Chapter 58
"Harry! I just knew you'd be here again!" a familiar voice called out to me with surprising suddenness — a voice whose lovely owner was entirely immune to my shielding and concealment charms. After all, I had long since added Daphne, Luna, and even Ginny to the list of exceptions my standard concealment charms barely affected at all.
"Girls? Is it lunchtime already?" I looked at my friends with mild confusion, quietly grateful that I'd had the skill last year to weave a few exceptions into my charms. It had made them somewhat weaker, but they still deterred any wandering students who might have interrupted my training.
Fortunately, even the Gryffindors in the castle knew better than to go poking around in enchanted classrooms — you might stumble into some experimenter's curse, or worse, interrupt a pair of lovebirds seeking a quiet corner. So my defenses were more than sufficient even in their weakened state. And the girls could pull me away at any moment if something came up.
Though in practice, they were more likely to come find me to remind me about a meal or the start of curfew. I had a habit of forgetting to set magical timers for myself, which meant I'd disappear entirely into practice whenever I was working on something new or trying to refine skills I already had.
Hours and hours could vanish that way, especially when things went beyond ordinary spellwork or transfiguration drills. In those cases, I rarely needed more than an hour to wear myself completely out. Running through endless chains of powerful, destructive spells, or pushing to the absolute limit during large-scale transfiguration work, burned through my magical reserves with brutal efficiency.
My longest training sessions tended to happen either when I was learning new spells — where, beyond the brute repetition, I also had to twist my own mind into knots while giving myself time to let my magic recover — or during small-scale transfiguration experiments.
The latter was exactly what I'd been doing today, working to fully master sequential material transformation from non-living to non-living. Meaning I was practicing turning wood into steel, then steel into stone, and after that into gunpowder, amber, water, and even a mildly non-toxic acid. The gunpowder and acid were purely a concession to my obsession with combat applications of transfiguration.
In reality, these exercises — which went far beyond anything expected at seventh year or in basic transfiguration mastery — greatly expanded my overall command of the magic and made simpler transformations easier. It was like adding heavy weightlifting to a training regimen to expand what your body could do with its own weight. After working at the edge of your abilities in transfiguration, growth in the ordinary formulas and familiar formations began to feel almost exponential. And this kind of practice didn't even demand a massive expenditure of magical power. Concentration and skill mattered far more than raw force.
"Uh-oh, he's still not quite with us," said the only Gryffindor in my company, shaking her head with clear disapproval and pulling me out of my thoughts again. "And lunch ended a long time ago. We're nearly at the hour when the foreign delegations arrive. After that, rumor has it there'll be a holiday feast."
"Is that right? I really did lose track of myself this time," I blinked, somewhat dazed. Between the mental fatigue and the sheer absorption of what I'd been doing, it was only now beginning to dawn on me just how long I'd spent buried in transfiguration practice.
We'd had shortened classes today, precisely because of the preparations to welcome our important guests. Against that backdrop, I'd been tormenting myself with particularly unpleasant thoughts — still finding nothing suspicious about our new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher, no matter how hard I looked — and I'd decided to drown those thoughts in another training session, working myself into the right headspace for serious transfiguration practice.
"I'm hungry," I finally said, after another brief pause, voicing the first thought that actually reached me. Fatigue and hunger hit all at once with staggering force. And there was almost nothing left of my magic — six and a half hours of continuous, if not especially large-scale, spellcasting was simply brutal.
If not for the elevated concentration of magic within Hogwarts itself, I'd have collapsed from exhaustion long ago. No matter how large my reserves or how decent my natural rate of magical recovery — the kind that flows from the soul of a wizard rather than drawing on external sources — six hours of unbroken casting would still have broken me.
As it was, I seemed to have come out more or less intact. In fact, from the prolonged nearness to depletion and the constant replenishment from the castle's ambient magic, my reserves had likely grown a little. A few more drops added to the well of my future power.
…I'll have to do this again sometime. I smiled faintly and, thanks to my mind-magic-sharpened consciousness, didn't allow the witches who'd come to fetch me to get a single word in edgewise, setting immediately to work restoring the half-abandoned classroom to its original state.
"I honestly don't know why this still surprises me… Are you aware that ordinary wizards don't enjoy draining every last drop of their strength?" the Greengrass heiress asked as if making casual conversation, though her eyes tracked my manipulations with a certain quiet satisfaction.
"I don't push myself to full exhaustion — I take all the potions necessary to keep myself healthy, and I perform the simple rituals… So nothing terrible is going to happen to me. Nothing except brief bodily weakness and a general vulnerability to other wizards," I offered the girls a weak smile, raising no objection as my fiancée slipped her arm through mine.
I genuinely wasn't feeling well, after all. Even if I put myself in this state nearly every day, it didn't get easier. A wizard truly did feel wretched without his magic. And while I never actually pushed myself to full magical exhaustion, I still needed to regularly drain my reserves almost to zero in order to progress at the fastest possible rate.
The girls practiced this fairly regularly themselves, it was worth noting, which made Daphne's comment pure slander and hypocrisy. Though in fairness, I should acknowledge that I drained myself to the dregs far more often than all of them put together. The sensations were deeply unpleasant, made all the worse by the feeling of being almost entirely defenseless.
Daphne, for instance, only permitted herself to reach that state once a week — on weekends. Luna and Ginny were sometimes too lazy even for that, practicing magic regularly but in no rush to put any real strain on their magical bodies. They made excellent progress without it, easily outpacing lazier and less talented peers.
