The Borderland was shrouded in mist.
Through the haze, the outline of a ruined street could be seen.
There was always rubbish piled at the mouth of this alley. Beside a peeling, painted door, a faded plaque reading Oak Tree Children's Home hung crookedly, shaking dust loose in the wind.
The dust drifted down.
And a black cat was suddenly grabbed without warning.
"Centuries have passed, and you lot still appear in the exact same place—"
It was an interested voice, full and strong, ringing with force.
Startled, the black cat vanished in an instant. When it reappeared, it was already standing on a clump of mist.
The mist not far in front of it began to gather. It did not move quickly. It was as if invisible fingers were drawing gray fog together layer by layer, stacking it into an enormous outline.
First came a huge cat's head, then an upright body, and finally ink-black fur.
The wizard lifted his head and saw a gigantic cat towering there, nearly five meters across.
"Hah."
He chuckled and raised the sword in his hand, glowing with a scarlet light.
The giant cat stared at him with icy vertical pupils. In the next second, it vanished.
When it reappeared, it was already more than ten meters away.
A sword glowing red was the sharpest thing in the Borderland. Every wizard knew that.
Unfortunately, the giant cat had underestimated the wizard's speed. In only a few seconds, the man was already blocking its path, sword in hand.
"You are—"
the giant cat asked warily.
It stared carefully at the wizard before it, wondering which notorious wizard of the Borderland he might be.
Very few Dark wizards could endure long in the Borderland, but that did not mean there were none.
Even beyond the Veil of Death, the soul was not completely safe.
No place was entirely harmonious. That was true in every field of magic.
The Borderland was even more so. That was why wizards often avoided newly arrived Dark wizards.
They would eventually be devoured by their negative double anyway, so there was no need to get entangled with them.
But the black cat hadn't expected to encounter a Dark wizard now, after all this time without ever running into one.
"The distance between him and this Dark wizard is very close—"
That was the first sentence that surfaced in the black cat's mind.
But it had no connection like that with any Dark wizard, let alone a "madman carrying a ruby longsword."
So when that face gradually emerged through the drifting mist, what the black cat noticed first was the scars.
Three deep claw marks cut diagonally from his left forehead across the bridge of his nose and all the way down to his lower right jaw, almost splitting that face into two separate maps.
The scars were old and pale, but still so hideous they made one want to take a step back.
Yet above those scars, his eyes were a bright amber.
He seemed frozen at an age when he no longer grew older, somewhere just over forty. His dark-gold hair, like a lion's mane, was threaded with gray, and his beard was roughly trimmed, as though he had scraped it with a dagger one morning without much care.
He did not wear the splendid wizard robes seen in ancient portraits. Instead, he wore an old deep-red coat, the cuffs frayed, and a patch on his left shoulder that was obviously darker than the rest.
That patch had been sewn on later.
The black cat did not understand why it knew that.
The "madman carrying a ruby longsword" tilted his head and studied the black cat with undisguised curiosity, like someone browsing an open book at a market.
"You're awake,"
said the "madman carrying a ruby longsword."
His voice was low, with a hoarse tail to it.
"Most people are dreaming when they arrive here. You aren't."
"The Void Talisman grants wizards the ability to travel through the Borderland."
the giant cat said.
"Oh? Is that what you think?"
The "madman carrying a ruby longsword" grinned, laughing until his body trembled slightly.
The giant cat stared at him, especially at that sword.
"You like this sword?"
he said with interest.
"With this sword—a goblin-forged thing, ugly beyond belief—I cut down seventeen wizards in one go. They were all decent fighters.
"For the month after that, I couldn't lift my right hand, and had to hold my wand with my left. An old friend of mine cursed me out and brewed a whole vat of ointment himself. The way he scolded me stank worse than the ointment he made—"
The giant cat did not understand why this Dark wizard was saying any of this. It stared at this "utterly vicious" man who had killed seventeen wizards in one go, wondering if it should leave the Borderland early.
"You came here because I have something to teach you,"
the "madman carrying a ruby longsword" took a step forward.
"What Ravenclaw didn't teach you, I will."
"What?"
The giant cat didn't react for a moment.
"She carved wandless magic into your soul, didn't she? Wasn't that so I'd come find you?"
