"Now the hourglass needs to be used again."
John's tail hooked the soul lamp, and a silver-white soul flew out from it.
After he infused it into the hourglass, the golden Möbius ring began to flow.
John flipped the hourglass, and the surrounding scene began to change rapidly.
The place that had been a ruin returned to how it had looked a thousand years ago.
Fragments that had fallen from the human-faced serpent statue began returning to their places.
The damaged giant hourglass slowly repaired itself bit by bit.
As time passed, the hourglass was fully restored, and golden sand gathered at the bottom.
John's own hourglass shimmered faintly as he stared at the giant one, now filled with sand of time.
All he had to do was turn it once, and this ancient tomb that had slept for a thousand years would return to that era.
"A large-scale Time-Turner like this affects enough space to cover the entire pyramid."
John circled the hourglass and reached its base. He tapped it lightly with his wand.
"Flip."
A trace of magic pulled at the bottom.
The enormous hourglass creaked with a long, grinding sound.
The structure supporting its middle seemed barely able to bear the strain as it slowly began to turn.
John kept his eyes fixed on the hourglass. The turning process took ten minutes.
At last it fully flipped over, and the golden sand began flowing from the inverted top to the bottom.
When the first grain of sand fell into the lower chamber, a golden pulse spread out from the hourglass.
The wave quickly covered the entire pyramid.
At the same time, the surroundings began to change.
First, the human-faced serpent statue, whose color had faded over the years. Now, its colors began to return.
The uneven stones on the ground gradually smoothed out.
Gold spread across the floor, filling the entire space with a dazzling golden glow.
A rumbling sound rose from the bottom of the cliff.
From the lowest point, a streak of gold appeared, followed by a geyser-like surge rising upward.
John looked over. It was an immeasurable mass of treasure.
The jagged stones above turned golden, while sand poured downward like a waterfall.
The sand of time.
The entire pyramid was changing. In the corridors stretching through it, figures appeared like scenes played in reverse, flashing by one after another.
"Rewinding at a rate of one year per second."
John's expression turned serious. The scale of this undertaking was immense.
"To reshape the entire pyramid… this design is incredibly ambitious."
A Time-Turner usually sends someone back to a specific moment in time, but this… this had transported the pyramid itself from a particular moment to the present time anchor.
Such mastery over time magic was something even John had to admire.
The reconstruction was still continuing. Judging by the time it had taken so far, John reached a startling conclusion.
This place had existed for more than a thousand years.
What an ancient creation.
As the final sharp golden pinnacle settled upside down onto the vault above, John was finally able to glimpse the pyramid's true form.
A pyramid built from endless treasure and the sand of time had reappeared in the world as time continued to turn.
The human-faced serpent statue slowly bent its body, forming the shape of a "?".
John no longer lacked the sand of time. The amount stored here far exceeded what the Ministry of Magic possessed.
An immense quantity of time sand gathered together, forming a special domain.
John lowered the snake-eye gem, yet the scene before him did not change.
Within this special domain, time had been fixed in place. There was no longer any need for the snake-eye gem to see the scene from a thousand years ago.
The grains of time sand, pushing against one another, flowed through the air like a river.
John tossed the worn Time-Turner into the flowing sand.
Like dipping a bucket into water, when he pulled the Time-Turner back out, it was now filled with the sand of time.
John had achieved his goal.
He looked up at the human-faced serpent and began walking toward it.
The bent human-faced serpent appeared even more eerie than before.
A strange thought formed in John's mind.
"It's moving."
The moment the thought appeared, John heard a sound.
A hissing noise came from behind the human-faced serpent.
John understood what it meant.
"Hungry…"
Then a basilisk even larger than the one in the Chamber of Secrets at Hogwarts slowly extended its head.
This was a basilisk from a thousand years ago. After countless cycles of shedding its skin, it had grown more than twice the size of its kind.
Its terrifying body slid across the ground, the hissing sound it produced enough to inspire fear.
John stared at the basilisk as it emerged and remembered the snake skins he had stepped on earlier when he fell.
It seemed they had all been shed by this very serpent.
This serpent was even older than the one beneath Hogwarts.
John guessed the reason for its death was that every living thing inside the pyramid had eventually been eaten.
Earlier, he had noticed parts of the basilisk's skeleton that had turned golden. It was probably because the creature had accidentally swallowed some of the treasure.
Catching the scent of food, the basilisk slowly turned its head.
Its movements were sluggish, giving the impression that it posed little threat.
