“Oh, right—look at me. I forgot my poor little darling has amnesia. Tsk, tsk, tsk. What a tragic, tragic thing.”

Maybe it was because work was over? Molin slipped back into her awful translator voice, her pitch rising and falling as if she were singing an aria to Dido.

It was all nonsense.

“So?”

Jiang Cha tilted her head, her big eyes blinking rapidly. Growing a little impatient, she interrupted Molin’s little performance.

“So, kiddo, if you’ve got time, go ask that old hag in the principal’s office yourself. I don’t know either!”

This time she had a Northeastern accent. Jiang Cha was starting to think Molin was seriously messed up.

With symptoms like that, they’d lock her up in a psych ward and throw away the key.

“Mm.”

Though Jiang Cha had already sentenced Molin to life in her mind, in reality she only drooped her head and looked dejected. Her voice sounded hurt, but with a hint of determination. Paired with her pitifully adorable face, it made Molin’s heart soften.

“Oh~ my adorable little darling, please don’t make that heartbreaking face. That old hag of a principal spends all her time slacking off in her office, so you can go see her whenever you like. For now, let’s get back to testing. The sooner we finish, the sooner we can clock out.”

This time, Molin had combined her translator voice with the tone of a slacking office worker. Cha Bao was curious what other tricks she had up her sleeve.

“I understand, Big Sister Molin.”

Jiang Cha nodded obediently, but she still looked down. All the energy had gone out of her.

“Good~! Now go left. There’s a door over there. Go inside, and we’ll start testing what kind of innate magic you have, darling.”

Molin looked extremely pleased to have been called Big Sister. Even her voice had softened.

......

Compared with the straightforward mana test, testing innate magic was much more difficult.

It was only here that Jiang Cha learned innate magic was divided into different types: Evocation, Information, Mysticism, and Force. Each type of magic had different characteristics.

But those characteristics only existed in the magic’s underlying nature. They affected its activation conditions and the direction in which it could be developed, but made no difference at all to how the ability manifested in reality.

In other words, if two Witches used the same fireball spell, one might have Evocation magic while the other had Mysticism. The spell’s power could be exactly the same. But after two stages of development, the Evocation spell would generally grow into the Church of Five Fireballs: a rapid-fire style that lived by the creed that more was better and bigger was better.

The Mysticism spell, on the other hand, was more likely to develop into the kind of forbidden spell people traditionally imagined: a one-shot style built around charging up one enormous attack.

There was no definitive answer as to which was better. It all depended on how the Witch in question chose to develop her magic.

But Jiang Cha’s magic wasn’t something you could identify just by looking at it.

Her inhuman ability to control every inch of her body’s muscles was merely a by-product of her power. Her tremendous physical abilities, meanwhile, came from her deep reserves of mana.

After a series of complicated tests, Molin was surprised to discover that Jiang Cha’s innate magic was, of all things, a fixed spell.

Well... she really wasn’t just saying the same thing twice.

“Your innate magic is hard to classify, but it’s probably a basic spell in the Mysticism category. Its official name is [Information Gathering]. Witches usually call it [Last-Minute Cramming].”

After having Jiang Cha lie down in a strange machine that looked like a CT scanner and gave off magical energy, Molin held a printed report and spoke solemnly, like a doctor.

“Plenty of people use this spell, but very few have studied it in depth, so it’s hard for me to give you any real guidance. From what we can tell, it’s just a little spell that improves learning efficiency. Little Witches commonly use it to cram for exams.”

‘So that’s why it’s called [Last-Minute Cramming]... It’s pretty straightforward.’

Jiang Cha stood up and obediently waited in place as she buttoned her shirt.

“It has an advanced version, developed by the principal a hundred years ago. It greatly improves Information Gathering efficiency and can even strengthen the brain to something like the level you’re at now.”

“But its mana consumption also became terrifyingly high. It jumped up five mana tiers and consumed mana all at once, making it a ninth-circle spell. Even a Grand Witch with deep reserves can only use it for twenty-four hours. After that, there’s a risk of having all her mana drained. The materials needed to activate it are bizarrely hard to find, too. To put it in terms you can understand...”

“In the Witch world, this spell is widely considered a project with huge development potential, a high barrier to use, and an even more ridiculous barrier to develop. Only Witches with money to burn would study it—like our brain-dead principal.”

Now that Molin knew what Jiang Cha’s innate magic was, she no longer had to worry that the newly awakened girl might take in too much unfamiliar Witch knowledge at once and end up a vegetable from mental exhaustion. Instead, she launched into lecture mode and talked without stopping.

‘My head feels... a little dizzy?’

The girl rubbed her temples, trying to focus enough to understand the knowledge Molin was explaining.

“But when a ‘high-barrier project’ becomes a Witch’s innate magic, it usually means it has enormous potential. Yours is especially impressive. It’s far more complete than the defective version the principal developed, and it’s become a permanently fixed spell. Maintaining it costs around 500 mana per magic-ring point. With your mana reserves of over 60,000, that’s nothing. You probably recover more than that automatically.”

A magic-ring point is a unit used in magic. It measures the shortest time mana takes to complete one circuit through a spell model. The term is also commonly used for fixed spells, since their magic-ring points are constant.

Jiang Cha’s spell had a magic-ring point of 2.31 seconds.

In other words, it consumed an average of 214 units of mana per second. For a fixed spell, that was practically forbidden-spell territory. Ordinary Witches didn’t stand a chance; the spell would drain them dry in a few days and kill them. Only a Grand Witch might be able to sustain it.

“Still, for now, the spell barely improves you at all. Other than developing your brain to a level I can’t even understand, it does nothing to improve your combat ability. If it still has no destructive power after you develop it to the second stage, our research institute would be happy to have a genius like you join us anytime.”

“I’ll put in a request for a high salary for you.”

Molin sighed. The academy’s Combat Witch squads were so short-staffed they were practically working around the clock. The Rift was entering an active period, appearing all over the world almost nonstop, and the monsters were causing trouble just as constantly. If Jiang Cha, a newcomer who’d awakened with Grand Witch Tier mana reserves, joined them, then in a few years the academy could expect to have another top-tier fighter.

But unfortunately...

‘This Grand Witch is still a sweet little darling with practically no combat ability...’

Jiang Cha had taken in so much Witch knowledge all at once that she’d slipped into a half-dazed state, her little mouth going “ba ba ba” without pause. Molin watched her and smiled.

She’d seen plenty of Little Witches in this state. There was no need to worry; Jiang Cha would return to normal after a while. Yes, “a while.”

“Learning about Witchcraft comes at a price, you know? My cute, poor little darling~”

Molin chuckled as she reached out and gave Jiang Cha’s cheeks a rub, patient as a seasoned hunter.

“We’ve got plenty of time. What little game should we play next?”