"A relic of Lady Rowena Ravenclaw?"
The image of the diadem hidden within the Room of Requirement immediately flashed through Ethan's mind. It was a legendary treasure said to grant the wearer ultimate wisdom, but it was also one of the Horcruxes chosen by Voldemort.
In the original timeline, it was eventually consumed by Fiendfyre.
Recalling this, Ethan nodded thoughtfully. "Destroying your own mother's relic? One might say you're a very... filial daughter."
Helena: "..."
How was this guy somehow less human than a literal ghost?
She took a deep breath and drifted to the side. Her brow furrowed, and her eyes lost their focus as if staring into a past she couldn't bear to revisit. Her pearl-white face was etched with sorrow.
"Because of a moment's greed, I stole the diadem," she began slowly. "I met my end in a dark forest, leaving my ailing mother to pass away in regret... And then, because of my naivety and stupidity, I was seduced by the honeyed words of an evil man. I allowed the diadem to be shamed again, defiled by a filthy curse!"
Helena's face flared with sudden rage. Her long hair and skirts billowed like a storm, and her voice echoed through the corridor like a harsh, rasping wind.
Ethan remained unmoved, his tone as calm as his gaze. "So, you think I can resist the temptation of the curse and help you destroy it?"
"...Yes, Mr. Vincent."
Helena turned slightly, her eyes looking down at Ethan with a flicker of emotion. "Because I see a possibility in you, Mr. Vincent..."
Ethan let out a "hehe" and scratched his head, looking almost bashful. "Is it a possibility for 'Light'?"
"No," Helena said seriously. "It is a possibility for evil. You are more evil, more dark, than the curse that infects that diadem."
Ethan: "..."
Not funny.
He'd thought she'd chosen him for his noble character, but it turned out to be a "big fish eats little fish" situation. His own "curse" was just more potent? No wonder she kept getting tricked; she really wasn't the brightest.
Tsk, tsk.
For some reason, seeing the boy's sideways glance, Helena found herself clenching her spectral fists. Her temper was rising.
"...I heard your conversation earlier. I know what you are looking for," Helena said suddenly, looking down at him. "You are searching for the ultimate secret hidden within Hogwarts Castle. And I... I may be able to give you guidance."
At those words, Ethan looked up. A faint light flickered in his deep, cobalt-blue eyes.
"That's right..." he murmured. "If one wants to ask about the past, who knows more than a ghost?"
In the current Hogwarts, who else but the daughter of Rowena Ravenclaw—one of the Four Founders—would know the secrets from a thousand years ago?
"But—" Ethan's thoughts shifted. "You don't actually know the specific location, do you?"
Otherwise, in the original story, she wouldn't have remained silent until the very end, watching Hogwarts get blasted apart.
"...Correct." Helena's expression shifted, but she remained firm. "However, I believe my help is better than having no clues at all."
Ethan lowered his head, his mind racing. After a long silence, he spoke. "...That is Ravenclaw's treasure, your mother's relic. It seems like a waste to just destroy it. I think we could just exorcise the curse on it—"
"No, it cannot be done." Helena shook her head, her face filled with grief and indignation. "That unspeakable evil has soaked into the diadem. It is like a drop of ink in clear water; there is no way to separate them. I know you purified Hufflepuff's Cup, but that was because the cup itself possessed a powerful life force. It could endure. This diadem, however, is beyond repair. If you have such thoughts, dismiss them early."
Helena looked at the boy as he pondered. A hint of admiration and envy flickered in her eyes. If only I had possessed such a pure, inquiring heart back then, perhaps none of those tragedies would have happened.
However, she was too weak to move forward. If only... if only I could personally atone to my mother...
No, she shouldn't daydream. Helena shook her head, casting the absurd thought aside. Her figure drifted backward as she left him with a final word:
"If you are willing to help me, come to the entrance of the Room of Requirement. I will show you the way. In exchange, I will give you the secret of this ancient castle."
Helena vanished into thin air like a wisp of pale blue mist. Behind her forced composure, a trace of sadness lingered.
"Is there really no other way besides total destruction...?" Ethan mused.
He absentmindedly summoned the Anywhere Door and stepped through it into the Ravenclaw Common Room. Not looking where he was going, he bumped straight into Luna.
"Oof."
Luna buried her face in Ethan's chest. She didn't move away; instead, she took a little sniff. Then, tilting her pale face up, she said, "You smell like the past."
"Hmm?" Ethan rubbed Luna's reddened forehead. "That's because I just saw a lady ghost—"
He froze. A sudden flash of inspiration struck him, and his cobalt eyes lit up!
The past! The past! If he couldn't change it in the [Present], then why not just go back to the past and change it there? He could return to a time before the diadem was tainted and intervene. That would solve the "must be destroyed" dilemma!
