Chapter 121: The End of Bullying and the Mad Girl's Intuition
Luna's pale blonde hair hung loosely over her shoulders.
She stood barefoot on the Castle stone floor on a late autumn morning, bending down to search, muttering to herself: "Wrackspurts always love to hide my shoes... Those naughty little rascals."
The early winter stone tiles were biting cold. Any normal student would have been jumping from the chill long ago, but Luna showed not the slightest sign of discomfort.
Cassius did not make a sound, his gaze passing over the top of Luna's head and locking onto the area behind the carved circular pillar on the other side of the corridor.
Two third-year Ravenclaw girls were hiding in the shadows.
The freckled girl was named Mary. She had received a "Poor" in Potion Class three times in a row this semester, and with nowhere to vent her frustration, she desperately needed to regain a sense of superiority by picking on a girl universally recognized as a freak in the school. Mary was dangling a pair of Luna's old leather shoes, the cheap leather at the heels long worn and discolored.
"Guess how much longer that mad girl will look?" Mary mocked in a low voice.
Another girl grinned: "Once she turns around, we'll throw the shoes out the window into the Black Lake. Let her go to Potion Class barefoot; Snape will definitely deduct all of Ravenclaw's points!"
This girl's school robe was washed until it turned white, with unclipped threads hanging from the cuffs. She didn't actually hate Luna; she just needed to join in on the group bullying to hide the inferiority complex brought on by her poor family background, desperately trying to avoid becoming the next target of isolation.
Mary raised the leather shoes, the moment she lifted her arm.
Her peripheral vision caught a figure in the center of the corridor.
The smirk on her face froze completely. Her pupils contracted, and her breathing stopped.
The school's universally recognized "Slytherin Tyrant" was standing just five steps away.
Cassius stood with his hands in his pockets, looking at them expressionlessly.
He did not draw his wand, nor did he say a single word of warning.
His deep blue eyes scrutinized the two lumps of lifeless flesh.
A loud explosion went off in Mary's mind, and she remembered Marcus Flint, whose wand had been snapped on the train on the first day of school.
And the terrifying rumors about him taking on a squad of Aurors alone.
There was no extra emotional fluctuation in the depths of Cassius's eyes.
A trace amount of blue gravitational field spilled out from the [Dual-Soul Furnace] within his body.
Less than 0.1 percent of his power.
The invisible force field turned into a thousand-pound millstone, slamming directly onto the two girls' shoulders.
"Thump!"
The two third-year girls didn't even have time to gasp; their knees lost sensation and slammed heavily onto the hard stone floor.
The sound of bones colliding with stone made a dull thud.
Extreme fear brought a substantive physical chill, making their upper and lower rows of teeth clatter uncontrollably.
Clatter, clatter, clatter.
Neither dared to lift their heads, the two of them lying on the ground trembling violently, their pant legs completely soaked by the condensation on the stone slabs.
Cassius didn't need to do anything; his reputation and this pure aura alone were enough to crush these greenhouse flowers.
The severe knee pain and nerve pressure caused Mary's hand muscles to spasm.
The old leather shoes slipped, falling straight toward the ground.
The split second before the soles were about to touch the dust.
A precise, invisible magic that didn't stir up even a breeze caught the soles of the shoes perfectly.
Cassius's right index finger, hanging at his side, twitched slightly.
The leather shoes stopped falling in mid-air, then drifted steadily across the three-meter-wide corridor, landing firmly beside Luna's bare feet.
The tips of the shoes were facing her toes, placed neatly.
Harry, in the distance, was hiding behind a suit of armor, seeing this scene through the reflection of the breastplate.
He swallowed a mouthful of saliva in horror. His sweat-drenched palm gripped the handle of his broken wand until it was slippery. Harry forced himself to clench his molars, terrified that even a heavy breath would bring about a fatal disaster.
Harry, behind the armor, desperately covered Ron's mouth. Ron's broken wand, wrapped in magic tape, slipped from his sweat-slicked palm and "clattered" onto the edge of the bronze breastplate.
This crisp sound echoed back and forth in the empty corridor.
Harry's heart slammed against his ribs, and cold sweat flowed down his forehead into the corners of his eyes, stinging and astringent. He forced himself not to blink, his eyeballs bloodshot, clenching his teeth as he waited for fatal magic to smash into this rusted armor.
Cassius did not look back.
For a predator about to hunt a millennial magical creature, the two herbivores shivering behind an iron shell weren't even worth squeezing into his hunting range. The muscle fibers in Cassius's forearm were in an excited state of tension, and the extreme hunger of the [Dual-Soul Furnace] for the vast life essence deep underground completely severed his patience for dealing with the weak.
Without any spellcasting preamble, without incantations, this microscopic control—precise enough to straighten someone's shoes—was far more despair-inducing than blowing up a wall with a punch.
Fury and precision coexisted, meaning there were no flaws in Cassius's magic circuits.
The two girls kneeling on the ground felt as if they had been granted amnesty.
The oppressive feeling vanished; they didn't even bother to brush the dust off their knees, scrambling to escape the corridor.
The girl with the loose threads on her robe hem tripped over her own robe because her legs were weak, her chin hitting the stone bricks hard and leaving bloody marks. She didn't even dare to scream, climbing up and continuing to run like mad.
Luna turned around.
She was completely unaware of the bullying and the counter-attack that had just occurred, nor was she surprised by the shoes flying back.
She slowly lifted her foot and stepped into the old shoes, too lazy to even tie the laces.
