The camera flashes in Diagon Alley were brighter than daylight.
They were like a vast, blindingly white sea.
Skyl carried himself as lazily as if he were strolling along a beach.
He lowered his head and looked down at Rita Skeeter: this malicious smear-monger of a reporter, this illegal Animagus who transformed into an insect to eavesdrop on secrets, this gaudy, overdressed middle-aged witch. How many labels are enough to sum up a person? However many you pick, it's never enough. Human beings are complicated creatures; animals in the wild are often much simpler.
Everyone present realised that things were about to take an unexpected, dramatically sharp turn.
The bored onlookers held their breath. The racket of the flashes was as frantic as the beating of hummingbirds' wings.
Professor McGonagall watched the scene in profile.
In her heart, Skyl's words filled her with unease.
Rita wanted to say something, but she suddenly discovered that, without knowing when it had happened, she had been hit with a Full Body-Bind Curse; she couldn't open her mouth, she couldn't even blink.
"I warned you long ago. Don't waste my mercy. Perhaps it's precisely because of my mercy that you felt free to run wild. Look, Rita, I honestly don't mind being interviewed. If we could respect each other and have a proper conversation in a civil tone, things never had to get to this point. I'd even say, if you had sincerely apologised, I would have chosen to forgive you. You see only the mote in my eye and not the beam in your own. You say I'm too arrogant—have you ever noticed your own prejudice? Unfortunately, the way you present yourself doesn't inspire in me even the tiniest shred of pity."
Professor McGonagall murmured, "de Lin, don't be rash." She rose to her feet as well, trying to stop this from going any further before the situation slid into an irreparable abyss.
"Professor, do you remember how many laws I proposed in my paper?"
"Two. Essential Transfiguration was the stroke of genius."
"That's right, two. People always forget that I proposed two laws. Besides Essential Transfiguration, there is another. Even now, you don't quite dare to believe in that second law. But that's all right—I don't mind using this ready-made example to demonstrate it for you. Think of it as your immodest pupil showing you an even more magnificent landscape in the field of magic."
Facing the thin, slightly hunched back of the transfer student, Minerva McGonagall suddenly felt the same awe she'd had as a girl, standing before Dumbledore as he was then, like a mountain you could only look up to. She stood there, stunned, unable to move.
She had a premonition that something was going to happen. It was about to happen. It was happening. It had already happened.
Skyl pressed a hand, wreathed in dim blue radiance, to Rita's forehead. Behind the exaggerated frames of her glasses, her eyes were bulging with terror.
"Rita Skeeter. An Animagus unregistered with the Ministry of Magic. You must have felt delighted when you turned into a tiny bug to eavesdrop wantonly on other people's secrets. You like that feeling of hiding in the dark. You like the feeling of twisting right and wrong and distorting the truth with your words. You don't possess anything one could call a journalist's conscience. Everything you do is for your own gain—using shamelessly sensational language to make your readers' eyes pop, so the paper will sell a few more copies, the Prophet will print a few more of your pieces and toss you a couple of extra Galleons."
Rita's face had gone as chalk-white as plaster.
Skyl couldn't care less about how violently his words were stirring up the crowd. The reporters had already surged forward, hemming the long table in on all sides.
The flashes had turned the air into a blinding false daylight, stabbing at Rita's eyes until the blood vessels burst; tears leaked from the corners of her eyes of their own accord. It even made her ordinary, over-made-up face look almost pitiful.
But he simply went on talking, his tone as relaxed as if he were chatting while taking an evening stroll along some suburban street.
"Seems incredible, doesn't it? How could I know all this? Anyone who pries into other people's privacy, in the end, can't protect their own. Rita, Rita, Rita, you've given me a bit of a problem. The fallout you caused has made my name rather unsightly. But you'll find that I don't actually care about reputation. What I care about is: why didn't you respect my warning? It's fine. None of that really matters. I'll take care of the little trouble you've brought me."
