The System Shop was a market of gods and thieves, a place where desperation met design. Each icon I hovered over sang to a different hunger inside me: power, knowledge, leverage. I had the points; I had the patience. I had the plan.
First came death — not as fear, but as instruction. For five hundred points I bought the Complete Grimoire of Necromancy. The download was surgical and immediate: diagrams of bone-raising, the cadence of name-based bindings, the skeletal architecture of death-knights, lichdom rituals with their required safeguards, soul-binding schemata, and the ethics-free shortcuts no respectable scholar would admit existed. I felt the old edges of my necromancy snap into place and then bloom with new complexity: armies as architecture, death as supply chain. Knowledge made the abyss useful.
Next, potions. Succinct, ruthless, necessary. Snape's private compendium — two thousand points — slid into my consciousness. Brewing methods, hexed alembics, night-blooming ingredients that reacted to intent rather than heat, regeneration draught adjustments, poisons with perfect half-lives. In one swell of data I acquired years of a man's craft: the recipes he'd trusted in dark hours and the secret tempering that made his vials uniquely lethal or curative. Snape had been useful once; I intended to make him indispensable again.
The System offered rarities that made the heart of an ordinary wizard pound. I kept thumbing past the resurrection token — ten thousand points for a single return — an obscene price for obscene power. I did the math in my head and filed the desire away. Lily Evans resurrected and indebted to me? That would bend the world. But ten thousand points would require a campaign, not an impulse buy. Patience was, again, a weapon.
Then the temptation returned in a different form: elemental ascendancy. I scrolled through the pages until letters congealed into meaning — affinity, communion, embodiment. I considered earth for its immovable might; fire for its pure annihilation; lightning for speed and ruin. Each appealed, but none satisfied the strategist in me as neatly as balance.
So I bought the rarest variant: Elemental Primal — Quintessence Attunement. It was expensive. It was excessive. It joined itself to my soul like a pact, a dozen tiny conduits opening under my skin. Immediately I felt the world differently: the whisper of rivers in stone, the cold arithmetic of wind, the way flame tasted like a memory of battle. I could bend earth into bulwarks in the blink of an eye and call fire to obey with a thought. But more dangerous than raw power was the way balance opened doors — cross-elemental reactions, combinations for which no school had prepared me. The elements learned my name.
After that, only a few points remained. Enough for one last, practical acquisition: a spell from the shop's minor magics — Resurrection of the Undead. Cheap, imperfect, and perfectly suited to my current resource strategy. It would not raise corpses from true death, but it would re-anchor someone who had been turned into undead within the last decade — a usable limitation, not a fatal one. I bought it with the precise calculation of an economist: an imperfect tool that could, when combined with manipulation and muscle, produce leverage.
Regulus Black flashed through my thoughts the moment the limitation registered. He had betrayed a Horcrux; he had been brave in a small, reckless way. If I raised him from the half-state, controlled him with necromantic bindings and soul-compulsion, then threaded memory-modifications through his mind, he could open the doors I could not. Grimmauld Place would be mine. A locket would return to my hands. Wealth would follow behind protocol and old family obedience.
Snape came next not as nostalgia but as vector. He was talented, dangerous, and morally complicated in a way that produced useful edges. He had loved Lily; that love could be a lever: restored, realigned, or broken. The resurrection token remained an obsession in the back of my planning, but not yet a priority. First I would rebuild the infrastructure that would let me earn ten thousand points without selling my soul in pieces.
Practicalities folded into rituals. I tested the necromancy grimoire by raising a skeletal sentinel and binding it to a sigil drawn from the Ring's runes; the elemental attunement allowed me to anchor the sentinel to the ground itself so that a single gust could unmake it and I could rebuild it in seconds. I brewed a vial from Snape's techniques that slowed decay; when applied to the re-anchored undead, it extended the window the resurrection spell required. All the purchases interacted like instruments in an orchestra and I was the conductor.
I set the timeline in my head — not in years, but in measured operations:
• Acquire Grimmauld Place and Marvolo's Locket via a resurrected, compelled Regulus.• Convert the locket into a secure Horcrux-sensor and insurance policy.• Use Gringotts contacts and Black family holdings to bankroll Grindelwald's Alliance and resurrective operations.• Build a tiered undead corps — scouts, shock troops, and immobile guardians tethered to my will and the Resurrection Stone's bonds.• Keep my public face polished: the child prodigy, the exotic ward of Grindelwald, the gentleman scholar who reads more than he speaks.
All of this required patience, secrecy, and incremental advantage. I would not fling armies at Britain yet. I would not fall into the old mistake of hubris. I would instead shape inevitability by attrition: knowledge, artifacts, puppets of wealth, a spy net that watched everything.
At night, when Grindelwald's library hummed and the Palantír watched like a jealous god, I practiced calling the elements in combinations: a ring of stone to shield, a breath of wind to carry a silent curse into a soldier's ear, a flash of electricity to short a ward, a controlled flare that could cleanse a ward but leave a corridor untouched. I practiced the necromantic cadences until raising a small death-knight was as simple as lighting a candle. I brewed Snape's slightly bitter draught that masked necromantic signatures from Ministry scanners.
More than power, though, what thrilled me was leverage. Each purchase was not an indulgence — it was a transaction toward autonomy. The Resurrection token — that obscene, single-use ticket — became a goalpost: ten thousand points that would be paid for in gambits, heists, and favors. Grindelwald's patronage, the Black fortune, Gringotts, and a few well-placed Horcrux recoveries could get me there.
And Regulus — coward and traitor — would be useful because traitors make obedient retreads when given a second chance and a new master.
I slept poorly that night, more from anticipation than fear. The child's body beneath my skin dreamed mundane dreams — toys and warm milk — while my mind wheeled with campaigns and contingencies. The fusion of Riddle and me planned with a cruelty that felt almost clinical. Power was not a desire anymore; it was method.
When the morning light carved the library into pale squares, I put the ring on and looked at my hand.
The Resurrection Stone had given me more than points; it had coagulated my will. The elements had widened my grasp. Snape's knowledge had made me an alchemist of advantage. Necromancy had turned death into workforce.
Everything else was arithmetic and patience.
England was still complacent. The Ministry thought the worst was a whisper. Dumbledore polished his spectacles and read the world as a man who believed he could fix everything with kindness.
Let him believe.
I was buying time — and when time had paid back its debt, I would spend it with interest.