Chapter 26: Magical Artefacts

"Ugh." Ginny groaned in her comfortable seat. She had come back to the Room of Requirement after placing Pettigrew near Ron's bed, "That's gonna be an ordeal no matter how many times I do it."

Using Dark Arts was very difficult in her normal state, so she had to use her skill in the Mind Arts along with Hyper-cognition to pull out some parts of Riddle and some of her own darker thoughts and feelings and build a second personality that allows her to cast Dark Arts easily. Why did she need to do this? While she could cast the weaker curses like the Blasting Curse, Furnunculus Curse, or the Full Body-Bind Curse without a problem in her normal state, she would have a hard time casting the Entrails-Expelling Curse or the Bone Spur Curse, the Cruciatus Curse or the Killing Curse; these curses that required one to truly wish suffering unto their victim and revel in the pain they caused - which she wasn't capable of, and she wished it would remain so.

She could practise the Dark Arts, but she risked being affected by it. So, she decided to craft another personality that allowed her to do so. While it would also affect her, it was not something she could not handle.

But that didn't mean it was easy to handle either: She had to make sure that she wasn't influenced by the other personality.

While she didn't have to suffer something like personalities battling for control over her body, she still had to deal with the effects the other personality had on her, the main personality. After all, she was artificially amplifying a part of herself. That would affect the overall balance that her mind had normally established. And because of that, her personality changing to another one was a real concern. In fact, she already had to deal with the more intrusive thoughts that plagued her mind, telling her that she should be practising magic, getting stronger, and doing something useful instead of wasting time with her friends. And sometimes she might even have given in to them. In retrospect, she had given in to them; in her defence, the Trial of the Wind was just too enjoyable.

So, she had to take measures and slowly filter out the thoughts that passed through her mind and reduce the influence they had on her. It was way too much hard work. Every time she used her new persona, she had to recover for almost a week, slowly suppressing the influence the other personality had on her mind.

"But at least, the amulet is complete." She spoke out loud, a wide smile adorning her face. She felt a small sense of accomplishment. While she was sure that anyone with access to Rowena's library, hard work, resources, and a modicum of creativity would be able to make this, it was still her first fully functional Magical Artefact! She had splurged most of her savings, leaving behind a mere 7 Galleons, 4 Sickles and a few Knuts, but with this, she would at least have peace of mind while Bill went after the Pharaohs like a man possessed. That fellow liked his job way too much!

{'Tsk, he really made us waste so much money,'} a dissatisfied voice whispered in the back of her mind, causing Ginny's smile to disappear. This was the result of using the other persona too often. When her defences lowered a bit, this little shit slipped through and caused her a headache - sometimes a literal one.

"Shut it, Schizophrenia."

{'Oh, how you wound me, main~! I sacrificed so much for you and this is how you repay me? By shoving me into a prison and-?'}

The voice was cut off by her occlumency. She sighed in resignation. "This is gonna take a while. The erosion of the other personality is slower than I expected." She had initially thought that a week's worth of rest during which she would slowly erode and weaken the personality she crafted would be enough to effectively reduce its influence on her (This would also allow Pettigrew enough time to recover). But apparently, she was wrong - she had underestimated how difficult it was and she had overestimated her own skill in the Mind Arts. And because of that, the personality had grown much stronger and more difficult to deal with.

"Is it because of casting Dark Arts?" It was a well-established fact that casting any sort of Magic affected a wizard and this was why some wizards were so weird and quirky - especially the stronger ones. Unless your achievement in Mind Arts was even greater.

But Dark Magic was especially strong in its effects - even Mind Arts was not very effective in keeping the influence at bay. Whether it was the inherent darkness within the wizardkind or whether it was the Magic itself that was debatable. So it was possible that her other personality grew stronger the more she used the Dark Arts. In fact, it was probably the reason.

"Sigh… What a pain." She looked down at the amulet in her hands, slowly turning it over. "Let's finish making more amulets and get them over to Bill first. I'll deal with this later."

She pushed aside her thoughts and walked over to a massive platform-like table. On it were an assortment of different things; parchments full of notes and strange drawings, quills - many of which were broken by her in frustration (Ginny's heart also was broken when she realised that one of them was the luxury quill she had spent a small fortune on), several pieces of gold, and finally a few of rings made of pure gold. The golden rings were what she was going to use to create the amulet. Rings made perfect sense because circles and rings often represented a cycle. She wanted to use this to make sure the wearer's 'cycle of life' remains unaffected.

