Chapter 112

When you seek information purposefully, time flies by.

The penultimate day of vacation has come, I have a little more than two weeks left, and at the moment, I can summarize the following - I'm in a really bad situation.

Hermione replied the same day, and I picked up the letter in the evening in the owlery. I received congratulations in return and a list of related books she had seen or read in the Forbidden Section and in the public domain. For practically the rest of the vacation, I did nothing but read, study, comprehend, eat, and occasionally sleep. I have shoveled through more than thirty books, folios, and scrolls of varying degrees of danger: from the basics of magic medicine to abstract concepts and visions on the living organism Vitamisterium, the science of the mysteries of life, death, and non-life. I came across materials on so-called "Maleficism" with its methods of curses and getting rid of them, two works on necromancy with its vision of the concept of the soul, and all sorts of other stuff. A lot of this knowledge is abstract, but a good background in biology and allied disciplines, both human and non-human, has allowed me to understand many things. But unfortunately not in lycanthropy, although in terms of knowledge, I am now equal to a good but completely inexperienced mediwizard of average skill. Although I think there's a lot more to learn when you join a guild.

No matter how much I've read and studied, I can't understand wizards' attitude towards this obvious and serious problem, which can bring any respectable wizard down to the very social bottom in a moment, if only the public is aware of the problem. Take, for example, the works on Maleficence: "I, the great 'insert name yourself' will let you learn by reading this talmud about all kinds of curses on both a person and an object or area, to understand the mechanisms of their work in the representation of wizards, and methods of struggle. Oh, yes, there's also Lycanthropy." Lycanthropy prevention? Throw Avada at the werewolf. Or any other ways to interrupt its existence, though the chance that this werewolf will interrupt yours is a bit higher for the average wizard.

However, in one folio of chimerology, a nameless wizard-experimentalist suggests hiding the results of your labors under the guise of ordinary magical animals in a rather extravagant way. This wizard first created the chimera he wanted, then boiled it in a special potion. Alive. In the end, the potion was transformed, as I understand it, into a kind of colloidal suspension, separating into a remnant useful to the wizard and a useless base mass. The resulting useful mass was combined with the help of another potion with a jar of Central Asian magic mosquitoes, now completely exterminated because of a disease they spread - pestilence fever. A terrible disease that affects only certain magical mammals and magical primates. Yes, there are some, but not about that now. During the merger, a liquid substance of a poisonous green color was obtained.

The intravenous injection of the substance slowly and surely transforms the experimental magical creature into the original chimera. However, its overall characteristics differ from the original by a third in the direction of weakening. But according to the wizard-experimentalist, this is not the result that is needed because the original goal is to hide your development among ordinary magical animals. That's when he came up with the last stage of processing the green fluid substance - a complex ritual was performed over it, during which strict conditions were set to transform the animal into a chimera. The wizard-experimentalist chose a complex mental impulse as the conditions for the animal to turn into a chimera at the wizard's will but assured that the conditions could be anything from a banal fracture of the little finger of the animal's left paw to some environmental conditions. In the absence of conditions, the animal can calmly live its normal life and even die without ever transforming. At the same time, it is possible to fine-tune the conditions of transferring "chimera essence" to the animal's relatives or to block this function at all.

Particular attention was paid to the fact that the animal must necessarily be magical. Without the "magical essence," everything is useless, and an ordinary animal dies painfully. This green liquid lines up, as written, "the essence of the chimera around the magical essence of the animal, and when the moment comes, it is through the magic of the animal that the chimera reveals itself to the world."

Such material I considered a most genuine revelation. Even though the text of this folio was in the format of a description, without detailed instructions, it made me think: "What if a werewolf is a chimera? Such an assumption has a place because it turns not into an ordinary wolf but into some kind of mutant. All the characteristics of the body are much higher than those of animals.

Such information is capable of generating many different theories and assumptions, but all of them will remain assumptions without tests and experiments. But even here, not everything is smooth. Among the materials of magical medicine and other related disciplines that I studied, there are no spells or rituals for really deep scanning of the body, cells, and other things. Even though ancient wizards had their own notion of bacteria and viruses as tiny organisms, they did not seek to study them, body cells, and their structure. Why go far - the ritual performed by Malfoy over me, and I found a similar one. It's pretty simple, considering what it does. With its help, the wizard does not delve into genes and so on, no. In a very clumsy and simple way, "the essence of magic and body, which is like the essence of the father," is literally cut out of the child's body. Survival was really not implied after such a ritual.