A door that existed between reality and illusion.
The hourglass was the key that opened it, allowing the existence of this door to trace back to a specific domain.
John knew that whoever had left behind such an alchemical device must have been extraordinarily powerful.
"A wizard as strong as Dumbledore."
Several names flashed through his mind. In the history John knew, there were very few wizards capable of something like this.
Ambrosius was one of them. John's time magic had benefited greatly from Ambrosius.
However, this place didn't seem like somewhere Ambrosius would appear.
Even though he was ..a Merlin, he wouldn't cross the ocean just to settle here.
Besides, John couldn't be certain how many Merlins there actually were. It was also possible that another Merlin had once been here.
Merlin was like a kind of rule. Wherever magic was born, the presence of Merlin would follow.
No matter who it was, he would only know after entering.
The door finally became completely solid, and John reached out to touch it.
This time his fingers didn't pass through.
Pushing harder, the door slowly opened.
A passage appeared behind it.
It was a pyramid from a certain point in time.
"Setting a temporal anchor so that people from any era can return time to a precise period."
Seeing how it worked, John thought it was a brilliant idea.
He stepped inside.
Beyond the entrance was a wall covered with murals depicting many different eras.
John stared at the image of a wizard wearing a pharaoh's headdress and holding a serpent staff.
When he placed the snake-eye gem before his eye, the mural disappeared, replaced by a stone door.
The stone door was carved with numerous snakes coiled together.
John stepped forward and pushed it, but it was locked.
Drawing his wand, he cast the Unlocking Charm.
"Alohomora."
A series of gear-like sounds echoed from within the stone door. The intertwined snakes began to unwind their bodies and bite their own tails.
When the sound stopped, every snake had become an ouroboros, each biting its own tail.
The symbol represented endless infinity.
The stone door slowly opened, revealing a steep staircase behind it.
Each step was extremely narrow, barely enough for half a foot to stand on.
John descended along the stairs, keeping the snake-eye gem in place the entire time.
The soul lamp hooked onto the tail of the copper snake, casting light through the tunnel.
After walking for nearly an hour, a glow appeared ahead.
John held his wand in his left hand and placed the snake-eye gem over his right eye with his right hand.
Stepping into the light, he found only a long corridor.
Looking up within the space, he saw a passage above that resembled the body of a serpent.
It seemed to be a space with no distinction between up and down. When John lowered the snake-eye gem, the passage above instantly turned into a ceiling.
"As expected, this place is filled with illusions and reality everywhere."
John tapped the corridor he was standing in with his wand. It was no different from the inside of an ordinary pyramid.
He continued forward along the passage. The roads and doors that hadn't existed before now appeared before his eyes.
He walked into a room with a half-open door. Inside were many burial items belonging to Egyptian culture.
"If I want to reach the true burial chamber, I'll probably have to keep switching between illusion and reality."
John understood immediately. Whoever the wizard was who built this place had a very interesting personality.
John smiled faintly. "Since you want to play, then I'll play along."
Inside the burial room, he found several golden scarabs and stuffed them into his pocket before raising the snake-eye gem to look again.
The room instantly transformed into a dangerous narrow log bridge.
John stood on the log while the soul lamp on his tail illuminated the depths below.
Below was a deadly pit covered with sharp spikes.
John lowered the snake-eye gem and walked toward another door inside the room.
When he pushed it open, the dust from the paint turned into powder and released a choking smell.
Covering his nose, he stepped inside and placed the snake-eye gem over his eye.
The scene changed. He silently memorized the position, crossed from that side, and then lowered the snake-eye gem again.
By repeating this process over and over, John gradually drew closer to the real chamber.
Because of the constant switching between illusion and reality, he sometimes nearly stepped out of the passage altogether.
Lowering the snake-eye gem once more, John arrived at a place where a stone bridge stood.
At the end of the bridge was a stone structure formed by many pillars.
Inside the structure lay countless treasures.
Through the perspective of the snake-eye gem, the bridge had turned into a long tunnel.
Whether with the naked eye or the snake-eye gem, the path pointed toward the stone structure.
John walked forward. The inside of the tunnel was smooth, as though something had been crawling through it for years.
The scene felt strangely familiar to him.
The sewers of Hogwarts.
"Could it be that something large is kept here as well?"
John fell into thought.
Passing through the tunnel, he arrived at the stone chamber supported by pillars.
