Chapter 186: (Self Edited) Witchs Forest*
Located in the northern part of the capital, designated as the 13th district, was the Witch’s Forest. However, in reality, this district is rarely referred to as the thirteenth district. Generally, it was known as the Grand Witch Square. Around the forest, which occupied an entire district, stood the mansions of the Seven Great Witch Household and their retainers in succession. The forest is inside this area, and naturally, ordinary people cannot enter.
A thousand years ago, during the era of the Great Empire, this land was the property of a General household based in the White Wolf Peninsula. At that time, there were no mansions. Instead, a vast forest was surrounded by fences. The general and his subordinates released animals into the forest and frequently visited for hunting during their spare time.
Originally a hunting forest, after Shaalta Chartres came to rule this land, it was offered as a tribute to the queen. Later, it was bestowed upon the Witch households that arrived with her, becoming the Witch households’ base. The animals such as wild boars once released into the forest were eradicated, and now only small animals like deer and squirrels live there, moderately thinned out.
In ancient times, Seven Witches who supported the royal ancestor Shamo Chartres gathered herbs in the forest north of the Black Sea. They bought parts of animals from hunters and belonged to a clan of pharmacists who refined medicine. Respected as sages of the forest, they served Shamo Chartres well, becoming the cornerstone of the later Great Empire.
The forest was a source of medicinal herbs, and for the Witch households claiming descent from the Seven Witches, having a forest near their homes was an important confirmation of their proud lineage. Leaving the deer was because the antlers of young stags were an important medicinal herb, a key ingredient in medicines. However, the reason for keeping them was the only trace of the ancestors’ occupation, which the last Witches living today had long since forgotten. The last clan that cherished tradition, passed down skills, and refined medicine was the Yurumi Witch Household in the Kilghina Kingdom, a Witch clan that was not protected in the Shaalta Kingdom and had long been extinct.
In the heart of that forest stands one house. In the perfectly maintained forest, with a few trees felled, a small wooden house stands in an open area. Upon closer inspection, the house appeared to have been skillfully crafted by a talented carpenter, using the finest wood and cedar bark meticulously applied to the exterior walls. The roof was not made of boards or tiles but was covered with natural stone. This natural stone was mined in a land called “Beard Valley” from the now-defunct Yalta Kingdom, a famous export at the time. The slab-like joints formed on a cliff in Beard Valley had uniform thickness, making the andesite extracted from there ideal for roofing without much processing.
Of course, in the modern era, long after the fall of the Yalta Kingdom, houses using such stones did not exist. The houses that were once roofed with those stones had been rebuilt or re-roofed using different methods, and now only this one house remained. The stones used for the current roof were purchased in bulk by the ancestors of the current Witches at the time of the fall of the Yalta Kingdom.
Using the architectural techniques of the Great Empire era, building a house like those from that time, no matter the cost, was a modest pride for the witches. Wooden houses, which were not as durable as stone constructions, had stood there for nearly nine hundred years, undergoing numerous rebuilds and repairs, with little change from how they were then. The only notable change was the disappearance of the room once called the dispensary, with shelves of medicinal herbs and mixing tools, which has now become a storage room.
Inside that house, six Witches were gathered.