Chapter 115

Under the happy glances of the house-elves, I ate my fill and hurried to the eighth floor of the castle to the portrait of Barnabas the Barmy. The path was long because the castle is large. In general, relatively soon, I found myself in a corridor where, except for a picture with trolls in ballet tutus and wizard, there was not a single magical canvas.

Concentrating on the thought, "I need to hide something right away," and imagining a huge hoard of things, I walked around the painting three times. As I expected, it worked at the first attempt, and in the stone wall opposite, there was a two-leaf arched door with a lot of iron monograms. When I pushed one of the flaps and looked inside, I could hardly contain my amazed and delighted whistle. The vast room stood in half-darkness. A soft and almost imperceptible light, so similar in shade to that of the moon, poured from somewhere in the very high ceiling. From almost the entrance and as far as I could see, there were mountains of junk of all kinds.

"Looks like," I grinned to myself, "this might take a while... Although..."

Stepping inside and closing the door behind me, I took my wand out of the holster on my forearm and raised it above me, pointing it upward.

"Echo."

From the tip of the wand, a quick and tiny but relentless wave of magic spread out, immediately returning from various corners of the Room of Requirement, bringing with it an understanding of the approximate location of at least a few magical items. There weren't many of them in relation to the total amount of junk - about two hundred. Another fifteen hundred responses were extremely weak - exhausted enchantments.

"Holy..." a smile came out on my face. "Malfoy is an asshole, of course, but I probably won't stop thanking him for a visit to France for the rest of my life. It's time to look for..."

I decided to conduct my search for the Ravenclaw Diadem in strict order, moving around the room from the entrance to the depths and inspecting the places where the magical responses came from. Legends have it that this diadem is the pinnacle of the art of enchantment and artifacting in one object, so to speak. There was no such task or arithmetic equation that Rowena could not solve in a brief moment using this artifact. The concentration of attention, improvement of the thought process, and its optimization - this is what is attributed to this diadem, and Rowena herself spoke about such things, albeit in more vague words. Regarding this diadem, I have as many as three options for the development of events.

Bad - my Spirit Sword would kill Voldemort's Horcrux along with the artifact.

Normal - only the Horcrux dies, and the diadem survives, retaining its functionality.

Perfect - the artifact's essence and its functions will be absorbed by the sword, and part of Voldemort's soul will fly into the other world. Or will be destroyed.

There is, however, some possibility that part of Voldemort's soul will be absorbed, but there's nothing I can do about that. But if that were to happen... Well...

The search went quickly. You just go to a magical response, and you don't have to rummage through absolutely every pile of junk, furniture, some incomprehensible structures, mountains of rags, notes, and books that are not unique at all, by the way. I didn't pick up any of the items I found - it takes experience in diagnostics because Dark Spells, true Dark Spells, curses, and the like are not much different from simple enchantments in terms of magic. Even the same Riddle's journal felt just like a book. You really need experience, and you can't get very far with just knowledge. So, I was just checking to see if the diadem was in front of me or not.

After two and a half hours of searching, I finally stumbled upon the object I was looking for, though I didn't recognize it. It was a massive hoop of gold and silver, with lots of topaz and a massive ruby in the center. It looked like a crown. That it was a Horcrux I knew by the slight mental impact - an indecipherable hissing whisper appeared in my head, which I easily cut off with a slight mental effort. But why is this diadem so different from the one shown in the movie? Hmm ... Although, no wonder - in those distant times, there was such a fashion.

After walking in circles above the diadem, I sat down beside it and wondered. How to "eat" it without choking? What was the result of past uses of the Sword? Stabbed a living basilisk - absorbed its soul, took one mental ability. In France, during a ritual, my consciousness fell into the Grimoire at the mercy of some demon. Having defeated the demon with my sword, I almost absorbed it, but the Old Man took away the "illegal," as he himself put it. However, I was still inside the Grimoire, and by destroying the "bricks of the walls" of that mental dungeon, I absorbed the knowledge from it as well. I didn't get anything from the demon, by the way, if I understood correctly. Or maybe I did manage to get something - who knows.