Now, crafting an artefact could be done in multiple ways: one was the Rune Inscribed method. This was used by most experts, as it allowed for the highest controllability. It allowed the Artefact Craftsman to decide every single aspect of their product to the finest detail magic allowed. It required a vast knowledge of Ancient Runes and how they work, Alchemy, Arithmancy, and Magic in general. One had to inscribe all the runes in the correct configuration, ratio, size, and order relative to each other and the base object. And all of this depended heavily on the material and its properties like dimensions, form, shape, weight etc. This made errors occurring a real pain.

The more magically powerful the material the craftsman used, the more errors he can make without the thing blowing his head off rather than keep intact like it was intended to.

This was why Goblin Silver was so popular and so precious, it was the most powerful magical material. And this was also why untreated Goblin Silver was utterly priceless: it allowed for the largest range of mistakes to occur. As long as your runic arrangement wasn't hippogriff-shit, it would work perfectly.

Untreated Goblin Silver was also the reason why some of the Goblin's Artefacts were so very powerful. Artefacts that had no right to be as powerful as they were given their relatively shit knowledge and understanding of Runes. Even their crafting capability was simply not on par with the wizards' methods. It was only because of their monopoly over Goblin Silver both untreated and treated that they were able to maintain a somewhat equal relationship with the wizards who were able to wield wands. Otherwise, they would have been exterminated or worse - enslaved; much like the Dwarves were.

Anyway, Rune Inscriptions required one to have a Rune Etcher, which was not exactly what it sounded like. One would conjure an image of a pen or brush of some sort when thinking of Rune Etchers but it was actually a lot more sophisticated than that. The Rune Etcher was essentially a printer, except this one printed Runes.

There were various types of Rune Etchers, each tailored to the specific item you wanted to etch your rune on, such as rings, pendants, bracelets, and more. The arrangement of runes varied depending on what you were inscribing. To simplify the process, wizards developed templates for different shapes, forms, and materials. For instance, a pure gold ring had its specific template, as did an Orichalcum pendant, and so on. Now these Etchers were based on the templates and each was used to inscribe on a very specific template.

Now, all you need to do is have your pure gold ring ready, your runic arrangement ready and you just need to feed the Etcher with magic and intent and it would inscribe all the runes and patterns as long as you kept your concentration and flow of magic.

And voila! You have a perfectly functional Artefact! And its success rate was far beyond what a Rune pen wielded by a normal wizard could ever achieve. Sadly though, it was way too expensive and difficult to build. And only the real experts used this and manufacturing organisations used this. Normal plebs merely used the old-fashioned rune pens.

Sadly, Ginny did not even have the capital to buy a rune pen. Those cost nearly 500 Galleons. Even the cheapest one at 300 Galleons was beyond her: The materials also cost a lot of money.

So, Ginny would have to use other methods. Namely, a ritual-based approach. It used a different way of crafting. This was very similar to enchanting, but much more powerful than what any wizard could ever do. By sacrificing powerfully magical materials, they altered the properties of the material itself, weaving the magic into its very structure. This concept actually drew inspiration from the principles of Alchemy which used a similar method to create new materials. Yes, Alchemy was the Material Science of Magic.

And the best part of this method was you did not have to truly understand what you were doing - you just need to enforce your intent. This was incredibly useful when making powerful but simple things like what Ginny was making: an amulet that has the property of protecting the wearer against anything malicious - at the cost of the Artefect itself. Another was the Sword of Gryffindor, which had the properties 'seek the brave' and 'imbibe what makes you stronger'.

On the other side, Rowena's Diadem was a super complex artefact that may achieve only one purpose of enhancing the mind but had way too many facets that needed to be controlled to be effective, so it could only be made using runic inscriptions that allowed for tremendous control.

Then there was also the combined technique that tried to make use of the best of both worlds. Slytherin's locket was one of them. At least according to Riddle's relatively amateur opinion. Riddle was wholly uninterested in anything that did not further his personal power. After all, what use was a locket that can only resist the Basilisk Death Gaze? He wasn't exactly running around fighting Basilisk. He was a Ruler, not some Magizoologist.

Anyway, Ginny was going to use the second method for obvious reasons.

She selected one of the rings and brought it to another table that had its top made completely of Holly. Ginny felt incredibly lucky that she'd stumbled across this in the Room of Hidden Things while looking for the diadem. Magically Potent Holly was already rare, being one of the better wand woods; but the fact that someone had crafted a whole table out of it was mind-blowing to Ginny. One had to understand that Holly wasn't a tree, but a shrub. Or something similar, she was unsure. But the point was that it was small. This meant that this tabletop was made using a lot of those plants that the maker somehow managed to fuse into a perfect whole. The tremendous skill was not lost on her. But, apparently was, on the owner of this table.