As for how to get back to the past, Ethan had a way. Specifically, the Time-Travel Key—the Silver Key—that had once taken him to the Goblin Rebellion!
"Brilliant! Luna!" Ethan grabbed her shoulders and shouted excitedly. "You're a genius!!"
"?" Luna tilted her head, a look of confusion on her face. Then, as if accustomed to this, she reached up and patted Ethan's head with a gentle smile. "I'm glad I could help."
"Ahem."
Nearby, Michael Corner cleared his throat. He glanced at the surrounding students who were watching and gave a wry smile. "Honorable Headmaster, we're in a public place. Mind your image."
Seriously, don't just drop 'dog food' (PDA) on us without warning! For a bunch of single guys, this is the ultimate torture!!
The other Ravenclaw boys, who were reasonably handsome but had the misfortune of being overshadowed by Ethan, were currently drowning in a sea of jealousy and envy.
Two Weeks Later
Somewhere in Hogwarts.
A group of first-years clutched their textbooks, staring at a corridor lined with portraits. They swallowed hard and tried to encourage each other.
"Come on! If we get past this stretch, we'll make it to the Transfiguration classroom!"
"Three, two, one—CHARGE!"
They bolted at full speed. As they ran down the corridor—Rrrrrip!
Arms suddenly tore through the canvases on both sides, reaching out wildly to grab them! If they weren't careful, they'd be dragged into a painting for a one-way trip to the Hospital Wing.
"Rrrrrip! Rrrrrip!" "AAAAAAHHHHH!!!"
Similar scenes were playing out all over the school.
The main entrance to the Dark Arts Physical Training class was locked, forcing students to climb through windows. In the Pitiful Student Protection class, students had to wrestle dragons—only for the dragons to fly away halfway through the fight. And then there was the Human Transmutation class, where if you didn't brew your potion in time, a giant spider would drop from the ceiling and carry you off.
Even the regular floors of Hogwarts had been replaced in sections by the Weasley twins' "Portable Swamp."
Regarding this, Hermione's take was: "Somewhere in the Amazon, explorers are going to be very surprised to find a patch of marble flooring in the middle of the dirt."
Day and night, the painful wails of students echoed through the halls.
"—The letter says he wants to know if Hogwarts has been converted into a mass grave! He wants to send his father over!!" Professor Snape slammed a complaint letter onto the desk, his voice rasping as he glared at Dumbledore.
"Ho ho ho~"
The gracefully retired Dumbledore was entirely unbothered. He popped a Cockroach Cluster into his mouth despite Snape's look of disgust and chuckled. "But you have to admit, under Ethan's... innovative teaching methods, the students' strength has increased significantly."
In the past, a first-year successfully hovering a feather in their first lesson was a huge success. Now? If you don't make the feather fly, you're the next one flying.
"Indeed," Snape's lip curled. "In life-or-death situations, humans tend to find their potential."
Dumbledore just smiled and said nothing. Honestly, after decades of work and two Wizarding Wars, he finally got to rest. He had thought he'd only find true peace when death arrived.
"Now, I can finally make up for the time I missed with you... my sister, Ariana." Dumbledore looked at the portrait of the girl on the wall and raised his hot cocoa. The rising steam fogged up his spectacles, hiding his slightly reddened eyes.
Oh, Gellert... this is a happiness that no amount of power or title can bring.
The next second—BAM!
The door was kicked open with tremendous force! Ethan charged in like a runaway train, his eyes gleaming. "Old Man Dumbledore! I need to leave for a while. The school is yours!"
Dumbledore: "..."
He paused, silently put down his cup, and wiped the spilled cocoa off his face and robes. Then he looked up with a stiff smile. "Huh?"
Ethan: "No time to explain. I'm going back to the past. Helena asked me to fix her mom's—"
Just then, a spectral figure drifted in behind him. Miss Helena, usually reserved and reclusive, was now a picture of shock and fury. She hollered, "You're insulting my mother?!"
Ethan: "? I am not! I just said I was going to fix your mom's—"
"Ahem." Dumbledore gave a light cough, interrupting Ethan before he could add more fuel to the fire.
Helena took a deep breath, glancing nervously at the others in the room before looking deeply at Ethan. Heaven knew how shocked she had been when this guy suddenly ran up to her saying he could go back in time to change the diadem's fate.
Normally, when someone hears a treasure is unfixable, shouldn't they give up? Why would he try something so impossible, using a method as absurd and mad as "returning to the past"?
She looked at the boy, staring into those cobalt-blue eyes. For some reason, she suddenly thought of her mother—the strict, stubborn Rowena who only ever looked at unsolved mysteries.
"Trust me, Miss Helena," Ethan said solemnly.
