[Ti]: Day 36, Sunday, afternoon → Day 37, Monday, morning
[Location]: Dormitory [Golden Bough] · Room 302
Hathaway woke up to her own quill jabbing her in the cheek.
The notebook had migrated during the night, landing open across her pillow next to her face. Her boots were still on.
The last page of Amora's decompiled logic tree stared up at her from the mattress: every variable resolved, the entire developer log finally translated from an alien language into executable code.
She peeled herself off the mattress, her joints popping in a grim reminder of her corporate-slave days.
But beneath the physical fatigue, her mind buzzed with the cold, sharp clarity of a Lead Systems Designer who had just pushed the final commit before a major server update.
Day 36. Sunday. QA Testing Day.
The materials from Hollow Mountain sat arranged on the desk. Hathaway slipped entirely into her ga-dev headspace, running the final asset verification:
The [Mirror-Spider's Prism Eyes]: Confird. Pristine. Looking at them felt like being surveilled by seventeen security caras simultaneously. It wasn't a bug. It was a core feature. Literally.The [Liquid Mithril]: Confird. Exactly three drops. She weighed the vial twice, treating it like highly unstable server architecture.The [Logic-Construct Fluid & Nerve Stimulant]: Confird. The silver cerebral fluid swirled with the distinct, infuriating smugness of an NPC holding a main quest item, while the electric-blue stimulant humd against her palm like a live console power supply without its plastic casing.
Spell model: error-free.
Asset pipeline: verified.
A fourth check would add absolutely nothing to the data and everything to her blood pressure.
She glanced at the clock. Thirty-eight minutes until the cafeteria closed.
Hathaway's stomach gave a hollow growl.
Right, she thought, rubbing her temples. Pre-launch panic attack successfully identified as a low-blood-sugar hardware error. Executing dinner protocol.
She left.
[Ti]: Day 37, Monday, 08:00 AM
Victoria was already at the small table by the window when Hathaway ca downstairs—a cup of tea at the perfectly calculated temperature, and a grimoire so dense with notation it appeared to have aged faster than the surrounding air.
She did not look up.
"The dormitory's baseline calibration ward is active," Victoria said, casually turning a page. "If the ambient mana readings spike beyond the safety threshold, the system response is automatic."
Hathaway paused on the stairs.
To anyone else, it sounded like a cold liability waiver. But Hathaway instantly decrypted her aristocratic tsundere roommate's encrypted patch notes.
She wasn't saying: 'Be careful.'
She was saying: 'I have the ambulance on speed-dial, the fire extinguishers prid, and the ergency rescue protocols prepared for when you blow yourself up. Go wild.'
"Understood," Hathaway smiled softly. "The readings will stay within paraters."
She went back upstairs feeling like she had just been handed a massive, invisible buff.
Brewing the potion was less like magic and more like compiling code with highly explosive liquids.
Salt water first—scrubbing every interior surface. Then clean water.
Formatting the hard drive, her inner developer muttered. Absolutely no legacy code allowed.
The coating step. She mixed crystal-clarity oil with prism dust, rotating the vessel slowly in the morning light. An iridescent film settled across the interior—not one color, but all of them simultaneously.
Multi-stream processing. Zero singular focus.
Rinse. Base liquids poured: distilled water and clarified spirit for maximum refractive index.
There was no 'Ctrl Z' in alchemy. If she dropped the next assets in the wrong order, she would brick the entire server.
Biological first. The Logic-Construct Cerebral Fluid hit the water, instantly reorganizing the mixture's color gradients with arrogant purpose. Then the Lightning Ray Stimulant.
Hum. The vessel lit at the bottom with a rapid pulse. It has a heartbeat.
Plant matter: a micro-dose of Vision-Fern extract. The botanical firewall. Just enough to convince her optic nerves not to imdiately trigger a fatal system-rejection when hit with overclocked data.
Mineral matter, last. She lifted the Prism Eyes with silver tweezers.
"Deploy."
She dropped them in.
The liquid detonated into light.
Not heat—pure, prismatic radiance. Every color in the spectrum refracted violently in all directions for four solid seconds.
Hathaway didn't blink.
Then: silence. The light collapsed inward.
The liquid settled into a deep, luminous clarity. It looked like heavily distilled logic.
Above the vessel, vapor rose from the extre temperature differential, tangling and organizing itself into floating holographic text. They layered over each other like aggressive error windows in a software stack running too many processes.
Five layers. Matching the five execution layers of Amora's original model.
[DRINK ]
[DRINK ]
[DRINK ]
[DRINK ]
[DRINK ]
Hathaway stared at it in disbelief.
Are you kidding ? A five-layer End-User License Agreent? With confirmation stacking?
"Hold your horses," Hathaway told the arrogant UI. "I have to do the tutorial ritual first. I'll click 'Accept' when I'm done."
