From what she'd seen today, witches in general seemed to have very strange personalities.

They prized efficiency and yet were extravagantly wasteful, installing things like subspace rail shuttles on campus—a means of transportation that was pure overkill.

Yes, wasteful.

Aislen Witch Academy was enormous. According to the map, this place called a school covered a full 450 square kilometers, but it still wasn't so large that it needed this kind of commute. Jiang Cha had thought it over for a long time before reaching that conclusion.

They seemed to be doing it just to save ten or so minutes of commuting.

The energy it consumed and the cost of manufacturing the equipment were astronomical by the standards of what she knew.

Yet on the other hand, witches were extremely laid-back and old-fashioned in their daily lives.

They kept a lifestyle like that of European nobles in the Middle Ages. They liked reading and afternoon tea, and were willing to spend huge amounts of time on their personal interests.

The dilapidated Academic Affairs Office, for instance, sat in the woods at the academy's most remote northwestern corner. A long path led from the drop-off point straight to its front door.

From an urban-planning perspective, it was baffling.

There were no other landmarks anywhere nearby. In other words, unless there was some technical issue, the shuttle could've put its stop right in front of the office instead of making witches walk for ten minutes or more.

All the time saved by high-tech shuttles was spent on this inexplicable... sense of ceremony?

Or maybe just perverse fun.

Jiang Cha found it hard to understand.

But either way, she really was living in this bizarre witch society now, and for the foreseeable future—years, maybe even a decade or more—she had no chance of leaving.

Much less changing it.

So all she could do was adapt.

When the girl came out of the Academic Affairs Office, she was carrying three books, looking utterly bewildered and more than a little incredulous.

She'd mentally prepared herself for the witches' wastefulness and bizarre sense of ceremony, but she was still stunned: picking up textbooks at the office was self-service.

She swiped her access card, confirmed her identity, and a strange riveted machine with a distinctly steampunk look spat out three books.

They weren't some high-tech data medium she'd imagined, nor were they magical spellbooks made of parchment. They were just ordinary books, printed in ornate script and still carrying the scent of ink.

They weren't even written with magic quills. They really were made with nothing but ordinary mechanical components.

The technology required to cram the entire process of making a book into one machine was far beyond the world she knew. And yet the witches had used this high-tech contraption to make just three completely ordinary books.

'Witch society... really does waste things in ways I can't understand.'

It was one thing for a high-tech world to print books with ink, but did students really need to make a trip here to pick them up? The academy had a delivery service!

An Introduction to Witch History, Basic Magic Studies, An Introduction to Magic

Along with Witch Martial Arts, which wasn't listed on the timetable as requiring a textbook, these were all the courses first-years would study that year.

Since learning witch knowledge put a strain on their Mentalism, this curriculum should be just right for Little Witches. But for a student like her, whose innate magical power far exceeded that of ordinary witches, it would be quite easy.

'No wonder Senior Sinan said the first-year curriculum was easy.'

She didn't know the exact figure, but Jiang Cha could roughly sense Qu Sinan's magical power. It was at least in the tens of thousands.

Mentalism and magical power were closely linked, and a witch's Mentalism coefficient determined how quickly she could learn within a given period. So at the Witch Academy, it was perfectly reasonable to treat magical power as a simple measure of aptitude.

Of course, that didn't mean low-magic witches had no future. At least from what Jiang Cha had learned in the enrollment handbook, they could still make a comeback and gain higher social status by specializing in fields like potions or alchemy.

—Even if they chose to slack off, it didn't matter. The witch society's abundant resources could easily support a high-welfare society.

Though Jiang Cha still had absolutely no idea how witches had access to so many resources.

After picking up her textbooks from the Academic Affairs Office, the girl didn't head back to the dorm right away. Following the map, she boarded a shuttle and went to the library known as the Great Library.

As a transmigrated witch with almost no understanding of society, Jiang Cha's most important task right now was to get at least a basic grasp of more common knowledge.

So even though she was quite curious about magic and magical power, her rational mind told her to read some of An Introduction to Witch History first.

The Great Library was very quiet.

Or rather, judging by what she'd seen along the way, everywhere in the academy was sparsely populated except for the teaching and dormitory areas.

Aislen Witch Academy was one of the top educational institutions in witch society. But under its elite-education model, there weren't many witches here, faculty included—only around twenty to thirty thousand. The sixth- and seventh-year seniors were also mostly away on external internships.

Compared with its sprawling grounds, which surpassed those of many countries in the human world, the academy could practically be called deserted.

So even though this “library” was huge and its collection comprehensive, during class hours there were only a few dozen people reading there. Most sat quietly by themselves, and nobody spoke.