The Dark wizard grinned.
"She's still like that. Says nothing, waits for people to guess. She thinks that's 'wisdom.' Who doesn't know what she's doing? But we loved her, so we let her make her little messes."
The giant cat was shaken.
So the "madman carrying a ruby longsword" was one of Teacher Ravenclaw's suitors?
"Come on, then. Try my sword."
The Dark wizard raised his sword. Its sharpness reminded Sean of the legends of the Borderland.
According to legend, the "madman carrying a ruby longsword" was the most dangerous, vicious fellow in the Borderland.
He had an absolutely sharp sword. No wizard could emerge unscathed beneath its edge, and to this day, no one had ever been heard to defeat him in a duel.
And unfortunately, he was the kind of man who liked challenging people to duels.
Most of the time, no wizard wanted to meet him in the Borderland.
Not if they wanted to see tomorrow's mist.
"Oh, right. If you don't fight with everything you have, I'll be displeased."
the Dark wizard said with a hearty laugh.
The giant cat felt certain that all its fur had risen.
In the next moment, the earth shook. Deep within the mist, an intense change seemed to be taking place.
As a special guest of the Borderland, the giant cat always enjoyed certain extra privileges.
For example, it could use magic that was difficult to use in the Borderland.
For example, it could apply partial transformation or concealment to its own soul.
Its recent enlargement, sudden disappearance, and sudden reappearance had all been the effects of such magic.
Now, it naturally used the magic it was most familiar with.
An enormous stone hand interwoven with vines abruptly rose from the ground, dispersing a whole stretch of mist.
Amid a rumbling roar, the "madman carrying a ruby longsword" laughed heartily—and was gripped firmly by the stone hand.
The giant hand, like the remnant of some ancient ruin, closed shut. The giant cat deflated like a leaking balloon and turned back into a black cat.
Would it be… that simple?
The black cat thought about what the Dark wizard had said.
He was Teacher Ravenclaw's suitor, and he had come to… teach it?
And his method was… raising a sword and cutting at a cat.
The whole thing was strange in a different sort of way, and for the moment, the black cat could not think it through clearly.
The change that came in the next second left it unable to think at all.
The Vine-Stone Warden was split open again.
This time, from top to bottom. The entire stone hand cracked in half and crashed down onto the white, misty ground.
The black cat had never seen magic like that, nor had it seen such a powerful wizard.
"Still not enough—"
Amid flying stone chips, the Dark wizard walked out from the rubble as casually as if strolling through a garden. His bright amber eyes had become even more arresting.
"We foresaw this long ago. Once all crises were solved, later wizards would become weaker—but they shouldn't be this weak.
"As her student, her only student, I can't let you stay like this—"
Before the black cat could react, his shoulder sank, his knees bent slightly, and in an instant he had reached the black cat's face.
The black cat had never felt anything so sharp get so close to it before. Its emerald vertical pupils grew solemn.
In the span of one breath, a stone shield one meter wide blocked the space between them.
And this time, the ever-victorious scarlet sword paused for the briefest instant.
The black cat's paw slammed heavily into the mist. The shattered stone hand began to gather again, and something even deeper, even grander, seemed ready to break through the fog.
The "madman carrying a ruby longsword" laughed loudly and freely, the scars on his face stretching wider, making him look somewhat terrifying.
He watched with great interest as the mist was pushed aside.
Then, in the next moment, the light in the black cat's vertical pupils dimmed. Exhausted, it nearly fell off the clump of mist.
At the same time, the entire Borderland seemed to thunder.
Two stone palms, each nearly thirty meters in diameter, tore through the mist and closed together at a speed impossible to react to.
The instant the stone walls met, a massive shockwave scattered the mist that had just begun to gather again.
And between those stone walls, the Dark wizard's fate was unknown.
Yet the black cat still stared at that place solemnly.
Then it turned and ran.
"There are plenty who've fled in duels. Those fellows, I sometimes spare—"
A hand appeared from nowhere and lifted the black cat by the scruff as its legs kept kicking frantically.
The "madman carrying a ruby longsword" wasn't in especially good shape either. His robe was torn in several places, and he was covered in dust and dirt. But he still looked largely unharmed.