The ritual logic for [Analytic Vision] was brutally straightforward: Force the visual and cognitive systems to forge a brand-new neural pathway under extre, overloaded conditions.
She clamped an incredibly sharp prism shard onto a stand, exactly thirty centiters from her face, catching the harsh morning sunlight.
The staring contest began. Twenty minutes. No blinking.
Simultaneously, she maintained a continuous, high-speed ntal math calculation to keep all processors red-lining.
Minute 3: Seventeen overlapping bands of refracted light were being delivered simultaneously to her optic nerves. It felt like microscopic scalpels actively carving her retinas. Hathaway gritted her teeth. User Experience rating: 0/10. Absolute garbage. Would request a refund on Steam.
Minute 12: Geotric halos began expanding wildly at the edges of her sight. Hardware adaptation process, or retinal detachnt dical ergency? She aggressively selected 'adaptation' and refused to think about the dical bills.
Minute 17: The inanimate prism fragnt... was looking back at her. Hathaway's fundantal trust in physics suffered a catastrophic crash.
Minute 20: Her optic nerves filed a formal labor strike. Tears stread down her face in a physiological flood.
Ti.
She violently broke the gaze.
The room lurched. Colors peeled away from their objects and redistributed themselves at slightly wrong addresses. She blinked hard while her visual system frantically flushed its cache to avoid a blue-screen crash.
Verdict? Core concept logic: 1 point. Playability: absolute zero.
After thirty rapid focal shifts—near, far, near, far—her eye muscles scread for early retirent. Finally, she tracked three erratic mana-orbs while reading the ingredient list aloud.
The ritual was complete.
Hathaway sat in the wreckage of her own visual cortex. She grabbed the brass bowl, stared at the fading prompts, took a deep breath, and chugged it.
The potion tasted like cold tal, a static battery, and a massive, violently compressed zip-file bypassing her tastebuds entirely and detonating directly in the region behind her eyes.
She dropped the vessel. It clattered against the floorboards.
Nothing.
Then—the server went live.
Her vision fractured—not into a blur, but into horrifying, agonizing clarity.
Seventeen simultaneous readings. The stress lines in the grain of the floorboards. The atmospheric pressure differential near the window. The color-coded mana-residue distribution on the north wall.
Her biological brain scread: NO! Hardware cannot process!
The ruthless power of the potion barked: YES! Force Execute!
Sothing dense and highly structured dropped into her mana ocean from a significant height, shattered on impact, and spread outward. The water took it in. All of it.
A terrifying thrill surged down her spine. The sweetness of acquired knowledge and the tearing agony of an overclocked brain occurred simultaneously.
And then—she understood.
Not just the spell. The entire magic system.
The house. And the key.
Building this from scratch—decoding the developer logs, translating Amora's handwriting, enduring every session where Victoria coldly forced her to rebuild her foundational logic—that had been the process of building the house.
The potion was rely the key.
A key that only fit this specific house.
If she had tried to cheat by downloading soone else's 100% completion save file without doing the grueling research... holy crap. The knowledge would have flooded in and found no architecture to anchor itself to.
It would be the equivalent of holding a complex key with no house in your brain. The mismatched key would frantically search the empty void, flood her mind with fatal error codes, and trigger a catastrophic physiological crash.
In this world, "bricking your console" ant your brain stem literally detonated.
She thought of Victoria. First floor. Sitting with her grimoire. Technically, absolutely not worrying about Room 302.
Just five days ago, Victoria had proudly labeled her a 'High-Yield Asset' to justify the relentless tutoring. Sitting here now, feeling the flawless architecture of the spell running smoothly in her mind, Hathaway didn't feel the old, corporate urge to calculate the exact weight of the debt.
There was no transactional panic. They both knew exactly what this was.
You don't sit up late debugging soone else's foundational code just for a financial return.
A quiet warmth settled in her chest. They had a very long ti ahead of them to navigate this bizarre world together, and Hathaway was going to make damn sure her tsundere roommate's 'investnt' paid off spectacularly.
Hathaway was on the floor. She leaned back against the foot of the bed, the sweet, clean numbness of a successful installation radiating behind her eyes. She activated the spell.
The world beca a diagnostic report.
Structural integrity of the floorboards: intact. Desk: micro-fracture at the left rear leg. Her own hands: mana conductivity elevated. And right at the edge of her vision, quiet as an unopened notification:
[NEW CONFIGURATION DETECTED]
Then the potion's energy finished processing, and she felt the tide co in. A warm river of mana flowed into her internal sea, expanding her maximum capacity. Like rainwater rejoining an ocean that had been waiting for it.
She pulled the [Ludwig Custom Platinum Mana Wave Detector] from her pocket and pointed it at her wrist.
She looked at the number.
Then she rubbed her eyes, checked the settings, and looked again.
The detector was not malfunctioning. Victoria had explicitly told her that a Tier 3 utility spell would produce incredibly ager mana growth. The primary value was the utility.
