Chapter 7
Wow, people are proud about the fact that they can turn into bats. I simply shrugged it off and the day continued with Rose giving me bits of knowledge about the vampires. The day soon came to an end as I boarded a train out of the city. I even gave Rose my address should she ever find herself in London. My final stop in America was New York and the train was headed there.
In the meanwhile Rose was at the coven trying to get in touch with the Elder who approached her in the morning. She found him in the study reading a book about wandless magic.
"Elder, I was wondering about a few things that happened today." She asked politely.
"Is this about why I didn't kill that child?" He asked, closing the book.
"Yes, and you even offered me to guide him." She said.
"He held you hostage, any move from me would have ended your life." He said as he frowned.
"How? I was untouched with magic." She replied in shock.
"Untouched by wand magic. He did it all himself. He set up a blade inside our spine to sever our spinal cord should we step out of line. He is a blooded warrior and a great wizard. I suppose you both parted on a great note, because that would be a boon to the coven." The Elder said and moved on with his tasks for the ritual while the young Vampire was left there in a daze.
In New York, a new serial killer was in town and no one was aware about the death that he would cause during his stay.
I immediately headed to the public library and got myself a room in the nearby hotel. The rest of my break here was about getting as much science into my head as possible. Due to there being over a million books in there, i had to prioritize and select those that would be immediately helpful. I focussed on bio chemistry, biology and a bit of material sciences. One a side note, causing so many maintenance scaffolding to fall on people set off a government check. The city would be safer for it.
Back at Hogwarts students were talking about their breaks while I was left alone in the library or in the RoR practicing my transformation or new spells. Professor 9McGonagall wanted me to participate in a contest about magical knowledge that would be against 3 schools. Drumstrang, Beauxbaton and Ilvermorny, the participants would be arranged to be competing in the ministry of magic itself. A month before the finals. The competition would be pure knowledge based and the winner of each year would get paid in Galleons starting from 300G and increasing by a hundred for each subsequent year. Naturally, I agreed and earned a few books from Minerva's private collection. There was even a book on detecting Animagi which was surprisingly useless unless you want to try and put a spell on all animals in your vicinity.
I also looked up a few strange potions that required blue water beetles to use and one such potion was a floating potion that makes one float on water when drunk. Naturally, i took note of that and prepared all the other ingredients necessary. The day of the competition came and as i had expected a blue water beetle was following me around. One wandless stupefy and half an hour later , there was one more floating potion in the world and one annoying bug less. I poured the potion down the drain and continued with my day. There was no surprise from me when i was awarded the first year winner and given 300 galleons. There was a quick photograph and i behaved like a good boy throughout.
At Hogwarts, Ravenclaw was awarded 250 point for the awards we brought to the school. 75 points for first and second year and 100 for the sixth year. Naturally, it came as no surprise when Ravenclaw won the house cup this year. The summer vacation was rather dull for me as i didn't get to do much but i did spend most of my time in America and i can proudly say that i have about 10% of the entire library inside my brain. On the magical side of things, my transformation time was brought down to 8 minutes but it was still nowhere near applicable in battle. My magic reserves were finally comparable to those of 4th years while my skills were well past Hogwarts level but not quite NEWT level. I was finally delving into magical research of my own with the first topic being a simple one, the mutation of a frogwart.
Basically, as the name would suggest, the wart grows on the back of a frog that has been peed on by a horse and a dog then was somehow dipped into a cold water for exactly 21 seconds. Despite the fact that all creature involved were of non magical in nature, the frog wart was a magical item capable of controlling the temperatures in many excitable potions. It was a common item which no one has looked into quite closely. A good 45 days later, the research came to an end and now the frog wart could be grown in controlled condition without a need to chance it. The secret was in the frog skin and under a microscope. The cell structure formed a miniature rune circle which caused an abnormal growth on frogs. This would not cause any impact on the frogwart supplier as the natural method is cheap and produces the warts without any equipment necessary.
Despite that research being a dull and unnecessary one, it rather felt nice to see it to completion. There was no doubt in why people choose to do this for a living. Anyways, the second year for me was more or less of the same thing and that was stuffing books into my brain and experimenting with the kids. Seriously, my pranks reigned supreme in the halls of hogwarts. I fell in love with the art of healing during this year. So, much potential and the wizards just sit on this goldmine wallowing in mediocrity. Experimenting of humans was not allowed by the ministry causing the innovation in this field to come to a grinding halt.
There was another concern of mine which kept me awake at night. Magicals more often than not were lacking in common sense which should be a paradox in of itself because magic thrived on imaginations and intentions. Yet, people were idiots, gullible and backward to the extreme. Why was this? Obviously, the television had been invented, phones were also a thing yet the magical community relied on owls and newspapers. It was like they were desperately trying to distance themselves for modern advancement. Watching magic happen under the microscope was the most fascinating thing I had seen but the magical community never used these things as they decided the muggle inventions were stupid. I, on the other hand, kept a grenade handy to deny these suckers when the time comes.
Despite my mind, clashing against these backward dumb shits, I had no intention to help them advance into the modern world. Afterall why strengthen your toys, when you can strengthen yourself at their expense. My other subject of keen interest was transfiguration and how it played a major role in nearly all forms of spells. Despite me having all the knowledge for passing NEWTs, Hogwarts library kept surprising me with niche spells and their slightly tweaked versions. There were joke spells that were specifically designed to fling shit at other, and there were 3978 versions of this stupid spells. Someone had gone ahead and made a specific potion that would be thrown at the target that would magically conjure shit and hit the target, instead of directly throwing shit at the target. Hilarity aside, there were many useful spells as well. Like the spell to muddle perception of time for someone or the spell to rid the opponent of their fear making them drop their shields for attacking.
