It wasn't long before the three found the mirrors in their hands had gone completely black — showing nothing at all.
Meanwhile, the woman had already endured the pain and reshaping the potion brought, and had begun using meditation to rein in the brief period of slightly uncontrolled power that followed a fresh advancement.
She had no time to take in the subtly altered landscape that her meditation-heightened perception revealed, nor to examine the nearly doubled total spiritual energy compared to before her advancement.
When the ethereal, drifting sound that was faintly like laughter faded from her ears, she immediately opened her eyes — eyes now crystalline and luminous as sapphires.
But when she looked down at the ice formed by the overflow of potion energy during advancement, she didn't see her own normal reflection. Instead, she saw her own face — twisted and distorted with malice and hatred.
Damn —
She startled and immediately rolled sideways, leaving the ice's reflective surface, and slipped into the shadows — taking care to keep her body out of any mirror's line of sight.
For a strange phenomenon appearing in a mirror to exert influence on someone in the real world, it typically needed the mirror surface as a medium. As long as you weren't reflected in it, the danger was significantly reduced.
That knowledge had come from the potion — the one that had nearly burst her head open. Among all the dark arts a Witch commanded, spells involving mirrors occupied a substantial portion, so every Witch understood mirrors far more deeply than Extraordinaries of any other pathway.
But with that roll, the small surge of relief she'd felt a moment ago — a flicker of pleasant surprise at noticing her face hadn't changed much — vanished instantly. The oversized clothes, the unfamiliar weight in her chest, and the hair that kept brushing against her face were all reminders to stop entertaining false hopes.
Disappointment aside, she hadn't forgotten the pressing matter at hand. Using her slightly-enhanced hearing to confirm that at least one person was still nearby, she looked at the thin sheet of frost on the ground before her — still, nothing moving in it. Without further delay, she summoned a dark, ephemeral flame using one of her newly acquired Witch abilities and sent it streaking toward the frost like a bullet.
Black flame — phantom fire that burns spiritual bodies and spiritual energy. That was the potion's entire description of this ability. But brevity didn't mean weakness. The Witch potion's knowledge had already made clear to her that spiritual energy existed in far more than just living creatures. Vengeful spirits, ghosts, and the strange things that emerged from mirrors were all types of spiritual bodies — entities that, for various reasons, no longer required a physical form to exist. And the reason corpses could reanimate as the undead or as water spirits, moving through the world with strength beyond any ordinary person, was equally the work of spiritual energy driving them.
In short, at least within the Witch's body of knowledge: anything that moved on its own could be harmed by the black flame.
The flame touched the frost, flared for a moment — then burned out quickly, leaving the ice intact.
"That's it?" she thought, puzzled.
Thinking about how long that thing had been watching her while she advanced, she decided to go check cautiously. The sounds she could hear — not yet gone, not far away — gave her the nerve to try.
But first, she condensed a piece of ice in her hand that could serve as a mirror.
Ice Manipulation: By consuming spiritual energy, conjure ice that spreads and freezes at Beyonder speed, and freely control and reshape the ice created.
Entities that appeared through mirror surfaces generally had the ability to instantaneously move between mirrors. She was prepared for it to come straight at her — the moment the ice mirror showed any irregularity, the black flame would consume it in an instant.
(This phenomenon of moving through mirrors was unsurprising to a Witch. They knew well that in the occult tradition, mirrors were often considered gateways to another world, each mirror surface connected to the others through an interior space known as the Mirror Realm. Witches themselves had spells for entering mirror surfaces and leaping between them.)
The ice held steady in her hand — neither smooth enough to slip nor cold enough to bite. No irregularities. She set aside her uncertainty and used a sharp ice spike she'd formed on its surface to prick her now-pale, unmarked index finger.
After the brief sting, she pressed the cut against the ice's surface. The shallow wound sealed almost immediately. The blood on the ice was sparse — but enough for what she had in mind: creating a mirror double for herself.
Mirror Double — the single most useful spell in a Witch's arsenal, without question. When a Witch sustains a fatal attack, the mirror prepared as a double automatically intercepts it. If the Witch chooses to activate it proactively, any single attack she receives within a brief few seconds is completely negated by the double instead.
More importantly, the conditions for using Mirror Double were remarkably simple. The required casting material was easy to find — something closely tied to the Witch herself, such as blood, combined with a mirror. It could be prepared in advance rather than having to be cast in the moment like most spells, and it didn't require specific materials on hand at the time of use.
Since she was only creating her own double, she simply placed her hand over the ice surface and spread her spiritual energy through it and the blood, then spoke a single word in Ancient Hermes:
"Double!"
As the blood merged with the ice, her dramatically heightened inspiration — one of the Witch potion's gifts — immediately sensed a new, mysterious, and invisible connection form between herself and the ice. Because of this occult bond, as long as the mirror remained within thirty meters of her, it would function as a double.
In truth, a mirror double wasn't limited to blocking attacks — a Witch could also use it to interfere with divination and create convincingly realistic illusions of herself.
Satisfied with that precaution, she stood — and only then noticed an unsolved problem: these clothes, now far too loose on her, were genuinely going to get in the way.
But she was Sequence 7 now. Was she really going to let that be a problem?
She looked at the piece of "glass" in her hand. An idea came to her immediately.
She gathered the excess length of her trouser waistband, folded it over on itself, then used conjured ice to freeze the fold in place. Against anything other than its owner's flesh and blood, the ice showed no restraint — the trousers froze rigid instantly. Without deliberate control, the small amount of ice she'd summoned would have spread through the entire garment in a second or two.
She fixed the rest of her clothes by the same method, quickly resolving the fit problem. Good news: her height hadn't changed much. As for the bad news — she'd been aware the balance felt off, but when the tightened clothes revealed the outline beneath them, even she, thoroughly focused on eliminating a threat, finally broke her concentration for a moment, and thought to herself with profound disbelief:
"No. What the hell. That woman doesn't even come close to this, and she's still somehow this perky about it?"
She let out a sharp breath, feeling her urge to kill someone tick a few notches higher, and carefully approached the frost. A short few steps away — deeply unfamiliar in sensation — but the frost, showing nothing but her own reflection, let her breathe out. No lingering threat.
The mirror now showed a woman with long, sleek black hair, clear blue eyes, and a fair, luminous face. The individual features weren't dramatically different from before — close enough to be siblings — but the visual effect was worlds apart, like the gap between a game's female protagonist and a nameless background character who shared the same face template.
Looking at the face that could genuinely be called exceptional, she felt the fire in her chest burn hotter.
She conjured ice at her chest and used it to firmly secure everything in place.
Then, quietly:
"Now it's my turn."
Her clear, pleasant voice was full of cold killing intent.
Author's Note (this chapter): Chapter 47 — Her Transformation
Shandong Too bad she didn't drink the potion in front of the Nighthawks .Author reply: I really wanted to see that scene too, but thinking it through — given what the Witch cult is like, not force-feeding the potion to a new member on the spot would already count as gentle for them. Had to scrap the idea.· Shandong Here we go.(rubbing hands)