Wild Growth in This World

Jiang Han had probed indirectly at the dinner table and finally pieced together the basic common knowledge of this world.

Witches had begun spreading wildly in 643 AD and gradually integrated into human society.

They possessed formidable military power and exceptional individual abilities, eventually becoming the dominant branch of humanity. Although witches in Asia, Europe, and the Americas differed in certain ways, those differences were neither that great nor that chaotic—no matter where one obtained a witch's diploma, it was recognized throughout the world.

The globally acknowledged birthplace of witches was somewhere near Eastern Europe, so witches everywhere carried, more or less, a touch of European Continent design. For instance, most Eastern witches wore witch robes and witch hats as well. Naturally, there were local characteristics too, such as qipaos, hairpins, hanfu, or the recently popular short robes and casual attire.

Humans were highly adaptable, and witches were no different.

In this era, the witch culture promoted domestically was only just taking shape, entering an extreme bipolar phase of both inferiority and pride.

The inferiority came from their yearning and admiration for Western witches. One could see it from the fact that most domestic witches began learning Western languages in elementary school and studying Western magic from childhood.

They revered Western culture and Western education—in short, domestic witches were curious about everything Western and hoped to absorb it.

The pride, on the other hand, was downright reckless. Unlike foreign witches, who favored tea parties and social galas to settle disputes, domestic witches possessed the intensely Asian cultural trait of throwing down at the slightest disagreement. In those days, if two villages had even the smallest conflict, they would gather every able-bodied fighter in the village, clutch huge fireballs in their hands, and charge in headfirst.

The police witches from the local station could often only stand by and try to keep either side from suffering casualties. Very few people were capable of mediating between them.

While many domestic Archwitches admired and loved foreign culture, they struck without mercy when it came to a real fight, and the nation's policies were just as reckless.

Even their slogans were absurdly bold: "Move mountains to make continents, fill seas to build bridges."

All manner of massive projects, grand construction, and sweeping development sprang up alongside those slogans.

Jiang Han knew that if this had been the domestic scene of the original timeline, the consequences of such development and construction would have been overreaching. Businesses would have collapsed one after another, and only after paying a hefty price in tuition would the country have finally stabilized and entered its golden era of growth.

But this was the Witch World timeline.

Out of the country's more than one billion people, seven hundred million were witches. They were all people with superpowers and extraordinary strength. The country swung its hammer wildly, and with such an ample number of witches, it had somehow truly bludgeoned its way into a new horizon...

Amid the blazing frenzy of development, if one witch was not enough, they sent ten. If ten were not enough—the local official would wave a pen and say, "Easy. We'll send a thousand!"

In a world without superpowers or witches, sending in those thousand people would probably have led to failure because their skills did not match the work and there was an excess of low-end labor.

But among witches, there was no such thing as mid-tier or low-tier labor. Aside from a handful of purely noble intellectual workers, all witch labor was treated equally; the only difference was how much magical power they could put out. So if they piled in a thousand witches, building a dam would take only ten days or half a month.

Take the artificial satellites foreign countries had just launched. Domestic witches would slap the table and declare, "Make one for us too." Their technology started from nothing, and so did their materials, but the country's expert witches came up with a crude solution: they assembled a team of five hundred Archwitches, rode their brooms beyond the atmosphere, manually built an ugly little platform, and stationed a twelve-member Archwitch squad there. Every month, another squad rotated up to take over, manually performing the role of a satellite.

In another timeline, wouldn't that have caused enormous problems?

But in the Witch World, crude methods really could solve problems.

For example, if a paper mill producing the papyrus witches needed could not keep up with imported goods technologically, they would simply send the Archwitches in personally to lead a group of witches. As long as their magical power held up, could imported machinery really outperform the work of noble rural women?

"One witch equals ten production lines."

"If there aren't enough witches, then send in the Archwitches."

It truly was wild growth at its finest.

The dinner-table conversation had long since wandered far from pets. One moment they were talking about witch advancement, the next about international affairs, and then they were even discussing gossip—such as how a witch from one family had laid an egg with a witch from another...

That was right. Witches were oviparous creatures. After two witches mated through special means, they laid an egg. As long as the egg was kept in the refrigerator for eight months and then incubated by a witch for eighteen days, a new witch would be born.

The witch in the active role was called the "father clan," while the passive one was the "mother clan." A new witch generally represented the finest evolution of both clans and would carry many traits from the father clan and mother clan, whether traits from a single clan or several clans. For instance, her younger sister Jiang Zhenling had inherited Mother A Ye Keshu's height, eyes, and part of her personality, while inheriting few traits from Mother B Jiang Xuan. The Jiang Han of this world had inherited Mother B's height, but also Mother A's facial features.

Because witches had a high egg-laying rate but a low survival rate, often only one out of twenty or thirty eggs could endure eight months in the refrigerator. Thus, witch families often kept dozens of their daughters' sister eggs in the fridge, casting a wide net.

That topic did not last long either, and the family soon moved on to witch ranks.

Foreign witch ranks were divided into more than ten levels, while domestically they were simply and brutally divided into two categories: witches and Archwitches.

A witch was comparable to a bachelor's degree, while an Archwitch was comparable to a doctorate.

Legally, witches possessed only the ordinary rights and duties of citizens. Archwitches, however, were genuine members of the elite class, officials who even city halls and provincial governments had to grant preferential treatment and special benefits. Like doctoral students, they could also apply to official institutions for various research funds.

The gap in combat power between the two was enormous. An ordinary witch might need to rest after flying her broom from City A in the south to some City B, while an Archwitch could often fly across oceans, build her own residence at sea, and provide ample reasons and evidence for the nation's claim that "this territorial sea has been an inseparable part of our territory since ancient times."

Her younger sister Jiang Zhenling also gossiped a little about the witches living nearby.

In Jiang Han's memories, her family in the original timeline had not been fabulously wealthy, but they had been middle class in 1994. They lived in a villa compound in a southern development zone and owned their own small two-story villa—when she was little, she had even misread the word as something else. Their daily meals consisted of four dishes and a soup, and once or twice a week they went out to restaurants for Western food. Perhaps because her family had been middle class, after arriving in this timeline, they had become the standard witch family of this world. Most of the other households in the villa compound had likewise turned into middle-class witch families, including their neighbors.

She remembered the neighboring family quite well.

Back when she still carried a schoolbag, the neighbor's little girl had been her secret crush. The neighbors were a family formed by an American and a Chinese national, so their daughter was naturally mixed-race. She developed physically better than the other children her age and possessed the delicate features of a mixed-race child.

And according to her sister, the neighboring family was still a mixed Chinese-foreign combination. The Western witch had come to China to develop her career, making her imported talent...

Although Jiang Han still could not quickly adapt to this world, her sense of immersion had deepened considerably. After all, many familiar things had merely put on a witch's skin before slipping in. They felt familiar yet distant, intimate yet strange.

The witch timeline of 1994 was a little savage, and a little reckless.