Harry and Ron quickly arrived at the entrance to the Room of Requirement on the eighth-floor corridor.
Since, as usual, very few students had chosen to remain at school over Christmas, no one had noticed the uneasy expressions on their faces along the way. And now, on the stretch of wall that ought to have been empty, the door to the Room of Requirement had already appeared.
"…Let's go in."
The two exchanged a glance. Harry stepped forward first and pushed open the door, though he did not immediately walk through it. Instead, he first poked his head inside and took a quick look at the room's layout—
It was a room resembling a laboratory. All kinds of tables, chairs, and cabinets had been piled up into a small mountain in one corner. It was obvious that not long ago, they had originally been arranged in the center of the room, but now they had been replaced by two enormous magical instruments that looked both highly complex and imposing. And Avada was currently standing beside one of them, wand in hand, seeming to be adjusting something…
"You're here?"
Hearing the door open behind him, he turned and beckoned to Harry and Ron. "Come in quickly. I know you may have some doubts about my sudden appearance, but time is short right now, so I can only keep this brief—you two should close the door first, and don't touch anything in here."
Only after hearing that did Harry, who had still been standing hesitantly in the doorway, finally step across the threshold and enter the private laboratory Avada had carved out inside the Room of Requirement, a laboratory that had been left idle for more than a year. Ron followed after him and shut the door behind them. Together, they looked at the magical instrument Avada was adjusting.
That instrument consisted of several rings of various sizes nested together, and its appearance resembled a more precise armillary sphere. Each ring had a groove set into it, and in those grooves were embedded all sorts of strange objects—
a ring, an ornate locket, an ancient diadem, a black notebook, and a gleaming golden cup…
That golden cup… isn't that the very cup Ken gave me two years ago and told me to carry so we could bait out Voldemort's leftover object?
Harry recognized Hufflepuff's cup at a glance, the one he had carried around for several days.
And the one next to it… isn't that the notebook Voldemort left behind?
He unconsciously took half a step back, and then noticed two other objects on the table behind Avada—two things he was even more familiar with.
A black crystal sphere encircled by a silver ring, and a glass bottle filled with gray mist…
"That's—"
Before Harry could cry out in shock, Ron beside him also realized what he was looking at, and his already poor complexion turned even paler.
"Is that… Voldemort's soul from the last time he was sealed away??"
"That's right."
Avada's eyes remained fixed on the Hufflepuff Cup he was adjusting, and he did not stop working because of Ron's question. "And not just the soul that was sealed that time. Voldemort's entire soul is gathered in this room now. Aside from the crystal sphere and the glass bottle, each of those remaining objects also contains a fragment of Voldemort's soul…"
To be honest, Avada was rather glad that Dumbledore had been busy rushing off to meet that person who was very likely Grindelwald, which meant that after dropping him here, he had hurried away without intending to personally supervise the experiment. That saved Avada the trouble of explaining the Resurrection Stone to him.
And once all of this was over, the Resurrection Stone would go back to being that ordinary-looking Deathly Hallow, without a curse and without carrying Voldemort's life. After this year's upheaval had passed, Avada would be able to hand it over to Dumbledore without worry, which could be considered the resolution of one of the old headmaster's obsessions.
"Every one of those objects contains Voldemort's soul?!"
Harry and Ron were both stunned. "A soul can just be stuffed into objects like that?"
"This is a form of Dark Magic called Horcruxes."
The moment he recalled the matter, even Avada could not help frowning slightly, and his work slowed as well.
"This technique lets a wizard split their soul and place the separated fragments into specially made containers. That way, even if the body is destroyed, the soul fragments inside the containers can still anchor the main soul and keep it lingering in the world after death, achieving a kind of immortality. That's why Dumbledore has only been able to seal Voldemort away, and has never been able to destroy him outright."
"Ever since confirming that Voldemort created Horcruxes, Dumbledore and I have been secretly searching for the Horcruxes he hid in different places. We only recently finished gathering them all. And if everything goes smoothly, then in less than two days, his death will finally arrive."
"…So that's how it is."
While marveling at the fact that such a technique even existed in the world, Harry nodded thoughtfully.
"No wonder that diary acted so realistically back then, as if it were truly a living person… And the reason it could use Parseltongue to control the basilisk was probably because of that fragment of Voldemort's soul too…"
While Harry was busy recalling the dangerous events from two years earlier, Ron, standing nearby with a horrified look on his face, had started counting those objects one by one.
"One… two… three…"
"…Six… seven?!"
"Voldemort split his soul into a full seven pieces?!"
He stared at Avada, who was still hard at work, in utter disbelief.
"Has he gone insane?!"
"That's right. He has gone insane."
Avada finally stopped what he was doing, straightened up, and turned to face Harry and Ron directly.
"And one correction—Voldemort didn't split his soul into seven pieces. He split it into eight."
"Eight?"
The two of them counted the objects all over again, then looked up in confusion.
"Where's the eighth one?"
Avada silently raised one finger, and under Harry and Ron's gaze—which gradually shifted from confusion into shock—he steadily pointed in a certain direction.
"Harry Potter,"
he said softly, "why is it that although you are of the Potter family's bloodline, you can use the Parseltongue of Slytherin's descendants?"
"Why were you able to fool the diary so perfectly? And why could you be struck by the Killing Curse and still survive?"
"There is only one answer to those questions…"
"Harry Potter,"
he said, looking directly into Harry's eyes and enunciating each word, "because you are the last Horcrux Voldemort left behind!"
"I… am a Horcrux?"
Harry looked blankly at his own hands, then lifted his head to look at Avada, forcing out an extremely strained smile.
"This has to be fake, right? You're joking with me, aren't you?"
Avada did not speak.
He simply watched in silence as all the color drained from Harry's face.