I woke up feeling groggy and disoriented after my dream conversation with Yaga Grandhilda. Her words about meditation and connecting with the spiritual aspects of my domain echoed in my mind.

Despite my skepticism, I decided to give it an honest try.

I opened all of the windows of the pub, sat down on my blessed relocated earth, and closed my eyes. All I could focus on was the whooshing wind trying to claw against the walls of the pub and the softness and the odd warmth of the earth beneath me. My mind constantly wandered, thinking about the crystallization of materials and all the samples I had collected.

I shook my head, trying to clear my mind. I even took deep breaths, attempting to feel the sun on my skin and become “one with the glade” as she had instructed.

There was no sun inside the pub to speak of, it was cloudy out and fat snowflakes occasionally drifted through the open windows.

For what felt like hours, I sat there, breathing and trying to sense...something. Anything. But all I felt was an increasingly numb behind and a growing frustration.

I stood up from my earth pile and stretched.

“Well, I gave it a good try,” I said to nobody in particular. “Alas, both of my attempts at meditation have resulted in complete failure. Time to try something else.”

If I didn’t have the necessary organ or perhaps simply lacked the gender-specific innate talent to perceive spirits, I would just have to construct a tool to observe them.

I carefully examined the samples I had placed in my magical earth pile the night before. To my fascination, I noticed that certain materials had indeed begun to crystallize faster than others.

The metals showed minute signs of transformation. The silver spoon and gold nugget were definitely shinier. The iron nails and steel scraps weren’t far behind, their surfaces glittering with microscopic crystalline formations upon magnification.

Among the stones, the marble and granite pieces showed the most change, with microscopic crystal structures forming along their edges. The river rocks and sandstone, however, showed almost no alteration.

The wood samples showed zero change.

The gemstones in the jewelry pieces seemed to be greatly amplifying the effect, crystallizing faster than the metal, becoming more transparent.

I noted these observations in my codex, theorizing that materials with more ordered internal structures seemed to crystallize more readily. This aligned with my understanding of entropy and crystallization processes from my previous life.

[Greater Syntropy = faster crystallization] I wrote in the Codex.

Syntropy was a term I liked quite a bit. It was coined in 1974 by biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi who proposed the word to replace the term ‘negentropy’ aka the opposite of entropy.

Sadly there were no diamonds among the jewellery pieces. However, the next most crystallized gemstone candidate was likely a ruby or sapphire which were both forms of corundum, with a hardness of 9 on the Mohs scale.

I carefully examined each gemstone in my possession, measuring their dimensions with the crude caliper I had pilfered from the smithy. After meticulous comparison, I selected the widest stones: amethyst, ruby, sapphire, citrine, peridot, and the round garnet.

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I went to the smithy and set about the painstaking process of grinding softer gems into rectangular shapes of similar size.

The work was slow and meticulous. I frequently paused to check my progress, ensuring that I was maintaining an even surface.

Hours passed as I tirelessly carefully shaped each gemstone. The softer stones like the citrine and peridot were easier to work with, but I had to be extra careful not to apply too much pressure.

As I ground away the last of the edges on the garnet, I held up my handiwork to the light.

Five flat, somewhat evenly polished rectangular planes of varying colors and sizes lay before me.

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Wait. How did I just do that? Was it supposed to be this easy to grind gems? Were all witches experts at lapidary or was that just me? Hypothesis: Crystals and gems grown or altered by a witch's domain may be easier for a witch to manipulate or shape compared to regular gems/crystals.

I grabbed the other garnet that I left in the drawer and tried to grind it. It simply didn't work. The grinder wheel didn't do anything whatsoever to the non-witch affected garnet.

Damn!

I tried the same with other duplicate or split stones for another hour. It was painfully difficult to work with non-witch affected materials, they just didn't want to cooperate, were too hard or too brittle, shattering as I tried to shape them.

Witch affected amethyst definitely wasn't as brittle as the amethyst piece I left in the smithy!

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I returned to the pub, my hands aching from hours of meticulous work, my mind buzzing with anticipation. Carefully, one by one, I affixed each witch-gem-lens I made to various iron pliers, securing it in place with a strand of rope.

