March 27, 1989
England, Little Whinging
The Easter holidays began today, and I had big plans for them. Grand plans, even. Easter itself was yesterday, and in honor of the holiday school was closed for a full two weeks. Dudley and I had gone to the celebration in the park. There, we searched for chocolate eggs. According to local beliefs, they were produced like chicken eggs by the Easter Bunny, who hid them everywhere for children to find. Ridiculous, but fun. I won a prize because I found more of those eggs than anyone else. Chocolate was a rarity in the Land of Fire; it had been brought in from somewhere on the southern islands. That had never stopped me from loving it. I first tried it while traveling with Jiraiya. Here, chocolate was sweeter and lighter than I remembered... Dudley, Piers, and I pooled everything we'd collected in the park, divided it equally, and stuffed ourselves until we got hiccups.
There were four months left until I saw Sensei again, and I still had nowhere to practice magic regularly. So I was limited to physical training, studying books, and rare little experiments here and there. We had managed to drive Miss Figg's half-Kneazles away from our garden and the Polkiss property, which was also subjected to 'pest control'. It turned out that the 'cat-repelling potion' also worked rather well against garden pests and aphids. But we couldn't exactly spray all of Little Whinging!
The animals and the old woman were watching us, and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to protect the Dursleys if somebody tried to wash their brains—always assume the worst. So we almost always ran to school. I went in front while Dudley and Piers chased me, sometimes shouting wildly, things like "Catch Potter!" It was both training and disinformation for any 'enemies' we might have. People generally tended to invent most of a situation for themselves. We had to wear uniforms to school, but after lessons we changed into old clothes that we didn't mind getting dirty. Big D had lost a lot of weight and grown taller thanks to our exercises, cold-water hardening, and pull-up bar. I'd grown too. I decided to save the Skele-Gro for now and see how my new body developed naturally, without drugs. I definitely didn't want to be short, but maybe it would 'grow on its own'. I did a lot of jumping and hanging from the bar.
The point of all the running was that if you rushed past quickly enough, people wouldn't really notice what you were wearing or exactly what you looked like. And our fence was good. Sometimes I deliberately put on some of Dudley's old stretched clothes, stuck the frames of my former glasses on my nose without lenses, and walked around the neighboring blocks. It bothered me that none of the neighbors paid any attention to how I looked. As far as I'd learned from immersing myself in local culture, people here were supposed to care about children.
I found out that there were services here specifically responsible for monitoring how children were treated. Martha Polkiss, Piers's mother, had been telling Aunt Petunia about 'some Smiths' who supposedly treated their own child badly. Something along the lines of 'she shouted at him in a shop'. A complaint had been filed against Mrs. Smith by her neighbors with the 'appropriate services', and she'd received a warning and 'apparently a fine'. Listening to all that was extremely strange considering that the Polkiss family were our neighbors across the back garden, while Harry had told me his relatives had constantly taken their frustrations out on him. Yet that same Martha had remained perfectly friendly with Aunt Petunia and apparently hadn't reacted at all to the 'oppression of the child'. Nor had any of the other neighbors.
If I assumed the worst-case scenario, it meant the residents of Little Whinging had had their brains, morals, and virtue slightly scrubbed by magic. The alternative was that one small town had somehow collected a whole bunch of callous, heartless people who simply didn't care about an orphan's obvious problems. Because even I—the 'demon' hated by an entire village—had been welcomed and fed by Teuchi-san. There had been a woman at the orphanage who cared for me. One iryo-nin at the hospital... Sometimes packages of food or clothing appeared outside my door. Now I understood that people who did care had probably been prevented from showing it openly, either through threats or direct orders. Ours was a military village, after all. The Third had needed an obedient little savage who ate out of his hand... And for wizards, doing something like that would be even easier.
It was disgusting when children became bargaining chips in adult games! Naive, straightforward, still foolish and knowing almost nothing about life. Especially when you were taken from an 'ordinary' life and thrown like a puppy into a whirlpool of 'magic'.
Someone who had never known warmth or love, who had endured deprivation, was easy to bargain with by tempting them with affection and a comfortable, beautiful life.
My plan for these holidays was to solve the problem of protection. More precisely, to conduct tests that would, I hoped, allow me to build a place for magical training.
Until Christmas, I had diligently trained my disobedient hand by drawing fuinjutsu blocks on sheets of paper with ink. The results had been horribly crooked. For Christmas, Aunt Petunia gave me a good brush with long bristles ending in three fine hairs. I had no idea how or where she'd managed to find a real calligraphy brush in England, but after that things finally started improving. A week ago, I managed to draw the simplest linked symbols for an explosive tag correctly. The happiness I felt was almost like when Iruka-sensei gave me my Konoha shinobi forehead protector as a child and then fed me ramen until I was stuffed.