After putting on the shoes, Luna stood up straight and looked up.
Her protruding, light-colored eyes stared straight at Cassius.
No fear, no fawning, and certainly no gratitude.
The corridor was so quiet that only the sound of wind blowing through the window lattice could be heard.
"You have a scent on you that smells very hot."
Luna did not thank him, instead extending a finger and pointing at the left side of Cassius's chest.
Her tone was ethereal, with the same casualness as someone discussing whether to have pudding or roast meat for lunch.
Cassius did not make a sound, watching this girl whom the whole school regarded as an oddity.
"There is a behemoth with a thousand teeth screaming in your shadow."
Luna tilted her head, her light blonde hair swaying with the movement.
"You're planning to go eat it, right?" She asked the question with extreme certainty.
Harry and Ron, not far away, couldn't understand this sentence at all, only assuming this mad girl was spouting nonsense.
But Cassius, standing where he was, saw a rare flash of light in the depths of his pupils.
A behemoth with a thousand teeth. Screaming in the shadow. Planning to go eat it.
This absurd, mystical remark directly pierced through the plan he had settled on in his mind: to hunt the millennial Basilisk!
In this school filled with stupidity and prejudice.
Self-righteous Professors, paranoid saviors, muscle-brained Quidditch players.
These people were all blinded by appearances.
Only this girl, whom everyone called "the mad girl," saw through what he was really going to do, thanks to that transcendent intuition that looked through the soul.
Cassius did not deny it.
Denying facts in front of a smart person was an act of degrading one's own intelligence.
He calmly accepted this shocking speculation.
"It should taste pretty good, and the nutrition is rich enough."
Cassius, for the first time ever, followed up on Luna's absurd topic, his tone sounding perfectly natural to the extreme.
"If you can't finish it, can you share two teeth with me? They would be perfect for stringing into a necklace to ward off Wrackspurts." Luna made the request seriously, her toes dragging boredly on the stone bricks.
Cassius withdrew his gaze, put his hands in his pockets, and turned to walk toward the dark staircase leading to the underground pipes.
Chapter 122: Imagined Conspiracies and Transparent Jokes
Hearing Cassius's reply, Luna's eyes curved into two crescents.
She nodded, clearly extremely happy that someone had picked up on the topic of eating monsters.
Cassius didn't waste any more words.
He raised his left hand and reached into the inner pocket of his black robe.
His slender fingers held a thumb-sized glass bottle, which he tossed toward Luna.
The glass bottle traced a cold, rigid parabola in the air, landing with extreme precision into Luna's hands.
Inside the bottle were a dozen dark red hard candies.
Sunlight swept across the transparent glass, refracting a thick, blood-colored reflection.
This was a byproduct Cassius had created himself, fulfilling his previous promise.
He had used the purest, most violent methods to forcibly compress and fuse high-purity Dragon blood and Unicornhorn powder.
The Potion-making process of setting up a cauldron and brewing slowly was completely abandoned by him.
A high-density magic field directly physically compressed the Potion ingredients into the form of fruit candies.
If this bottle of candy balls were thrown into the black market of Diagon Alley, even pouring out just one would cause high-level Wizards to draw their wands and fight each other to quickly refill their depleted magic sources.
Yet, Cassius treated it as nothing more than an object to be tossed away.
As long as someone was judged by him to be of value or interest, his protectiveness was always blatant, and his generosity was completely unconcerned with cost.
Cassius put his hand back into his pocket, his Dragon-hide boots deliberately avoiding a puddle of murky water in the cracks of the floor tiles.
He maintained a physiological disgust for this dirty Castle.
"Put your shoes on, and stop walking barefoot on the stone floor."
His voice was cold and hard, without any inflection.
"The earth veins beneath Hogwarts are living things. Constant contact with the ground will drain the flow of magic in your blood vessels, and your hyper-dimensional perception will be ruined."
It was concern without a shred of warmth, entirely like a precision killing machine issuing maintenance instructions to another instrument.
Luna pulled out the glass bottle stopper.
She pinched a dark red candy, eyes fixed intently on the inside of the bottle.
Only after confirming that the remaining candies were exactly the even number she stubbornly preferred did she feel at ease and pop the one in her hand into her mouth.
Crunch.
The crisp sound of chewing spread out.
"It tastes like roasted Dragon fruit, I like it."
Luna tucked the glass bottle into a deep pocket of her wide robe and reached up to fiddle with the Butterbeer cork necklace hanging around her neck.
She turned around nonchalantly, continuing to hum that out-of-tune hunting song as she walked away.
Forty meters away.
Behind the tapestry at the fork in the corridor of the Ravenclaw tower, Harry and Ron were staring intently at this scene.
The empty corridor stretched the distance.
The two couldn't hear the content of the conversation at all.
On their retinas, only this sequence of images was recorded: Cassius cruelly scared a lower-year student into kneeling.
Immediately after, he walked toward the craziest Ravenclaw girl in the whole school, handing over a bottle of unknown blood-red pills.
The girl swallowed a pill and turned away obediently.
Harry kept his mouth shut, his chest heaving violently.
The lightning scar on his forehead throbbed with his heartbeat.
This pain reminded him year-round of the shadow of Lord Voldemort, and also made him highly sensitive and hostile toward any dealings involving the Dark Arts.
"Ron!" Harry lowered his voice, gripping his companion's arm tightly.
