With his obligations to the Dueling Club finally concluded, Alan's life at last settled into a stretch of calm, precious, unbroken time that he could devote entirely to his own research.
The castle's usual bustle felt as though it had been sealed behind a pane of invisible glass. The gossip about his dueling performance, the admiring and jealous stares alike, all of it gradually faded into the background hum of Hogwarts life.
He welcomed the silence.
His mind, the Mind Palace, was a precise machine, now humming with hunger, craving new input, new material, a higher tier of data.
The Arrival from the Black Forest
One quiet afternoon, sunlight slanted through the tall Gothic windows, casting fractured beams over the ancient flagstones.
Then came the beating of wings, heavy, uneven, exhausted.
A lone owl swooped through the open window, feathers ragged and speckled with damp, blackened leaves that could only have come from the Black Forest of Germany.
It carried a parcel, weighty, meticulously sealed in layer upon layer of waterproofing and strengthening charms.
The sender was clear even before Alan checked the wax seal.
Helmut Volk.
The old German spell-master had fulfilled the second half of their bargain.
Alan did not pause in the common room. Cradling the dense, rune-stamped package, he went directly to the Room of Requirement, his private laboratory, the external reflection of his mind itself.
With his arrival and a flicker of intent, the door formed into a bright, bare chamber containing nothing but a massive stone worktable.
He set the parcel down and began the delicate work of unbinding it.
The outer layers gave off a cool magical resistance under his fingertips: the waterproofing formed a slippery membrane, and the reinforcement charm rendered plain leather as tough as dragonhide. Alan did not tear or force; instead, he used his wand like a surgeon's scalpel, teasing apart each knot of Germanic runes with mathematical precision.
Layer by layer, the wrappings fell away, until the heart of the package gleamed before him.
The Living Archive
A perfect dodecahedron, carved entirely from crystalline matter, lay in the center of the table. It pulsed faintly with a steady, living white light, neither harsh nor dim, but vibrant, responsive to the subtlest movement of air, like a creature breathing in rhythm with the world.
This was the object of rumor and legend, the Living Archive, a magical copy crafted personally by Helmut Volk.
Alan's breathing slowed. His hand reached out with reverent precision, fingers brushing the cool, impossibly smooth surface.
At the instant of contact,
Hummm,
A resonant tone, subtle yet soul-deep, exploded through the halls of his Thinking Palace. Then, the long-familiar chime of his system followed, cold and mechanical, threading directly into his consciousness:
[Chain Quest "The Logic Exchange" , Complete.]
Evaluation: Exceptional.
Reward: Special Skill , "Information Parsing."
Your mental core has linked with a higher-order information structure. Your decryption and interpretation speed for all encoded magical data and ancient runic systems is permanently increased by 50 %.
A flood of silver data cascaded through him, rewriting the lower architecture of his mind. He could see it, new logical circuits lighting up within the Palace, glimmering lines weaving themselves into existing structures. The once-opaque knots of ancient runes now unfolded naturally, like puzzles rendered into simple arithmetic.
For Alan, poised to tackle a new intellectual "hard bone," this gift was the equivalent of receiving a furnace full of flawless smokeless coal on the coldest night of winter.
He wasted no time.
His consciousness plunged into the crystal.
Connection
This was unlike any act of reading.
It was integration.
If reading was observation, this was docking, a link between a mortal mind and an ancient server.
Instantly, torrents of knowledge surged in. Vast, starry streams of information from the earliest magical eras poured into him. His awareness detached from his body, floating in a boundless space built of points and filaments of light.
Every point represented a unit of knowledge.
Every filament connected ideas by pure logic.
Here, there was no up or down, no time, only the eternal architecture of understanding.
He focused, and the system responded.
The prologue of the Archive assembled itself before his mind's eye, forming out of luminous ancient runes that wrote themselves across the void.
At its head was a symbol, one that sent a tremor through his entire consciousness.
A circle,
a square,
and an equilateral triangle,
interlocked in perfect geometric harmony, a glyph radiant with the serene beauty of universal order.
The circle stood for infinite energy and cyclical motion.
The square embodied material stability and the manifest world.
The triangle represented pure will and truth.
Alan knew it instantly.
Memory flared: Nicolas Flamel's own notes on the Philosopher's Stone, the symbol he had drawn by hand, the triad of matter, energy, and information, united and interchangeable.
This was the philosophical cornerstone of alchemy itself.
Volk's Archive had opened with the same axiom that lay at the heart of Flamel's research.
That was no coincidence.
It was lineage, a continuity of minds across centuries and nations, converging upon the same cosmic truth.
Alan felt his pulse quicken, thoughts racing at exhilarating speed.
He understood now that he was in the right place.
The archive Volk had given him, the so-called "technical material," was not a mere artifact of trade. Hidden within it was something far more profound, perhaps the very framework leading toward what the ancients had called the First Principle: the origin equation of magic itself.
~~----------------------
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