As Charlotte's coven grew stronger by the day, deep within the Witching Hour, somewhere where ravens endlessly circled above a vast estate, stood the domain of one of the oldest witch families.
The House of Ravens.
It was here that the first calamity, the Crystal Witch, was born.
The Ravens, the originators of mana circulation Crystallification, had long gathered witches under their banner to teach, study, and expand the boundaries of magic. Every descendant of the Raven bloodline carried the same trait,
an insatiable greed for knowledge.
And the current Arch-Witch, someone who has reached their peak in their respective circulations, of the Ravens possessed it more than any before her.
Persephone Raven stood with the quiet authority of someone who had long surpassed the limits of ordinary time. Though she had lived for one hundred and thirty-seven years and had given birth to numerous children, both witches and men, her appearance defied that age entirely. She looked no older than a woman in her thirties, a natural consequence of advanced circulation training, where mastery over mana flow slowed the body's decline and preserved vitality.
As the head of the House of Ravens, she had reached the pinnacle of that discipline: Crystallification.
It was a technique few witches ever fully mastered, where the mind itself gradually took on a crystalline structure. The more it crystallized, the greater a witch's spell potency and mana capacity became, however, at the cost of becoming increasingly inhuman in thought, precision, and detachment.
Persephone had embraced it completely.
Her brilliance had been sharpened into something almost surgical.
Her appearance was marked by striking black hair, dark as a raven's wing, flowing with an elegance untouched by age. Even her fashion sense carried the weight of earlier centuries,
Refined
Traditional
and unmistakably Aristocratic.
And yet, when she stepped into the world of the Barebloods, she adapted.
With the help of her many granddaughters, she could wear modern attire well enough to blend in, all without diminishing her authority.
After the meeting, Persephone returned to her estate, exhausted from the endless bickering surrounding the so-called "heretical acts" of Charlotte Sweeiz.
She descended from the skies with a simple Flight spell, landing gracefully upon the estate grounds.
Walking through the long halls, she passed countless witches sponsored by her family—students studying, practicing, refining.
The usual.
"It's always the same boring shit," she muttered.
Elemental affinities.
Mana control.
Standard spellcasting.
Nothing new.
Nothing worth remembering.
It had been decades since a new school of magic had truly been discovered.
As she reached her office, she slammed the door shut.
"Damn it!"
The sound never left the room. The chamber was sealed. No noise could escape its four corners.
They were supposed to be the holders of magic.
The family that invented it. Defined it.
And yet, in all these years, only Charlotte had produced something truly revolutionary.
An unknown witch who had appeared out of nowhere and yet surpassed them all.
It gnawed at her.
Yes, the Ravens still made discoveries. Witches and supernaturals alike benefited from their work. Life became easier because of them.
But that was all it did.
Ease.
Convenience.
Nothing compared to what Charlotte had done.
What angered her more was not just the gap in achievement but the speed of it. The Ravens spent decades refining a single concept, perfecting it through generations of accumulated knowledge. Charlotte, on the other hand, treated those same concepts as if they were unfinished drafts. She moved forward without hesitation, without reverence, without fear of consequence. It was not just innovation, it was recklessness disguised as brilliance.
And yet… that recklessness was working.
Combining multiple runes to create different combinations.
It was one of the many things she had achieved.
In theory, it was possible. An idea discussed only in the highest academic circles of witchcraft. Most believed it would take centuries before it could be realized.
Yet Charlotte accomplished it.
Her research papers, meticulously prepared and brutally precise, were nothing short of revolutionary. For a brief moment, even the most rigid scholars could not deny its brilliance.
There was also another. Encoding intent directly into rune matrices, bypassing traditional chant-sequence dependency.
Instead of casting spells through structured invocation, where rune symbols merely guided mana in real time, Charlotte allowed spells to be prepared in advance.
Activated with ease. When casting, normally, witches had to manually etch runes to cast spells. Different runes, different results.
It was not entirely new.
Witches had discovered similar methods long ago.
They had simply banned it.
To the old witches, it made practitioners lazy. Too reliant on convenience rather than discipline. Magic was meant to be practiced, refined through effort, not simplified into something effortless.
What unsettled them was not the concept.