Ron shrank his shoulders, his left hand habitually rubbing the washed-out patch on his cuff, and his stomach let out a subtle rumble at the perfect moment.
"Did you see clearly? Did you see what he fed her?" Harrypressed.
Ron shook his head in astonishment: "It was too far! It looked like some kind of red pill?"
"It's poison! Or some kind of Dark Arts contraband that controls the will!"
Red, chaotic bloodshot lines crawled into Harry's eyes.
His logic was slammed to a halt by extreme panic.
"He's not just mapping the school's terrain to find demolition points, he's started targeting other houses!"
Harry's fingers dug into the stone cracks, his nails scraping a harsh, faint sound against the brick edge.
"Luna was forced to eat it! Cassius is using poison to control marginalized students to act as his eyes and ears in the Castle!"
"His tentacles have already reached into Ravenclaw! The entire school is being assimilated by him step by step!"
Ron was left dazed by Harry's rapid-fire conclusions.
He swallowed his saliva and looked at Harry fearfully: "Should we... should we go knock on Professor McGonagall's door now?"
He just wanted to retreat; as long as he didn't have to confront that monster, running errands to report it was perfectly fine.
"The Professors can't figure out his background at all!" Harry interrupted roughly.
The heroism of saving the world and intense anxiety were frantically intertwined in his mind.
"We'll investigate it ourselves! We have to intercept him before he blows up the underground nodes!"
At the other end of the corridor, Cassius watched Luna's back disappear.
He turned and walked toward the hidden stairs leading to the basement.
He lifted his right foot into mid-air.
The boot, which had been about to step onto the stone stairs, suddenly hovered in place.
The surrounding air pressure dropped immediately.
The dust drifting in the draft froze in mid-air.
Cassius did not turn back, nor did he reach for the wand inside his robe.
He merely turned half his face, leaving behind a cold, sharp jawline devoid of warmth.
In the depths of the pitch-black corridor, those deep blue pupils pierced directly through the floating dust and several beams of sunlight forty meters away.
A capture without any deviation.
It locked precisely onto the light-leaking gap at the edge of the tapestry.
The zero-point-one second that the gaze pierced through the gap, the oxygen in Harry's chest was completely drained!
The sensation of his heart suffering a violent, heavy blow struck his entire body.
Cold sweat soaked through his undergarments in large patches.
He opened his mouth wide, but not a single syllable could be squeezed from his throat.
Harry realized with horror.
His seamless secret surveillance had been a ridiculous trick laid out in the open from the very beginning.
This was absolutely not him scrutinizing an opponent.
It was looking at an ant that could be crushed at any moment.
Whether or not to crush it depended entirely on the other person's mood today.
Cassius took a look.
He didn't even bother with the motion of curling his lips.
He simply withdrew his gaze and turned back to the front.
His thick, black Dragon-hide boots slammed heavily onto the stone steps.
The hem of his tall, black trench coat swirled into the shadows.
A series of dull echoes gradually faded away along the walls.
Behind the tapestry, Harry's legs lost their support, and he slumped against the cold, hard brick wall, gasping for air.
Ron curled up trembling in the corner, his fingers clutching his worn-out robe tightly, hesitant to reach out and pull up the Boy Who Lived sitting on the floor.
"We..." A dry, hoarse stream of air squeezed out of Harry's throat, "must do something..."
Harry's back ground against the rough brick seams, and the lining of his Invisibility Cloak exuded a pungent, sweaty odor.
His heart hammered against his ribs, and the dull thud of flesh and blood echoed in his eardrums.
Forty paces away, Cassius had turned his head, his eyes precisely locking onto the crack at the edge of the tapestry.
This gaze had pierced through his defenses.
Harry uncontrollably scratched at the lightning scar on his forehead.
His fingernails were filled with grime, and his skin was scraped with a few red marks; he needed to touch this mark to confirm his identity.
"Ron." Harry swallowed, his Adam's apple bobbing. "You saw it, right?"
Ron huddled in the shadow of the armor pedestal, his knees constantly knocking against the stone sculpture base.
He subconsciously shoved that broken wand, wrapped in transparent tape and ready to snap at any moment, into the wide sleeve of his robe, his knuckles rubbing off gray-white powder onto the stone floor.
He shook his head from side to side.
"I saw it, but I'd rather gouge my eyes out." Ron clutched the hem of his faded robe.
"He made two Ravenclaw girls kneel, then shoved a red pill into Luna Lovegood's hand."
Harry tightened his fingers, digging into Ron's shoulder muscles through the fabric, "The crazy girl swallowed it straight down. Didn't even chew."
The freckles on Ron's face bunched together as his muscles twitched.
"Mind control." Harry gritted his teeth as he spoke, "High-level forbidden Potion. First, use violence to drive away irrelevant people, then target solitary lower-year students. The entire process is so practiced that you can't find a single flaw in it."
A wheezing sound leaked from Ron's throat.
He shoved his broken wand deeper.
"Combine that with the diagram he drew in the Great Halla few days ago."
Harry held up his index finger, tracing a crisscross pattern in the air, "Red markers, underground pipe networks, load-bearing nodes. He's scoping out demolition points. He's going to blow through the foundations of Hogwarts."
Ron covered his mouth with his palm.
Chapter 123: The Savior's Conspiracy Theory
Only a draft blew through the stone corridor.
"Go find Albus Dumbledore." Ron lowered his hand, his nail edges bitten down to a ragged mess. "No, find Professor McGonagall first. Or find both—together—"
"It's useless." Harry cut him off.