But basilisks didn't rely on speed. Their eyes alone were enough to kill their prey.
In that instant, the basilisk's orange-yellow eyes met John's.
Under normal circumstances, the prey would collapse dead, and the basilisk would feast.
But the reality was different.
The basilisk widened its eyes and asked in confusion, "Strange… why is he fine?"
Its enormous body gradually slid forward as it emerged fully, still unable to understand why John was unaffected.
This living creature looked even more imposing than the skeleton John had seen earlier.
Calling it the king of serpents would not be an exaggeration.
At that moment, John raised his head. In his eyes appeared a pair of narrow vertical pupils, different from dragon eyes, giving him an additional cold and sinister aura.
He spoke, "Hello there, basilisk."
His voice had turned cold and hoarse, like the hiss of a serpent.
"Basilisk, tell me.. who is your master?"
With basilisk blood flowing through his veins, John had no fear of the basilisk's gaze.
The basilisk froze in place when it heard Parseltongue.
It spoke uncertainly, asking, "Are you the master's descendant?"
Clearly, the basilisk's master had also been a Parselmouth.
It was a talent that required inheritance.
The basilisk didn't think too deeply about it and simply assumed that a Parselmouth must be the master's descendant.
"Descendant of the great Herpo, the basilisk bows before you."
With that, the basilisk lowered its massive head to the ground.
Its large orange-yellow eyes, like lanterns, stared directly at John.
The great Herpo?
If John's guess was correct, then this Herpo must be Herpo the Foul.
Yet in the basilisk's words, his foulness had become greatness.
John felt even more certain of his earlier guess.
He said, "Tell me, where is Herpo's most precious treasure?"
John did not deny the basilisk's assumption, allowing it to guide him instead.
This basilisk had lived inside the pyramid until its death and had even been Herpo's pet.
If anyone understood the pyramid better than Herpo himself, it could only be the basilisk.
"I obey the command of the great Herpo's descendant," the basilisk said without the slightest suspicion. Or rather, its mind was simply too straightforward.
Just like Slytherin's basilisk—though a thousand years had passed, it still obeyed the commands of any Parselmouth.
You could call it loyalty, or you could call it stupidity.
Suppressing its urge to swallow the little creature in front of it, the basilisk turned and moved behind the human-faced serpent statue.
"As expected, those treasures piled up like garbage along the cliff weren't the real treasure."
John, confident in his abilities, followed the basilisk that could swallow him in a single bite.
As he passed the human-faced serpent statue, John paused.
He looked up at it, feeling as though the statue's posture had changed slightly.
"Specialis Revelio."
He used magic to test it. With a point of his wand, the human-faced serpent showed no reaction at all.
Seeing this, John dismissed the thought and continued in the direction the basilisk was leading him.
After he walked past, the human-faced serpent statue's previously closed eyes slowly opened, a pair of lifelike eyes staring directly at John's back.
The basilisk arrived at the base of the giant hourglass, where a pit appeared beneath it.
The pit connected to a tunnel whose interior was unbelievably smooth. The basilisk's massive head slid inside.
John grabbed hold of the basilisk's tail, and the downward force of the serpent's movement pulled him into the passage.
The basilisk moved swiftly through the tunnel.
The tunnel branched in every direction, forming a network that ran throughout the entire pyramid.
John guessed that this had been part of Herpo's defensive system, designed to allow the basilisk to move freely.
Herpo had intended for the basilisk to use these tunnels to deal with intruders, but he could never have expected that John would use the same passages to reach Herpo's own lair.
The basilisk traveled through the tunnels for who knew how long. When it finally emerged again, the grand scene of the enormous statue from earlier was gone.
The place before them now was not large. It seemed to be some kind of vault.
Only a few items were stored here.
The space itself was small. After the basilisk entered, it was so narrow that only John could pass through.
Stepping into what looked like a study, John saw a black leather-wrapped book placed in the most prominent position, radiating a sinister aura.
"Greek."
John didn't touch it directly. Instead, he carefully opened it with his wand.
Inside were records of many evil curses created by Herpo, and John also saw that dreadful spell.
"The method for creating a Horcrux."
Staring at the method written there, John scoffed at Herpo's practice of splitting the soul, though he couldn't help admiring the wizard's imagination and intelligence.
"In the fields of time and the soul, he could truly be called unprecedented."
This wizard, active around 100 BC, possessed astonishing intelligence. In many ways, he was a fully enhanced version of Voldemort.
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