Chapter 233: Cultural Exchange 

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I would like to thank my beta, Akisu, for his help in this chapter.

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10 August 1994, Black Manor

Having decided on who to summon, he took out the stone from the wand and turned it three times, thinking of Lily Potter. Yet, he was only met with a silent room. Harry's eyes grew wider, and his skin grew paler with every second a shade didn't materialize itself.

Lily Potter was alive.

Even weeks later, this sheer fact was mind-blowing. Honestly, if he had never met Sirius Black or Remus Lupin, this realization wouldn't have fazed him. Sure, he would have been curious, but that would have been the end of it.

He would never consider her as his mother, not really. Whether he was abandoned, or she was forced to leave him for some reason, the fact remained that she didn't raise him. If she just showed up one day, she would have just been a stranger who was related to him by blood, nothing more.

Unfortunately for him, Lily Potter wasn't a regular witch. According to Lupin, she was a magical genius who was working towards curing Lycanthropy. According to Sirius, she was a secret Dark Witch who meddled with horrible things and killed Harry's father to power a ritual.

Neither were really unbiased sources. He could have asked Snape, but the man had disappeared after the semester had ended. Funnily enough, Mcgonagall somehow convinced Slughorn to come back, and truth be told, Harry was looking forward to learning from the man the coming semester.

Back to the issue at hand, Harry's mother didn't die in Godric's Hollows.

It was the only explanation.

He spent days in his room, trying to understand the resurrection stone, and he had made some good progress. First of all, summoning shades of death was, at best, an exaggeration of the stone's capabilities. Harry didn't fully understand the theory, but from what he could gather the stone used the fact that magic remembered. However, it didn't remember in a structured way and somehow created an illusion of a dead person, finding them using the user's connection to them, and what magic could remember of their personality.

Harry had tested by summoning Sirius, who was just as messed up as a shade and refused to answer any questions, and James Potter, who was just a typical spoiled popular boy who was good at sports and wanted to become an Auror. When he tried to summon older people, shades were less structured, and they remembered less until they became nothing more than blobs of smoke that couldn't say anything.

The conclusion was simple. He should have been able to summon Lily Potter if she had died that day. So far, he had two theories, ones that he couldn't test. The woman was either still alive or she had died in an alternate dimension. Harry didn't know for sure, but Sirius was trapped between two planes of existence, so dimension nonsense could happen to make magic not see her die, somehow… It was way over his head and Harry barely knew anything about souls, so this was barely more than wild ideas in his head. Unfortunately, with the destruction of most tomes that dealt with soul magic, this was the best he could do.

Thankfully, Harry's crest started pulling its weight after his birthday. It seemingly acknowledged the fact that he got the stone and wanted to reward him. He could feel an entire branch of the crest, ready to be explored, that had something to do with the Deathly Hallow. So far, Harry learned to imbue, what he called, a soul element to his detection spells, allowing him not to just detect traces of magic, but something metaphysical inherent to every person. He assumed it was the soul, for the lack of any other definition or mention of similar things in theoretical texts.

Progress was extremely slow, but it was progress, nonetheless.

His portals, on the other hand, were far more interesting and useful for the moment.

Harry grinned as he opened a portal to the living room, dodging a surprised hex from Arcturus, "I told you to stop doing that."

"It's not my fault you're easy to spook."

The Black Patriarch looked fed up with the whole thing, "I know it's an exciting form of magic and everything, but you don't have to use it for everything."

The younger wizard sighed slightly. The man had a point, but Harry had spent almost two years working on creating this spell, one that happened to bypass any sort of anti-teleportation wards. These kinds of protections did not prevent the warping of space, they just stopped Portkey and Apparition systems from using them as a place to depart from or arrive at. Harry was teleporting the hard way around, which also happened to have its disadvantages. It was very energy intensive, and it grew exponentially the longer the distance he wanted to travel.

There was a reason why Harry could use them while he was injured. He never even considered it, really. The pain alone would have been agonizing.

At the start, he couldn't have even used them. Harry was able to use the portal to escape the Garden of Avalon because of the temporal event at the end of each cycle. He opened himself up, let as much new data as he could about time manipulation, and stored it in his family crest to be used later. However, on a fundamental level, the way time worked in the normal world was different than that of Avalon.

It took Harry months to adapt his model to work well enough to make portals, and even then, he couldn't really test them himself. Nevertheless, the sheer fact that Harry could travel without being stopped by any wards would have made him a security threat…

Harry had no intentions of being hunted down by a bunch of power-hungry guild members, trying to extract the secrets of his magic from him. It would have been different if it was a documented ability, and thus classified as family magic, but the sheer fact that it was new also meant that he had created this magic by himself, and thus could be replicated. Theoretically, that is. Harry still used his Arcane Hearing heavily when shaping this spell.

Harry's thoughts were interrupted by Arcturus speaking up, "It's almost time for the Portkey. Let's get down to the hill outside the manor…"

Harry smiled cheekily and opened a quick portal that swallowed him and Arcturus immediately, sending them towards their desired location. Arcturus lost his balance again and almost fell, pressing himself on his cane.