With bated breath, I peered through the ruby lens at my relocated glade. Nothing. Just the same pile of earth and plants I’d been staring at for days. Disappointment gnawed at me, but I pressed on.

I cycled through each lens - sapphire, citrine, peridot, garnet. Each time, I was met with the same view, devoid of any spiritual or otherworldly phenomena. Frustration mounted as I realized that perhaps Yaga was right–maybe magic wasn’t something that could be measured or observed through physical means.

But I wasn’t ready to give up just yet. In a final, desperate attempt, I placed all of the gemstone lenses into the pliers atop of each other, creating a kaleidoscope of colors. I pressed my eye against the makeshift viewfinder to see… nothing more than a blurry, rainbow-tinted version of my glade.

So much for the experiment of seeing spirits through crystal lenses. Oh well.

I began to pace across the pub.

Maybe the lenses needed more exposure time to my domain? Or, maybe… I wasn’t using them to look at the right thing? I thought about the earth, about what witches represented as the catalyst that made mundane rocks magical.

What was the most magical thing here?

As I paced across the pub again, frustration gnawing at me, a sudden realization struck me like a bolt of lightning. I stopped in my tracks.

Of course! Eureka! I was the most magical thing in this entire pub all along!

Hypothesis: A witch's blood, being intrinsically connected to their domain, may possess heightened magical properties or serve as a catalyst for magical phenomena.

Without hesitation, I grabbed a small knife from the table and, with a quick, decisive motion, pricked my finger. A droplet of blood welled up, glistening in the dim light of the pub. I quickly prepared my water drop microscope, carefully placing the blood sample on the glass shard.

With trembling hands, I positioned my newly crafted multi-lens apparatus in front of the microscope, lighting a candle to produce light for the mirror shard to reflect as it was quite dark outside now.

Taking a deep breath, I leaned in and peered through the kaleidoscope of crystallized gemstones and the microscope.

What I saw took my breath away.

Through the view of the combined gemstone lenses, my blood was no longer just a red liquid. It pulsed with an otherworldly violet light, each cell a miniature galaxy swirling with radiant energy. Tiny motes of light danced between the cells, connecting them in intricate patterns that shifted and changed as I watched.

The longer I stared at the blurry motes, squinting through the lenses, I began to see... something else. Shadowy something flickered at the edges of my vision, just barely perceptible as if the violet shimmers held otherness within them, akin to doorway, an impossible fold into elsewhere.

Something moved with fluid, alien grace, an impossible pattern danced between the blood cells like ethereal fish in a cosmic sea.

My heart pounded in my chest. Were these the spirits Yaga had spoken of?

Had I actually managed to glimpse the Astral realm through sheer scientific ingenuity?

I pulled back from the microscope, my mind reeling from what I’d just witnessed. It was incredible, paradigm-shifting, and utterly terrifying all at once.

I had done it.

Science: 2, Witchy Meditation: 0

Take that, Grandhilda! Who needs meditation when you’ve got a gemstone lens Astralscope and a reckless disregard for personal safety?

But my triumph was short-lived as a new thought occurred to me. What if these ‘spirits’ were actually some kind of local parasite now inhabiting my blood courtesy of the local Goddess Zemy or whatever?

Or worse, what if they were always there, in everyone’s blood, and I’d just invented a way to see our microscopic overlords?

Paranoia: 1, Common Sense: 0

I sat back down onto the blessed earth and watched as the cut on my finger slowly sealed itself.

Wait. How was I doing this? Was I doing this, or were the questionable things in my blood responsible?

I adjusted the candle and the mirror and pointed the Astralscope at the cut on my finger and watched, mesmerized by the dancing blurry microscopic motes of violet light.

The shimmering motes swarmed around the cut, weaving themselves in and out of my skin with an eerie intelligence and purpose. As I watched, the wound closed before my eyes, leaving no trace of the injury. Something odd was happening in the wake of their motion, skewering space and introducing an extra dimension to the view, making my head throb.

I reached for the knife once again and dipped my finger in alcohol. Science required sacrifice. Further testing was necessary to observe this phenomenon.