What Witch? This Alchemist is Breaking Bad!

The first time Leon Set pointed a gun at a witch, the barrel shook—not from fear, but from the weight of the idea that had just taken root. One sentence left his mouth like a stray bullet:

“Miss Witch… how about we make a deal?”

Leon is not from this world. He woke up here with nothing but a stranger’s name and a talent for survival, then spent years groveling at the bottom of the Imperial Church as a minor inquisitor: dirty boots, cold rations, and the stench of burnt spellbooks embedded in his clothes.

The Church bans mana refined from magical beasts. It calls the substance heresy, chains or burns the witches who can handle it, and posts bounties that glitter like dragon hoards. Which means anyone bold enough to brew, bottle, and move the stuff can drown in coin—or in their own blood.

Leon chooses coin.

He takes the witches marked for the pyres and teaches them to be alchemists, handlers of monsters, smugglers in silk gloves. In damp cellars and reeking slaughterhouses, they cook contraband mana and build a black market that quietly threads through the entire continent.

By daylight, Leon has become Viscount Arend: imperial lord, newly raised cardinal, Grand Inquisitor, patron of the new emperor. By lamplight, another name moves through tavern corners and prison yards—Fenrir, the Church’s favorite blasphemer, its most wanted ghost. Witches murmur that name like a charm in the dark.

Every step up buys him another title, another estate, another corpse underfoot. The staircase he’s climbing is made of other people’s bones, and there are only two places it can end: a holy throne, or a traitor’s grave.