Millennium Witch

Book 3: Chapter 286: Got Emo

A few minutes later, in the endlessly layered, infinitely extending corners of the library, those shelves tens of meters tall began slowly shifting position, like giants rearranging a chessboard. Soon, a small platform gradually emerged, carpeted in something soft, with sofas, a coffee table, a tea set and other furnishings laid out. The figures of Shuanghua and Ice Rain appeared on the platform, becoming the only spectators for this spar.In fact, Yvette had only informed Shuanghua to come watch and absorb some combat insight. But once everyone was here, of course Ice Rain couldn’t possibly miss it. She wanted to watch the spectacle and, while she was at it, collect combat data—also very important for the church’s growth.

Looking at the two figures drawn apart to left and right on that vast, empty central area in the distance, Shuanghua’s expression was a little tense.

She still remembered how terrifying those overwhelming, unstoppable tentacles of Grandmaster’s were. Even now, just recalling them left her with lingering fear and a helpless sense of having no answer at all.

But at the same time, in her heart, Senior Sister was also an invincible existence—and that impression of invincibility had already lasted for over two hundred years.

So she felt the key was whether Senior Sister could withstand the assault of those tentacles, or find a way to break them.

With that thought, she suddenly felt a bit confused.

She remembered that the birth of a divine art came from one’s insight into oneself, others, and the world. It was both a long process of creative expression and a journey into the depths of one’s own heart, and the final stop of that journey would fuse into a mage’s soul in the form of a divine art.

Therefore, whether it was a divine-realm powerhouse or someone in the Saint Realm whose divine arts were still incomplete, the exclusive spells they created were always deeply tied to their life experiences and personal temperament.

But—

Why was Grandmaster’s tentacle divine art so dark, so terrifying, so fear-inducing?

She clearly didn’t have that kind of evil vibe at all, right?

Standing in the middle of the Knowledge Divine Realm, in an expanse of hollow emptiness where nothing existed, Tertia drifted down like a feather and settled, taking a kilometer of distance from Yvette. Then she floated the Nameless Book in front of her and gently opened it. Page after page of blank paper flipped on its own, and with them appeared countless rune circles around her, like an array of floating cannons, gathering scintillating colors.

“Grandmaster, forgive me.” Tertia said softly.

That was what she said, but the eyes behind her round-framed glasses were wide open at the moment, bright and shining, as if full of anticipation for the battle to come.

Yes, she actually liked fighting quite a lot. After all, someone with no desire to fight could never become an invincible existence beneath the True Gods.

Unfortunately, ever since she’d become the strongest on the Eastern Continent, she had never again encountered an opponent who could both fight her and leave her satisfied. The last battle that had truly stirred her interest dated all the way back to the era of the previous Blood Moon Demon King.

Now that she had Grandmaster, life finally had something to look forward to again. At the very least, she believed that sparring with Grandmaster would definitely be challenging, might even let her rediscover the joy of battle.

Yvette, far away, didn’t say anything. She just watched the dozen rune circles around Tertia and felt something rather familiar.

The next second, the same number of rune circles appeared around her as well, even matching the number and elemental types one-to-one.

So similar? she thought, and then poured a massive amount of elements toward her opponent. Tertia did the same, and very soon, in the kilometer of void between them, countless dazzling magical particles exploded, like a bridge woven jointly from rainbows and fireworks.

A minute later, this elemental barrage ended.

Tertia was the first to change moves. The previously complex multi-element spellwork became singular and pure, turning into a torrential downpour of golden light-points.

At the same time, the Knowledge Divine Realm went into effect. The other elements suddenly vanished into nothing, leaving only pure holy-element.

In this situation, the holy-light branch under Light-and-Shadow Magic would be infinitely strengthened, while all other spells—whether elemental magic or shadow magic—would be greatly weakened. Only a few types, such as force-field magic, could maintain normal effectiveness.

Yvette thought, I can do that too. Then all the rune circles around her instantly turned golden, firing dazzling beams of light that kept popping those incoming light-points one after another.

Tertia raised an eyebrow slightly. She hadn’t expected Grandmaster to also know holy-light magic, and even to wield the same divine art as she did.

She immediately changed the state of the divine realm again. In the blink of an eye, the holy-element vanished, replaced by dense darkness. Black chains emerged from the shadows one after another, lashing toward Yvette’s limbs.

Yvette instantly followed suit, counterattacking with shadow magic.

Very quickly, flame, lightning, illusions, plant-summoning—dual-element meshes, triple-element fusions—Tertia kept changing her moves, and kept changing the environment inside the divine realm to always favor herself. Yet Yvette could always adjust immediately. Whatever Tertia used, she would mirror; the cards in her hand seemed endless.

This made Tertia’s eyes grow ever brighter, flickering with excitement.