"Have you forgotten last semester? The Troll died at his feet, Fluffy's head was crushed under his boot, and he even handled Quirrell all by himself. How did Albus Dumbledore handle it afterward? He deducted five points from Slytherin. A mere five points!"
Harry lowered his voice, his vocal cords strained to the point of cracking.
"The adults have already made a deal with this madman. The policy the entire teaching staff has adopted toward him is—" Harry paused for a few seconds, "—to ignore him."
Ron's lips parted, then clamped shut.
He couldn't find a reason to argue. At the opening Sorting Ceremony, Cassius merely tapped his fingers on the oak table, and the entire Slytherin table spontaneously applauded.
This kind of dominance was displayed right before their eyes. Even Snape chose to turn a blind eye, so why would Albus Dumbledore jump in to muddy these waters? As a minor character, he had even less reason to go to his death.
"What can we do?" Ron hunched his shoulders.
"Find Hermione."
"Find her?" Ron tugged at his frayed sleeve.
Reluctance and guilt were intertwined.
The incident last semester where he'd angered Hermioneto the point of her hiding in the girls' bathroom to cry hadn't been moved past yet; he couldn't bring himself to ask her for help.
"She is the most knowledgeable person we know." Harrypropped himself up on his thighs to stand straight, his kneecaps still knocking together uncontrollably.
He stared straight ahead, his right hand continuing to pick at the scar on his forehead. "We must have her decipher the specific coordinates of those red crosses on that map."
Ron lifted his cuff to wipe the moisture from the tip of his nose. "What if she refuses to help?"
"She will agree." Harry clenched his fists; his palms were already soaked.
— —
At the end of the third-to-last bookshelf in the library.
In front of Hermione Granger, a thick wall of books was piled up.
Seven open hardcover books were spread out in a semi-circle, with the third edition of "High-Dimensional magicMedium Conduction" weighing down the outer side. At the core was an old edition of an Arithmancy textbook, its gold-leaf lettering worn and flaking off the spine. The edges had to be kept flush with the table.
Three layers of parchment were stacked on the table.
The bottom layer was filled with crossed-out derivation formulas; the middle layer was written with rearranged thermodynamic equations; the top layer...
Hermione gripped the stiff quill shaft, stripped of its down, and carved the final line of numbers onto the paper: "The Effect of Gravitational Collapse on the Decay Rate of magicBeams in a Sealed Space."
The nib had dug a deep red indentation into the side of her index finger, and her middle knuckle was stained with two stubborn spots of blue-black ink.
Her eyes were bloodshot.
Her emotions were in a state of extreme agitation.
Last semester, Cassius had left a single sentence at the circulation desk: "You failed to account for air resistance." This sentence had severed Hermione's nerves of blind obedience to traditional textbooks.
She turned her focus, starting to use mathematical tools to violently deconstruct the physical architecture of magic.
The thrill of exploring underlying truths far exceeded those few 'O's on her report card.
As long as she calculated the formulas correctly, she wouldn't have to waste effort catering to peers who didn't understand how her brain worked at all.
"Hermione!"
Harry and Ron rushed to the table. Harry slammed both hands on the edge of the table, panting heavily, while Ronkicked the leg of a solid wood chair, lost his balance, and fell onto the edge of the book pile. A thick book dropped to the floor.
Behind the circulation desk, Madam Pince lifted her chin, the skin on her face tightening as she stared fixedly at them.
"Shut up." Hermione kept her head down, the quill tip hovering over the paper for only half a second before continuing its dance.
"Hermione, something terrible has happened." Harryleaned his upper body over the table, a drop of sweat dripping from his forehead, hitting the ink on the edge of the parchment and causing it to bloom into a black circle.
"Cassius Malfoy—"
Hermione's fingers tightened, and the nib stabbed heavily into the parchment, punching a hole through it.
"—is poisoning Luna Lovegood in the fourth-floor corridor."
Hermione raised her chin.
Ron saw on her face the same muscle twitch Professor McGonagall had when grading failing exams. He stepped back half a step, treading on the fallen book cover.
"Repeat that."
Harry rattled off what he had seen like a machine gun. Cassius forcing the girl to kneel, shoving a red pill into Luna's mouth, sketching pipe network blueprints in Diagon Alley, marking key coordinates with red crosses.
The volume erupting from his throat continued to rise.
"He's using contraband to brainwash Ravenclaw students! He's already infiltrating other houses! The next step is to detonate the underground barrier and make the whole Castle collapse—"
"Stop."
Hermione threw the bare quill onto the table, the wooden shaft making a crisp sound.
"Show me the evidence."
"I saw it while I was hiding behind the tapestry—"
"What you saw is based on the premise that you were hiding forty paces away, through fabric, and unable to hear any conversation. The rest was automatically filled in by the persecution complex in your brain." Hermione pressed her lips together.
She bent down, avoided Ron's foot, and pulled a copy of "Advanced Potion and Alchemy Product Guide" from the stack of books by her feet, flipping it to page 347. Her index finger nail dug heavily into the third paragraph of text, the edges of her nail turning white.
"Dragon blood and Unicorn horn powder, when forcibly compressed under extremely high-frequency magic, generate dark red crystals that possess anomalous light transmittance." Hermione pushed the heavy book under Harry's nose, the spine pressing over the earlier water stain. "This is advanced content from the seventh-year Alchemy class. The 'red pill' you mentioned is, in all likelihood, a top-tier magic recovery crystal."