“Hello, welcome to the Great Library. I'm the librarian here. You can call me Mo'er. Hmm... should I contact the discipline team? Skipping class is against the school rules.”

She wore a brown witch's robe that seemed custom-made—or perhaps she'd altered it herself. Though the garment was loose, the modifications showed off the woman's explosive figure to perfection. Tight where it needed to be, loose where it should be. The few lines of cleavage, seemingly there by chance, stood in stark contrast to the loose lower half of her robe.

Her soft features carried a faint smile, and behind her glasses, her brown eyes held a hint of amusement.

Her bright purple hair added a touch of dangerous allure.

The perfect big-sister type.

'Oh! She's exactly my type!'

Jiang Cha wailed inwardly.

Maybe the old her would've been so nervous around a beautiful big sister that she couldn't get a word out. After all, her “common sense” contained a strangely large amount of information about big-sister types. But tragically, under the effect of her inherent magic, Jiang Cha felt absolutely nothing.

“Hello, Miss Mo'er. I'm a transfer student. I just checked in today, and classes officially start tomorrow.”

The girl gave a slight curtsy, then blinked up at her, putting on an obedient act. “So I wanted to preview my lessons today... Please don't report me.”

“Oh my, what an adorable new student. I'm truly sorry for mistaking such a beautiful young lady.”

Mo'er covered her mouth and put on a surprised expression, though it looked a little fake.

She wasn't even trying to hide it.

'Maybe she was just teasing me?'

“How about I recommend a few books as an apology? They'll help you settle into this academy faster—the place is quite different from the outside world.”

“As a transfer student, you must be struggling with that, right?”

“That would be a huge help.”

Jiang Cha patted her chest, letting out a small breath of relief as she put on a grateful expression. “Then I'll leave it to you, Big Sister Mo'er~”

The familiar form of address came naturally, drawing the two of them closer.

“You actually called me big sister? That's a surprise.”

She covered her mouth and giggled softly. “Then let me recommend a few books for my little sister.”

Mo'er seemed to know the Great Library's collection inside out. She only had to frown and think for a few seconds before drawing up a reading list for Jiang Cha.

“These are all books that fill in basic knowledge. They have the lowest level of knowledge contamination, so they're perfect for you.”

“Thank you so much.”

'Librarians are all secretly powerful... That ridiculous stereotype actually holds true in the Witch World.'

The girl had only thought there was no harm in trying, but it turned out that Miss Mo'er really was the unassuming expert type.

Anyone who recommended books to others should at least have read them herself. And considering the Great Library had more books than she could see at a glance...

Even if they were all supplementary reading for lower-year students, the contamination contained in them was more than an ordinary witch could withstand.

Jiang Cha didn't dwell on the librarian for long, though. It'd be stranger if the witch in charge of an important place like the Great Library weren't some hidden master. Even if it was worth building a good relationship, there was no need to rush. What she urgently needed right now was basic knowledge about this world.

With the help of the guiding sprites—sprites, as it turned out, had no fixed form. Some looked like ordinary animals, while others were just little blobs of magic.

They were fascinating creatures, each with its own personality.

With this little creature that looked like a lightning sprite to guide her, the girl made it to the seat automatically assigned to her by the system. It seemed the system took witches' love of privacy into account, so even with plenty of space, it never assigned anyone a seat next to another person.

She quietly began to read.

'I'm remembering things much faster than my common sense says I should.'

Twenty minutes later, Jiang Cha put down the book in her hands.

Thanks to a witch's extraordinary eyesight, she could read a page at a glance. And her brain, greatly enhanced by her inherent magic, could memorize every word without missing a thing and sort it into the attic of her memory.

The knowledge within became nourishment, gradually turning into understanding and building the foundational soil of the attic—that is, the girl's perception of the world.

In other words, Jiang Cha had fully digested and absorbed a book of tens of thousands of words in just twenty-one minutes. And as she grew more familiar with this way of reading, she'd only get faster.

From the first book to all thirteen books on the list, Jiang Cha took two and a half hours.

That was her limit.

And...

Real witch knowledge was even harder to learn than she'd imagined. Knowledge contamination really wasn't simple. Ordinary miscellanies were manageable; she barely felt any pressure from them. They only built up an unusual fatigue, considering how much energy her body had.

But when she opened a witch textbook with an extremely high concentration of knowledge, she finally experienced what this so-called knowledge contamination was like.

Every new piece of knowledge she took in came with a soft black mist that wore away at her Mentalism.

She couldn't resist it or stop it. All she could do was stop taking in knowledge before her Mentalism reached its limit.

Rather than contamination, it felt more like a curse.

—A curse from knowledge itself.