Although she had once fought the Blood Moon Demon King, that battle had actually left her quite unhappy. The Blood Moon Demon King refused to fight her head-on. The moment he fell even slightly behind, he retreated. Sparring with Grandmaster was different. Whatever she threw out, Grandmaster would answer and unravel. This was exactly the kind of fight she’d imagined between experts: you come, I counter, trading move for move, gloriously unrestrained.

At this moment, Yvette did not know that Tertia was already thoroughly hyped up. But even if she did, it wouldn’t have mattered. Her own mood had never fluctuated from the start—she was simply calmly observing the changes in Tertia’s divine realm and finally confirmed the gap between her two grand-disciples’ abilities.

If Shuanghua was taken as the baseline unit of a “standard divine-realm powerhouse”, then Tertia, on that basis, had added the ability to freely alter the divine realm’s environment, added a huge array of different divine arts, and possessed noticeably superior combat technique and adaptability—

Truly excellent, she thought. If she didn’t use Aberrant Mana, then aside from not knowing rune compilation, in pure mage ability Tertia was almost like a higher-end version of herself.

No wonder she had the idea of challenging the True Gods. It made perfect sense.

With that settled, it was time for the most important test. Her silver-white long hair began to dance, transforming into countless black tendrils that chased after the constantly darting and weaving Tertia from all directions.

Tertia had long heard of Grandmaster’s Shadowtouch by reputation, but this was her first time actually facing it.

By rights, she should have been more cautious. But she’d gotten too into it, felt she’d never fought so freely in her life. She pushed up her glasses and, instead of dodging, actually charged straight in. A dozen invisible barriers spread out in front of her layer upon layer, blooming like flowers.

“Grandmaster, I’ve already put all my defensive divine arts on the field—can you do the same?” she shouted, her pale face flushed with excitement, her eyes a little unfocused, like she was drunk.

Yvette did not respond. She fused thousands of black tendrils into one, turning them into a single sharp shadow and stabbing sharply forward.

In an instant, all the defenses shattered layer by layer like mirrors being smashed. Tertia stared, stunned, and by the time she thought to retreat and pull away, it was far too late. She instinctively raised her hands, her head jerking back on reflex. Only several seconds later did she blankly lift her gaze and see that the pitch-black tentacle, like a long, murky blade, had stopped right in front of her.

By the time they stepped out of the divine realm, Ish Island was already shrouded in thick night.

The sky was strewn with stars, glittering like scattered shards of glass on a black curtain. Seeing it, people couldn’t help but quiet down, emptying their minds, as if all their troubles were diluted by the boundless universe.

To fulfill her duties as host, Ice Rain tried to personally cook and put together a full feast.

But this evil plan was stopped by Yvette. With neither Abella nor Lucia in the kitchen, she would rather not eat than touch Ice Rain’s “creative” dishes—just as Italian people would never forgive pineapple pizza.

After that, Yvette went out alone for a walk, thinking about the future development of Ish Island and what new products she should have Ice Rain consider designing. By the time she returned, it was already past midnight.

At that moment, moonlight spilled over the small lake in the manor’s back garden, the surface rippling with silver light. She saw Tertia squatting by the shore, staring vacantly at the koi of various colors swimming in the water. The hem of her black robe skirt trailed on the ground, and her expression was a little gloomy.

Yvette knew perfectly well what she was sulking about—in simple terms, she’d gone full emo.

That wasn’t strange at all. After all, Tertia had been invincible on the Eastern Continent for many years, to the point of swelling with self-confidence. She’d come to believe that even if a True God descended into the world, she could still wrestle with Them, and she believed that down to her bones.

And then, in the span of just a few blinks, she’d been one-shotted without even knowing how. With a gap like that, how could her state of mind not shatter, how could she not start doubting her whole life?

But there was nothing to be done about it, Yvette thought.

She could have controlled how much Aberrant Mana she poured in, won in a way that wasn’t so absolutely crushing, but—Grandmaster had to have Grandmaster’s dignity.

Otherwise, how could she make Tertia believe that Grandmaster’s shoulders were something she could lean on?

The next morning, in the manor’s conference hall, Yvette began teaching Tertia a class on faith magic. Shuanghua and Ice Rain also sat to the side and listened in. One had long since learned it, the other would never have any use for it at all, but since they were already here—plus, Shuanghua could use the chance to avoid Ice Rain’s blazing, sun-bright presence and keep from being roasted.

This brand new field of knowledge quickly washed away the literary girl’s gloom from the previous night and brought her smile back out.

She had an extremely intense thirst for knowledge—otherwise she could never have created so many different types of divine arts.

And she had long coveted that mysterious faith magic of the divine race. Now that she finally had it, she couldn’t help but feel even more gratitude toward Yvette—and a faint, almost imperceptible sense of worship.