Harry's back stiffened.
"The black market transaction price starts at thirty Galleons." Hermione smoothed out the creases on the edge of the page, flattening the dog-ear. "Cassius Malfoy, a person who can snap a wand with his bare hands. Does he need to rely on psychoactive poison to control first-year students?"
"He could easily—"
"If he wants to control someone, he just has to walk up to them." Hermione closed the guide, the closing pages creating a gust of air. "He didn't even open his mouth to speak in the corridor today, and a third-year student knelt down immediately. Does he need to waste poison?"
Ron shrank his neck into his collar by an inch. This logic was so tight there wasn't a single crack to be found. He used his thumb to pick at the mangled nail on his index finger.
Harry's cheeks flushed red with blood.
"What about that underground pipe network map? How do you convince me of that?" Harry continued to attack.
"I cannot convince you. I haven't seen that blueprint." Hermione quickened her speaking pace, compressing even the pauses for breath. "But you are equally clueless. You have never been exposed to Runes, and you have no concept of ley line engineering. You even need to copy my parchment scrolls for the basic principles of turning a match into a needle in Transfiguration class. By what rule do you determine that the red cross is a 'demolition point' rather than a 'detection node' or a 'magic leak marker'?"
Harry's jaw hung slightly open, his tongue pressed behind his teeth, unable to make a sound.
Hermione stood up straight, gathered the parchment on the table with both hands, and aligned the edges.
"Hermione!" Harry slammed his palm onto the oak table.
A sharp warning sound came from the direction of the circulation desk from Madam Pince.
"You are clearing the name of a future Dark Lord!" Harryreached out to grab the parchment.
Hermione sidestepped to avoid him.
She turned her shoulder to face Harry head-on. The bloodshot veins in her eyes had not yet faded, but her facial muscles were completely relaxed.
"I am not speaking for anyone. I am only standing on the side of logic."
"You've been brainwashed by his posturing—"
"The one brainwashed by fear is you." Hermioneenunciated heavily. "You fear him, so you need to define him as a villain. As long as he is a villain, that'Savior' halo on your head can maintain its value. You are simply afraid that others will strip away your uniqueness."
A layer of blood-red suffused the area around Harry's eye sockets, and his left hand gripped the lightning scar on his forehead so tightly that his fingertips scratched the skin. He wanted to retort, but his vocal cords went on strike completely.
Hermione clutched the three heavy volumes to her chest and walked around the corner of the table.
When she reached Ron's side, she paused for a second.
"If you must go to your deaths, cast Expelliarmus three times in a row before walking out of the common room door. During last semester's practical exercises, you never successfully cast it even once."
She walked out of the aisle and pushed open the wooden door.
The door panel turned on its hinges, emitting a dry, grating sound. The wooden door latched shut again.
Harry gripped the wooden splinter on the edge of the table with his right hand, and Ron shoved his left hand, which was hiding his broken wand, into his pocket.
Chapter 124: The Tyrant's Countdown
The green flames in the fireplace licked the silver serpent relief on the vaulted ceiling. The fire cast dancing shadows on the walls.
Cassius sat on the silver serpent chair, his spine straight, eyes closed.
The [Dual-Soul Furnace] maintained low-power operation.
Two highly concentrated masses of soul energy merged at the dantian, squeezing out materialized droplets of magic. The droplets were dark purple and carried an extremely high temperature.
They circulated along the meridian circuits, scouring every nerve ending along the way.
With every scouring, the muscle fibers underwent minute ruptures and restructuring.
The meridian fissures caused by the battle in the Forbidden Corridor last semester had completely healed; the thickness of the blood vessel walls had increased by three percentage points, and magic transmission efficiency had risen by twelve percentage points.
Physical endurance was stuck at a bottleneck.
If magic was overclocked for more than ten seconds, the capillary network would rupture and bleed.
The essence blood of a thousand-year-old Basilisk could remedy this defect.
The active essence of that ancient creature was sufficient to recast bone density and muscle fibers, making this body fully compatible with the full-power output of the furnace.
Tactical simulation in the brain initiated.
An adult Basilisk is eighteen meters long.
The thickness of its abdominal scales exceeds ten centimeters, with a high-level magic-resistant film attached to the surface, and its structural strength far exceeds that of Dragon scales.
Conventional cutting curses cannot cause physical damage; they would only deflect upon impact.
The venom glands store a sufficient amount of lethal venom, and the bite force of its fangs can sever heavy steel shields forged by Goblins.
Direct eye contact instantly strips away vital signs, while indirect viewing causes cellular petrification.
Battle plan established.
Eyes closed throughout. Sever the visual nerve connection. Rely on global magic perception to construct a three-dimensional topographic map.
The Four-Channel Shunt at full power overload.
Outputting from both hands simultaneously, first release a high-frequency magic cutting net to strip away the outer scales of its head, then precisely sever the venom gland ducts.
Then, compress all remaining magic to a single point to pierce through its skull from the upper jaw, destroying the central nervous system.
Estimated time: ninety seconds; fault tolerance: zero.
The disturbance cannot be concealed.
The magic shockwave generated by breaking through the load-bearing wall of the Chamber of Secrets would trigger the ancient defensive arrays beneath Hogwarts within three seconds.
The silver instruments in the Principal's office would immediately sound an alarm.
Dumbledore would arrive at the scene in at most four minutes.
Four minutes is only enough to complete the killing; it is not enough to drain the essence blood and erase the traces of battle.
