Chapter 20: Numbers, Runes and Rewards

After the new students were sorted, Dumbledore stood up, his magnificent silver beard still shiny and his eyes still twinkling behind his half-moon spectacles. Ginny, when reading the books, had particularly liked the 'twinkling eyes' part about Dumbledore's description. It somehow lent his character in his books a great deal of interest. It made him more mysterious and eccentric. More magical. And she'd really loved it!

At least, until it was destroyed by some fanfiction that said his twinkling eyes were due to him employing legilimency on the children. Then, she was horrified; almost every time he was mentioned in the books - at least, before the 6th one - his description included 'twinkling eyes'. If one were to take that fanfiction's words to be true, it would mean that Harry was legilimised almost every time he met Dumbledore!

That was the first major blow to Dumbledore's image in her previous incarnation's mind.

Pushing her thoughts about dark-Dumbledore's mind-violating tendencies aside, she concentrated on tentatively-light-grey-Dumbledore's speech, warning them about Dementors.

"... every entrance to the grounds. And during this period, nobody is to leave the school without explicit permission. Dementors are not to be trifled with: No form of invisibility, cloaks or otherwise, will work on them. And even in the unlikely scenario that you can perform the Patronus Charm," his eyes flickered towards Ginny, "the sheer number of dementors is not something you can handle at your age."

"Do not give the dementors reason to harm you. They are not forgiving. They will not listen to excuses, no matter how valid."

Dumbledore did not like the dementors. At all. And Ginny could understand why. For people like them - who could sense Magic's reaction to their presence - it was obvious why they would loathe dementors with every fibre of their being. The sheer feeling of repugnance that Magic had towards those soul-sucking creatures was so intense that it was impossible not to loathe them. It was as these vile creatures clashed with the very nature of magic itself. Violated everything it was.

Plus, he probably absolutely hated every moment of their continued presence in Hogwarts because of how much danger these things posed towards his students. The fact that Dumbledore was not blasting them away was already more tolerance than what Ginny would ever show.

"On the brighter side of things, I'm happy to welcome two new teachers to our ranks! Professor Lupin…"

He went on to introduce Lupin and the neighbourhood gentle giant, Hagrid. Ginny actually never had the chance to interact with the Keeper of Keys. The only time they were even close to interacting was when she had kidnapped all of his roosters and was very nearly caught!

And she really wanted to get to know him. After all, he should know where Fluffy was! How can she miss out on petting a three-headed massive doggo?!

"Finally, 50 points to Gryffindor for Miss Weasley's perfect casting of a Corporeal Patronus and defending her fellow students against the Dementors!" He gave Ginny a smile. While Ginny herself was smiling brightly at Snape, which turned even brighter when she noticed his expression turned even more ugly (it was ugly before because he was glaring at Lupin) and hatefully turned to Dumbledore.

Dumbledore's mouth twitched slightly when he noticed Ginny's smile and Snape's venomous gaze. He shook his head helplessly.

"May the feast begin!"

And it did.

-x-x-x-

The new term began with Arithmancy for Ginny. After bidding her roommates goodbye, she accompanied Hermione - who she found midway - to the classroom.

Honestly, if there was one artefact Ginny really, really wanted to assimilate, it would be the time turner. Needless to say, the ability to reverse time was an extremely powerful ability.

Unfortunately, she couldn't take Hermione's, as she did not want her friend to be expelled or worse. The Department of Mysteries kept a very tight hold on all their Time-Turners. It was baffling why they lent it to a 13-year-old to attend classes of all things. Why they would do so, she would never know. It was as much a mystery as they themselves were.

Arithmancy was the magical discipline that studied the magical properties of numbers, their correlation to things in reality and magic, including predicting the future with numbers, which was Numerology. Ginny had learned a lot about Arithmancy thanks to books on spell creation by Rowena. Using the magical properties of numbers one could formulate and derive the wand movements and incantations one required to cast a spell. It was a fascinating subject.

What interested her more was Numerology - the art of predicting the future using numbers. Numerology basically works by assigning a number to all aspects of reality and through tremendous amounts of calculation, one can predict the future.

Theoretically, if a person knew every single aspect of reality and their correctly assigned numbers and had enough computational power, the future would be an open book to them. This was basically the Magic version of Demon of Laplace. But the thing was, that was simply impossible. A wizard's lifetime would end thousands of times before they predicted a second into the future.

Therefore, Numerologists used a method called Reduction to, well, reduce the number of 'factor's multiple times to make it something that could be handled. But this introduced errors in the process. And it had to be Reduced many, many times. In the end, Numerology was not that much more reliable than reading from tea leaves, twigs, crystal balls or smoke spirals. Perhaps, one might have more success in predicting the future by reading Tarot Cards because of sheer luck.

