I was born on June 26, 421. My mother is the lord of Debusota City, the largest shareholder of Aether Exploration.

My mother named me "Summer Night".

Two years later, my mother gave birth to a second egg and I had my own sister.

Her mother named her sister "Winter Day".

By the time my sister was born, I had already completed a series of courses such as "Advanced Magical Energy Dynamics", "Corporate Governance", and "Contract Design in Investment", and according to my mother's plan, I would be the vice president of a second-tier subsidiary in a few months for a term of one to two years, and if I did well, I would rotate through the subsidiaries in various areas of "Ether Exploration" for the next few years, and finally return to the headquarters and join the company's board of directors to prepare for my mother's succession.

But that's not the life I wanted.

I told my mother that I didn't want to be a lord of the city, and that I wasn't interested in the struggle for power in the company, and that I wanted to go to the "Bibri Woseka" archipelago to study the mysteries of the witch's contract.

My mother didn't agree, but she didn't object, she only said to me, when your sister grows up, if she is more suitable than you, I will let you go.

With high expectations for my sister, I joined the management of "Bafaria" and began the experience that my mother had planned for me.

But the mother failed to fulfill her promise.

When Winter Day was a year old, my mother traveled to Bibri Waseka to attend a regular meeting once every decade, and never returned.

And, according to feedback from the Round Table Parliamentary Secretariat, the mother did not attend that meeting at all.

In simple terms, she went missing on her way to the archipelago.

The company immediately sent a large team into the Aetheric Sea to search, including several great witches above level 6, but after a month-long careful search, they did not find any clues about their mother.

In the end, after discussion and voting by the board of directors of the company, it was determined that my mother "no longer has the ability to perform the duties of the city lord", and according to the relevant articles of the company, I inherited all her shares and assumed the position of city lord.

My wish to travel to the Bibri Waseka Islands came to naught.

The directors were in such a hurry to put me in the position of lord of the city because they thought I was easier to control.

But they got one thing wrong, I didn't want to be the lord of the city, not because I wasn't good at it, not because I didn't like it, just because it was so simple, so simple that I was bored.

Less than a year later, the scheming directors found themselves at the end of their best days. The Aether Exploration division and the company's subsidiaries are no longer the "fiefdoms" of the directors, they only obey the orders of one person, and that is me. Directors of course still have the right to have their say – but only on the board, and I decide whether to adopt or not to adopt their opinion based on whether it is reasonable.

At this point, there are only two paths left for the directors: surrender to me, or kill me.

About a small half of them chose the latter.

In fact, if I were to be put in their place, I would also think that the latter would be a wise choice.

I was not naturally well suited to contracts, and my mother made me try all the columns that Debussota had, but the results were all unsatisfactory. And that's why those directors dare to get their hands dirty – the law of the jungle has always been one of Debussota's most basic rules, and although this is not as explicit in the upper part as it is in the lower town, smashing the board on the opponent's head is often the best option when you can't win a game of chess.

Unfortunately for the directors - Winterday's adaptability to the Witch's Pact is the opposite of mine, and she adapts well to most pillars, especially the "Agareth" pillar with the Witch's Flame at its core.

The winter day is my shield and my sword.

The fight took place on an unusual night, and after one night, when the Dome of Debussota lit up again, it was all over, and the directors who tried to solve me with violence were reduced to cups by even more violent violence, and their bodies were reduced to ashes in the black flames.

I gathered the ashes, placed them evenly in each cup, and set them in front of the remaining directors at the makeshift board meeting that morning.

Through the eyes of those people, I knew I was finally approved by the board.

But I wasn't surprised, nor excited, as I said before—to be a lord of a castle is a very simple thing for me.

I was four years old this year, and I was two years old in winter.

The next few years were boring, both the company and the city were running smoothly under their established rules, and the only meaningful thing I could do was to make life as good as possible for as many people as possible to live a little better than in the past.

Other than that, the joy of life is only the winter day.

Dongtian is a lovely sister and a person who is the polar opposite of me, especially in terms of character and talent. I often think that I and Winter Day are like biscuits that have been broken in half, and only when put together are they a complete circle.

