Millennium Witch

Book 3: Chapter 235: Siren and Tertia

District One, outside the restricted zone of the Magitech Power Central Station, atop a building’s uppermost floor.Here, all was still and calm. It was not even raining. Looking up, he saw the thick cloud cover swept away by the airflow, revealing the starry sky above.

At the edge of the rooftop, a woman in a purple dress who had been waiting for some time gazed toward District Four, as if fixing her eyes on something far away.

After a moment, as though she had received confirmation, her figure flickered and she stepped into the central station. A blue orb of light rose from within her body.

In the next second, the orb expanded outward with her at its center. In a single instant it swelled to encompass the entire station, which spanned over a thousand acres, as if a mountain-sized blue glass sphere had been embedded into place.

Then, in the blink of an eye, the blue sphere vanished. Anyone who had glimpsed it in the deep night rubbed their eyes in astonishment, thinking they had seen a mirage.

By the time Hills Heller realized something was wrong, he was no longer in the break room of the Magitech Power Central Station.

He found himself standing atop an endless surface of water. Above was a sky of pure blue without the slightest impurity. In the distance, a pale golden sun cast a gentle halo. Water and sky were one, empty and breathtaking, yet suffused with a loneliness that made the heart quail.

Hills narrowed his eyes and looked around, grim and wary. As vice dean of the Elemental Sanctum and master of the Elemental Furnace, he had never imagined he could be dragged into another space so silently.

He knew there were those who could do this. Dean Tertia was one. He had once been fortunate enough to enter her book-scented Domain of Knowledge.

But this place was different. Vast and serene, yet hiding abyssal danger.

Puzzled, he watched the air ahead ripple. A woman in a purple dress emerged. She had removed the silver half-mask, revealing a beautiful face as expressionless as the deep sea. She said, “I am the Evernight Matron of the Witch Cult. You may call me the Mourning Songstress, ‘Siren,’ the Sovereign of the Sea of Cognition beneath the Goddess’s throne.”

Before Hills could speak, Siren pressed on as if in a hurry, her words coming with striking speed: “Now I shall act in the Goddess’s stead and grant you an evolution of life itself, a shedding of the mortal shell. Take it as an honor.”

As the water-blue world began to heave with waves, Hills felt a hair-raising pressure descend.

Without hesitation he released his Frost Sanctum. Ice-blue light spread outward, congealing the water beneath his feet into a hard sheet of ice.

“Since you have reached the divine realm, why not found your own faith and be a god, instead of serving another eldritch god as a lackey?” he said with a cold sneer.

As a Saint Mage, there was no way he could defeat a god-tier being within a divine domain. His only hope was that the dean would sense the unusual spatial disturbance here and hurry to investigate.

“I know what you are thinking,” Siren said. “Tertia will not notice your peril. Before I released my Regal Domain, she had already entered her own. That is the core of this entire plan. During this time, she cannot perceive external spatial fluctuations.”

At that, Hills’s face finally darkened. He did not know what plan Siren meant, but if she dared to act tonight, she would not have come unprepared.

A dozen seconds before Siren, Sovereign of the Sea of Cognition, dragged Hills Heller into her divine domain.

A gigantic brown orb, at least two or three kilometers across, burst into being over Magibeast Boulevard before the gates of Beast Spirit College. It appeared and vanished in an instant, carrying off every rampaging magibeast on the street, Daedalus included, along with the two godlike statues.

So, in less than a second, every crisis dispersed as if into thin air, as though nothing had happened at all.

Meanwhile, Yvette, whose true body was still inside Beast Spirit College preparing to perform a heart transplant on Anya, used her own Flesh Waymark and saw another remarkable scene.

The Flesh Waymark, which had mimicked the bronze statues, was now in a space that seemed free of gravity. Countless massive bookshelves layered upon each other, stretching up and down, left and right without end, crammed with all manner of tomes and classics. The magibeasts that had been drawn in flailed like drowning men in the weightless void, unable to move.

The Terrorclaw Beast King, Daedalus, was bound fast in a corner by golden chains fired from several open tomes. It could not budge, and could barely part its jaws.

“Thank you for your aid in minimizing casualties in the City of Truth,” Yvette heard someone say to her.

She tilted the Silver Witch statue’s face upward and saw a slender girl with short brown hair and round-rimmed glasses, cradling a heavy tome. She drifted down lightly from the top of an upper shelf and hovered at the statues’ height.

She wore a plain charcoal robe over a white underdress, a little dowdy, with the look of a girl hopelessly lost in books.

“Are you Tertia, dean of the Academy of Truth?” she asked.

“Yes.” The bespectacled girl nodded, light glinting through the lenses as she regarded the statues coolly. “I appreciate your intervention, but it does not fully clear you of suspicion. I hope you will drop the disguise and state your true identity. As long as you are not an eldritch god, I will take no hostile action.”

To be frank, using statues to impersonate two deities was already impious. She let it pass only because the act had been for good, and would help spread the gods’ glory.

Yvette fell silent for a moment and did not answer. She guided the statue’s gaze around.

This place resembled the dark space once created by Shadow King Vermeis, yet where Vermeis’s domain was vast, black, and empty, Tertia’s was stuffed with books, an endless library. Tomes floated up and down in the void, and all illumination came from small luminous stones set upon the shelves.

“What tier are you?” Yvette asked.

“You do not know?” Tertia sounded not mocking, only surprised. “This is the divine realm, a realm above the Saint Realm, second only to the True Gods. This is my domain.”

Yvette’s feelings turned complicated at once. Her student’s student had already reached a realm she had never even heard of. She was far older than her grand-disciple, yet she had not even stepped into the Saint Realm. It was hard not to feel dejected.

She even suspected she could not beat her grand-disciple.

Could she really prove her identity without reservation?

She even wondered whether Rosalyn’s apotheosis and her fall had both been tied to the True Gods. In these five centuries, had the current dean of the Academy of Truth been taken under a True God as well?

It might sound a bit conspiratorial, but with trust in short supply, she could not bare her origins to an almost entirely unfamiliar powerhouse.

“I am leaving. I will go elsewhere later. For now, take good care of the academy. Do not let the Witch Cult find another opening. This place is Rosalyn’s life’s work,” Yvette said in parting.

Tertia found the tone odd, like an elder instructing a junior. Who was this person?

She was dean of the Academy of Truth, a continent-toppling force on par with the Demon King. Across the entire Eastern Continent, no one dared claim to be stronger. And this unknown interloper dared tell her what to do, even dared speak her teacher’s name so casually?

“Who are you, really?” Tertia’s voice cooled. The entire Domain of Knowledge began to surge, books rustling without wind.

She could parley calmly here with this unknown bronze statue for one reason above all: within her domain, no one below the divine realm could leave without her consent.

Since the other party refused to cooperate and even dared call her teacher by name, she would have to apply a little pressure.

Innumerable chains woven of knowledge threaded out from the pages of certain books and reached for the bronze statues. These chains had an anti-magic effect. Once they bound their target, every disguise spell would fail and the true form would be revealed.

Yet at the instant the chains flew out, the bronze statue vanished.

To be precise, it shrank where it stood into a hair-thin tendril of darkness, then drifted away like ash, dispersing into her Domain of Knowledge.

Startled, she roused her domain at once, probing the area where the statue had vanished. No matter how she searched, she found not the slightest trace.

She fell quiet, thinking. The other side had controlled only the Silver Witch half of the pair, and in the final instant there had been a tendril.

“No, that is not right. It was not black,” she murmured, and her doubts deepened.