The students immediately plunged into a fresh round of struggle. Or rather, practice.
Shaping their own souls was actually a lot like casting a spell. They had to transmit the thoughts they used in magic into the fragment of soul they had separated.
But magic was sometimes like mathematics. The principles sounded simple enough, but once you tried to apply them, endless problems and variations started cropping up.
"I just want to cast a Transfiguration Spell on it!"
After trying for more than ten minutes, George's face was red with effort, yet there was not the slightest change. In frustration, he flicked his wand so hard he nearly sent his own soul flying to the floor.
Tver waved his wand and lightly guided that strand of soul back in front of him.
"I should remind you that using Transfiguration on a soul requires a far higher level than what you're trying to do now."
"...But I can't do it, Professor," George said, sounding both downcast and a little like he was whining.
"Stop disgusting the professor!" Even Fred could not stand it anymore, and he pulled George behind him.
Then, pretending to whisper while speaking loudly enough for everyone to hear, he said, "You just want to ask if the professor has any good tricks, right? Then just ask. Our beloved professor definitely won't mind telling us!"
"You're right, I really wouldn't mind telling you," Tver said, amused by their little act. "But unfortunately, there really isn't any trick this time."
He had actually created Imp Magic back in his seventh year. Advanced Transfiguration could indeed help with shaping, but that would limit an imp's power.
Under the current circumstances, he had no intention of teaching that, and the students would not be able to learn it anyway.
"It still comes down to concentration. Just like casting a spell, give an order to your own soul!"
"This is a very simple spell. I created it when I was in seventh year. What, can't you even learn that?"
The students were left speechless by Tver's shameless showing off.
Most of them were seventh-years themselves. Forget creating spells, they had not even touched the core principles of magic in their studies yet.
Last year, just improving a simple Riddikulus Spell had taken nearly a full year for a whole circle of Hogwarts' top students.
"Well... you are a professor, after all..." George muttered.
The students, especially the Hogwarts ones, could not help nodding in agreement.
The longer they spent with the professor, the more awed they became by his strength.
In the past, they had still dared to court disaster, thinking he was not that much older than they were and imagining they might be able to challenge him with sheer numbers.
Now?
Now they just wanted to obediently follow the professor and learn magic from him.
The Durmstrang students wore the same bitterly understanding expressions, but they also looked enviously at the Hogwarts students.
They only ever got beaten up, while these Hogwarts students actually got to attend Senior Fawley's classes.
Once they thought it through, the room immediately fell into a strange competitive mood.
The Hogwarts students wanted to prove themselves in front of the professor. They could not beat him in a fight, but surely they could not let him look down on them in learning too.
The Durmstrang students were driven by envy, jealousy, and resentment, and secretly started competing with Hogwarts. Giving Senior Fawley's lessons to Hogwarts students was a complete waste!
As for Beauxbatons, they were utterly baffled. They had no idea how the other two groups had suddenly started competing, yet they found themselves dragged into it all the same. Beauxbatons students could not very well lose face in front of the other two schools either.
"Did I... succeed?"
This time, the first one to manage it was Cedric, though he was looking at his imp with a rather odd expression.
"But why does my imp look like a stretched rubber ball?"
From Tver's point of view, calling it a rubber ball was practically an insult to rubber balls.
The imp had no outstretched hands, and certainly no hair. It only had a body like a cloak and a crooked, misshapen head.
Even stranger was its face. It did have features, but they were not where they were supposed to be. Instead, they drooped down in a horrifying way, one side higher and the other lower.
"If you call that a ghost, it actually fits pretty well," Davies said with brutal accuracy, drawing on a few Muggle films he had seen.
"But this still counts as success," Tver said happily. "With a bit more touching up, it'll be easy to grasp the trick of shaping the soul!"
"See? This little technique really isn't that hard. You were just unfamiliar with the magic and a little afraid of it."
With Cedric's example in front of them, the students finally settled down and began carefully feeling the faint influence they were exerting on their souls.
Then they gradually increased it.
This time, though, the task was harder, so it took them much longer than splitting the soul had.
But in the end, an hour before the activity ended, all of them, including the somewhat lagging Weasley twins, had successfully shaped their souls into extremely ridiculous forms.
Judging by their smug expressions, Tver strongly suspected they had done it on purpose...
"Not bad progress. At this point, you can be considered to have entered the basics of Imp Magic."
"The basics?" Fleur looked up in surprise from her lovely little imp. It had taken her half an hour to refine it into that shape.
"That's right, the basics." Tver smiled at their stunned faces.
"Do you remember the imps flying all over the Great Hall at Halloween, even casting the Shield Charm?"
"Only when you can reach that level can you be said to have mastered this magic!"
"But it still took you two years before your imps could cast spells..." George muttered quietly after thinking about it.
But Tver's sharp ears caught it at once.
"But I was controlling a whole flock of imps," he replied with a smile.
And strictly speaking, those imps had been created through Transfiguration, so they had not contained his soul at all.
Still, getting imps to cast magic was exactly why he was teaching this group of students today.
Controlling one or two imps to cast spells was naturally easy for Tver.
But making dozens, or even hundreds, of imps cast spells was something he did not dare try lightly. He had no idea what might happen.
Now, however, things were different. He had the finest students from all three schools here. By using multiple individuals, they could help him test the upper limits of Imp Magic.
Or rather, in a situation where soul power was insufficient, test whether imps could reach the upper limit of an ordinary wizard.
Tver wanted to know whether, in the future, if summoning hundreds of imps left his soul temporarily weakened, he would still be able to direct them in battle.
That was also the reason he had created Imp Magic back in seventh year.
Once he realized he might one day face a large number of enemies, he had already started thinking about creating magic suited to attacking groups.
After all, the wizarding world's conventional spells were basically all single-target attacks.
And teacher's Protego Diabolica was far too conspicuous in the wizarding world to be used casually.
But Imp Magic used soul power, and it was only after acquiring Godric's soul-nurturing power that Tver had dared continue researching in this direction.
The students naturally understood none of that. They stared at Tver in utter shock.
"Professor, if imps can cast spells, then what do we need to be here for?" one fifth-year asked gloomily.
A very serious question had suddenly occurred to them.
With the professor's strength, could he not simply command his imps to cast, with ease, spells they could not produce even with everything they had?
"We need you so you can be defeated by the imps." Tver bared his teeth in a grin.
"..."