Chapter 21

Coming back to Lily, she visited me a few times by Floo, she loved Hogsmeade and was fascinated by the magic village and people. In fact, she seemed reluctant to leave.

I showed her around the place and I even took her out to some places to eat. I showed her the Hogwarts Castle and she became awed by it.

She was much more eager to start her term there.

Eileen and I lived in the potions shop now.Tobias' house had been put up for sale and we had moved here. The shop itself was a small building with two storeys. The ground floor was where we displayed potions and other items we wanted to sell and the second floor was where we lived.

Eileen got expansion charms cast on this floor. It was slightly expensive but the large space was worth it. We had space for two rooms there instead of the original one.

The shop was ready to open but needed to get approved by the Potion's Association.Fortunately they weren't as slow as the Wizengamot so this should be done soon.

There was also the Prince manor in Godric's hollow that we could have moved into but Eileen didn't want to live there yet as she needed to manage her shop and she would get lonely there when I went to Hogwarts. She did say we could move in there later when her shop settled down.

…..

Over these few months I had made some decent progress in my magic. After getting my wand,spells became much easier to cast. I could see why wands were so preferred. They basically did all the work while you had to only say the spell incantation and wave it.

I tested out all the spells I could and they all worked well. The same spells that I could do wandless were now better when performed with a wand.

Before long the wand which I had considered as a mere tool had become an extension of my arm. After studying the spells, I could finally cast some chantlessly and wandlessly.

They were basically like my own magic now. I did have to make some gestures though like snapping my fingers or pointing in a direction but I felt that I could cast them without them too just that my accuracy would be reduced.

The same gestures could be used to cast other spells too like by snapping my fingers, I could cast lumos and incendio.

I couldn't get all spells to this proficiency but I was satisfied with the ones I did get up to this level.

My training with Aberforth was also coming along well, I hadn't known what to expect when he had agreed to teach me. I just knew a little about him from canon and had known that he was strong so I had asked him to teach me.

Well it turned out to be a good idea as he did teach me some useful things. At first, he checked what I could do. He was a bit surprised by my progress but wasn't too phased after all he grew up with Dumbledore who must have been better than me. After that he made me do all spells by wand and then made me learn some other spells that were related to them.

For example, the levitation charm was basically an improved version of the floating charm, the hover charm and to some extent the rocket charm.

It could do all the things the other three could do. These spells were not in curriculum so Aberforth taught me the spells himself and eventually he made me learn similar versions of different spells.

This played a big role in me mastering these spells thus being able to cast them chantlessly and wandlessly. Honestly mastering these spells was not that hard but it would only get harder from here on out as the other spells didn't have as many variations or similar spells from which I could comprehend from.

As for my part of the trade, I just gave him some ideas for goat milk based recipes. Actually he insisted on not wanting anything after learning my reasons to learn magic but I didn't want to come of as greedy so I didn't agree.

He seemed pleased with the goat milk recipes though and they were doing moderately well. I didn't think they would do well in the muggle world but they did well in the wizarding world.

Other than training my magic, I also helped Eileen out in brewing potions. I had finally begun brewing potions and it was coming along well.

Eileen was not a potion's master but she was not too far from it. Watching her brew potions was a valuable experience. I noted the important points and even began looking for ways to reduce production cost.

I just had to find cheaper ingredients with similar properties and then by trial and error swap them out.

I believed that Severus in canon also did something similar as he was able to improve the recipes of the potions. I also focused on learning chemistry and other muggle subjects albeit I was taking it slow as I didn't enjoy it as much as magic.

And lastly there was Occlumency. I did make some progress in it and my mind palace was a bit more refined now.

I could also change memories but only Severus' set of them. The book stated that doing it hastily might affect the user and they might fool themselves into believing the fake ones but since the memories were not mine to begin with,it didn't affect me at all.

I still couldn't make big changes and I couldn't change my memories yet but I was content for now. As for the mind palace, I made some other structures within it and changed the library layout as I felt it was too small and gathering all memories in one place felt dangerous so I made a maze based on a horror game from my previous life.

[A/N: The horror game mentioned is Dark Deception. I was playing that the other day and the second level gave me this idea.]

The maze was basically a manor with lots of corridors and rooms with most rooms having hidden bookshelves within bookshelves with normal books which I had read. It took quite some time to print them based on suppressed memories and looking for them was hard too since to print a book word to word from memory was not easy.

This would not only serve as a distraction,I could also come back and read them in here. Most books were just scribbles now as it took a lot of time to get one book "printed" but for now I made some copies of some books I reread.

I could write and publish them but I didn't have any plans on doing so until I was older.

Coming back to the maze, its layout was ever shifting and only highly skilled legilimens would be able to sense it changing but even then they wouldn't be able to navigate it easily.

All this was just a setup for more. Once I got better at Occlumency and reached Advanced level. I could place traps in the entire layout. For now the only 'traps' were getting locked in a room or running into a dead end with the wall closing around you.

This didn't harm the legilimens and would only delay them but if they couldn't figure out a way to escape, they would be forced to leave.

Overall I was quite pleased with it. It's a good thing that Occlumency didn't have any age limit. While starting early was considered good, it wasn't a requirement. Anybody could be skilled at it with the right mindset but after that it was a mixture of talent and dedication.

Anyway I was currently in a good position and was waiting eagerly to start Hogwarts.