Even if the older man looked exasperated by the action, Harry didn't miss the look of pure wonder for just a fraction of a second until he steeled his expression once more.

The man had started to look for him ever since Harry told him about his ability. It was something the old man ought to know in case someone did find out and wanted to hunt him down or something. Sure, the man had freaked out, at first and had almost put on heavy wards in fear of someone already knowing about it, but he calmed down after a couple of days.

However, the man was still insistent on travelling to the World Cup using a normal Portkey, which was widely uncomfortable. Apparently, the man wanted to keep up appearances or something…

Still recovering from Harry's surprise, the Black Patriarch gave him a dirty look, "I'm going to get back at you for that. You know that right?"

Harry snorted, "I'm looking forward to it old man."

"Let's just grab the damn Portkey," he returned while pointing at a piece of rope on the ground.

Ever since Sirius' death, Harry made sure to be more friendly with the Black Patriarch. Even if he did not show it, the man was deeply mourning his grandson's death, and it had hit him deeply. Sure, at the start, Harry was too preoccupied with his misery, with his frustration regarding his magic. But after retrieving the stone, he noticed just how down Arcturus really was, and how the man seemed to lighten whenever they joked around…

It wasn't perfect, but it was still progress.

Suddenly, Harry felt as though a hook just behind his navel had been suddenly jerked irresistibly forward. He felt as though he was being pulled through a tight, spinning tunnel, his body twisting and turning in ways that defied physics. The sensation was disorienting, a whirlwind of colours and sounds blurring together until he couldn't tell up from down.

Just as suddenly as it had begun, the sensation stopped, and Harry found himself losing his balance. He righted himself and muttered, "I hate those things."

"Your grandfather did too, funnily enough. It's not pleasant but it's a good enough alternative."

With his nausea retreating, Harry finally took the time to take in his surroundings. hey had arrived in a vast field, bathed in the golden light of the early morning. Tents of all shapes and sizes sprawled as far as the eye could see, some floating a few feet above the ground, others shimmering with enchantments that made them appear larger on the inside.

Harry turned to his guardian with a questioning look, "I thought we were supposed to register for our tent or something…"

The Black Patriarch looked amused more than anything, "I paid extra for the private Portkey, that means all this crap is taken care of for me. I'm too old to wait in line for a fucking tent of all things. Speaking of the tent, it should be set up by now."

Harry nodded absent-mindedly, focusing on a group of children of seemingly Asian descent who were running on the air somehow. Arcturus smiled, "Ah yes, wind hopping. It's a common technique taught in the East. People have been trying to copy it for years until they realized that the trick was in the shoes…"

The last Potter couldn't help but be amazed by his surroundings. Everywhere he went, there was something different, a new culture, some new magic. It was like stepping into a kaleidoscope of wizarding cultures, each tent representing a different country, with wizards and witches wearing their national colours proudly, using some unique magics.

To his Arcane Hearing, it was like the entire world had united into a giant Orchestra, that was both too loud and yet it worked somehow.

Yes, coming to the Quidditch club was definitely a good idea.

Arcturus snorted at the expression on his ward's face, "You don't have to come with me. I've been meaning to speak with a few old friends of mine anyway. Why don't you wander off and try to look for your friends? You know how to find me, right?"

Harry gave him an incredulous look, and the man snorted, "I forgot for a moment who I was talking to. Seriously, magical prodigies are unfair."

Just like that, the man disappeared into the crowds, leaving Harry to wander around on his own.

As Harry ventured deeper into the colourful maze of tents and stalls, he witnessed a spectacle of magic that was as diverse as the crowd itself. To his right, a group of Italian wizards was conjuring spectacular firework spells that burst into the shapes of dragons and phoenixes, their flames shimmering in every hue imaginable, casting a warm, enchanting glow over the onlookers. It wasn't anything special, but the animation charms were very realistically done, probably by layering multiple illusions on them. It was fascinating, to say the least.

Further along, he stumbled upon a tent where Japanese witches were practising the ancient art of paper magic. With delicate flicks of their wands, they brought to life intricate origami animals that danced in the air, folding and unfolding themselves into new shapes. It was magic Harry had never seen before, but he had read about it. While it was currently something ceremonial in nature, and considered to be an outdated form of magic, ancient Japanese mages often used it in conjunction with their infamous paper runes to achieve some very impressive results.

Harry was admiring a paper dove floating around, trying to understand its enchantments while tuning out the rest of the overwhelming magical noise, but he was taken aback when he noticed a familiar mane of brown hair.

She was walking next to the familiar figure of Neville Longbottom, who looked far happier and more relaxed than Harry expected him to be. Huh, they must have let him attend the World Cup for behaving himself or something.

She must have noticed him staring because she turned and stiffened when she recognized his face. She snuck away from Neville, who was admiring a small Quidditch match happening in the background, and made her way to him, "Hello Harry Potter."

Harry tilted his head and responded, "Hermione Granger. It's been a while."

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If you want to support me check out my patréon at https://www.patréon.com/athassprkr

I tend to upload drafts of early chapters on there to get people's opinions of them so you can read up to 20 chapters ahead as a bonus.

Thank you guys for your support in these hard times.