Chapter 52: The Witch of the Rime-Blight Is Actually Such a Sexist

After taking the book and returning to his room, Magna didn’t start reading right away.

He first told the maid waiting outside his door to bring some snacks.

When he said "some," he made sure to specify he wanted a whole trolley full.

His digestion was incredibly fast now. Even just an hour after breakfast, he already found himself ready to eat again.

It wasn’t that he felt especially hungry. It was just that whenever he could eat, he would, since it was necessary to keep filling Gaia’s gauge.

Not gaining any unnecessary weight from it was another thing that kept him motivated.

The kitchen prepared his request incredibly fast, almost as if they always kept every kind of food ready and waiting. Just five minutes later, the maid returned, pushing a trolley loaded with every kind of salty and sweet snack, along with at least three different drinks.

"Thank you." Magna said, his eyes lighting up as he dug in without waiting.

The maid simply bowed her head in response and left the room, a strange look on her face, closing the door quietly behind her.

Magna’s unusual appetite had already become daily gossip among the maids. With that small body of his, he was already eating as much as Titus, the lord of the house.

After clearing everything off the trolley, Magna felt the warm energy inside him rise slightly again.

’I wonder if I could get something like Faye’s cookies again,’ he thought, already realizing they had been made using some kind of special technique and ingredients.

He decided he would ask Faye about it later, since according to her own words, she was the one who had made them.

Turning back to what he actually wanted to focus on, he picked up the book, sat cross legged on his bed, and leaned his back against the headboard as he started reading again.

This time he didn’t bother closing the curtains. The sunlight pouring into his room felt nice, and he wasn’t doing anything he needed to hide, nothing that would make him worry about someone catching a glimpse of some secret.

As he started reading, the first few pages were an introduction covering Shadows in general. He skimmed through them quickly, since nothing in them seemed especially important.

Then he reached a part that finally caught his interest, still within the introduction section.

"A Shadow contract can only be formed by a Witch of the 13th trial or higher, one who has mastered spells of the Matriarch of Order."

So far, Magna only had a little knowledge about the Matriarch of Life, since that was the Goddess the Winterborne family was devoted to.

’Next, I should find a book about the 5 Mothers,’ he made a mental note.

The next few paragraphs explained how, through the contract, Shadows could sense their Witch’s mana and even draw a small portion of it into their own bodies whenever they wanted, without needing to be close by, depending on how large the Witch’s mana reserves were.

’So is there some kind of long, invisible hose pipe connecting them after the contract is made?’ Magna pictured it in his head, finding the image pretty funny.

How far that hose could stretch, and how much mana a Shadow could draw at once, both depended on the Witch’s own mana capacity.

He skimmed through a few more pages, most of them repeating the same points over and over without adding anything new, until he finally reached the part explaining why and how Shadows could cast spells without chanting.

This section of the book had a different format. Each page held just one paragraph, some long, some short, with a name written underneath, crediting whoever had proposed that particular theory.

Magna read the first one.

"Mana has a consciousness of its own, capable of acting independently. Every time a spell is cast, mana particles left behind form an echo of that spell. The stronger the spell, the weaker and fainter this echo becomes. The opposite is also true. The more basic and common a spell is, the more distinct and powerful its echo becomes.

When Shadows draw mana from their Witch, they can also reach these echoes, and by drawing in the strong, distinct ones alongside the mana itself, they can cast those spells directly, without needing to chant anything at all."

Beneath the paragraph, written in italics, was the name of the theory’s author.

Yennefer, the 13th Trial Witch of the Le Fay family.

"Thirteenth trial? She’s even above the head of the Winterborne family." Magna was quite surprised that the very first theory he read belonged to such a high level Witch.

Keeping that in mind, he moved on to check the next one.

"Men lack the faith and sense of duty required to be true followers, which is why they are kept apart from ever speaking the honorific names of the Matriarchs.

They exist only to serve Witches. The five Mothers created them this way on purpose, so they would never need to pray, while still being granted enough power to properly serve the Witches they belonged to."

Vanessa, the 16th Trial Witch of the Ives family.

Reading it, Magna’s face twisted into a frown. It was clearly based entirely on the author’s personal beliefs, and the heavy discrimination and contempt toward men was impossible to miss in her words.

Beyond being a 16th trial Witch, which was already surprising enough, there was also a title written next to her name.

The moment Magna read it, he immediately recognized it.

Witch of the Rime-Blight.

"Isn’t this the Witch Faye admires so much? The one who fought a real dragon for three years and ended up in a draw?"

He felt like he needed to talk to her later and help her find a different role model, since this one clearly wasn’t someone worth looking up to.

He completely wiped what he had just read from his mind and quickly moved on to check the rest.

There were 23 theories in total by the time he reached the last page, and each one was different from the last, with almost half of them just as biased as the Witch of the Rime-Blight’s, some even more so.

Among them, the highest trial level he came across was 18, belonging to just one person, listed under the name Echidna, the 18th Trial Witch of the Vengerberg family, with the title Witch of the Pale-Plague.

Her theory turned out to be quite good, as it caught Magna’s attention immedietly.

It argued that since spellcasting only required sound, a man’s heartbeat could technically provide a sound strong enough to work, as long as it was powerful enough.

As for why Shadows didn’t need to chant the honorific names of the Matriarchs, she argued it was because, unlike Witches, Shadows didn’t draw their power directly from the five Matriarchs.

Since their power came straight from their own Witch instead, they were able to bypass that step entirely.

Magna really liked this theory. He combined all the details from it with everything else he had read so far, grouping together every part that felt logical or similar, and started piecing it all together in his mind.

Eventually, he arrived at a conclusion.