Release that Witch

Roland felt relieved while he received the message that the rescue mission had succeeded.

Although they failed to take control of the Kingdom of Dawn as a conqueror, after a little deviation from their original plan, the neighboring country at least overthrew the Moya Family’s rule and basically maintained stability. Before the Quinn Family could thoroughly gain a firm foothold, it would remain Graycastle’s most faithful ally.

Besides, Andrea was also in Neverwinter. If everything went smoothly, the alliance with the Kingdom of Dawn could at least last until the next generation.

Roland did not believe the third Battle of Divine Will would last for a century.

Andrea, along with the other God’s Punishment Witches in the expedition, was estimated to return to the Western Region in about a month. Roland intended to make use of this time to make a sound plan for Graycastle’s future development.

After all, with the destruction of Timothy’s remnants, the counterforce had temporarily disappeared and the kingdom was integrated in name. Although it would take some time before the secondary City Halls in the various cities to take effect and make Graycastle a highly efficient authoritarian country, he could already start to prepare for it. When the time came, the strength of Graycastle would enjoy an unprecedented leap, lifting it to a whole different level from the other three countries.

The key point in his development plan was to put the witches’ abilities into full play.

After all, they were the reason for Neverwinter’s high productivity.

Within half a month after Anna’s return, the city had enjoyed a series of changes, with the most prominent ones happening in the castle. His mahogany desk was double its former size; on the desk were over 10 wind-up telephones connecting with the Witch Building office, the City Hall, the barracks, the Third Border City, Longsong Stronghold, and so on. In case of emergencies, the guards did not have to run to deliver messages anymore.

Furthermore, the first public telephone appeared in the central square, connecting the city with Misty Forest. It extended with the building of railways and satisfied the workers’ demand to communicate with their families as they could not meet face to face over a long period of time.

Of course, the fare for using this telephone was time-based, and the number of people to use it was limited and application must be made in advance. If one found it pricey, one could choose to use carrier pigeons or railways to deliver their messages. Thanks to the popularization of preliminary education, text-based communication in Neverwinter had become increasingly popular.

In charge of the operation of these systems was the Ministry of Communications, a newly established department in the City Hall.

Its work covered every link of the delivery process, from taking care of carrier pigeons to providing home delivery, as a result, its subdivisions instantly grew to a colossal size which was only second to the Ministry of Construction. It offered about a thousand jobs and almost all the newly graduated Neverwinter civilians were taken in.

Through this department, Roland could vaguely see the silhouette of a future large group.

That was merely the result of Anna’s own ability.

After solving the problem of demon’s attack, Roland put most of his efforts on the statistics work of the witches’ abilities from Sleeping Island.

With the arrival of the second batch of migrants, 96 witches had joined the Sleeping Spell. To test their abilities alone was stressful enough for Wendy and Scroll. Besides, not all witches were cooperative, which made the first step of data collecting quite difficult. Luckily, with Tilly’s prestige and Wendy’s conciliation, the registration work was more or less finished smoothly.

The black notebook in front of Roland was the result of the preliminary examinations of all the witches’ abilities.

He had read it over and over in the past few days and figured out the uses of most of the witches’ abilities.

Now he felt that the former way of classifying the witches’ abilities as intensifying, summoning, and attaching magic type was too rough and unfit for expressing their usages directly. Hence, he reclassified the witches by their work assignments. For example, witches good at processing were classified as manufacturing type; witches who were pro animals were classified as the cultivating type; witches whose abilities had not found a usage were put under the type of undetermined. Thus the City Hall could clearly see the number of witches which could be employed for production work.

Besides, this batch of witches had shown Roland how drastically different their abilities could be.

Although they were all Awakeneds, some of them could make flowers bloom from a crack in a stone and some could create big and tall Magic Servants. It was no wonder the Union could not withstand a long term war, because if a combat witch died, it would take years before the role she played could be replaced.

Obviously, the most reliable arrangement for a witch was to put her in a factory.

Among the list of nearly 100 witches, Roland put special emphasis on four of them.

They were No. 26 Darkcloud, No. 43 Azima, No. 44 Doris, and No. 89 Slimwrist.

Darkcloud’s ability was to dye. She could dye any object she laid her hands on into any color she wanted it to be, without changing its original nature.

Theoretically, it was an ability of attaching magic. Its effective time was limited, its consumption was closely related to the target’s size, and its effect was free from the influence of God’s Stone of Retaliation. But Darkcloud’s dyeing ability was so powerful that its effective time was strikingly long. This was probably because the change of color barely affected the object and she only needed to use a little bit of magic power for the dyeing effect to last for years. In other words, if Darkcloud exhausted her magic power, the dyeing effect could last for a century.

But the size of the object still mattered. She could not, like what Hummingbird did, release her ability in an instant and reduce its effective time, so if she ran into a large object beyond the upper limit of her magic power, her ability would not take effect. Things like changing color of the sea in one breath would be impossible for her.

In fact, according to Wendy’s test, Darkcloud could affect an area with the length and width of two arms-length, roughly 1.5 square meters.

To Roland, such an area was big enough.

After all, an object could be divided and combined.

In a manner of speaking, Darkcloud’s ability filled in a gap in Neverwinter—the dyeing technology. In the current era, the dyeing method mainly depended on extracting colors from nature, which in later ages would be a big selling point. But the truth was the performance of colors extracted from nature was terrible—too many impurities, fading easily, poor oxidation resistance, and too few varieties. As a result, only nobles could afford colorful clothes, and the colors mostly came from embedded gold and silver threads.

Dyes had a broad usage. Apart from the traditional textile industry, other areas like education, printing, chemical, and biology all needed them. To some extent, Darkcloud could reduce the burden on Soraya’s shoulders, which basically made her a great jack of all trades.

But witches No.43 and No.44 gave Roland a headache.

Azima and Doris were the kind of witches, according to Wendy, who were unwilling to cooperate. In the initial meeting, they had expressed their dissatisfaction about Tilly and wished to leave Neverwinter as soon as possible. Although this plan was temporarily put off by Scroll, the crack still existed. Whether the two wanted to be recruited and devoted to work remained unknown.

Unfortunately, their abilities were very peculiar—Azima’s ability was ”Source Tracing”, although unique, yet not irreplaceable. But Doris’s ability of ”demonification” enabled Roland to see the possibility of using magic power on a large scale.