"...If you defile the diadem again, you will never hear the secrets of Hogwarts from me." With that final warning, Helena vanished.
"Defile? Me? The bright and righteous Ethan Vincent? What a silly girl." Ethan shook his head and sighed.
Over the past few days, he had searched Hogwarts top to bottom with Dumbledore and the other professors, but they hadn't found any unknown secret passages or guides. Even the oldest books mentioned nothing about the "Core" of Hogwarts. Right now, the ghost was indeed his only lead.
"Besides, purifying a Horcrux and gaining a treasure is a win-win for me. The other half of the Reaper's remains is quiet, and that weird hunchbacked girl seems like a normal student... actually, she's doing better than most freshmen. I'll use this gap to deal with the Horcrux."
Ethan turned to Dumbledore, who looked like he had a thousand questions, and pulled a mirror from his robes. "Here, Old Man. It's a Two-Way Mirror. If anything goes wrong, use it to contact me."
"...Alright." Dumbledore took the mirror. He pursed his lips, about to ask something else, but Ethan had already activated that mysterious Time-Travel Key and vanished.
"Traveling to the past... I hope it's not to the first Wizarding War decades ago." Dumbledore muttered. Gellert, the Blood Pact, the Maledictus, and the nephew he couldn't save... surely a person's dark history wouldn't keep getting dug up, right?
Dumbledore gripped the mirror, a strong sense of foreboding washing over him. There was so much history; surely Ethan wouldn't happen to land in that specific time node...
Worried, Dumbledore turned around only to meet Snape's mocking sneer.
Snape drawled slowly, "Well, well... I wish you a peaceful retirement, Professor Dumbledore." With that, Snape tilted his chin up and sauntered out of the office.
That felt good.
Place de la Madeleine, 1927
FLASH!
A white light erupted, and countless dense bubbles pushed against Ethan's body. An invisible pressure bore down from above, and the bubbles seemed to turn into eyes, looking down at him. However, this time, the pressure wasn't as overwhelming as before. Ethan even had the leisure to look back at those countless eyes. It felt as though he had become a being of the same rank—or close to it.
After what felt like both a second and an eternity, the bubble-eyes slowly closed under Ethan's gaze. A sensation of falling hit him, and the white light became blinding!
The next second—thump.
Ethan's feet hit solid ground. Suddenly, the chaotic noise around him vanished into a heavy silence. He blinked, adjusting to the dim light.
What met his eyes were dozens of wands pointed straight at him, framed by the dark, damp, arched stone walls of what looked like an underground chamber. It was a massive space, but it felt subterranean.
Ethan stretched his limbs and took a deep breath. "Ah... a cemetery. It feels like home."
The air seemed to grow even more stagnant.
Just then, a low, elegant voice—filled with the effortless arrogance of a leader—rang out from beside him.
"And who might you be?"
Ethan turned his head. He met a pair of eyes—one black, one white. When their gazes locked, Ethan felt as if destiny itself was unfurling within this man's sight.
A natural-born Seer.
Ethan glanced at the man's white hair and then shifted his gaze to the stunning woman standing beside him, her wand held steady. He slowly let out a grin.
Ah... so I was sent to this specific point in time.
[Arrived at Père Lachaise Cemetery! Current Time: 1927]
The era of the first Dark Lord's rise. He had arrived exactly at the site of the famous "gas stove" cemetery rally.
Ethan didn't answer immediately. Instead, he turned to face the tiers of stone steps where hundreds of wizards stood in shock. His clear voice rang out through the dead silence.
"Good evening, everyone."
He bowed elegantly, a perfect, standard greeting. When he looked up again, a bizarre, pure-white mask had covered his face.
"Allow me to introduce myself. I am Mr. Lamp. I am nothing special, merely..."
Behind the mask, Ethan's grin widened. Using a cheerful voice that everyone could hear perfectly, he said, word by word:
"...another 'Seer'."
(After all, nobody knows the 'prophecies' better than someone who knows the plot.)
The moment the last word fell, the white-haired man—the one future generations would call a "Cockatiel"—Gellert Grindelwald, lost his composure. His heterochromatic eyes flashed with an irrepressible shock.
Another Seer? Impossible! And such a "possibility" could not be allowed to exist.
Grindelwald shot a sharp glance at his subordinates.
The next second—"Avada Kedavra!"
A harsh cry rang out as a terrifying bolt of green light erupted from the wand of the "Black Rose of France," Vinda Rosier. It streaked directly toward Ethan!
"Goodness me."
Watching the Killing Curse fly toward him, Ethan calmly raised his hand. Between his fingers, one, two, three cards wreathed in dark energy appeared.
"A 'Fantastic Beasts' theme, is it? Come out, my little darlings."
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