After a whole night of peaceful and friendly negotiation—
Petunia finally humbly accepted all of Snape's opinions, feeling ashamed beyond measure for her past mistakes. She profoundly summarized three "should nots" and seven "shoulds" as important guiding thoughts.
She decided to accept Snape's deal, turn over a new leaf, and become a good sister again!
It could be said that everyone was happy, truly everyone was happy!
Snape left with satisfaction.
A wisp of haze that originally hovered over the festive season was roughly dispersed before it could destroy the atmosphere, preventing trouble before it happened.
In the following days, Snape followed Eileen and Tobias to the shops to purchase various items needed for Christmas.
Colorful small lights were installed along the walls.
Long strings of them hung there, emitting festive, colorful light once powered on.
A bought Christmas tree was also specially placed in the yard, fully hung with bells and bulbs, stubbornly blooming with warm-toned light in the air that was getting colder day by day!
There was naturally no lack of a radio singing Christmas carols.
Adding a more lively atmosphere to the warm house, and Eileen's joyful laughter could be heard from time to time.
After simply spending time on family activities, Snape didn't stay idle. He continued to work overtime reading an evil book titled Cruciatus Venom borrowed from the Black Eye Society.
This book, which recorded a large amount of Dark Arts knowledge, had itself been tainted with indescribable evil due to its content as time passed.
Snape had to feed it 100ml of blood every day to calm the book down.
Otherwise, its cover would irregularly grow teeth to attack the reader, satisfying its appetite with their blood!
Holding such a dangerous book in hand.
Snape greedily absorbed the many dark knowledge recorded on it, feeling that the minor hex brewing in his mind was gradually becoming mature and perfect.
If he worked harder, he might be able to complete it before the Christmas holidays ended!
Relaxed and leisurely time passed day by day.
As if to make up for the vacancy created in school, Lily stuck to Snape almost every day.
With an incredulously surprised tone, she talked about how Petunia had suddenly been willing to reconcile with her for some unknown reason these past few days. In a trance, it seemed like they had returned to the innocent childhood years of the two.
Snape always smiled silently by the side.
Occasionally, when inspiration struck, he would use Floo Powder to fly directly to the Golden Organ Candy Shop opened by Eileen in Diagon Alley, where he freely used his wand to experiment with his guesses.
Logically speaking, underage wizards shouldn't use magic outside of school.
Hidden in their wands was a special tracking charm called the Trace. Any act of casting spells would be detected.
However, the subtle part was—
After confirming through multiple communications with Ollivander's Wand Shop via Juliet before the holidays, Snape learned that the Trace could actually only detect whether a spell was cast, but couldn't confirm who the caster was.
In other words.
If within a certain range, Snape was the only wizard in the area, then all spells cast would be counted on his head.
But if there were several, or even more wizards active in this area—
Even if the Trace inside the wand detected someone casting a spell, it couldn't conclude whether it was Snape secretly casting it. This gave him a loophole to exploit!
Therefore, Diagon Alley became the best hiding place.
Even if someone was bored enough to find trouble with Snape, they couldn't convict Snape who was amidst it.
Only practice is the sole criterion for testing truth.
Having not waved his wand for several days, Snape's movements were rarely a bit rusty for a moment.
Walking to the basement usually used for storing candy.
Snape first casually cast a few harmless spells to warm up his hands, and only then began to try orderly according to the ideas in his mind.
The feeling of experimenting with developing spells was wonderful.
Like being blindfolded and walking alone on a single-plank bridge.
One wrong step would cause unexpected serious consequences, forcing Snape to possess keen intuition. He had to abruptly stop the failed casting before detecting something wrong to avoid causing too much damage.
But even so, after spending an afternoon, the entire basement became a mess, the kind that even "Reparo" couldn't restore.
His expression showed no discouragement.
Snape put a candy in his mouth, rested briefly to organize his thoughts, and then started the second round of attempts again.
The content of countless Dark Arts books flew quickly before his eyes.
As the sky darkened bit by bit, Snape, who was constantly casting spells in selflessness, could feel that he was only one last step away from success!
However, this short distance seemed impossible to break through no matter what he did, forming an indestructible bottleneck that stuck him firmly!
But the more it was like this, the less impatient he could be!
Taking a deep breath, Snape maintained an inhuman calmness.
Like a third party unrelated to himself, ignoring all interference from anxious emotions, he scrutinized every detail and change in the process of casting the minor hex as harshly as ever!
The third syllable slightly raised, then reduce the wand movement amplitude a bit...
Feeling something in his heart.
Snape spat out a few words from his throat, and a feeling of blessed inspiration surged into his heart!
"Levicorpus!"
The brilliance of the spell flashed and disappeared.
Amidst Snape's surprised and stunned expression, this minor hex, which had never appeared in the world before, swept through with a natural roar, smooth as water flowing into a canal. In an instant, it hung the glass bottle serving as the target upside down in mid-air, motionless!
On the 115th day of his enrollment at Hogwarts, Snape successfully created a miracle that belonged only to him!!