The intrusion completed within the span of a Planck time.
Alan's consciousness was pierced in an instant by a torrent that defied any known physical law. It was neither matter nor energy. It was information: the compressed, purified, re-encoded malicious data formed from sixteen years of Tom Riddle's twisted desires, dark ambitions, seething jealousies, and the enormous cache of forbidden lore he had stolen from countless banned tomes. Its only aim was contamination and overwrite.
The borders of Alan's mind-palace were rent open.
His self-awareness was subject to an immediate, devastating format. Blankness, absolute, cold, without reference, spread through him. He lost sense of time, lost sense of space, even the concept of "I" was taken. His existence was hauled into an abyss built of howling souls and venomous curses: cold and viscous, each droplet a shattered memory, each ripple a piece of black magic that withered the mind.
"Ha… hahahahahaha!"
Tom Riddle's laughter did not travel as sound; it detonated inside the fragments of Alan's awareness, resonating irresistibly, reverberating and spreading. It was the victorious cry of a conqueror.
Riddle's consciousness moved through the ruins of Alan's "absolute-rational" mind-palace like a sovereign touring new territory. He could sense how grand the foundation had been, how exquisite the architecture. And yet, now it would be submerged, filled with the vilest dark, becoming Tom Riddle's eternal trophy.
This was the most dangerous instant: the point at which Alan's existence neared erasure.
And in that critical instant, the very fortress Alan had built, the perfect "thought citadel" he had shaped by pursuing an initial formula, reacted.
It activated.
A hum, no ordinary vibration from the outside world, but a sound rising from the deepest reaches of Alan's soul, roared. It was vast and solemn, beyond hearing; it was the law of order reasserting itself across a spiritual realm.
The foundation of the palace, the countless logical paradoxes and mathematical conjectures, ceased to endure passively. They lit up.
Purely conceptual beams rose from the ruins' depths.
The indestructible "conceptual firewall," upon detecting the malicious information intrusion, flipped system privileges and enacted a radical mode change.
Passive defense was forcibly disabled. The highest "active eradication" mode seized control.
If Tom Riddle's information stream was the most filthy, chaotic, contagious "soul-virus" the wizarding world had ever known, then Alan's conceptual firewall was something like a computation engine from a higher dimensional logic: an absolute rational antivirus wielding calculus beyond the normal.
The firewall did not attempt to "block." Blocking is crude and inefficient. It chose a far more domineering, unreasonable method: absorb and decompose.
All firewall modules ran at full power and began ravenously integrating the incoming dark data into their computation.
First interception protocol:
Target: Tom Riddle's negative emotional memory fragments.
Execution logic:The Barber's Paradox.
Riddle's memories of cruelty and envy were essentially a swelling self that proclaimed, "I hate everything, and I am everything." When those emotional streams struck the first filter, they were forced into an unresolvable logical loop.
"If a barber shaves every man in town who does not shave himself, does he shave himself?"
Riddle's hatred fell into an infinite loop. If it hated the thing defined as "not hating itself," then must it hate itself? If it hates itself, it becomes the hated, and therefore no longer needs to hate. If it does not hate itself, it fits the definition of "not hating itself" and must be hated. Affirmation collapses into negation; negation unravels into affirmation. Logic here disintegrated.
The memory fragments saturated with rage and envy were ground, torn, and re-argued by the paradox until their attached emotional potential was eroded, neutralized, and stripped. What remained were pure, featureless psychic energies, meaningless and inert.
Second processing protocol:
Target: Black-magic knowledge and Parseltongue-talent structures.
Execution logic:The Goldbach-style Deconstruction.
The knowledge Riddle prized, curses, Parseltongue secrets, were stable, uni-form answers pointing to effects. The firewall did not attempt to prove or disprove them. Instead it applied the idea of infinite decomposition: every supposedly atomic "answer" was forced into a frame of unending possibility.
"Any even number greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes."
The firewall did not test the conjecture; it weaponized its infinite combinatorics. It dismantled a deadly curse into whether it might be seen as the sum of two simpler runes, three, or infinitely many, placing each sigil and syllable into an unbounded coordinate system searching for "prime" relationships. Riddle's hardened knowledge, once definite, became fragile when confronted with boundless possibility: certainty disintegrated into a profusion of undecidable fragments. The once-solid structure was ruthlessly reconstructed into raw intellectual material, awaiting redefinition.
Final protocol:
Target: Tom Riddle's soul core, his self-identity.
Execution logic:The Ultimate Philosophical Question.
At the eye of that data storm, the proud, arrogant core of the sixteen-year-old Tom Riddle was exposed to the firewall's ultimate judgment.
The firewall launched no ornate logic; it posed the simplest, most damning question:
"Who am I?"
Riddle's self-identity, with no hesitation, supplied the answer: "I am Tom Marvolo Riddle, Slytherin's heir, the greatest wizard ever!"
The firewall accepted the answer, and then asked again.
"Who am I?"
"I already said, I am Tom Riddle!" his proud will snarled.
"Who am I?"
That repetition became an eternal, unbreakable loop. Riddle's definitions, his name, lineage, title, were peeled away. The labels that had been used to prop his "I" up were stripped of meaning.
"Tom Riddle" was reduced to a mere symbol. "Heir of Slytherin" to a string of data. "Greatest wizard" to a craving. Once those external definitions were sequentially stripped, what remained of the core self?
He could not answer.
Pride, ego, and implacable hubris, his entire selfhood, gradually and irreversibly eroded in that philosophical black hole. Every futile struggle, every furious roar, merely hastened the disintegration.
In the end, his self-recognition, his soul-core, was ground into amorphous, shapeless psychic energy, freed of identity and ready to be reshaped.
Tom Riddle's deliberately engineered, lethal information-pollution attack did not destroy Alan. On the contrary, in a way Riddle could never have foreseen, it became the richest nourishment, an experience pack, that rapidly elevated Alan's own mental power.
Back in the physical world, Fred and George saw Alan's body shiver the merest fraction.
In that micro-movement, the inked letters across the diary, Tom Riddle's handwriting, began to dissolve before their eyes.
Not erased, nor faded. Rather, they vanished as if seared by the most intense sunlight: fast, absolute, complete.
Tom Riddle's sixteen-year-old, arrogant soul fragment had been wholly and perfectly digested by Alan's conceptual firewall.
Alan opened his eyes slowly.
They shone with a depth and clarity greater than ever.
He had succeeded: the sealing was complete. And in a way even he had not expected, he had been granted an epic, profound advancement.
~~----------------------
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