After escorting Skyl to the shop door, Quirrell suddenly claimed he needed to go to Gringotts Wizarding Bank to withdraw some money, and told Skyl to go in alone to choose a wand. He would be back shortly.
Skyl agreed at once. The two of them were meticulously polite with each other, never prying into private matters, jointly maintaining a friendly façade.
Ollivander was a quiet old wizard with silver-white eyes and an excellent memory. He remembered every witch and wizard who had ever bought a wand in his shop, along with the wand they carried away—but he had never seen Skyl before.
"Oh, a new customer. How unusual. You're from the East, aren't you? Everything all right, sir? Has something happened to your wand—you need me to have a look at it?"
"To be honest, I've come to buy a wand."
The moment the subject turned to wandcraft, Ollivander became eager and animated. He took out a magical tape measure and asked, "Which is your wand arm, if you please?"
"My right, sir."
The tape measure slipped from Ollivander's hand and began to fly about on its own, measuring Skyl's arm span, shoulder height, head circumference. The old shopkeeper launched into his well-practised speech.
"Every Ollivander wand contains a powerful magical substance in its core: unicorn hair, phoenix tail feather, or dragon heartstring. Every wand I make is unique, for no two unicorns, dragons or phoenixes are exactly alike."
"I've heard it said that wands are like people—they choose the wizard."
"Exactly!" Ollivander exclaimed, clearly delighted, praising Skyl's answer.
He drew a box from a high shelf. "Try this one. Aspen wood and dragon heartstring, nine inches, quite springy."
Skyl took it and gave it an experimental wave. A white flash spat from the tip. Ollivander's face lit with surprise, but there was a hint of hesitation there too. After thinking for a moment, he took the wand back and swapped it out.
"Here—hornbeam and unicorn hair, eleven and a quarter inches. Give this a try."
Just like before, the new wand reacted to Skyl the instant it touched his hand. This time, it exhaled a milk-white, chilly mist.
Ollivander frowned. "Strange. Very strange. Wait, try this one… cypress with dragon heartstring…"
After that, Skyl tried almost every wand in the shop. All of them resonated with his magic. To Ollivander, this was unthinkable. The wands were behaving far too docile, yet at the same time oddly distant. Even the usually mischievous dogwood wands sat perfectly behaved in Skyl's hand.
"What a particular customer you are," Ollivander muttered at last. "They're all willing to accept you, but none of them like you. I'm afraid you may not find your life's true match here in my shop."
Skyl didn't particularly mind this verdict. In the end he chose the cypress wand with dragon heartstring and paid seven Galleons. Ollivander kept muttering under his breath, clearly convinced Skyl's case was highly unusual.
Before he left, the master wandmaker offered one last piece of advice.
"Young man, I still believe there is a wand out there that truly belongs to you, and only you. Perhaps fate will lead you to it someday."
"Thank you, sir."
When Skyl stepped out of Ollivanders, Professor Quirrell suddenly appeared at the corner of the street.
"Y-you're all s-set? Then let's g-go to the n-next stop. Come a-along… with me."
A wizarding student needed certain essential tools and garments.
Robes, pointed hat, dragon-hide gloves, cloak, wand, cauldron, potion phials, telescope, scales.
Then there were the textbooks Skyl needed for the year. Given his special circumstances, they bought the full set of required books from first through fifth year. It made quite a hefty stack; Skyl needed two large trunks just to fit them all.
The final item on the list was an owl. Owls were the messengers and postmen of the wizarding world. Hogwarts students weren't strictly required to have one, but Skyl, when in Rome, chose to do as the Romans did and picked out a beautiful female snowy owl. He named her Kaia.
Before they parted ways, this poor man carrying Voldemort on the back of his head pressed ten Galleons into Skyl's hand—enough to pay for Skyl's room at the Leaky Cauldron until term started.
"Goodbye, Professor Quirrell."
A strange look flickered across Quirrell's pale face: a touch of melancholy, a drop of grief, a few shots of sourness and a whole ton of numbness—that was the look of someone whose last nerves had been ground to dust by life, glancing back at the golden youth of his past.
He gave Skyl a small wave, then staggered off toward the streets of London.
Back in his room at the Leaky Cauldron, Skyl couldn't wait to pull out his newly purchased spellbook.
The Standard Book of Spells, Grade 1, by Miranda Goshawk.
The ornate letters dancing across the cover felt heavier than gold. Holding this repository of knowledge in his hands, Skyl felt an immense sense of fulfillment well up in his chest. He knew that he was about to set off down the path of pursuing magical power. The sights along that road would be strange and uncanny, far beyond anything his former Muggle self could have imagined.
