I peered out the window into the shaded trees and wondered where exactly it was that Astrid lived. I had been out here plenty of times to set both magical and non-magical traps for animals when I was younger. Uncle Phil even took me into the woods to fire off his bootleg wands. All those times I had been out here, I had never seen any kind of building.

Giant beech and sugar maple trees flanked my car. They stretched up toward the night sky, much larger than anything that existed in regions where cultivation was more strictly regulated. This was a direct effect of magical cultivation happening in these woods. When people practiced the magical arts in an area, the mana they expended influenced the surrounding environment, making trees taller and more dramatic, and sometimes even having strange effects on the animals in a region.

According to arcane scientists, the natural environment was not capable of cultivation, at least not the intentional, active cultivation that humans and Outworlders practiced. How then did they explain these giant trees? The only explanation was that people were coming out here to do cultivation, and the trees benefited from the expended mana.

Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who came out to the forest to practice magic.

There was nothing to illuminate the track except the full moon and my car’s single headlight—the other had gone out a few weeks ago, and I hadn’t quite been able to find the cash to fix it. The enchantment store was all legal, and legal charms were cheap, so we didn’t turn much of a profit. This meant that the pay wasn’t great, and the materials for my own experiments in arcane enchantments soaked up most of my disposable income.

Making enchantments for my personal use had become an obsession for me, and I had become good at it. The dashboard of my car, for example, was fitted with a spell panel. This was a small electronic device that could link with my internal chi and activate any enchantments attached to the vehicle.

I’d heard that the government was making such devices, so I’d used a little imagination and fashioned something similar over the course of a few years. Doing this had required examining a few Outworlder spells and then modifying the tech devices that could integrate magic. A particularly useful device had been those medical chips that tapped into an individuals’ chi essence to increase a cancer patient’s healing rate. The Nissan’s spell panel was the result.

It was my proudest work, and it was also completely illegal. I couldn’t share it with anyone. I would be able to find a high price for it on the black market, but it would either lead to a governmental grant or life behind bars if I were caught doing so. I preferred not to take my chances. I would remain poor but free.