Once caught in the act, the secret of the Dual-Soul Furnacewould easily be exposed.
External environmental cover is needed.
In two days at the Quidditch Pitch, the cheers of thousands of Wizards mixed with the explosions of hundreds of magical fireworks will push the background magic noise of Hogwarts to its peak.
Under the coverage of this massive amount of white noise, the magic eruption sixty meters underground will be completely swallowed.
Cassius opened his eyes.
In the center of the common room, Draco was contending with a hovering iron ball.
The iron ball was fifteen centimeters in diameter, with a gravity curse anchored inside that was three times Draco's body weight.
Draco's arms were extended horizontally, his ten fingers fully splayed.
magic condensed into blinding white frost at his fingertips, holding up the falling iron ball with all his might.
Sweat rolled down his sharp chin, splashing into dark water stains on the bluestone floor.
The front of his robes was soaked through with cold sweat, clinging tightly to his chest, outlining the thin contour of his ribs.
The muscles in his right arm twitched at a high frequency, the magic aura flickering between bright and dim.
Draco's thumb was tightly clamped over the second joint of his index finger, his sharp nails cutting into the skin, seeping out tiny beads of blood. The pain helped him maintain focus.
He absolutely would not allow himself to retreat. The humiliation of being pressed against a wall by a senior Gryffindor last semester lashed at him at every moment.
As the heir to the House of Malfoy, he could be defeated by someone stronger, but he absolutely could not become the burden that needed his younger brother's constant protection.
The surface of the iron ball emitted a creaking sound of metal fatigue, and the outer layer of iron began to peel off.
Draco forcibly lowered his center of gravity, squeezing out the remaining magic in his meridians.
"The magic output frequency of your right hand is off," Cassius said, his tone flat and devoid of inflection. "Your left hand is making unnecessary compensations. Keep your core in your waist and abdomen."
Draco bit down on his back molars, tasting the metallic tang of blood in his mouth. He said nothing, forcibly adjusting his breathing rhythm and shifting the magictransmission node from his wrist to his abdomen. The swaying of the iron ball reduced by half.
"How much longer?" Draco asked.
"Five minutes."
Draco pressed his lips together, the muscles in his cheeks taut, no longer wasting energy to speak.
Twenty feet away, Zabini leaned against the back of a leather sofa, with a copy of Modern Wizarding Weekly spread across his knees.
The rustling sound of pages turning rang out punctually every fifteen seconds.
His attention had completely drifted away from the travelogue article in the magazine.
He knew very well that not even a seventh-year Slytherinprefect could withstand the pressure of triple gravity without using a wand. This pair of Malfoy brothers was widening an absolute gap in strength from all their peers.
Zabini's right thumb repeatedly rubbed a brass button on his left cuff.
This was the only item left to him by his mother's fourth husband.
His mother had taught him to always stand in the right position before a strong person rises, and never to bet his chips on the weak.
He continued to maintain a steady frequency of turning pages, offering no comment.
In Slytherin, questioning Cassius's training methods was equivalent to voluntarily giving up the qualification to befriend the strong.
He only needed to record quietly and then evaluate the value.
Five minutes were up.
Cassius snapped his fingers crisply.
The gravity anchor was released. Draco's arms lost support and slammed directly against the outer sides of his thighs.
He lost his balance and fell forward, his palms scraping against the rough granite wall to steady himself, his chest heaving violently as he greedily gasped for air.
"Pass," Cassius said, standing up and smoothing the hem of his robes.
Draco rubbed his cheeks vigorously, using external force to forcibly suppress the unnatural spasms of his facial muscles.
He wiped the sweat from his chin with the back of his hand and stood up straight.
A sense of euphoria from pushing past his limits occupied most of his central nervous system, and even his breathing carried an irrepressible fervor.
"What are we practicing tomorrow?"
"Rest tomorrow," Cassius said, walking toward the fireplace, the dancing green light carving sharp shadows onto his face. "The day after tomorrow, Gryffindor plays against Slytherin."
"That idiot Flint only knows how to lead by ramming into people; he has absolutely no tactical sense," Dracosneered, reaching up to smooth his disheveled blonde hair. "Are you going to watch that bunch of apes play?"
Cassius did not respond.
The Dual-Soul Furnace switched to passive scanning mode. Invisible magic shockwaves penetrated the stone floor, cut into the six layers of granite foundation, and delved deep into the ancient underground water system network.
Forty meters directly below.
A massive living entity was sleeping underground. The heartbeat was dull and heavy, trembling once every twelve seconds.
The enormous heat source appeared as a dark red outline in the sonar grid.
The thousand-year-old Basilisk.
Precise coordinate locking complete.
Pipe entrance in the abandoned girls' bathroom on the second floor.
Vertical depth: thirty-seven meters. Inclination angle: sixty degrees. Pipe material: enchanted cast iron.
Sliding down the pipe entrance, potentially encountering corrosive gases along the way, takes two minutes.
Piercing vertically through thirty-seven meters of rock strata directly from the bathroom floor, a single point-detonation would be enough to achieve the goal.
But the loud noise of physical destruction would alert the entire school.
The day after tomorrow at two in the afternoon.
All the teachers and students of the school will be gathered in the stands of the Quidditch Pitch.
Dumbledore will be sitting at the teachers' bench, Snapewill be monitoring Harry, and McGonagall will be keeping a close eye on the score.
