After returning to her room, Anna tossed a cluster of embers into a large wooden bucket filled with water, and soon the water began to bubble with steam.
She stripped naked and stepped into the bucket.
When the Witches needed to freshen up, they would always ask Anna to boil water for them—after all, fetching hot water from the kitchen was a hassle. Your Highness was taken aback by this, clearly finding it hard to accept the idea of reusing bathwater.
Thinking of this, Anna found it amusing. For ordinary families, it's hard to bathe even once a month, so using the same water repeatedly is completely normal.
He hadn't even noticed how much the lives of the witches he had taken in had improved. Anna shook her head. Roland WimbledonYour Highness seemed erudite, yet in some ways, he was... clumsy. Didn't Prince, as she read in books, have been attending banquets and social gatherings since childhood, wandering through flower beds? He could have been uneducated, timid, or even cowardly, but at least socially adept.
However, this feeling unexpectedly made her feel at ease.
Her Highness possesses a wealth of astonishing knowledge, such as steam-powered iron machines and the ability to make stones float on water through calculations. Today's lesson reveals that the world is composed of countless microscopic spheres—so tiny they require magnification by millions of times to be visible to the naked eye. This explains why they are ubiquitous, whether in solids, gases, or liquids, or in humans, plants, or stones. Ultimately, they all share the same fundamental nature.
It's unbelievable, Anna thought. How did Your Highness know all this?
After drying off, she quickly dried the water droplets on her body. She put on her clothes and sat back down at the desk.
The textbook written by Roland is placed at the center of the table.
While the Book of Illusion still had some time left, Anna borrowed this textbook from the scroll, intending to read it a little longer before bed.
The book begins with common phenomena in daily life, unfolding like peeling an onion, with some sections accompanied by vivid and engaging illustrations. The unprecedented novelty of the knowledge captivated her, and Anna found herself unable to stop once she turned the first page.
The earlier sections were relatively straightforward, but the subsequent content grew increasingly complex. For instance, the temperature chapter explains that both cold and heat reflect a particle's activity level—the higher the energy it absorbs, the more active the particle becomes, and thus, from a macroscopic perspective, it appears hotter. If Your Highness is correct, then when your green flame is magnified, it would manifest as individual pulsating particles?
The candle burned down to its core, its flame flickering twice before dying out. At that very moment, the Book of Transformation reached its final hour. Its pages and text gradually became translucent, then vanished without a trace. Darkness engulfed the room, until a green flame burst from Anna's fingertips, dispelling the night's gloom that had seeped into the space.
Looking at the empty desk, she felt a little sad.
Raising his right hand, the emerald-hued flame of Magic Power glowed like a cluster of fireflies, frozen motionless at his fingertips.
She suddenly decided to try it out. If everything in the universe is made up of tiny spheres, could it also become as small as a sphere? Anna closed her eyes and imagined it as a collection of countless particles.
The flame began to change.
It begins as a droplet-like shape and gradually transforms into a thin thread, growing increasingly slender and elongated until it resembles a human hair.
Anna sensed this change, but it was still far from enough. She thought the hair strands were still much too large for the little ball. It could be made even finer.
Though this thought crossed his mind, the emerald flame seemed to have reached its limit. The glow of the flame body dimmed, and the slender green light began to tremble.
Perhaps it's not about stacking, but about connecting... Your Highness observed that the small balls are interlocked like a chain, and perhaps it's time to reshape its form.
The particle flames in Anna's mind flickered twice before shattering with a metallic clang. No longer tightly bound, they scattered like stars across the void. Though the slender embers of green flame had vanished, their essence lingered in her consciousness—now transformed from the original form. In the boundless darkness, after most stars had fallen, the remaining few slowly regrouped, forming a long line of starlight that gradually coalesced into a delicate filament of luminous streaks.
Temperature is activity, she thought.
The moment the thought crossed his mind, the line began to sway as if someone had gripped one of its corners and gently shaken it. After this tremor, the fine thread's undulating motion could no longer be halted, and ripples spread out along its surface.
Ripples rippled through her world, blurring the boundaries between things as they danced with the waves. Magic Power felt the same way—she even sensed that the very act of stretching her fingers to create the first ripple was Magic Power herself.
She opened her eyes, and everything returned to calm. The embers had vanished, and as her eyes adjusted to the room's darkness, the desk, wardrobe, candlestick... the furnishings gradually emerged from the shadows. Soft blue moonlight filtered through the window, casting a pale gray glow on the floor. Everything remained unchanged, just as it had always been.
But in her eyes, the world had transformed completely. A slender black thread floated in the air—Anna knew it wasn't actually being' seen,' but rather emanated from her own perception.
She took out a piece of iron ingot from under the table and placed it in front of her.
The black thread coiled around the iron ingot as she commanded, then swiftly retracted. Like butter being sliced with a hot knife, the delicate filament embedded itself with effortless precision. Guided by Anna's will, the filament's heat—several times more intense than the embers—was contained within an extremely narrow zone. The ingot snapped in two almost instantaneously. She picked up the half, its surface smooth and polished, still retaining a faint warmth when touched.
Then she stood the iron ingot upright, with the black silk at the top, and split it into a thin, horizontal strand that lay perpendicular to the vertical one.
This is the mathematical concept Your Highness explained during the lecture: a circle can be drawn by circling a point with a taut string. The area of a circle equals the string's length squared, multiplied by a constant.
Anna shaped the horizontal filament's tip into a right angle, threading it through the iron ingot to the tabletop. Then she gently rotated it around the central black line—unlike the previous green flame that could only adjust its overall shape or temperature, these particle-based black flames could take any form, with each part's temperature precisely controlled.
After rotating one full turn, a standard cylindrical section is formed.
The joint was so tightly sealed that Anna had to exert tremendous effort to pry it loose from the iron block. Mirroring the previously observed cross-section, the entire outer surface of the iron cylinder was flawlessly smooth. Bathed in moonlight, she could faintly discern her elongated face on the polished surface.