During the break between lessons, Tertia suddenly asked, “Grandmaster, does faith magic have the ability to extend one’s lifespan?”

“No.”

“Really.”

“What’s wrong?” Yvette sensed the shift in her mood.

“When I was organizing continental history, I found that the four Righteous Gods—the Sun God, Lord of Sky and Air, Sea God, and Death God—as well as the Eldritch Gods, have all existed for over three thousand years. Some can even be traced back seven thousand years. That already far exceeds the lifespan of the divine realm. So I want to know how exactly they’ve lived that long,” Tertia said.

She paused, then shook her head. “Before, I thought their method of extending life was tied to faith. But if it’s unrelated to faith, then maybe that’s just the divine race’s innate advantage.”

“Lifespan, huh—” Yvette frowned in thought, then suddenly asked in return, “By how much can a divine-realm lifespan be increased?”

“Roughly a thousand years. But that’s just a judgment Teacher made in the past—not something we can be one hundred percent sure of.” Tertia pushed up her glasses. “Before Teacher was born, the highest realm in the world was Archmage, so a lot of information is only an estimate, with no concrete reference cases.”

Yvette nodded, then asked, “I know True Gods and witches were both created by the sages. How did the Righteous Gods come about?”

Tertia shook her head. “No idea—but Teacher once speculated that the source of the Righteous Gods and the Eldritch Gods might both be the True Gods.”

“So it seems ‘gods’ really aren’t a realm, but a race,” Yvette said.

Tertia looked at her, lips moving as if she wanted to say something but held back.

Yvette knew what she was thinking and immediately said, “I may be the God of Serendipity, but I’m not the same as Them.”

As she said it, she suddenly stopped, having thought of something.

From what she currently understood, the biggest difference between the divine race and later-ascended divine-realm beings like Tertia seemed to lie in lifespan. The gods could live for several thousand years, even tens of thousands, as if they were truly immortal. Coincidentally, Yvette herself was also extremely hard to kill—she had no idea where the upper limit of her lifespan even was.

But she also knew that her abnormal lifespan was only related to her Godshedding and Black Tower Pharmaceuticals’ immortality project, and had nothing to do with the gods.

So, whichever way she looked at it, this was all just an interesting coincidence in the end.

Life at the manor remained calm and orderly.

The days passed one after another. From the bitter cold at winter’s end, across the warmer days of the spring equinox, they arrived at early summer in the Snow Country.

——

In this season, the Snow Country still saw fine flakes drifting down, but the weather was no longer so bone-piercingly cold. Snow and ice began to melt from the sun-facing slopes, merging into trickling streams.

Within the Snow Country, the Silver Witch Church was still conquering territory city by city. The Ritual Council was beaten so badly they had no power to fight back; they could only shut themselves indoors all day discussing things, hoping Lady Tertia would step out and say a few words to help them counterbalance this new church that had suddenly sprung up.

But things went contrary to their wishes. Tertia only made a trip to the Snow Emperor Temple, and then disappeared like she’d evaporated from the world—no one knew where she’d gone. The Ritual Council and the four great clans weren’t worried about Lady Tertia’s safety, of course, but without her help, the Ritual Council simply couldn’t withstand the pressure of the Silver Witch Church. In just these few months, the hair that had fallen from the old shamans’ heads surpassed what they’d lost in the previous decade, and they were already starting to consider whether to send envoys to seek peace from that young Throne.

Over on the Academy of Truth’s side, through the flesh-and-blood marker, Yvette also learned how things were going on Lucia’s end.

Anya had completed her task very well, screening out many lower-class commoners from the Outer Eaves District with excellent character. If they were going to develop a church in the Academy, these people would be ideal candidates for the first batch of clergy.

Lucia wasn’t doing anything particularly special—just attending classes as usual and taking part in Disciplinary Committee activities. She had originally planned to use winter break to visit the Snow Country and meet up with Yvette, but winter break was too short and the travel took too long. In the end she regretfully gave up on that plan and could only complain to Yvette remotely.

Very soon, overwhelmed by piled-up affairs, Tertia had no choice but to leave first and return to the Academy of Truth. Before she left, Yvette gave her a ring mimicked from a flesh-and-blood marker to serve as a communication tool.

After that, as it neared July, Yvette herself finally achieved a breakthrough. She completed the connection between one divine realm and another and created a spatial corridor linking Ish Island and the Snow Country.

This meant that from now on, even when she wasn’t present, the door connecting the two worlds would remain open. As for acquiring various resources, she no longer needed to play human freight hauler—she could just leave it to Ice Rain to handle on her own.

Without a doubt, this would be the most crucial step in the Silver Witch Church’s development strategy. From this moment on, all the previously envisioned approaches to development had finally, truly entered the pipeline.