Chapter 288

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"Exactly, there would have been a massacre. And yet Lupin himself didn't tell anyone what had happened. Didn't notify the headmaster. Although he remembered everything, and all the time, he looked at me guiltily, avoiding me. He didn't talk to me, didn't explain the situation. Didn't share the experience of being such a creature, didn't tell me how to hold back or what measures to take. He just let everything take its course. Very cowardly and selfish, don't you think?"

"Ohh..." Nymphadora's mood was not good.

"So, in general, I was tracking him. Then, on one of his walks, I recorded his movement with a group of wizards. I was bored, so I decided to follow you — it was easy. Any average wizard could have done it. Well, what happened next, I told you — a non-standard application of ordinary spells multiplied by trained brains. Any sufficiently developed wizard would be able to do it, if not everyone. It was, in fact, the surprise factor and the fact that I was far away and out of your line of sight."

"But to attack like that..."

"Just Stupefy. There were no other wizards around. If someone had been following you, I would have knocked them out."

"Fine," Nymphadora slammed her palms on her knees. "But how did you deal with the lycanthropy? Don't get me wrong, an infection from a werewolf bite on a full moon is a guarantee of infection in its most severe form. Your method could help many... many people."

"My method is too unique. It's an extremely energy-intensive, individually calculated ritual."

"Energy-intensive?" the Nymphadora's look unmistakably hinted at certain peculiarities of energy-intensive rituals.

"Oh, no, no," I waved away with a smile. "No sacrifices, unless you count the almost completely decomposed corpse of the thousand-year-old basilisk that lived in the sewers of Hogwarts."

Sirius and Nymphadora looked at me with a completely stupid look for a few seconds, which was quite amusing.

"What?"

"Well, the Slytherin's basilisk. Judging by its size, it's lived about a thousand years. Give or take fifty years. The table of the dependence of size on age is the same for all types of basilisks."

"But... How?" Nymphadora jumped up from her chair and began to pace up and down the room. "That's... Wow! All this time... Such a dangerous creature lived there ... You're not lying?"

"I'm serious. Harry and I killed it in the second year, saving Ginny. You'd better ask Harry for the details - I was dragged into this at the very end, and events were gathering momentum for almost the whole year, and Harry was somehow involved there."

Nymphadora paced the room for a few more minutes, thinking. Sirius sat thoughtful and shocked, but I can't guess what he was thinking about.

"It turns out," Nymphadora stopped. "Did you decompose the basilisk into magic for the ritual? But this is a huge amount of magic! Where to?!"

"Do you know about the Triad of Being?"

"Mm-mm... No."

Sirius stirred.

"The result of dark magical research on the soul by wizards of the Middle Ages," Black said in a low voice, looking at the floor.

"Research may be darkly magical, the process of which I did not approve, leafing through the ancient parchments, but the results are very ordinary, useful, and opening eyes to some of the secrets and processes of the universe."

"Nothing is clear," Nymphadora shook her head, "and it's not clear how it helped you."

"I reconstructed the body based on information from the soul. Something like that."

"What?!" Nymphadora's eyes bulged amusedly, and Sirius nodded importantly, as if for him such things are commonplace, like breakfast in the morning.

"What part of my sentence escapes your understanding?"

"All of it! All parts of the sentence! How is that even? And don't tell me it's normal!"

Nymphadora was surprised and outraged, but you can't blame her.

"Well, all the information is in the Hogwarts library. There's lots and lots of different information out there in general, the level of which ranges from the most basic knowledge to those that far surpass the masters. You just have to be able to read, have the desire to understand, learn about the world in a variety of ways, and be able to count, if possible, quickly."

"That's nonsense!" Nymphadora sat down on a chair. "I actually went to Hogwarts, too. I've never seen anything like it."

"Well, no one will provide you such unique knowledge in its pure form and by a happy coincidence - suitable for your situation. At that time, I looked through a third of the library, and to achieve the result, I had to use almost all the knowledge available in my head while calculating the ritual scheme from scratch. I didn't even have much of choice. Remain a werewolf. Undergo treatment and for four days a month become magically, physically, and mentally disabled, but safe. Brew an expensive potion every month while still remaining a werewolf capable of infecting other people. And this option - to risk everything but be cured."

"But..." Nymphadora spread her hands to the sides with incomprehension, looking at me. "Where do you get such ideas from? To use almost basic spells this way... Even that ritual!"

"You haven't read Muggle fiction. There are far more ambitious ideas than mine. All that remains is to adjust the magic to the fantasy. Everything is here," I tapped my temple with a finger.