Now I needed to test whether my fuinjutsu worked in this world. On magic rather than chakra. I really, really wanted it to work.
The problem was that, in theory, the seal had to be drawn with my own blood mixed with a little ink, because blood was a conductor of magic. Accordingly, the blood had to be fresh so it wouldn't clot. And first I needed to draw blood from myself. The act itself wasn't a problem, especially with my wound-healing ointment. But judging by how Snape-sensei had reacted... Aunt Petunia would have a fit if she caught me doing something like that with a knife and a brush in my hands. Conclusion: I needed an assistant to stand watch. And proper conditions: dishes, a place to work. Doing it outside was dangerous, especially when I had no idea what might be attracted by a wizard's blood in this world. The book on magical creatures had made quite an impression on me. So I needed to work indoors.
Bloodletting created several problems: general weakness from blood loss and loss of concentration, while concentration was necessary for drawing fuin. After all, I had a child's body now—still weak, without chakra.
So in the future, if it turned out that my blood-based fuin worked, I'd need to solve the problem of blood coagulation. Then I could prepare a blood-and-ink mixture in advance for later seals. I'd also need to get a Blood-Replenishing Potion from Sensei. I'd learned of such a thing from a book on the most popular potion ingredients. Come to think of it, I remembered that at the Academy, from around age ten, they made us go to the hospital once a week to donate blood. Iruka-sensei explained that it trained the body to adapt to frequent blood loss, which was unavoidable for shinobi, and eventually improved regeneration. Maybe that was nonsense, I didn't know... But it did mean I probably wouldn't die from fifty to a hundred milliliters once every two weeks. In any case, I wouldn't need nearly that much for one test. It was too early to plan further than that.
"What are you doing, Harry?" my brother asked, peeking into the room.
"I need to do something secret. I'm trying to figure out how to keep Aunt Petunia from coming in and catching me," I admitted.
"That's easy." Big D smiled. He stepped out and shouted downstairs, "Muuum! Harry and I want to do meditation, so don't come in and bother us. You might throw me off like last time, when it was just starting to work! Okay?"
"Got it. Go ahead," Aunt Petunia called back.
"Elementary." Dudley shrugged at my admiring look. It really was simple and effective.
"You're not afraid of blood, are you?" I asked just in case. "I need some of my blood to try drawing a magical symbol."
"Nah, not afraid." My brother shook his head. "What's the symbol supposed to do?"
"If it works properly, then in theory it should explode a little," I answered, taking out the ointment, razor, bowl, ink, brush, and sheets of paper.
* * *
We went to the river to test the seals. Well, 'river'—Sleepy Creek wasn't called 'sleepy' for nothing. It was a muddy, shallow, barely flowing stream that emptied into the River Wey. I chose it as a testing ground because there was water nearby, so if anything happened, we'd have a good chance of putting out a fire. There also weren't many people around.
When Dudley learned that the seal could be detonated remotely, he came up with the idea of tying the cardboard to a string and testing it directly on the water. So that was what we did.
* * *
"Holy shit..." was the first thing I heard from my brother when my hearing returned.
At the same time I found myself thinking, 'Good thing I don't wear glasses anymore, or they would've shattered,' and, 'Good thing we decided to test it on water.'
"We're leaving," I ordered Dudley.
People were definitely going to come running after an eruption of fire and water like that, and no attention-dispersing magic would save us here.
I needed to think very seriously about the properties of magical blood. And now I knew for certain that it worked. Yeah... I hadn't expected that. Compared with chakra, the blast seemed about twice as powerful, despite the fact that I hadn't filled the seal with magic or chakra beforehand. I'd only sent it an impulse of power, the way I normally did when detonating one.
"That was like a stick of dynamite!" Dudley exclaimed excitedly, waving his arms. "Just an ordinary sheet of paper with a drawing on it! You really are an awesome wizard!"
"Yeah. I didn't think it would be that powerful. For seals like that, I should probably dilute the blood with more ink," I said, rubbing my neck.
A whole crowd of different thoughts and questions immediately filled my head. Would another wizard be able to use my seals, or would the blood respond only to my magic? What if I used the blood of a magical creature or a Squib? What kind of barrier would sealing formulas produce here, and would it work at all? Could I make a storage scroll? How would local detection spells react to my fuin-magic? And many other questions.
But the important thing was that I now had at least some kind of weapon and defense in this world. That made me feel a little calmer inside.
********************************************************************************************************
This is the end of the part 1, next would be a little time skip into the start of the Hogwarts