The night was deep, and the stone walls of Hogwarts Castle blocked the wind and snow outside, but they could not shield Alan from the turmoil within.
He sat by the dormitory window, moonlight spilling over the open parchment notebook.
Nicolas Flamel's handwriting was elegant and ancient; every word carried astonishing wisdom. Yet, when combined, they pointed to a destination as elusive as smoke:
"Construction of the Mental Realm."
This thin notebook was a map to an entirely new domain — yet it lacked the most crucial destination.
Alan closed his eyes and sank once more into his mental world.
The mind palace called "Absolute Reason" remained grand and formidable. Endless knowledge was arranged with meticulous precision; logical models rotated like stars across the dome, and rivers of cold, unfeeling data flowed throughout.
This was his kingdom: efficient, precise, yet utterly lifeless.
What he needed was a core.
A ruler capable of commanding this infinite domain, a singularity that could unify the very essence of his will.
Flamel's notebook provided only the method to forge the throne, but it did not state who should sit upon it.
Alan had tried.
He had attempted to condense relativity into a core, but that grand theory of spacetime in his mental realm ultimately dissolved into mere streams of icy, fragmented data.
He had tried to use the second law of thermodynamics as a foundation, but the ultimate concept of entropy, pointing toward oblivion, only caused his mental energy to slip faster into chaos and dissipation.
All efforts were futile.
His mental power, a weapon he had forged and honed through countless trials, each grain of "sand" a perfect crystallization of knowledge — flawless, unassailable.
Yet they were still only sand.
They could not coalesce into an unbreakable rock.
For an entire week, Alan repeated this failure each night. Every deep meditation ended in the dissipation of his mental energy, in utter futility. The sense of powerlessness almost shook the very foundation of Absolute Reason.
He had hit a bottleneck — an invisible yet impenetrable wall.
Until that afternoon, in the sunlight streaming through the library, an unexpected inspiration finally arrived.
The air smelled of old books and dry parchment. Penelope Clearwater sat across from him, speaking passionately about the glory of Ravenclaw. The upperclassman's face radiated a loving intensity.
"The crown of our house bears the most famous words left by the founder: 'Wit beyond measure is man's greatest treasure.'"
Penelope's eyes glimmered in the afternoon light. She leaned slightly forward, lowering her voice, carrying a mysterious tone of sharing a secret.
"But I heard Professor Flitwick say there was more to it."
"It's recorded in a book not open to the public. It's said that Rowena Ravenclaw once told her students…" Her voice grew solemn and distant:
"'The end of wisdom is not in possessing knowledge, but in understanding the initial formula of things.'"
Initial formula.
The moment those four words reached his ears, Alan's entire world went silent.
Penelope's following words, the chatter of the library, the rustle of leaves outside — all were blocked. His cerebral cortex seemed struck by an invisible current, and the foundations of his mind palace were hit with a cataclysmic force.
All rivers of data evaporated in an instant.
All logical models ground to a sudden halt.
All the stars of knowledge dimmed.
In the endless void and mist, only these four words floated at the center of his consciousness, radiating the light of creation's dawn.
He understood.
He finally understood.
He had been searching his mind palace — that infinite repository of knowledge — for a ready-made "answer," trying to place some "knowledge" or "theory" upon the throne.
How foolish that was!
All he had done — his insatiable thirst for knowledge, his instinct to convert everything into data and logic, his attempt to deconstruct all of magic with rational thought —
Its ultimate goal had never been to find some specific result.
But it was not to find an answer.
It was to pursue that legendary, singular "initial formula" that could explain all things in the universe and encompass all truths.
What he sought was not a destination.
What he sought was the pursuit itself!
This concept — this eternal, ultimate action — was the most fundamental driving force of his thought and will.
It was the logical starting point for all his actions.
It was the deepest, foundational definition of Alan Scott as an existence.
He had found it.
This was his one-of-a-kind, uniquely personal conceptual key.
That night, Alan sat cross-legged once more and entered deep meditation.
He no longer tried to sift through, condense, or construct from the vast sea of knowledge.
He emptied himself of everything.
He took his purest, eternal pursuit of the "initial formula" — this concept abstracted to its extreme — and made it the sole, absolute singularity in his mental world.
A hum arose — a vibration from the very depths of his soul, indescribable in words.
His entire mental world — that cold, scattered desert composed of countless delicate "grains of sand" — had found a core of infinite gravitational pull.
The storm began!
Those grains of mental energy, representing knowledge, data, and models, were stripped of all external attributes and reduced to the most fundamental, purest form of spiritual energy.
As if called by divine command, they transformed into torrents of silver, violently, irreversibly collapsing and condensing toward the singularity known as the pursuit core.
This was a black hole on the mental plane.
A genesis of the will.
Finally, when the last torrent of mental energy was swallowed, all turbulence settled into calm.
Beneath his mind palace, on the ground that had once been an endless desert, a perfect geometric sphere slowly took shape.
It was formed from the purest compressed spiritual energy, its surface smooth as a mirror, emitting a faint silver glow as if containing the birth and death of stars.
It was stable, solid, and profound.
Its existence was itself a declaration — an eternal, exploratory reach toward the unknown.
This was the cornerstone of his Fortress of Thought.
The moment Alan's consciousness connected with this spiritual core, an unprecedented sense of control spread throughout him.
He could see the ambient magic in the room — no longer vague mist, but clear strands of energy flowing according to discernible laws.
He could hear the whispers of ancient spells in the castle walls — no longer meaningless noise, but analyzable, stable energy waves.
His spiritual energy had become resilient and sharp, like a blade capable of precisely cutting through the fabric of reality.
He knew: from this moment onward, he truly possessed the most crucial "permission" required to become a magic programmer.
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