Chapter 644 – The Number of Witches

On the soft grass, several sorceresses sat in a circle, their gazes drifting from time to time toward the two little ones playing in the crib not far away.

Vasida’s eyes gleamed. “A bloodline resonance can’t be wrong. Flora is unquestionably a witch.”

She turned to Sylph. “With your mutated Tree of Life seed and Hybrid Magic, witches won’t need to rely on male outsiders to give birth to little witches anymore in the future. This is truly wonderful—so wonderful! Even if I can’t raise a Corpse Clan, I can still raise my own little witches!”

Mo Lan leaned against a soft cushion, idly twirling a blade of grass between her fingertips. Hearing that, she nodded slightly.

“Originally, I thought dating and finding a partner was pointless, but if I just picked some outsider race at random to mate and reproduce, that felt uncomfortable too—so I was ready to give up on having little witches. Who would’ve thought witches could be grown from a tree? Once I finish what I have to do on Earth, I’ll come back to the Wilds, plant a whole stretch of mutated Trees of Life, and raise a whole bunch of little witches.”

As she spoke, a light of anticipation rose in her eyes. “When the time comes, I can even apply to go be the headmistress at the Witch Academy and teach the witches everything I’ve learned in my life!”

“Then you all read 《Anatomy of Alien Bodies》 for nothing!” Lilith looked at them, thoroughly baffled. “With so many good-looking males, there isn’t a single one you like?”

She blinked mischievously. “The process of being intimate with a male is beautiful too, you know!”

A trace of stubbornness surfaced on Vasida’s round face. “I think no male matches my aesthetic as well as a Corpse Clan raised from a corpse I stitched together myself. And there’s no male who can, like my dead servants, stay by my side forever.” By the end, her voice was so soft it was almost inaudible. “As for intimacy… I only want to be intimate with the partner I’ve chosen.”

Lilith’s red hair swayed with her exaggerated sigh. “Fine…” She turned to Mo Lan, unwilling to give up as she pressed again. “And you? Who decides they don’t want to try something without having tried it?”

Hearing the question, Mo Lan chuckled. “There are so many beautiful things in the world. Being intimate with a male is just one of the most insignificant among them. That tiny bit of pleasure isn’t even as good as learning a new interesting spell!” With Earth’s memories, she had long since lost any curiosity about that kind of “exercise,” and her tone was as flat as if she were discussing the day’s weather.

Vasida suddenly burst out laughing. “Looks like, to you, knowledge is far more important than a partner.”

She rested her head on Mo Lan’s shoulder. “You really aren’t suited to finding a partner.”

Lilith propped up her chin. “I’m going to date no matter what. If I date enough, I’ll eventually meet someone who can stay with me.”

She turned her head toward the crib, her voice softening. “But planting mutated Trees of Life really is much easier than carrying and giving birth to little witches yourself—and much safer too. If I find a partner, I’ll plant mutated Trees of Life with him, and we’ll incubate the little witches that belong to us!”

“Once you, Sylph, make the mutated Tree of Life seed and the Hybrid Magic used to cultivate it public, the number of witches should soon see a major surge, right?” Mo Lan flicked away the blade of grass in her hand, watching it get swept off by the breeze. “The Witch’s Wilds is about to get lively!”

Sylph, however, gently shook her head, her dark green long hair spilling down onto the grass. “Based on my past experience researching mutated plants… even if a mutated plant has spirituality and can respond to my bargains, you still need at least one full cultivation cycle to end before you can confirm its traits.”

Her gaze shifted to Tiana’s eggshell, her brow knitting slightly. “Right now we still can’t confirm whether Tiana, once she hatches, will have witch blood like Flora. And we also don’t know whether Flora’s and Tiana’s talent tests after entering the Academy at thirteen will differ from witches who were naturally born…”

Mo Lan knew she had a point, but—“These past few days I’ve been bored, so I did a divination specifically about the witches’ population growth over the next hundred years.” She suddenly lowered her voice mysteriously. “Guess what I saw in the final divination vision?”

“What?” Sylph looked at her expectantly. “Could it be that the results of cultivating the mutated Tree of Life are extremely favorable for witches’ reproduction?”

“No,” Mo Lan shook her head. “My Divination Magic simply can’t foresee anything related to a Sorceress Talent’s Manifested Gift and its products.”

She added with a wry smile, “Even divinations about sorceresses have a pitiful success rate. I’ve divined the results of cultivating the mutated Tree of Life too, but it didn’t succeed.”

Lilith said thoughtfully, “If even you can’t divine information about sorceresses, I truly don’t know how that BeastmanElder Prophet obtained the divination about Lady Anita.”

“That’s an elder prophet who’s been to the Well of the Sky, with extremely high attainment in Divination Magic.” Mo Lan’s gaze grew distant. “His divination ability is certainly stronger than mine. But even his divination about Lady Anita was only a vague, unclear piece of side information.”

She suddenly sat up straight, her tone turning serious. “A lot of the time, when a direct divination fails, you can change direction and divine something else to obtain side information. Especially when you already have some expectations and guesses about future events—using this method to verify them can produce pretty good results…”

Seeing the puzzled looks on the three faces, Mo Lan sighed helplessly. “Like this divination I did: even though I divined the witches’ population growth over the next hundred years, as long as I got a result indicating a large increase in the number of witches, that would be proof—at least to some extent—that the mutated Tree of Life seed really can grow little witches, and that it isn’t limited to one witch only being able to plant one tree.”

Sylph’s eyes brightened slightly. “What did you see in the divination?”

“I saw that the Witch Academy’s dormitory district was much larger than it is now. It was only a quick glance, but there were at least several thousand little courtyards… Forget it—you should just see it yourselves!”

As she spoke, Mo Lan took out a divination crystal ball. It could display and record the divination’s imagery.

After she infused it with mana, the divination scene appeared on the crystal ball. Anyone who had studied at the Witch Academy could recognize it at a glance: they were the buildings in the Academy’s dormitory district.

“Oh my god! It really is that many!” Vasida exclaimed as she leaned in close to the crystal ball. “With this many houses, the number of first-, second-, and third-year little witches will definitely have increased by a huge margin!”

Lilith immediately thought of the practical problem. “With so many little witches, will the Breadfruit Grove produce enough breadfruit for them to eat?”

“That I don’t know.” Mo Lan pointed at the scene in the crystal ball. “All I saw was the situation in the Witch Academy’s dormitory district.”

She suddenly revealed a strange smile. “Funny thing is, a hundred years later, the Witch Academy dormitories are still these shabby little mud houses! Otherwise, if you only saw this tiny fragment, you might not even understand where it was—let alone interpret the divination’s result.”

(End of chapter)