The second-floor bathroom will be completely cleared out; even the ghosts will go to the pitch to join the fun.
"A perfect hunting ground," Cassius whispered.
He turned and walked toward the dormitory corridor. He stopped when he passed by Draco.
"Stay in the stands the day after tomorrow. Don't go wandering off."
Draco looked up, meeting Cassius's eyes.
"Where are you going?"
"For a snack."
Cassius pushed open the heavy oak door, stepped over the threshold, and slammed the door shut behind him. The brass lock emitted a crisp metallic click.
Chapter 125: The Breath of the Chamber of Secrets
In the final days before the Quidditch match, the entire Hogwarts was caught in a collective frenzy.
In the Gryffindor common room, Captain Oliver Woodpushed the training intensity to the physical limit.
Every morning at six, they did ten laps around the pitch for warm-up, followed by three hours of tactical collision drills.
Harry was thrown into the pouring rain to practice sharp turns and dives repeatedly, until all ten of his fingers were completely numb.
"If we lose to Slytherin," Wood paced back and forth in the locker room.
He stopped every three steps, rubbing a chipped Golden Snitch commemorative coin in his palm with his thumb.
It was proof of the first time he had touched a Golden Snitch in an official match when he was eleven.
He slammed his hand against the wooden locker door, ignoring the splinters embedding into his flesh, "I will jump off the Astronomy Tower."
"Captain, you've been saying that line for three years; the stones of the Astronomy Tower are tired of hearing it." Fred Weasley leaned against the bench, braiding the tail twigs of his broomstick into a tiny plait.
"I'm serious this year!"
Harry sat on the edge of the bench, the skin on his inner thighs already chafed raw.
The pulling of bones and muscles brought real pain.
He swallowed the hard, dry bread mechanically, the coarse bran scratching his throat.
His left hand unconsciously picked at the crack at the bottom of his wand handle. He didn't care about Quidditchat all.
That map of Cassius.
Red crosses.
Underground pipe network.
Hermione's questioning replayed in his ears: "On what basis do you conclude those red crosses are demolition points?"
On what basis?
On intuition.
Dobby's warning, the brutality of Cassius crushing the Auror in Diagon Alley, the pressure in the corridor that seemed to shred the oxygen—all these fragments linked together in Harry's mind into a Gordian knot, every link fitting perfectly.
Hermione refused to believe it. She only cared about logic.
Last night, she had thrown down harsh words with red-rimmed eyes, accusing him of falling into a persecution complex. Hermione's stance was faultless; she only wanted to keep Harry in the safety zone using school rules and logic, because she was afraid of losing a friend.
Harry swallowed the last bite of bread.
He did not go to find Hermione.
That confrontation in the library had become a thorn between them.
"You are afraid of him, so you need him to be the bad guy."
This stinging remark was too harsh, so harsh that Harryrefused to dig deeper into the real motive behind it.
He would not compromise.
Training by day, investigation by night.
For three consecutive nights, Harry had wandered the Castle under his Invisibility Cloak, searching one by one along the red cross coordinates on Cassius's map.
Basement storage rooms, first-floor corridor pipe manhole covers, third-floor restricted area vents.
Nothing was found.
No explosives, no traces of Dark Arts, no tripwires for magic traps.
Ron declared he was giving up late on the second night.
The red-haired boy tugged at his hair and sighed: "If I don't sleep, Snape will definitely stuff my head into a cauldron tomorrow. Harry, listen to Hermione for once, wouldn't it be better to just get through this semester safely?" Ron's retreat was reasonable; he craved the comfort of an ordinary student and didn't want to be constantly tied to the Saviour's chariot, risking his life.
Harry bore the heavy pressure alone.
The night before the match. Two in the morning.
Inside the Castle, there was only the sound of cold wind passing through and the flapping of owl wings.
Harry had figured out Filch's patrol route; he walked in the shadows cast by his Invisibility Cloak, moving quickly along the wall in the second-floor corridor.
This was the last coordinate to check.
At the end of the second-floor corridor, a wooden door stood at the corner.
A crooked sign hung on the door panel: "Under Maintenance—Do Not Use."
Abandoned girls' bathroom.
Harry pushed open the door. The rusty hinges let out a piercing screech.
A damp, musty smell rushed directly into his face.
There was half an inch of standing water under his feet.
The murky, dirty water submerged his shoes, and his footsteps made sticky sounds.
Three mirrors were mostly shattered; cracks sliced across the mirror surfaces, and the remaining glass reflected Harry's silhouette under the Invisibility Cloak in a play of light and shadow.
The faucet dripped continuously.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
The water droplets hit the ceramic basin, acting like a death countdown.
Harry gripped his holly wand tightly and took a slow step.
He heard crying.
Sharp, piercing, accompanied by the sound of metal scraping against a chalkboard, along with hysterical wailing.
"Who's there!"
The crying stopped.
The wooden door of the innermost stall flew open, and a translucent, silvery-gray girl came rushing out.
She wore thick lenses, ghost tears hung on her face, and her right hand tightly gripped half a rusty brass valve.
Whenever she was neglected, she would dive into the sewers to collect discarded parts, attempting to piece together a crown to prove that she was also a noble Hogwarts princess.
Myrtle.
Harry identified his target. The earthbound spirit that had haunted this bathroom for fifty years.
"You came specifically to mock me!" Myrtle let out a high-frequency scream, the sound waves rippling through the standing water, "The whole school comes to bully poor, unloved, hideously ugly Myrtle!"