In the blink of an eye, I was thirteen years old, and Dongtian was eleven years old.

This year, as the lord of the city, I had to complete an important task – to attend the regular round table held every ten years on the Bibri Woseka Islands.

Winterday was very worried about my safety during the journey and wanted to go with me, but I told her that it was impossible because she was my sister and that if something happened to me, she would need to inherit my shares and take over as lord of the city.

Eventually, I invited Victoria to join me on the Bibri Wasserka Islands

In a sense, I have fulfilled my wish ten years ago, even though I am not going to further my studies, but to attend a round table. But in between those boring and lengthy meetings, I still found the opportunity to enter the famous "Nest Tower" and read the vast research literature in it.

In the blink of an eye, a month had passed, the round table was over, and Victoria and I had returned to Debussota without a hitch.

I learned a lot – not from those boring meetings, of course, but from the nest tower.

Many Great Witches believe that the research of those scholars in the Nest Tower is too fanciful and ungrounded.

I think so too.

More than 90% of the literature I've read is fancy garbage, but I can't deny that very few of them are real treasures.

I had the pleasure of reading a "treasure" that gave me a very meaningful inspiration for a question that I have been thinking about in recent years.

The question is - where does the power of the witch's contract come from?

To this question, I believe that most people in Debussota will answer: it comes from the contract itself.

But this answer is wrong.

I've visited the contract manufacturing plant of "Aether Exploration". The raw material of the contract is oil, which is a by-product of the process of mana drilling to extract mana from the depths of the Aether Sea.

It was a black, viscous liquid that, in its natural state, writhed like a living creature, so the factory had to store it in an airtight container, or it wouldn't be long before a barrel full of oil would run away.

The way to make a contract is simple. Oil is simply poured into the press, and the printer prints the contract on pre-defined terms, and finally, the contract is encapsulated in crystals – an unsigned contract is complete.

When a contract is signed, the variables in the terms of the contract will produce different results depending on the adaptability of the signatory; In some cases, new supplementary clauses are also created in the contract, which usually occurs when the adaptation is particularly good or poor.

As long as you understand the process of making the contract, it is easy to conclude that the power of the witch contract cannot come from the contract itself. Because the raw material for the contract, oil, does not contain any magic or other mystical powers in itself. It counts as a medium at best.

And this leads to another point of view, which in Debussota is endorsed by most of the Great Witches:

The power of the witch's contract comes from the magic of the contractor himself.

This view can give a logical explanation for the vast majority of phenomena. In short, mana is a type of energy, and contracts are nothing more than a medium that converts this energy into a variety of different effects, which explains why high-level contracts are more mana-intensive than lower-level contracts because they achieve more effects and naturally require more energy.

However, this theoretical system cannot explain other phenomena.

For example, most contracts require a large amount of mana to be signed, while subsequent uses require only a small amount of mana at a time. If mana is a type of energy, then where does the vast amount of mana that is consumed when signing the contract go? It would be too far-fetched to interpret it as the act itself requires a lot of energy; If this energy is stored in contracts, many scholars have confirmed through experiments that oil does not have the ability to store magical power.

There are also some contracts that are more difficult to explain, such as "Cleansing", "Tiny Flame", "Witch's Hand" and most other life contracts, which only require a certain amount of mana to be signed and no matter how many times they are used, they do not need to consume any mana.

Finally, there is the most special counter-example: "prayer". Theoretically, "Wish" can achieve any earth-shattering effect without expending any mana, such as destroying an entire city, as long as the price paid by the wisher is heavy enough.

So, where does the energy that sustains the "prayer" come from? This is obviously a problem that this theoretical system is completely inexplicable.

The above questions are what I have been thinking about for the last few years, and I thought that I was the only one who would come up with these almost empty ideas, but in the Nest Tower, in the document that I was fortunate enough to find, the author asks almost the same question as I did, and gives a possible way to find the answer.

She thinks that some kind of elaborate divination may be used to find clues about the source of the witch's contract power.

(End of chapter)