Even Ginny had managed, over the past year, to come nearly level with someone like Draco in terms of raw power. And he was hardly the weakest wizard in our year, while the youngest Weasley, not long ago, had been lagging behind even her own classmates in many respects.
They simply don't have as urgent a need to push themselves to the limit over and over again… In their minds, the additional magical progress probably just isn't worth all the discomfort and the risk of running into some hostile passerby while completely drained, I thought, shaking my head faintly at the notion.
Though I wouldn't pretend to be different — I only allowed myself these training sessions in the first place because of my ability to directly influence my own emotions. Without that, I would have burned out long ago. Or I'd have simply limited myself to two or three sessions per week the way I had in my early years at school, or during my "home education" at the Dursleys'.
And, of course, I have one very particular Invisibility Cloak — which, after a thorough examination last summer, I no longer hesitate to wear for a quiet, safe return to my common room, I reminded myself of yet another important detail in my arsenal.
Without the Invisibility Cloak, I would never risk depleting myself this thoroughly within the walls of the ancient castle. I had no shortage of enemies. And though no one had come at me openly in recent months, and I hadn't been provoking conflicts with the Slytherins — some of whom viewed me with open hostility purely on account of my name and my reputation as a hero of magical Britain — I still wouldn't walk the castle corridors completely drained.
Only under the cloak, through secret passages, with the Marauder's Map in hand. Thankfully, these precautions had yet to fail me, and I could train at full intensity, making progress both in raw power and in overall mastery.
"I probably could have left a little magic for warming charms today, though," I grimaced, recognizing my mistake fairly quickly. The swift trip down to the Great Hall, followed by assembling in front of the castle in the cold autumn air, had not allowed me to recover enough. I could scrape together enough for a warming charm or two, but… I had no desire to make my condition worse.
"Your Wrackspurts have gotten the better of you again and turned your whole brain to mush… You've been having that happen a lot lately," said the incomparable Luna Lovegood, who — unlike Daphne and Ginny — studied in my house and could easily stay close by my side, offering her support without hesitation.
Her nonverbal warming charms were rather feeble in execution, but she didn't hesitate to repeat them several times over, drawing no particular attention to us while allowing me to feel considerably more comfortable all at once.
I deliberately carried none of the relevant amulets or artifacts, preferring to solve these problems with wandless magic. Everyday magical application was widely known to improve the general skill level of any practicing wizard — and that said nothing of the particular benefits to wandless casting it provided.
"Thank you… I honestly don't know what I'd do without you," I smiled warmly at the petite blonde, whose hair today was particularly light, shimmering with nearly luminous silver highlights. And that wasn't any kind of magic — it was entirely natural beauty, which I felt no shame in reaching toward as I wrapped an arm around her and drew the charming third-year against my side.
"Mmm… now I quite like your Wrackspurts… Though Daphne is absolutely, completely, entirely not going to approve," the darling thing purred in satisfaction, pressing her nose into my shoulder.
"You think she'll be jealous of you?" I asked with mild curiosity, having no doubt whatsoever that my fiancée would clock our little hug within moments. Even if there was no romantic subtext in it. At least, not from my humble, if no longer quite so naive, male perspective.
"She will — she always gets jealous of you. But she likes it, actually, so everything's fine," Luna reassured me in a conspiratorial tone, but managed only to confuse me further.
"How does that even work?" I felt compelled to voice the question that had formed in my mind, long since having learned to treat anything Luna said with the seriousness it deserved. This little one — who wasn't quite so little anymore — had a way of astonishing me with her perceptiveness.
"I don't know. I don't always understand her either, but… She considers Ginny and me her friends, so it'll definitely be fine," the petite blonde explained nothing in particular, letting a smile of such peculiar mystery cross her face that I had the distinct impression I was being gently teased — only I never quite managed to respond to it.
Because somewhere in the middle of all our talking and comfortable closeness, Luna and I had both missed the moment when a flying carriage — or whatever in hell that thing was — from the French wizarding delegation appeared on the horizon. The time for conversation had come to an end.
It was time to see what our foreign guests were made of.
Which was fortunate, because after my recent visit to St. Mungo's, I no longer had complaints about my eyesight — nor about any possible unwanted residents inside my humble skull. My eyes had been properly examined. The scar on my forehead had been fully removed, and no Horcrux had been found within it — and I had paid specifically for a thorough, exhaustive investigation of that mark.
But no. Nothing had been found in the scar, despite the parseltongue abilities that had remained with me. I didn't quite know how or why things had turned out this way — perhaps my arrival into this body had changed something fundamentally — but from this point forward, I could feel somewhat more at ease about my future.
Though placing full trust in a simple examination at St. Mungo's was, of course, impossible. In this world, you couldn't fully trust even yourself. Potions and mental magic hadn't been abolished, and a Horcrux was far from what even skilled professional Healers were accustomed to dealing with.
They might have missed something, despite all their experience with various curses and Dark magic. Dark magic specialists had been brought in specifically for my examination, incidentally. After all, my scar had been left on my forehead by the Dark Lord's Killing Curse, and its very shape was far too reminiscent of the wand movement required to cast the spell most effectively.
If You Like The Story Drop a Review
~Read Advanced Chapters on: p@treon/Amiii_
~Every 150 PS = Bonus Chapter!
~Push the Story forward with your [Power Stones]