatial turbulence, wings catching silver light.

On either side: a starless, bottomless black that did not feel empty so much as it felt infinite—the precise variety of infinite that, examined too directly, prompted the nervous system to file a formal complaint.

Hathaway kept her eyes fixed on Tasia's back. This was the correct decision.

"I saw on the news," she said, because conversation was preferable to the alternative, "that Gaia's developnt progress had stalled."

Tasia's footsteps continued their even pace. "Yes. The expedition team discovered sothing unexpected."

A brief pause, in which the quality of her voice shifted by exactly one degree in the direction of sothing a very restrained person might categorize as appreciation.

"At roughly 6,000 ters above Gaia's surface, there is oxygen. And above that threshold: sky islands. Enormous ones. Scattered across the upper atmosphere, connected by transparent rivers and springs that flow freely between them through the air in blatant defiance of physics." She turned her head slightly. "These river systems connect an ancient, highly complex teleportation chanism between the islands."

Hathaway's steps slowed.

"Our first expedition team attempted to row boats through the sky rivers," Tasia continued. "A current caught them. Teleported them into an isolated island containing its own enclosed miniature ocean—a contained world, structured along flat-earth principles.

"To return, they had to solve the teleportation devices on the island. Back to Gaia. Then back to the Inner Sea of Stars."

"And?" Hathaway said.

"And." A note of deeply experienced helplessness entered Tasia's otherwise immaculate composure. "This chanism is quite fun. The expedition team fell irreversibly in love with rowing, discovering new islands, and solving the teleportation puzzles. They beca hopelessly addicted to developing the sky islands. The infrastructure work on Gaia's lower stratum has been at a dead standstill ever since."

Hathaway stopped walking.

She stood on a path of silver fire above a starless abyss and let the architecture land.

She had spent seven years of her previous life designing systems exactly like this.

Multi-layered area unlock, hidden bio discovery, deliberate friction on the return path to force exploration rather than rush-clearing. This was not a natural formation. This was a complete, exquisitely tuned open-world sandbox map—either the deliberate work of so ancient civilization with a deeply personal sense of humor, or natural law having coincidentally evolved to produce a designer's ideal blueprint.

9.5 out of 10. Deducting half a point only because there is presumably no fast travel.

She caught up to Tasia without comnt.

They walked in silence through the void. After an unasured interval, Tasia stopped.

A second vortex of silver flas opened ahead—not carved, this ti, but simply opened, as if this particular fold of space recognized the keyring and stepped aside.

"Close your eyes," Tasia said.

Hathaway did.

The mont they crossed through, light arrived like a physical object.

Not the careful diffusion of the White City's engineered sky—the full, unfiltered output of a star doing its actual job. Hathaway raised her arm on instinct. Then cool air filled her lungs in a single breath, startlingly clean, carrying bamboo warmth and dry wood and sothing that slled like a mountain lake had decided to travel.

She lowered her arm.

An ocean. Not one—a stacked ocean, existing across multiple altitudes simultaneously, massive waves crashing and intersecting in open air between layers, each one perfectly transparent, refracting the sun into a thousand points of blue-white light.

The scale of it registered in the body before the mind caught up—the kind of sight that made a nervous system quietly acknowledge it had been operating at insufficient resolution.

"This is Gaia," Tasia said, standing at the edge of it, wings folded, as though impossible horizons were a normal thing to stand in front of.

Hathaway breathed.

They had smuggled themselves into another world.

It was, she decided, entirely worth the fine.