It was how far Charlotte had taken it.
Then, one after another, she came up with new research discussions. Another was forcing unstable spell outputs into something usable.
Spells once considered too volatile, too inefficient, or too dangerous were remade. Refined into something stable, efficient, and far more practical.
And that… they hated even more.
The spells passed down through generations—
Imperfect. Unstable. Sacred.
They were not meant to be changed.
They were legacies.
Yet Charlotte treated them as incomplete works, reshaping them into something undeniably better.
And many more.
Despite presenting these during her appearance in the Witching Hour, the great families refused to accept them.
That was when the fracture began.
Edith of the Pantheras was the first to react, hastily denouncing Charlotte as a heretic. She was a very traditional witch. The accusation spread quickly, echoed by many others.
Even Persephone herself had agreed.
Because what Charlotte had done was not entirely unknown.
It was only forbidden.
She had not just broken the rules.
She had perfected what others feared to touch.
Persephone leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes as memories resurfaced.
The discussion hall.
Edith losing her patience.
Then—
Impact.
With Martial Magic enhanced by the Pantheras' Great Genesis Circulation, Edith launched herself forward, her fist crashing into the ground and shattering it upon impact.
The hall descended into chaos.
Spells clashed. People fled.
Persephone remained seated.
Watching.
She knew Edith better than anyone. They had been friends since childhood. No one understood her strength more than she did.
Which was why—
Seeing her fail to land a single hit was…
Strange.
Iron Pulse.
Mana synchronizes with the heartbeat, sending bursts of reinforcement through the body. Resulting in enhancing strength, reaction speed, and durability.
Breaker Fist.
A concentrated strike that released mana at the moment of impact. Simple, efficient, devastating.
Edith used both.
Perfectly.
And yet—
None of them touched Charlotte.
She smiled as she dodged.
Effortlessly.
Calmly.
Edith grew impatient.
Before things could escalate further, Persephone intervened. She stopped Edith, turned to Charlotte, and offered a measured apology.
Charlotte only laughed as she left.
Even Edith had to admit it.
"She's skilled."
Persephone agreed.
Even with her Crystallification side effect, specifically the thought processing pushed beyond human limits, it should have been impossible to evade all of Edith's attacks.
Yet Charlotte did.
While smiling.
There was no strain in her movements. No excess mana leaking from her body. No sign of forced calculation. It was as if every action had already been decided long before the fight even began. Not prediction. Not reaction. Something else entirely. Something Persephone could not replicate—even with a mind refined by crystallization.
Back in the present, Persephone rested in her chair, sorting through Charlotte's research.
Even she could tell—
The Lunarian Principle was incomplete.
"Maybe it's for the best," she muttered, rubbing her temples. "Something like that would be too dangerous."
Still…
Her hands moved.
Practicing.
Replicating.
Heretic or not, she was an Arch-Witch of the Ravens.
The greed in her blood would not allow her to ignore it.
Her phone rang.
She didn't notice at first.
When she did, she fumbled to pick it up—still unfamiliar with such Bareblood devices.
After a few failed attempts, she finally answered.
"Hello?"
"It's me."
A woman's voice.
One of Lucien D'Arcel's wives.
Marielle.
"She came here," Marielle said. "You were right to suspect my husband."
Marielle D'Arcel was neither the most favored nor the most powerful among the wives, but she was the most observant.
While others chased influence, she watched.
Waited.
Calculated.
Always positioning her children for the right moment.
It was by chance—or instinct—that she had been near the outer grounds when Charlotte arrived.
She hadn't meant to pry.
But curiosity won.
She captured the image.
Clear. Undeniable.
Then she recognized her.
The Heretical Witch.
Without hesitation, she sent the image to the Ravens.
She didn't care for the implications.
Only the opportunity.
With this, she could secure support in the succession, something Persephone had already shown interest in.
Persephone smiled.
Finally, a lead.
A way to approach the Heretical Witch.
Through the D'Arcels.
For years, she scoured the planet, both the World of the Barebloods and the Witching Hour, but Charlotte disappeared just like that. Untraceable.
She stood.
In the next moment, she was already moving.
Lucien D'Arcel would be her next destination.