After the entire Great Hall erupted into roaring laughter, Ron finally realized the immense impropriety of what he had just done.
He instantly slumped into a posture of profound despondency and unease, a layer of ashen gray washing over his face as he muttered incessantly to himself in words nobody else could understand.
"An accidental touch, how can that not count as having touched one..."
"I, Ron Jingze, am destined to live out my days in utter loneliness and die an old bachelor..."
"Escaping singlehood is an absolute impossibility..."
Harry, sitting right in the seat next to Ron, didn't join in with the others to mock him.
That was because he could practically be said to have never touched a girl's hand either.
What truly enraged him wasn't whether he had touched a girl's hand; rather, it was the fact that at this very moment, the hand of Cho Chang, the goddess of his dreams, was resting squarely within Cedric's demonic claws.
You animal! Let her go right now, damn it!
Outwardly, Harry acted as though nothing was amiss, still maintaining a faint smile on his face, but deep down he had already chopped Cedric into ten thousand pieces roughly a million times over.
Looking at the sumptuous breakfast spread before him, Harry lost all appetite; the sausage in his mouth tasted like sawdust.
After a brief period of rowdiness, the students in the Great Hall gradually quieted down, and those who had finished breakfast left their seats one after another.
Prior to their third year, students would always have one or two blank spaces on their timetables, meaning they had no classes scheduled during those windows.
Starting from the fourth year onward, however, those leisurely days of ease came to an end.
For students in fourth year and above, the entire week was packed solid with classes, their schedules so densely crammed that just looking at them induced a wave of dizziness.
Leaving the Great Hall, the crowd hurried anxiously toward Professor McGonagall's classroom.
As the last to eat their fill and among the final batch of students to leave the Great Hall, when Kyle and the little Beaver rushed into the Transfiguration classroom, they were the only two missing.
Offering an apologetic smile to Professor McGonagall, the little Beaver pulled Kyle along to sit in the golden throne seats at the very back row of the classroom.
For an elite student like Hermione, the central seat in the very front row of the classroom would normally have been her prime location.
Not anymore, though.
For compulsory courses like these at Hogwarts, the little Beaver's learning pace far outstripped everyone else in her grade; as a fourth-year student, she hadn't even taken her O.W.Ls yet, but she was already previewing the N.E.W.Ts material meant for seventh years.
And Hogwarts professors were hardly going to tailor the classroom instruction to lecture on seventh-year material just to accommodate the little Beaver's situation.
Sticking to the regular fourth-year curriculum meant it was basically just a review session for the little Beaver, where she couldn't learn anything particularly useful.
Consequently, the little Beaver had no choice but to quietly move her seat to the very back of the classroom.
In order not to disturb her classmates—or more accurately, not to shatter her classmates' self-confidence—the little Beaver quietly relocated her seat to the far back.
"Before we begin class," the senior cat-lady rapped heavily against the blackboard with a solemn expression, "although you've heard me say this several times already, I must reiterate the immense importance of the O.W.L. examinations to your futures."
Even though the group of students before her were currently only in their fourth year, Professor McGonagall believed they ought to start preparing from this very moment for the crucial examinations awaiting them the following school year.
Therefore, before the formal lecture of every single class, she would unwearyingly repeat this speech.
Regrettably, Professor McGonagall's earnest words of advice failed to win much understanding from the students.
Down below the podium, Ron muttered discontentedly and softly, "Isn't there still over a year until the O.W.Ls..."
"In this class, we will continue attempting to turn hedgehogs into pin cushions." Professor McGonagall lifted her wand slightly, and a cage positioned behind her suddenly swung open.
Little hedgehogs drifted out of the cage one after another, landing precisely onto the desks in front of every student except Kyle and Hermione.
Despite Professor McGonagall having explained the essentials of transformation during last week's Transfiguration class.
She knew these students' habits all too well.
The moment they heard the end-of-class bell ring, they would practically return everything they had just learned back to her.
She could guarantee that among the crowd before her, aside from Hermione, not a single person remembered the key points she had taught the previous week.
Perhaps because following the conclusion of the astronomy class the previous night, the students from the Gryffindor and Hufflepuff houses had returned to their respective common rooms and spent a long time working on their homework.
Thus, faced with this first class of the morning, quite a few of them were feeling drowsy.
Listening to Professor McGonagall's lecture—which possessed max-level hypnotic efficacy—many students unknowingly began rocking back and forth and bobbing their heads up and down in a periodic motion.
Harry was among those feeling sleepy.
A thick textbook suddenly slammed down heavily onto the desk in front of Harry with a loud bang, instantly startling Harry so badly that he jumped straight out of his chair.
"How can you be sleeping? At your age, how can you manage to fall asleep?! Have you got no ambition at all!"
Looking at Professor McGonagall's furious expression, Kyle pushed up his nonexistent Force glasses.
It seemed his adoptive father had leaked some news to Professor McGonagall, intending to subject Harry to rigorous training to elevate our Savior classmate's proficiency in magic, thereby helping Harry shake off the title of a "combat power of five."
Otherwise, Professor McGonagall wouldn't normally fly into such a towering rage over students dozing off sneakily during class.
Ignoring the trembling Harry, Kyle and Hermione—hiding away in their dim, secluded corner—continued discussing advanced Transfiguration concepts.
A long time ago, Kyle had pondered a particular question.
The transfigurations they routinely cast, while seemingly capable of turning matches into silver needles, would nevertheless revert back to ordinary matches once the sustaining magic wore off.
This process seemingly involved material conversion—meaning wood fiber being converted into elemental silver—but was that truly the case?
If Transfiguration genuinely involved such rearrangement of matter at the atomic level, then even after withdrawing the magic sustaining the Transfiguration, the silver needle ought to retain its transformed state.
Rather than turning back into a match.
Instead of calling it the effect of Transfiguration, Kyle felt it resembled an illusion—the transformed silver needle remained fundamentally a match at its core, with none of its microscopic particles undergoing any transformation whatsoever; only its shape had been reshaped by magic.
As for why a transformed match could exhibit all the properties possessed by a silver needle, or rather, silver metal...
Kyle would rather believe that magic played a mediating role within it.
If he were to probe his perception of magic deep into the microscopic world, and then use magic to substitute for the role neutrons play during nuclear fission, thereby causing Uranium-235 to fission into Krypton-92 and Barium-141, what on earth would happen then?
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