This did not make it useless, though. It was still remarkably useful in predicting major storms that would jeopardise the Wizarding Community at large. Such a large factor would 'outweigh' most of the minor errors and make its presence known. The establishment of the Statute of Secrecy was actually partially due to this: they had predicted that if this goes on like this, a horrific confrontation between the Muggles and Wizardkind was inevitable. Although, anyone with foresight would be able to see such a thing happening, so it was iffy at best.

So while useful, it should not have been of that much interest to Ginny. But what Rowena had done had changed that impression.

Spell Creation required use of Ancient Runes to first describe the spell fully: requirements, magical power (aka spell energy), effects, after-effects and a whole host of other things. From there, the spell crafter would use Arithmancy to figure wand movements and incantations.

Now, what did Rowena do? She did not use reduction, but simply eliminated the 'factor's. She used Arithmancy to derive as many possible combinations of wand movements and incantations as she could. And then substituted them in different controlled environments and used Numerology to predict the effects of each combination relative to their environments, mapped their data and used statistics to derive the most stable of the 'generation'.

Then she introduced some differences in the most stable one and once again she had multiple possible combinations of wand movements and incantations, i.e. she was back to the first step. But the average stability was much greater!

It was way too much calculation, but she had the diadem. And loads of students who wanted to learn from her. So she threw a calculation at them and in return helped them out in their magic. Win-win scenarios at its best!

She did not have to worry about her work being stolen, too. She only gave them part of the calculation. So, the students just thought she was testing their mental capability!

And the best part? Throughout the whole process there was never any danger because she never cast a single spell!

When Ginny fully understood the process, she screamed out loud, "Isn't this fucking Machine Learning?!!" Needless to say, Ginny was convinced. This woman was something else. She invented Machine Learning when muggles hadn't invented a machine.

If only Wizardkind had the same mindset as Rowena's, they would have been a space-faring civilisation centuries ago. The sheer potential Wizardkind had was simply mind boggling. Yet, here they were, still fighting over the pettiest things like blood purity, the Statute and fucking Exploding Snap championships!

Anyway, third-year Arithmancy was a cinch for her. So, she just needed to follow her usual routine of being a teacher's pet and earn more points to squander on Snape! Except there was a problem.

Septima Vector, the Arithmancy professor, asked after introducing herself to the class, "Now, who can tell me about Arithmancy?"

Ginny raised her hand.

"Yes, Miss Granger?"

"Arithmancy is the…"

She had a competitor.

-x-x-x-

Hermione gave Ginny the slip saying that she had to visit the loos. Ginny nodded absentmindedly.

Things were not going well for her. She had hoped to get many more points now that she was taking electives, as it allowed her to be a teacher's pet to more teachers. But she had forgotten about Hermione! This feller had more experience in being a teacher's pet than her!

'But I won't lose! Otherwise, if I don't earn points how am I to bully Snape?!' She made a resolution to compete with Hermione and show the girl who's boss around here!

She caught the Golden Trio on her way to Transfiguration. Ginny made sure to give Hermione a 'confused' look, "Didn't you go to the loo, Hermione? How are you here?"

"Took a shortcut." she muttered in reply and slipped into the classroom.

They settled down according to seats set by the professor. Ginny sat down next to a very confused Dean Thomas, who looked like he really wanted to know what was going on here.

Professor McGonagall came out of her office at exactly 10 a.m. She greeted the class in her usual stern manner, before turning to the topic of Ginny's addition to the class.

"Some of you may have noticed a new addition to the class: Miss Weasley." she gestured towards Ginny, "She has been allowed to skip a year thanks to her hard work and brilliance and will be studying with you."

There were a few whispers of surprise. By this time, many people had already known of her skipping a year and as a result, they weren't very surprised.

"As third-years, you will study…"

McGonagall went to describe Animagi, their differences from werewolves and metamorphmagi and human Transfiguration.

Ginny wondered if she should become an Animagus. While the ability was pretty awesome, she did not really care much for the ability. Sure, it was nice to have an animal form and all, but what practical use would it lend her? It was great for concealment? That would be based on the premise that she would actually gain a form that is nondescript: A cat, or a rat, or an owl, or perhaps an eagle or any other small animal.

What if her newly gained animal form was that of a lion or some other eye-catching creature? While the Wizarding World was a pretty weird place, they did not have predators running around like it was the wilderness. Other than the coolness factor, it was of no use to her at all.

Besides, she did not know if the whole thing would conflict with her existent innate abilities. The situation with Aetherform, Parseltongue and Hypercognition made it clear that innate abilities affected each other in ways she couldn't begin to fathom.

So why risk it?

Transfiguration class came to an end with Ginny gaining a meagre 10 points compared to the nearly 15 to 20 points she used to gain.

She stayed back after class, as she wanted to know why she did not receive a Hogsmeade permission letter.

"The trip to Hogsmeade is only for those who are 13 or older. You are not, Miss Weasley." McGonagall explained.

"But why?" Ginny was confused. Although she wasn't uber hyped about Hogsmeade, she still wanted to visit. After all, there were several useful things she wanted to buy. There was Scrivenshaft's Quill Shop for example!