Inside, piles of gold coins were stacked like small mountains, gleaming with an enticing shine.
When John saw them, he didn't approach immediately. Instead, he tapped the ground lightly with his wand.
The Super-Sensory Charm activated.
The entire stone chamber instantly entered John's field of perception.
His gaze sharpened. This place truly was layer upon layer of traps.
Behind the treasure were countless mechanisms. The gold coins on top acted as counterweights. If too many coins were removed, the mechanisms would be triggered.
Beside the coins was a line of text.
"Greedy one, you should learn to let go."
However, John was certain that very few people, upon seeing such an enormous amount of wealth, would choose to heed the warning of someone who had died who knew how long ago.
Walking past the mountain of coins, John arrived at the center surrounded by pillars.
Raising the snake-eye gem, he saw that a passage leading downward had appeared on the smooth floor.
At the same time, many doors appeared within the surrounding pillars.
The writing beside the coins changed.
"Choose to face it, or to flee."
John jumped straight down through the floor.
His body continued to fall.
He landed on something that felt like a cushion made from hundreds of stacked quilts.
Looking down, John saw that the ground was covered with layer upon layer of enormous snake sheds.
It made walking extremely difficult.
When he stood up and lowered the snake-eye gem, the ground beneath his feet turned into scattered white bones.
Every one of those bones had been shattered to pieces, likely belonging to those who had let go of the snake-eye gem during their fall.
Stepping over a skull, a path appeared before John.
Through the snake-eye gem, however, it was a dead end, with a bottomless cliff in the middle.
On the far side of the cliff stood a statue.
John continued along the real path.
Along the way, several traps were triggered, as if merely greeting him.
The constant presence of traps might lull someone into complacency, but these sudden mechanisms were exactly what had created the bones scattered along both sides of the path.
As a wizard, John had his own way of dealing with traps.
As long as he destroyed them all, it was the same as if there were no traps at all.
His wand dragged arcs of white lightning through the air. With a flick of his wrist, every trap was triggered at once.
White light shattered every mechanism, and the path became safe.
Passing beneath a decapitation trap that now had only the axe handle remaining, John reached the other side of the cliff.
Raising the snake-eye gem, he saw that the statue ahead resembled the human-faced serpent outside the pyramid.
The statue's human face belonged to an old man with a long beard and a purple hat.
The wrinkles on his face had all been carved into the surface of the statue.
It was a human-faced serpent standing upright. Unlike the "8" shape outside, this one resembled a straight wand planted firmly before him.
Behind the statue stood a massive hourglass.
But just like the one in John's hand, this giant hourglass was badly damaged. The sand of time within it had long since disappeared.
After studying the giant hourglass for a while, John noticed something else.
It was the skeleton of a massive snake.
Its flesh had long vanished, but judging by the situation, the creature had once been a guardian here.
Time had simply passed too long, and the snake's lifespan had run out, leaving behind nothing but bones.
"Judging by the bones, it seems to be a basilisk."
John stroked his chin as he circled the skeleton.
A basilisk of this size had likely lived even longer than the one beneath Hogwarts.
But if even the basilisk had died of old age, just how many years ago had the master of this place existed?
"As far as I know, among the wizards who kept basilisks, aside from Salazar Slytherin, there was only one other."
John murmured to himself and looked up at the human-faced serpent.
On the list of the ten most notorious dark wizards in the world, there was someone as evil as Ekrizdis.
One could even say he was more evil than Ekrizdis.
Because he had created a form of magic that everyone considered utterly vile.
Horcruxes.
Pure slaughter, splitting the soul apart as a method of attempting to achieve immortality.
In John's view, that wizard was essentially an upgraded version of Voldemort.
Even someone as powerful as Voldemort had needed to pick up the scraps of his knowledge in order to prolong his existence.
At the same time, he was also the oldest dark wizard.
The man who used a toad to hatch a chicken's egg, thereby creating the basilisk.
The first to forge a Horcrux, and even in John's era, no one could say for certain whether he had truly died.
He created many evil curses that still continued to influence the magical world to this day.
This was not an Egyptian pyramid.
It belonged to an ancient Greek wizard.
A man ranked first among the world's ten most infamous dark wizards.
His era of activity came even before the time of the four founders of Hogwarts and the three brothers.
"Herpo the Foul," John said slowly as he looked at the statue.
If Herpo the Foul's Horcrux had not been destroyed, he would have almost achieved immortality.
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