The fact that the idiot had lost something so precious was a blow to her currently rather poor self. How rich did one have to be? And how the hell did they lose an entire fucking table, anyway?! She really would give them a piece of her mind if she found them - to their graves if they were dead - she would not allow them Peace on the Other Side!

Back to the Ritual. The reason she used this small-scale Reusable Ritual Table was the because Protective nature of Holly would make a perfect amplifier to the Ritual, even if a small one.

On the table was inscribed a simple-looking ritual circle. Ritual circles don't need to be complex. In fact, they were not needed at all. The only thing that was needed was a deliberate action, a sacrifice, and a target. That was enough to trigger a ritual. The reason she was using it was to redirect one of the ingredients required in the Ritual.

Taking the Triwizard Tournament's Champion Selection Ceremony as an example, the putting of one's name into the Goblet of Fire was a deliberate action, the sacrifice was their safety and freedom until the end of the tournament, and they themselves were the target. The reward for the Ritual was Eternal Fame and Glory for the winner. The whole thing Ginny was rather iffy at best, but the Triwizard Tournament Winner would indeed be known to most of Europe and beyond. She wasn't entirely sure how the whole thing worked, but the previous Winners were all very well known. And none of them were forgotten. She just didn't know whether it was the tournament itself that made them famous or whether it was the Ritual.

She shook her head to clear out her distracting thoughts and took a deep breath. After pacing the ring in the centre of the circle, she started chanting in Elder Futhark. She needed to do this as the ring wasn't a naturally magical material and she needed to temporarily give it a magical property. As the mysterious-sounding syllables left her lips, she felt her Magic slowly stir and shift, taking on a strange dissociative property and slowly separating from her. As she continued chanting, that dissociated magic flowed into the ring and established a very odd connection with her.

She then paused.

"Blood of family, willingly given;" she spoke in an eerily haunting voice, as she used a ritual dagger to make a cut on her wrist, letting her blood drip down onto the ritual circle. The blood then came alive, wriggling strangely and then flowing and reshaping itself according to the preset channels, forming a seven-pointed star in the end. She was using her status as a family member so that the ring's magic would latch on to Bill. Or if Bill willingly gave anyone this amulet it would latch on to them as well.

"Part of a Pure Creature, unknowingly left behind;" She took out a Unicorn Hair she found in a bush in the Forbidden Forest. She was using the 'Purity' of the unicorn Hair and its natural opposition to Dark Magic to shield the wearer of her Artefact from the Dark Arts.

"Magical blood, willingly donated." She once again sliced her wrist, this time the other one. She could use her own blood as a power source as she was a qualified magical being through her Ente Arcanum Innate Ability. Plus, this would also make her Artefact much more effective, because she could use the influence her blood had on the Artefact to make it stronger.

She pulled out her wand and directly enter the state of Hyper-cognition. Immediately, every single detail that had slipped past her before became obvious. The haunting and eerie, yet somehow comforting quality the ambient magic had taken on did not escape her notice, and neither did the fact that the ambient magic felt a lot more clear to her. Just like the time when dementors were around.

But she did not have time to dwell on this as she had to seize the exact moment when the ring became most receptive to her magic.

So she waited, she waited for the right moment. She sensed that the growth in the magical nature of the golden ring slowly come to a halt.

"Now!" She filled her mind with the purest urge to protect and let her magic flow into the ring through the wand pointed at it.

And then she stepped back and directly collapsed into the chair she had prepared. This time she was even more tired because she had willingly pushed as much magic as she could into it without collapsing due to sheer exhaustion.

But the result spoke for itself. She looked at the golden ring glowing intensely before it slowly dimmed down and looked normal again. But Ginny could feel it. Her senses told her that in front of her was a magical artefact, and it was not a weak one.

After she managed to regain some of her strength - just enough to move, she flicked her wand, causing the ring to fly into her open palm. She turned over the ring in her hand, multiple times sensing it.

"This one's far better than the last one… Even if I made that thing with shit materials, this one is simply so much better, taking into account the materials." she pondered. "Perhaps it was my urge to protect Bill that somehow amplified the magic? It is the most obvious conclusion, after all…" She smiled. "I can make six more. That should be enough." Even if she lost about a few weeks' worth of magical growth in her stats, she was still happy. Stats could be regained, not life.

{"Tsk. I don't like your decision. No one is worthy of our sacrifice, main. No one."} a supremely dissatisfied voice rang out inside her head. Except this time she remained completely unfazed.

"My peace of mind is worth the sacrifice, Schizophrenia. And you know it."

There was no reply.