Chapter 30

The Room of Requirement welcomed me like a native, kindly providing a hall with a set of pentagrams, runic circles, and other stencils. Let's get started. First, I took out the diary and placed it in the construction visualizing magical currents. Wow, that's a lot of work. Yes, Tom did a lot of work in his day. A talented young man, but only a high school student. So just forty minutes of tinkering and voilà. Ha, I knew it! The journal turned out to be a grimoire. Doesn't change the point, though.

I put the Horcrux into another ritual figure, not stingy, and even used the construction to hold the demons. Fifteen more minutes of fiddling and I managed to separate the spiritual essence. Tom resisted, but it wasn't serious. All right. There's a humanoid shadow in the center of the multibeam star. Well, bang your forehead against the barriers, maybe you'll get wise. They weren't designed for a lesser frailty like you, my friend. You don't look like you live on a demonic level. Let's get to the main event: submission. Imperio! What? Is it all? That too easy.

No, logical in principle, an incomplete piece, and even in its youth barbarically torn from the main, but somehow underlying something like this was expected. Like the Lord of Fates and blah, blah, blah. Ugh, it is rightly said that the fear is great.

Still, I didn't relax, so I threw a soul trap in the middle and shoved the unresisting Horcrux into it. I levitated the artifact into the final figure and began the ritual of separating the spirit essence. The complex and tedious process ended with dozens of energy clumps hanging in the air, some amorphous, some with the outline of a human.

Quite blurred, it must be said, contours that were barely recognizable. So, I'm not interested to knowing how the future lord lived, and I don't have time to look through his life. By definition, there is no important information there, because the orphan, he could not know anything special. So I get rid of the unnecessary.

Only amorphous formations remain. We can work with them. It took me a long time, until morning. A waste of time. Tom hadn't learned this stuff in his studies, and he knew less about Horcruxes than I did back then.

But he was a risky and talented guy, so he dared to tear his heart out over such crumbs. There were still the so-called magical gifts, both those he'd inherited from the Gont family and those he'd developed himself.

Of course, the latter could only be called a gift, more like a special reflex. However, it's not difficult to implant all this into the aura, but to the great sadness of my hamster, there was nothing I didn't possess myself. In fact, there was only an artificial "mutation" of usefulness, a highly specialized gift of mental magic, popularly known as Parseltongue, or, more simply, the language of snakes.

This is nonsense! Why do I have to fight and hiss? The creepy-crawlies are deaf anyway, and communication with them is telepathic. The only real advantage is passwords. Who in their right mind would pick up a word activator that consists of nothing but hisses and whistles?

Only someone who knows for a fact that a snake handler used to work here. Actually, as I now suspect, Parseltongue was created with one purpose in mind — to look the basilisk in the eye. After all, this "magical hose" performs a very specific mental attack, something like suggestion, which makes Muggles and ordinary animals, i.e. ordinary food, stiffen from such chains, but Mages and Squibs, due to the spontaneous release of magic, similar to that of a child, really stiffen.

And all this is only necessary until the young basilisk learns to control its murderous gaze. The hissing side effect was apparently a bug, but they decided to make it a feature. Standard lazy man's approach. Why fix it if you can figure out how to use it? That's right, no reason. Do I need this joy? Not too much. You shouldn't take someone else's, especially when it's practically useless.

Magic loves a workaholic. Which means goodbye, Horcrux, you were fun to study. Dissolve the last of the Horcrux "clots". Put the pile of rune scrolls away. I sighed at the fact that it would take a long time to sort through the, shall we say, technical information, and there was no time for that. I took some of my magic energy and hurried to the lesson.

The opening of the Dueling Club was canonical. We had a duel with Mr. Snape, and he beat me. If I'd used my full power, I might have been able to defeat him, but not really. Unfortunately, the magical talent you develop is no match for the acquired skill you train.

Of course, he couldn't finish me off with a single disarming spell, but after a few minutes of fighting, he cornered me and, using the tactical advantage with a general superiority in foresight, he mercilessly crushed me in half a minute. Of course, if it was a deadly fight, I would use the dirty tricks my mentor had shown me and my own developments. I had an arsenal of cumulative-effect spells. Personal know-how, so to speak.

Here's the thing. A magic shield, like any counter spell, basically works on the principle of exhaustion. If the shield is strong, it will not fall apart, but will only briefly disappear at the point of impact, and the total amount of energy in it will decrease by an amount roughly equal to the power invested in the spells that hit it. If the defense is weak, a powerful spell will destroy it.

What happens to the attack depends on how much energy is left in it. If it is enough to hold the web — it will fly further, if not, it means that the defender is lucky.

Actually, my developments were a simple matryoshka doll, one spell contained another, and that contained a third. So all I had to do was hit. Even if the first one didn't penetrate the shield, it would still open the door for the one I had placed. If the second one stopped the artifact, the defense it created would be temporarily destabilized and the third, internal one would hit the target.

The only problem is how to create such constructs quickly. Through practice, I translated the simplest spells into a non-verbal, wandless form. This allowed me to easily create two-part spells. The first was done as usual, and the second was added by will and reflex. Nothing too complicated, the same Avada is built on a similar principle.

Only the filling is made according to the principles of desire magic. That is why it is so important to consciously and literally desire the death of the enemy. You could say it's an echo of child magic. When a child wants something strongly and sincerely, magic fulfills the desire. For the three-component, shell spells were developed, again in analogy to Avada.

I immediately cast them with my wand, while the filling was similar to the two-part ones. The main difference from the Unforgivable — in my spells it was not necessary to fill the envelope to the brim, which provided additional penetrating power, and there was no overconsumption of mana. Everything was done consciously and in measured doses.

 In general, magic was based on desires and emotions, very, very costly. So when they say you have to be a strong magician to do Avada Kedavra, they are not lying. They're just not saying that this condition is necessary for combat, any weak magician can cast a single one. Even a third-year student can do it.

In general, the best way to stop a spell from coming at you is to create a physical obstacle. After all, magic is a complexly structured energy of a kind unknown to Muggle science, with absolutely fantastic properties. It can be used to turn matter into energy and vice versa. And to be honest, I haven't found even theoretical limits to the possibilities of magic. Except the core of the soul.

A simple example of the self-limitation of magicians. There's a law, Gump's Law, that says you can't make food with magic. Nobody questions that. But excuse me, in his time, Aristotle wrote that a fly has four legs, and that was piously believed for over a thousand years.

Even though anyone could have caught it and counted it. Anyone who's ever bothered with that sort of thing. You can make food with magic, just create organic molecules — it's not like making a diamond with just carbon. And you can make gold out of air, all you have to do is transmute the nitrogen nuclei that make up four-fifths of the atmosphere.

Just as no one makes gold from lead in particle accelerators because it is economically unprofitable, so it is in magic. Even I found it easier to create the natural conditions for diamond than to transfigure it. However, the mind is limited and cannot work with the required amount of information.

The same transformation of inanimate into animate is only possible temporarily, because a pig created from a snuff box looks and behaves naturally, but it is not alive. This is the case when something looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, but is not a duck.