New Spell

After returning home exhausted, Jiang Han prepared the potion.

The process was as follows:

First, rinse the mixing tools with salt water, then rinse them again with clean water.

Add aromatic essential oil symbolizing water, then drop two pieces of charcoal ignited with magic into it.

Brush the fused, pale blue, cream-like substance that smelled of charcoal with a wooden brush, then wash it clean.

Pour in distilled water, pure malt liquor, and rum, in that order.

Then add the remaining ingredients according to the Witch Ternary Method: biological, botanical, and mineral.

Once she had finished, a clear yet indistinct sound of freezing rang out. The potion burned fiercely, yet froze at the same time, with high and low temperatures steaming inside the vessel.

Jiang Han hurriedly tossed in the papyrus on which she had written the spell model.

Sizzle... hiss...

The paper dissolved as soon as it fell into the potion.

The heat gradually faded. Steam formed by the difference between the high and low temperatures drifted out, shifting above the potion like several twisted characters entangled with and devouring one another. The characters were impossible to understand or decipher. With her limited knowledge, Jiang Han could make out only two:

[Drink me]

...This should be about right... Jiang Han nervously glanced at the instruction manual, then set it down and tugged at her ill-fitting clothes.

She was wearing a tracksuit that was obviously too big. Even though it had short sleeves, they reached halfway down her arms, and she had to roll up the long hem twice to keep it from looking like a skirt...

There was no time to fuss over the tracksuit she had borrowed from her younger sister. She had to get moving...

Wearing the tracksuit, Jiang Han stepped outside, took a couple of deep breaths, and began to jog in place.

The conditions for taking the Fear Spell potion were: jog for thirty minutes, then do fifty squats...

Good grief, this was only going to make me fear working out... Jiang Han sighed and began to jog with difficulty.

Honestly, thirty minutes of jogging only made her break a sweat, but those fifty squats... Yikes. They were brutal.

"Gulp, gulp... gulp..."

Panting, Jiang Han cupped the potion glass in both hands and took small sips. It tasted a bit like herbal tea, with a hint of alcohol.

An extreme, sweet, tingling sensation exploded from inside her brain.

A soft moan escaped her before she crumpled to the ground. One hand covered her mouth while the other pressed against her abdomen, where the tingling sensation was growing stronger. She curled up on the ground.

Delicious knowledge, sweet and impossible to resist, flowed back from her stomach to her delighted brain.

She sucked in air in great gasps, as if she were suffocating. A faint red, a pale peach hue, tinged her icy eyes. Her arches tensed, and her toes curled inward as if trying to grasp something.

The agony of feeling as though her brain would burst and the joy of receiving knowledge struck her at the same time.

Her vision blurred. The tingling sensations gradually sharpened and cleared, and she felt that something was invading her thoughts.

It was like a drop of ink falling into her mind.

But it had no effect on Jiang Han. She could sense her magic, an immense sea of magic that grew little by little with every passing second, swallowing up the foreign drop.

Then she understood what that "drop of ink" was.

"Knowledge..."

Knowledge brought delight, the delight of reason. The tingling in her abdomen spread again, etching the newly acquired knowledge into the witch's body. Jiang Han felt a new spell enter her spell library: Fear Magic.

Only now, after making a potion herself for the first time, did she finally understand so many things that had eluded her before.

Why powerful witches didn't make spell models for weaker witches.

Why witches rarely exchanged spell models directly.

Why both Archwitches and Weak Witches had to study and thoroughly understand a spell before they could learn it.

She understood it all.

When a spell model entered the mind, it had to be understood and studied firsthand. The spell models witches wrote down were the standard models in their own minds.

Studying a spell was like building a house.

Creating a model was like obtaining the key to that house.

If a witch used a model someone else had developed without fully studying it herself, it was like having a key but no house. Her mind would be empty, instantly filled with errors caused by the key not matching, which would then trigger physical harm... It was dangerous. And that was only a level-three spell. With higher-level spells, failing to understand them fully might make your head explode.

No wonder some witches didn't mind if their potion recipes were leaked, and weren't afraid of people stealing their modified spells... If someone only got the recipe without the research notes, they were practically signing their own death warrant... Stealing a spell could very well kill them on the spot... Jiang Han, still shaken, pushed herself up from the floor.

Her body was still tingling, sweet, and excited.

This was what it felt like to fully understand a spell, learn it, and then take the potion. If she hadn't completely grasped it, the feeling might have turned to soreness, pain, and mental fog.

Jiang Han was truly grateful to her mentor, Cheng Yu. Miss Cheng Yu hadn't rushed to give her, an Archwitch, magic that "matched her status." Instead, she had patiently picked out several level-two and level-three spells for her to study, teaching her every step of the way.

That had allowed her to absorb almost all the knowledge contained in the spells perfectly, rather than merely knowing how to use them without understanding their core, as she had when she'd first crossed over.

Because she had taken part in studying Fear Spell from beginning to end, she had learned it through her own research.

So she could use the spell incredibly smoothly, even more proficiently than Fireball Spell.

Her consciousness and the spell had fused tightly together. The tingling and lightheadedness still lingered, but her mind was growing clearer and clearer.

In an instant, Jiang Han had a flash of insight.

She raised her left hand and tossed her staff onto the table with her right. With her left index finger, she traced a V enclosed in a circle in the air.

Magic poured out and hung suspended in the air.

"Hit the mark." Jiang Han murmured to herself, staring at a teacup set some distance away with her icy eyes as she focused her attention.

Vmm—

An invisible ripple surged out. In her perception, she saw her magic crash like a wave against the teacup.

A faint, nearly invisible red layer appeared across its surface, signifying that the object had become vulnerable to magic.

Thanks to Jiang Han's powerful magic, the spell had developed additional effects.

The usual effect for witches was to use a burst of magic to weaken a creature's resistance to magic. But Jiang Han's magic was too dense; it could directly infuse that effect into a creature's body. Even objects could be weakened by this spell that reduced resistance to magic.

Creatures and objects naturally had some resistance to magic, in varying degrees.

Fear Magic drove a witch's magic into the target's "magic resistance," disguising it as one of its components and thereby creating a weak point in that resistance.

It wasn't hard for high-level witches to counter, but it also had advanced derivative spells, such as the level-five Weakening Shield and Spell Flow Explosion.

Regardless, Jiang Han had finally mastered a spell that could be used in a combo with her Fireball Spell. Studying and understanding it had also finally let her use her magic freely, instead of fumbling with it like a non-mage who didn't know how to wield magic even crudely.

Strengthen her defenses, form the roughest kind of magic shield, improve her physical abilities.

—She finally understood why other witches didn't feel cold when riding brooms. At first, she'd thought it was because of her body.

No wonder she sometimes saw powerful Archwitches enchant their staffs on TV, charge forward, and cleave their enemies in two...