But the number on the screen suggested a completely different, mathematically broken interpretation.
With [Analytic Vision] still running, Hathaway turned her attention inward, tracking the potion's energy moving through her system. Standard protocol split the energy: one portion to the mana pool (MP), and one portion to fortify muscle and bone (Constitution).
Wait. Stop. Roll back the logs.
She finally caught the anomaly.
It was slow. Almost gentle. Like an automated script quietly rerouting a bank transfer.
Her eyes—those deep crimson eyes that had never once glowed—reached for the physical 'Constitution' energy with automatic precision.
They intercepted it. They violently reformatted it.
And dumped it straight into her Mana Pool.
No grand announcent. No glowing visual effects. Just a quiet, malicious background macro in her biological ledger that generated a number that absolutely shattered standard academic models.
Hathaway sat very, very still.
Day 1. Her very first afternoon in this world. Staring at her reflection in the Abyss Magma Hot Pot window.
These eyes have to an sothing, she had thought, buzzing with pure isekai-protagonist delusion. The Sharingan? Mystic Eyes of Death Perception? I'm going to absolutely dominate!
Then reality had slapped her. She wasn't an ani protagonist; she was stuck in a grueling, unskippable tutorial phase just to pass A1. She had abandoned the combat "cheat" fantasy weeks ago.
But she had been entirely, hilariously right.
The cheat hadn't been missing; it had just been starved. This overpowered background macro only triggered when she leveled up. Because she hadn't learned a single new spell until today, the cheat had been lying dormant, waiting for her to finally click 'Upgrade'.
Her non-glowing eyes were a silent, greedy toll booth. Every spell she learned, every potion she drank, for the rest of her career—they would secretly skim the Constitution dividend off the top and route it straight to her Maximum MP. Automatically.
Not a jackpot, her Ga Designer soul realized, her eyes widening. An interest rate.
Applied once per spell. Compounding forever. At Tier 5, Tier 6, at the high-yield windows—the dividend would scale with the investnt. Every. Single. Ti.
Just five days ago, she had felt a suffocating despair at the 10,000-Solar cost of re-brewing her entire back-catalog of low-tier spells just to fix her "lag."
She stared at the ntal inventory of every spell she'd ever learned with incredibly fresh eyes.
It wasn't a sunk cost anymore. It wasn't a penalty.
It was a massive, highly lucrative stat-farming loop waiting to be aggressively exploited.
Yesterday, hearing about Anita, the nineteen-year-old with 80,000 M-Units, had made her designer soul furious. But Anita was a natural-born stat monster—a freak whose base code was written with an extra zero by the devs.
Hathaway, on the other hand, was a dirty exploit-abuser who had just found a passive attribute-conversion macro buried in the ga's code.
They were two entirely different categories of 'Broken'.
"...I'm going to need to aggressively re-brew every single spell I've ever learned," Hathaway whispered to the empty room.
There was no wild, unhinged ecstasy in her voice. Only the profound, deeply satisfying relief of a grinder who had just figured out how to break the ga economy.
The version power creep, she thought, leaning back against her bed with a genuine, predatory smile, has not left behind after all.
A sound from the stairwell. Deliberate. Tid.
The door clicked open.
Victoria Wellington stood in the fra. Her gloves were precisely adjusted, exactly how they settled after several rounds of unconscious, anxious fidgeting during a long wait. Her expression was its default setting: cool, observational blankness.
She looked at Hathaway sitting on the floor.
Hathaway, with [Analytic Vision] still running, looked back.
For the first ti since arriving in this world, she could truly see Victoria's mana.
It was structured to an almost terrifying architectural degree—flowing through precisely maintained channels with zero waste and zero improvisation. The mana of soone who had spent years relentlessly forging a raw gift into a flawless precision instrunt.
Victoria, whose Mystic Eyes perceived the world as pure geotry, had presumably registered the new, complex matrix currently running behind Hathaway's eyes.
A pause passed between them, thick with approximately forty concurrent error ssages, all unread.
"Your mana configuration has shifted," Victoria stated. A factual observation. "I imagine it is currently refracting at the precise angle of unbearable smugness."
"I can see your mana," Hathaway said, her voice bright.
"Yes." Victoria's tone was dry, and faintly—deniably—warm. "I am aware."
She glanced at the empty vessel in Hathaway's lap. At Hathaway's face. At the general evidence that the floor had served as a recovery ward.
"Get up," Victoria commanded. "And comb your hair, Ludwig. Breakfast service ends in twenty minutes, and I refuse to be seen walking into the dining hall with a feral raccoon."
She turned and moved toward the stairwell with the exact posture of soone who had absolutely not spent the entire morning on quiet, calculated high-alert.
Hathaway looked at the five [DRINK ] prompts still ghosting faintly on the vessel's surface—residual mana, barely there, already fading.
She dusted off her pants, feeling a surge of quiet, absolute confidence, and got up.
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