Skyl swept his gaze across the noisy, chaotic crowd, ignoring all the voices, and said, "It's time I gave you a tiny demonstration of what Transfiguration can really do."
Behind him, Professor McGonagall pleaded, "Don't do this, de Lin."
"Professor, please bear witness to Skyl's Eternal Transfiguration."
Under the crowd's wide-eyed, horrified stare, Skyl slowly drew Rita's soul out of her body. The thought-form of that soul was wreathed in rotting black vapour, perfectly matching how people imagined her.
"Dark wizard! He's a murderer!" The crowd began to flee in panic. Their screams shrieked like sirens.
A few dedicated reporters stayed where they were. They were determined to record this horrific scene truthfully, to lay bare de Lin's cruelty before the world, to let everyone know that a villain as evil as the Dark Lord himself had appeared—here, in Diagon Alley, at Hogwarts, in a wizarding world already wracked by storm and unrest.
Skyl paid no attention to the chaos around him; to him, those screams were nothing but background white noise.
Now, the true main act was about to begin.
A fierce light lanced out from the Eye of the Tower set in Skyl's chest. Magic imbued with the property of eternity surged forth in a torrent, pouring into Rita Skeeter's soulless body. A blazing white band of light wrapped around that flesh and blood, lifting it weightless into the air.
Minerva McGonagall's right foot slipped half a step back, but her left foot moved forward; she staggered and almost fell onto the table. Her thin, withered lips trembled, her eyes shook uncontrollably. She desperately wanted to shut her eyes against this terrifying sight, but she could not stop herself from watching, from bearing witness to this miracle of Transfiguration.
Powerful wizards do have the ability to maliciously transform others, and that usually brings about very nasty consequences. The victim's mind is subjected to tremendous trauma, and even when they are restored to their original form, the sensations and experiences from that transformed state linger on, twisting their temperament. The consequences of being kept transformed for a long time can even be irreversible.
But that is only ordinary transformation of the body—powerful, cruel, immoral, nothing more.
That kind of malicious transfiguration could never reach the level of the art Skyl was displaying in this very instant.
This was the terrifying truth known as the Law of Eternal Transfiguration, the chaotic truth that the history of the world itself could be warped and rewritten.
The words from that paper flashed through McGonagall's mind.
"—The key step of Eternal Transfiguration is to find an 'eternal object' that transcends time, and replace the real object that exists in history with it. Let the eternal object extend backwards into the past, so that what is being transfigured is no longer the object at this present moment, but the entirety of that object's past."
Skyl had not explained in the article what an "eternal object" was or how to obtain one. Precisely because of that, the wizarding world had no way to begin exploring the Law of Eternal Transfiguration. He had put forward a theoretically self-consistent framework, but because it was impossible to falsify, researchers in Transfiguration had dismissed it as nothing but wild fancy.
Professor McGonagall had once thought the same of the Law of Eternal Transfiguration, and had even advised Skyl to cut that law from his paper so it wouldn't affect how people viewed the Law of Essential Transfiguration.
But here and now, confronted with this sight, she suddenly realised with a jolt that Skyl had long since found the so-called "eternal object". His theory was real, and workable.
Wizards truly possessed the power to change history.
"Merlin…" Professor McGonagall breathed in a weak whisper.
Rita Skeeter's flesh twisted within the magical energy. The colours that made up her body began to blur together; the outline of her form started to change.
Skyl spared not a glance for that contorting shell of a body. He whispered instead to the trembling witch's soul in his hand, "I know your Animagus form is a beetle, but I believe your soul is a hyena that feeds on carrion—greedy, sly, and vindictive over the smallest slight. So I'll make you inside and out the same. I'll make you live in the shape of your own soul. Don't worry, I won't kill you. I've even gone to the trouble of plucking out your soul and preserving your memories, because I want you to live in a hyena's body, in a world where Rita Skeeter was never born. Now, you may begin to weep."
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