For a wanderer between worlds, what could be more reliable than power held in one's own hands? There was hardly anything.
Overwhelmed with emotion, Skyl ran his fingers gently over the cover, letting the thickness and fine texture of the parchment calm his racing heart. Only when his breathing steadied did he finally open the book.
In the introduction, Miranda Goshawk warned the reader about the basics of spellcasting: incantation, wand movement, and unwavering confidence—none of which could be neglected. Beginners, she wrote, should start with simple spells.
Skyl read every line with great care, then turned to the first spell—Lumos.
There was an illustration of the wand movement on the page, with the stress pattern of the incantation carefully marked. Skyl drew his cypress wand and imitated it stroke for stroke.
"Lumos!"
A warm light blossomed at the tip. For an instant it was so bright that his eyes stung, and he almost felt tears come.
"I'm a wizard now," he whispered.
In her cage, the owl Kaia hooted, as if sharing his happiness.
Skyl spent the entire afternoon practising spells. He picked up the basic charms almost as soon as he read them, but the truly advanced magic did not come so easily. Transfiguration, for example. He tried to turn a splinter of wood into a needle and only succeeded on his sixth attempt. The thrill of success immediately cooled his earlier excitement.
"So I'm not a genius. Fine. I'll just let hard work make up the difference."
After three straight hours of spellcasting, Skyl felt thoroughly drained. He decided to take a break and glanced at the new set of robes beside him. A bath first, then a change of clothes. Since he'd arrived in this world, his pajamas had practically grown onto his body; he hadn't changed out of them once. Clothing was a symbol of identity. As a wizard, it was high time he put on robes and a cloak.
He said "bath", but what he really meant was "use magic".
"Scourgify!"
A cool breeze flowed from his wand, sweeping over him in an instant and scrubbing away every trace of dirt. This way of bathing was just too convenient—a true blessing for the lazy.
As he took off his pajamas, a plastic fork fell out of the robe pocket.
"Huh?" Skyl bent down and picked it up, surprised. "I didn't throw this thing away?"
He walked over to the little wastebasket in the corner, ready to toss it in. At that moment, the fork began to glow.
Startled, Skyl suddenly felt as if the plastic fork in his hand were an extension of his own arm.
"What the…?"
He ran through a few spells with the glowing fork and discovered, to his amazement, that it responded even better than the wand he'd bought at the shop. When he tried a transfiguration, the plastic fork abruptly stretched, becoming an eleven-inch wand—perfectly responsive, perfectly obedient.
"Don't tell me this is my destined wand?" Skyl laughed and groaned at the same time. His mind leapt to the obvious connection: the fork had crossed worlds with him. Maybe it had undergone some kind of mutation—just like him, who'd grown younger and turned into a wizard.
If that was true, maybe his pajamas and mobile phone had changed as well. Throwing them away without figuring this out would be a major loss.
"I wonder if those noodles turned into something useful, too. Shame about that…" Skyl clicked his tongue.
Just then, his heart gave a sudden thump. Instinctively, he looked at the mark on the back of his hand.
[World II: 00:00 (Open)]
Joy sparked in Skyl's chest. His "golden finger" had changed.
But how was he supposed to use it?
At the faintest touch of intent, the door-shaped mark on the back of his hand fired a pale blue glow at the room's wooden door.
In Skyl's eyes, that ordinary old door suddenly became a blue picture frame. Inside the frame was a beautiful natural landscape, the light of World II bathing his face in otherworldly color.
It was a portal.
Skyl waved his hand, and the blue light coating the doorframe snapped back into the mark on his skin. He repeated the process again and again, opening and closing the portal until he could do it smoothly.
Over the next few days, he experimented with the portal many times and summed up a few basic rules.
First: the portal allowed living beings to pass through, and it worked both ways. This might mean that, in the future, Skyl could bring other people across worlds.
Second: both opening and closing the portal were under his control, and there seemed to be no limit to how long it could remain open. The portal's size, however, was fixed—a rectangle 2.13 metres tall and 1.5 metres wide.
Third: the portal had to be attached to a solid object in order to open.
Lastly: time did not always flow at the same rate on both sides. While the portal was open, time passed normally in both worlds. But once the portal closed, no matter how much time passed in the world where Skyl was, the other side's time would remain frozen at the moment of closure until he opened the portal again.
After careful, methodical testing, Skyl finally decided it was time to step through the portal himself and see what lay beyond.