The black cat knew it could not defeat him. The Void Talisman floated at its chest, and mist began to wrap around it, preparing to send it out of the world beyond the Veil of Death.
At that very moment, the mist was cut apart.
The black cat's widened pupils stared fixedly at the severed mist, gaining a new understanding of how powerful that sword was.
"If you don't duel properly, I'll always be unhappy. And if next time you still want to go play with that witch called Ariana, I may find it hard to agree—"
The "madman carrying a ruby longsword" looked even more insane now.
At the mention of Ariana's name, the black cat's previously calm vertical pupils turned cold.
The Dark wizard before it was too dangerous.
Ariana—how did he know Ariana?
What else did he know?
What did he want to do?
The "madman carrying a ruby longsword," just as the people of the Borderland had named him, had always been a madman. No one could predict what he intended to do.
And so—
"Vine-Stone Warden—"
If a soul could roar with a soul's voice, then the black cat's soul must have been growling.
"Yes, that's it—"
The Dark wizard smiled, happy as a child.
But in the next instant, that smile stiffened on his face.
Because after a few breaths, the trembling ground returned to calm. The black cat's complexion visibly worsened, and its breathing sounded like a tiny bellows being pulled open and shut.
"You little thing—"
The Dark wizard froze, then his mouth curved upward, and he burst out laughing.
"Have you used up your magic?"
The black cat quietly stirred its mist clumps, quickly searching for Headmaster Dumbledore's dream.
It truly had almost no fighting strength left, but it could still call for outside help.
"You've exhausted the magic of your soul? Since when does a soul have magic?"
The Dark wizard was still laughing, but his bright, hearty tone made it sound less like mockery.
The black cat's paw, which had been stirring the mist, paused.
It suddenly felt as if enlightenment had struck.
Was a wizard's soul truly limited by so-called magical power?
The black cat had long known that magic existed in a wizard's soul.
But a wizard's body also affected how magic was realized. If magic were not limited by a wizard's body, what kind of power could it unleash?
The black cat did not know.
It had never thought about it.
But now it wanted to know.
"Let me see your will! In the Borderland, if you believe you can raise a great wave, then you can become the storm!"
The Dark wizard growled.
And so, that sentence became the last complete sentence he spoke before fleeing.
When he barely flashed away from beneath the towering stone giant, unconcealable astonishment still lingered in his eyes.
It was not like a mountain, because mountains did not crouch like this.
Its enormous body was made of bluish-gray granite, its surface covered with cracks of varying depth.
Moss and lichen spread across its shoulders in dark-green patches. Dwarf pines jutted from the rock seams near its collarbone, their roots prying apart the originally fine lines.
Its head leaned slightly forward, a protruding slab of rock at its brow shading the two dark-red glows in its eye sockets—faintly shining iron ore.
It crouched there in the Borderland.
The Dark wizard could not see its shoulders. He had never known that the mist suspended high above the Borderland could be touched—unless a stone giant's head was buried faintly inside it.
"What blind confidence—"
He swung his sword while charging straight toward the black cat without looking back, knocking aside the stone giant's earthshaking arm, an arm that could not be cut through.
The cat lay on a clump of mist. The Borderland had granted it vertical pupils that the fog could not conceal.
In the next second, the Dark wizard saw the mist begin to tremble.
The endless, eternal mist floating through the Borderland surged all at once.
The Void Talisman floated, but a deep crack had split through it.
The black cat did not know that. It only felt as though something had shot through the Void Talisman and into its body.
The battle stopped when the black cat realized in alarm that the Void Talisman had cracked.
The Dark wizard looked at the black cat and grinned broadly.
"The etiquette of dueling… I really have forgotten it for far too long—"
The Dark wizard sent the stone giant's hand flying with one slash. The burst of force made the black cat narrow its tense eyes.
"You face Godric Gryffindor, dead—one thousand one hundred and seventy-seven years."
The mountain moved.
It lowered its head from the distant clouds and mist, allowing the deep-furred cat before it to stand upon its shoulder.
"Sean Green—alive—fourteen years."
The black cat's figure was completely obscured by mist.
Godric Gryffindor's body stiffened.
He had just been dueling a fourteen-year-old wizard?
This was fourteen?!
"I'm not fighting anymore."
Gryffindor sheathed his sword.