"Shut up—" Harry pulled back his Invisibility Cloak hood, "I don't have time for that. I'm looking for—"
"Looking for a toilet? This dump has been broken for fifty whole years! No one fixes it! No one cares if Myrtle lives or dies!"
"I'm not here to use the toilet!" Harry raised his voice to drown out the noise.
Myrtle flipped her body in mid-air, staring fixedly at Harry's face.
"Then what are you doing here in the middle of the night acting crazy?"
Harry closed his mouth. "I'm investigating the demolition coordinates of a mad Wizard"—this kind of crazy talk must never leak out.
"I heard a strange noise." He threw out a cover excuse.
"What noise?"
"A hissing, scraping sound. It's coming from inside the wall bricks." Harry frowned tightly.
Myrtle floated up to the tip of his nose, tilting her neck, her two transparent fingers repeatedly toying with the broken water valve.
"Oh—that sound."
Her tone dropped suddenly.
"It's been sounding for the past few days. Most frequently at midnight. There is a huge object moving inside the walls; it is a giant snake crawling!"
The hair on Harry's body stood on end.
"Are you sure?"
"Very sure! I've been stuck in this ghost place for fifty years, and I can hear the drainage sound of every single pipe clearly." Myrtle folded her arms as if sulking, "That sound is definitely not a pipe. It's a living thing. It crawled up from very, very deep underground."
Harry's heart pounded wildly.
He turned to circle the bathroom, conducting an all-around investigation. Walls, floor tiles, window sill gaps.
He found spiders.
A dozen palm-sized brown spiders, arranged in a straight line, were fleeing frantically along the edge of the window frame.
A fleeing posture.
Harry turned his neck to follow the direction of the spiders' tails. The center they were desperately avoiding was only one place—the circular row of sinks in the middle.
He stepped over quickly.
Bent down.
His fingertips brushed across the cold surface of the pure copper faucet, touching a tiny protrusion.
A snake engraving.
A snake coiled into an S-shape, cast on the side of the faucet, the size of a fingernail. If not for inspecting it face-to-face, it would have been impossible to discover.
Harry held his breath.
The red cross on Cassius's map—the coordinate for the second-floor corridor area—was precisely fixed on this piece of copper.
Not a demolition point.
It was the door to the Chamber of Secrets.
A certain instinct etched into his bone marrow seized control of his vocal cords. Perhaps stemming from the dark resonance left by the lightning scar on his forehead, perhaps originating from the physiological call deep within his Parseltongue bloodline.
Harry opened his lips slightly.
A series of hoarse, inhumanly pronounced Parseltonguewords slipped out.
The sink vibrated violently.
The dull sound of mechanical gears meshing exploded against his eardrums.
The entire row of pure copper pipes rotated clockwise, the valves colliding with a piercing metallic clang.
The giant sink in the middle slid open to the sides, exposing a massive, pitch-black, vertically penetrating hole directly beneath it.
A decaying, foul stench surged up with the airflow, carrying the stench of an extremely ancient, extremely brutal creature.
Myrtle let out a short scream, clutching the rusty water valve, and fled back into the ceiling crawlspace.
Harry stared fixedly at the black abyss, his brain crashing on the spot.
At the same time.
Slytherin common room.
Cassius closed his eyes and sank into a light slumber.
He opened his eyes.
[ Dual-Soul Furnace ] completed data judgment in 0.03 seconds, red light alarms flashed directly deep in his retinas, and the system switched from standby to combat alert.
The earth vein feedback signal was extremely clear.
That ancient life source, suppressed by a thousand-year seal, instantly broke through the three layers of magicbarriers, crashing into his sensory network in a violent posture.
Someone had opened the entrance.
Cassius straightened his back.
Deep blue swallowed his original eye color. In the dark dormitory, these eyes lit up with two cold flames.
He got out of bed silently.
Spider-silk inner armor clung to his skin—he never took off his armor.
Dragon-hide combat boots were placed at the head of the bed.
Cassius bent down to lock the boot buckles.
His movements were steady and unhurried.
No need to wait for the Quidditch match to start.
Since some idiot had unlocked it in advance, it just happened to save him the trouble of a violent door-breaking procedure.
Quiet infiltration, quiet decapitation, quiet blood extraction, quiet retreat.
The decapitation process was greatly shortened.
Cassius walked to the wooden dormitory door, his palm gripping the brass handle.
He tilted his head to examine Draco, who was sleeping soundly on the opposite bed, wrapped in a wool blanket.
The blond boy's right hand was wrapped in white bandages; the magic burns from his Wandless Magicduring the day had not yet faded.
Even in deep sleep, Draco's fingers still curled and stretched unconsciously, his mouth vaguely piecing together syllables of attack spells.
This noble young master even dreamed of crushing Potter's skull, trying to fill the huge panic of falling behind others.
Cassius withdrew his gaze.
Pushed open the wooden door.
Stepping out of the dungeon, the green flames burning in the fireplace collectively leaned outward and retreated.
It was not caused by wind pressure. It was the magicflames instinctively giving way.
The torches on the corridor walls automatically lowered their combustion power as he passed by.
Not an environmental spell.
Hogwarts, this ancient Castle with independent consciousness, was bowing and submitting to a top-tier predator stepping out of its territory.
Cassius took steady, measured steps, piercing through the underground corridor, heading straight toward the direction of the second-floor bathroom.
The muscles in his face pulled upward.
"Prey, you've washed your neck clean."