The silent office.
Snape frowned deeply as he stared at the notebook before him. The handwriting on its pages appeared and then slowly faded, yet the words that had once emerged seemed to have been seared into his mind.
Completely impossible to dispel.
[Taboo among humans, requires the Gods' approval]
Judging by the effect of that finished potion, which could make a being without Magic Power awaken to it, it was indeed the kind of taboo that should never exist in the Human World.
On this point, Snape quite agreed with the notebook.
But what truly preoccupied him was the phrase that followed: "requires the Gods' approval."
"Does it require the gods' permission to craft the so-called Apocalypse Potion... But the key to the Apocalypse Potion seems to be the Infinite Firepower Potion that Ian Prince concocted."
Of course, Snape was no atheist, but neither did he claim to be a theist.
Like most Wizards, the only things he believed were those he could see with his own eyes. Perhaps it was precisely this logic and rationality inherent to Wizards that made Snape notice certain anomalies in the information left in the notebook.
"This notebook from thousands of years ago doesn't just know the names of Magic Potions I've formulated—it's already named them. It even knows the name of the Infinite Firepower Potion."
This above all was what sent a chill down one's spine the more one pondered it. If the recipe for the so-called Apocalypse Potion had already existed for ages, then it would shake far more than just the foundation of the Wizards' origin.
No one knows whether or not the Gods exist.
But anyone who shakes the conventions of the world is sure to suffer calamities the likes of divine punishment.
If not for him being the one who had personally brewed that potion, Snape felt he too would wish, at any cost, to kill whoever had uncovered so insane a truth.
He was no good person himself, and so he understood well what kind of fate awaited whoever concocted such a potion. But in the Muggle World and the Wizarding World, those far worse than him were still legion.
This was also why, after learning to make the Reviving Potion from the notes, pursuing alternate ingredients, and developing a modern formula to complete his own work, he had never dared release it to the world.
Dud Revival Potion.
As the name implied, it was a potion that could restore the "dead silence" of a Squib's Magic Power to a state of activity again. It could only last three to five months at most, not sustain the effect long-term, and yet even so, deeply aware of the darkness in the Wizarding World, Snape did not dare make this reproduction public.
He did not even dare to mention it to anyone else.
Only when he realized that Ian's Infinite Firepower Potion might serve another purpose did he lose control over his obsession with one particular achievement in Magic Potion-making—yet, he never expected that this forbidden work would already be recorded in an artifact from thousands of years ago, with the name Infinite Firepower Potion also present among its synthesis instructions.
"I always thought that little brat just made up that name himself," Snape's frown deepened, "but this clearly doesn't make sense... If the recipes he found could plainly tell him there was such a potion in them, then the author would have had absolutely no reason to hide the Infinite Firepower Potion within Amortentia."
"According to what's recorded in history, Morgan the Witch doesn't seem the type for such twisted amusements... Maybe it was out of caution?" Snape could only try to speculate as much as possible.
To be honest.
If one ignored the question of how Ian knew the key ingredient for the Apocalypse Potion was the Infinite Firepower Potion, Snape could actually understand why Morgan the Witch would hide such a recipe inside Amortentia.
The Changer is destined to become an enemy of the world.
At least from a Wizard's standpoint, that was the absolute truth... What would be shaken was not just the current relationship between Muggles and Wizards; the truly terrifying thing was that this potion could rewrite the Wizards' origin.
Once the divine origin of Wizards was gone, Snape truly could not imagine what kind of perilous chaos The Changer would bring about—perhaps not even Dumbledore himself could withstand the backlash from something like this.
Even a Legendary Witch would be the same!
This was far more horrifying than what Dumbledore's little-known friend Gellert Grindelwald, the old man imprisoned in the fortress, once tried to do!
No Wizard would allow anyone to produce such a recipe. If the formula Ian obtained also originated from Morgan, Snape thought some things could more or less make sense.
The Legendary Witch had uncovered the origin of Wizards—or perhaps discovered another possibility for the origin—and then, in ages past, split the forbidden Magic Potion into two parts for separate safekeeping. One part was written into her notebook, the other collected many years later within the Hogwarts Library.
This was absolutely a reasonable conjecture.
As far as Snape was concerned,
The Legendary Witch who unearthed such a potion had probably felt the same kind of dread and agony thousands of years ago as he himself did now; otherwise, she wouldn't have chosen to split the recipe as a way to preserve it.
Sealed away out of fear.
Left behind out of defiance.
Snape felt his current state of mind to be uncannily similar.
Of course.
There were also differences.
"This requirement for the Gods' approval as an absolute condition—perhaps it's a secret belonging to Ancient Wizards." Snape felt as though he had glimpsed something of the reason why Ancient Wizards were so powerful.
He couldn't help but clutch his forehead, his brow creasing together.
It wasn't that he doubted the existence of Gods.