Chapter 18: An overnight visit to the Room of Requirement

Tom shook his head like a rattle, "Don't worry, I'll figure it out tonight."

"You're acting like a Gryffindor!" Hermione slapped the table, her cheeks puffing out like a puffer fish, but finally giving in like a deflated balloon. She realized she couldn't stop this guy. The only way to stop him was to go to the boys' dormitory and make the Prefect stand up, but she didn't want to do that.

If she did something like that, Tom would be punished severely, and the friendship between the two would probably come to an end.

So, after a little struggle in her mind, Hermione compromised, "You can go, but take me with you to keep an eye on you before you make any more mistakes!"

After saying that, she maintained a stern face and an air of authority.

Despite his scowl, the atmosphere between them relaxed. Tom agreed to Hermione's request. But he remained motionless.

"Why don't you move?" asked Hermione.

"Are you going to walk around the castle with me in slippers?" Tom pointed helplessly at the slippers under Hermione's stool, "Can't you at least wear shoes?"

Hermione looked at him, hopped down from the stool and went back to her bedroom. Not that she hadn't thought about it, but she was worried that Tom slipped out while she was changing her shoes. She went back to her bedroom, hurriedly put on a pair of brown snow boots and ran out, not even taking off her nightgown, but simply covering herself with a robe.

Fortunately, Tom had stayed in the common room.

"I thought you were leaving," Hermione said.

"You can go back and change again if you want, and I'll be sure to go out alone," Tom said.

The two of them opened the common room door and ran out silently.

Luckily, the Ravenclaws lived in one of the castle towers, not far from the seventh floor, and Tom and Hermione found their way to the seventh floor after a brief search of the stairs. Had they been Slytherins or Hufflepuff who lived living in the dungeons, they would not have been able to find their way to the seventh floor tonight.

The two wandered around the seventh floor for a while before finding their destination: the Room of Requirement.

Tom knew the room was on the seventh floor of the castle, facing a tapestry of Barnabas the Nutty. But even with a clear head start, it took him nearly half an hour to find it. He stood in front of the empty wall, focused on the fact that he needed to solve the puzzle, and walked in front of the wall three times, and on the third time, a very smooth door appeared in the wall.

"Hermione, I'm coming in." Tom called to Hermione and opened the door to the Room of Requirement. The moment she stepped through the door, the third stage of the journey through the magical world was complete.

In the center of the room stood five pillars over ten meters tall, each with a few scratches on them, and in front of them were five stones, arranged in the same manner as the pillars.

Hermione approached the pillars curiously and looked at them, "What is this?" she asked Tom.

"I don't know." Tom shook his head and put his foot on a stone, which slowly sank with a crunching sound. Hermione shouted excitedly, "I got it!".

By now she was so into the puzzle that she had forgotten about school rules and such. She pulled Tom close to the pillar and pointed to the scratches on it, "See, these scratches, they correspond from one to five, I think that's the order, and the stones correspond to the pillar, which means if you step on the stones in the order of the scratch numbers, you'll solve the puzzle!".

And with that, Hermione set off to solve the puzzle, stepping on the corresponding stones one through five in the order indicated on the pillars, each of which made a crunching sound.

But when she stepped on all five stones, nothing happened, the pillars and stones were still there silently.

Hermione thought about it and decided that maybe she had stepped on the stones once on the way in and the result had been wrong, so she repeated the process, but there was still no reaction.

Tom stood silently watching Hermione solve the puzzle over and over again, and finally Hermione gave up, admitting that her thinking was faulty.

Hermione stood in front of the stone column, frowning, not saying a word, her toes tracing the floor. Tom walked silently to the edge of the room, slowly rounding the wall. Tom's actions caught Hermione's attention, who called out, "Have you found anything?"

"Not yet, Wait a minute, Hermione, come here!" Tom spotted something interesting in the corner and waved Hermione over.

"Look!" he pointed out five shallow strokes for Hermione, "I think this is the key to breaking the game."

He pressed his hand over the bumps and the ground in front of him dented, and with a roar, a pit was added to the floor. The four walls of the pit were rocky, with three graduated lines, and a handle at the bottom for some unknown purpose. Above the pit, two crude taps appeared in the wall.

"This should correspond to the fifth pillar!" Hermione saw something, and running quickly along the wall, soon found four other stone pits in four other corners and at the midpoint of a wall.

She tried turning the taps again and found two taps, one to release water and one to vacuum. It had been years since the device had been installed, and the water still came out crystal clear.

But Hermione was transfixed, having found all the wells, but not knowing how they related to the pillars.

Tom opened one of the taps and kept it filling the pit, and when he reached the first mark, there was a sudden, slightly muffled sound coming from the pit.

"Got it!" Tom realized, "So that's it!"

"What is it?" Hermione felt a vague answer in her head, but had no clue for a while.

"When you stepped on the rocks before, they also made a sound, and I remember one of them made a very puddle-like sound. You step on the first rock again, I'll go to puddle one." Tom set Hermione a task.

Sure enough, the sound of the first stone was the same as the sound made in puddle one when the water level reached the second mark. The puzzle was solved.

Next, the two did the same, filling the remaining four puddles with the appropriate amount of water.

"Still no answer, did we hear something wrong?" Hermione was already a little nervous.

Tom shook his head and turned his attention to the five stone pillars. He stepped on one side of the stones again, this time in order, and suddenly there was music in the room, ancient but pleasant, as if they were in a ruin.

When the music ended, the floor in the middle of the pillars opened and a treasure chest appeared in front of Tom and Hermione.