When Halloween arrived, I had chosen to stay for the break and keep hitting the library as much as I could. Even after I had spent nearly 2 years here, I wasn't certain that I had read even 10 percent of the books here. The sheer amount of comprehensive material about the basics was staggering and I absolutely loved it. Filtwick had finally accepted that I would never participate in any duel and stopped bugging me for dueling lessons. There was one significant change in Hagrid, he had begun to patrol the forest much more regularly which made me think about how I should have taken precautions before wiping out many small Acromantula nests but hey, I need to get stronger and killing magical creatures is the way to go.
Hagrid, despite being a pain in the ass, provided me with a great alibi, as I exposed my dragon form to him in high speeds. This drew any sort of attention away from the student body and even a few aurors were called for investigations. Hagrid even supplied them with his memories of the encounter but alas, a black blur could be far too many things in the magical world. From then on, I had to keep an eye out for random wards that were placed in the forest which was quite easy considering my amped up magical senses after the ritual especially in the dragon form.
Over the course of this year, I had discovered the truly broken nature of Dragon tongue. Any spell said with this language was amplified out of proportion to a nearly uncontrollable degree. It had learned this the painful way when I used bombarda and was thrown about 50 meters through a tree and into a Boulder. The nest of Acromantula straight vanished in the initial explosion and Dumbledore apparated to the blast site. A quick get away later, I began to experiment with the Dragon tongue. While it enhanced all magical spells, the attacking spells were its forte. Even simple spells like flipendo, the pushing spell turned quite deadly as the training dummy was embedded into a wall. The healing spells were also enhanced as the episkey charm healed a severe burn wound, but it was not as broken as the attack spells as a powerful and experienced healer can do the same with the episkey spell.
The finals arrived and like always I aced in theoretical portions and performed average in the practical portions of the test. I was pretty much lost in the ravenclaw crowd with nothing to make me standout. Over the summer vacation, I practiced the art of intent magic. It was different than silent casting as there were literally no spells used. I was based purely on the will and intent. Levitation and basic transfiguration came to me easily but the other complicated effects were harder to replicate via simple intent. This was simply one of those things that went better the longer they were practiced. Americans were faced with another spree of the scaffolding killer. That is what they were calling me now. I sighed and moved on with my life wondering if I should use something else as a killing method.
The summer in New york had newspapers riddled with the faulty lifts, falling scaffoldings, construction mishaps, gun misfires, many kitchen fires and so many deaths. All the while, Ace was holled up in the library, reading the latest scientific discoveries. The good part about the muggle books were that they were homogeneous throughout and were easier to read, thus increasing the reading speed.
During my stay in America, I came across a boy. He looked average but on the inside, he shone brighter than many of the professors. Uniquely, all that magic was being used to suppress another magical entity inside the boy. I looked at him in wonder, how coincidental was this? Meeting an undiscovered obscurial at such a young age. I used a bit of legimency to find out the boys age and he was exactly 6 years and 11 months old. My mind went to a ritual from Nott family about using an obscurial to gain the obscurus magic. The draw back of the ritual was that if the Obsucial demon was not properly suppressed it would kill the everyone involved in the ritual. I marked the boy with a tracking magic and began to prepare for the ritual. 7 mandrakes to facilitate the change, Blood of a dragon to provide the magic, flesh of a petrified slime toad to bind the magic. Then came the preparation for the obscurus demon. A mushroom from africa called wafting death, as the single whiff can cause you to lose your mind in hallucinations for a lifetime. There were 20 more hallucinogenic and paralyzing substances of powerful properties costing me over 20000 galleons. The ingredients were all gathered just 3 days before the boy had turned 7. I snuck into his house and used dragon tongue to knock him out and bind him.
The preparation of the demon took me nearly 2 days and on the final day I placed the boy on the ritual and with a final check I went into the ritual. In an instant, I was drawn into an unfamiliar mindscape. I saw the boys memories and the most prominent on that caused the birth of the obscurial was when his parents looked at him in horror and disgust as he performed accidental magic. From then on, he was tortured by priests and his parents many times in order to exorcise the devil away. With a final bit of torture and religious bullshit, the Obscurial was born and the magic was gone to defend the soul.
"Who are you Mister?" A voice sounded from behind me.
"I am here to get you away from pain." I said with a smile.
"Really?" The child was excited and happy.
"Yes, now look." I said and began to morph the child mindscape into a theme park of epic proportions.
The child played and enjoyed himself with many kids that wanted to be friends with him. He enjoyed his final day within a joyous memory and thanked me as he went to sleep, never to wake up. With the anger, trauma and the other issue resolved, the boy's soul passed away leaving behind the obscurus demon. It was relatively docile and only tried to push me away but was assimilated in myself soon enough. I immediately went to my mindscape and saw the demon rampaging in the barren fields. I transformed and after a fight, I ended up eating the damn thing. The effect was immediate and surprising. The dragon form was the only way for me to access the obscurial form and become intangible. It provided no other benefits than that for now and it was more than enough.