Ever since she'd received the Luxury Quill from Harry she had fallen in love with Luxury Quills! She had splurged nearly 30 Galleons of her prize from the competition on different Quills. She had almost spent another 40 Galleons on a particularly beautiful Thunderbird Feather Super Luxury Quill! If it wasn't for Molly literally dragging her out of the shop she might have been set back by a whopping 70 Galleons! As it apparently required special ink!

"It's Hogwarts' rules, Ms. Weasley, there's nothing I can do. Now, you should go. You have Study of Ancient Runes, I believe."

She was shooed away.

On the way to classroom 6A, Hermione had once again popped out of nowhere. Ginny was too busy brooding over the fact that she couldn't visit Hogsmeade to care, however.

'The Quills!' she bemoaned.

-x-x-x-

Ancient Runes was a subject that Ginny found mighty annoying, yet also fascinating. It was a contradictory feeling.

And from what she learned from Rowena's spell creation library was that Ancient Runes were very different from Magical Runes. Yes, there were Magical Runes, which were apparently very different from Ancient Runes.

Magical Rune was something that interacted directly with Magic itself. Each Magical Rune was a superposition of several 'meanings' with different possibilities, like one rune - Twol - is a superposition of two known meanings: to switch and to move. In practice, that means using Twol to cast magic - whether through artefacts or otherwise- will give you different results at different times. It would either make the object disappear 36% of the time and move randomly 60% of the time and do absolutely nothing 4% of the time.

And because of there being too many meanings in a single rune, it was basically impossible to use any combination of them to do magic. And this was only for this one Rune. Most Runes had 3 or 7 meanings. In fact, Rowena believed that even Twol has a third meaning for the remaining 4%. It was just that she could not - for the life of her - figure out what the fuck it was doing.

Again, humans wouldn't be humans if they didn't find a way around that. In the very Ancient times, a Roman Witch - whose name was, unfortunately, forgotten - came up with an idea. And that is to navigate these 'meanings', with something she called a 'context'.

A context was a rather ingenious fusion of language and parts of Magical Runes to form an Ancient Language like Elder Futhark, Nordic Runes, Ancient Greek and so on. Initially, the witch had made this as a way to 'coax' the Magical Rune into taking the effects of a certain meaning. She failed but ended up creating the embryonic form of Ancient Languages.

Later civilizations adopted and refined it. But none could quite achieve what she did: somehow managing to fuse it with Latin and giving it power, just by altering the language slightly.

The alphabet of these languages are called Ancient Runes.

-x-x-x-

After Ancient Runes, Ginny walked out of the classroom, depressed. She lost more than half her points to Hermione! This girl had made being a teacher's pet an art form!

Her hand speed was something Ginny found hard to fathom. By the time the professor had finished the question, Hermione's hand would be up, ready to answer. Even the superhuman reflexes gained from assimilating the basilisk were no match!

-x-x-x-

Soon the day came to an end, and she made her way back to her dorms with her roommates after a hearty dinner.

On the way, Gwen looked at her roommate in astonishment, "How do you eat so much? You probably ate more than both of us combined! How are you not fat?"

"Hey! I'm a growing girl, okay? I need my food!" Ginny spread out her arms.

"We're too! We don't eat so much!" Aileen pointed out.

"I'm taller than both of you, so obviously, I need more!"

"By 2 inches! And you ate enough to be as wide as Hagrid is tall!"

The trio bickered on their way back to the dorms.

-x-x-x-

After the two had fallen asleep, she slipped out of the dorms and made her way to the Room of Requirement. She had discovered that as long as she limited her use of Hypercognition, she could actually get away with less sleep than a normal person. If she didn't use Hypercognition at all, she would be fine with just 5 hours of sleep. She had tested this over the summer.

In the Room, she once again walked over to the wall and pushed her magic into it while whispering, "Man's greatest treasure is not wit beyond measure."

The bricks once again shifted into the majestic statue of the eagle.

"Welcome back, inheritor." The eagle's proud baritone reverberated through the room.

"I have completed the first Trial. I have created my own unique spell. I wish to proceed to the next trial." Ginny informed it.

"Very well, inheritor. Sign this contract and cast the spell. Be aware that after signing this contract, the first spell you cast should be the one you have created. Casting any other spell will be deemed a failure, and you will forever lose the opportunity to take this Trial."

Ginny, through her Magical Perception felt a weird sensation wash over her, as if she was being monitored. 'A Magical Activity Detection Charm? The heck? They aren't supposed to be sophisticated enough to detect the type of spell, though?" While she was confused, she did not waste her time thinking too much about it.

The contract basically said that the next spell that would be cast by her was created by her. She nodded, signed the contract and cast her newly created spell: <Enchanting Voice>

"No Contract failure. Conditions met. Trial Passed." the eagle's voice sounded. "You will find your rewards and the information about the next trial on the bookshelf."

She ran over to the bookshelf, which had expanded to include another layer, in excitement.

The new row contained seven very thick books.