Preparations finished and a new Advancement

At first Habol had planned to wake Lia up as soon as he was done, but she seemed too relaxed for that so he left her there for now while going to the neighbouring room to sleep after making sure the door was locked and warded to warn him in case it was opened.

...

The next morning Habol was awoken by just that.

He hurriedly jumped out of bed and sprinted out of the room, almost running into a sleepy Lia.

Apparently she had just woken up from her ritual induced sleep and was trying to find him to witness her first transformation.

...

A few weeks later it was finally the time for Julius to finish his preparations, starting with an experiment, using the map he had just gotten from the twins.

His starting point was the women's lavartory on the second floor, in his second form of course.

~Open.~

As he entered the pipes, Julius wondered, if he should have let Rachel come with him.

At first he hadn't wanted to, as he wasn't completely sure if it would be safe here, but by now he was almost completely sure it should be, as long as he didn't open the chamber and release the basilisk.

Not that he wouldn't make sure at least the main entrance to the chamber was closed.

…

A bit later Julius had made sure the door wouldn't budge without considerable efforts of magic and placed at least a simple ward to alarm him if it did.

Only then did he pull out the map as he hadn't needed it until now.

To his dismay the map did not change to show the layout of the pipes as it would if he had changed the floor he was on, but instead was still showing the nearest actual floor of the castle.

Even though that would still make the map a great help for navigating the pipe systems it would still require him to explore those to allow efficient use of the many smaller or bigger pipes, especially the first ones.

While in his last life Julius had oftentimes wondered how the basilisk was seemingly able to slither through all of the school using the pipes despite its huge size, now he  could see how it was possible; there were huge tunnels going deep into the darkness between the castle's rooms and hallways.

Of course there were also much more smaller pipes which would be completely inpassable for even a human, much less a giant snake with a tendency of turning people to stone.

Those were the pipes Julius planned to mainly use, of course after casting a spell on himself to make sure there would always be a thin membrane between him and whatever was flowing through these pipes.

Not that this spell would make him voluntarily use a toilet as his exit point, but he would at least be able to use sinks and similar things without having to constantly think about the centuries worth of grime and dirt that had certainly not been cleaned out by a wizard without any knowledge of such „primitive" contraptions.

Something Julius had still not figured out was, how something like this could have been built into the castle during the dark ages, especially by wizards which usually didn't really care too much about technical advancement.

But since it could probably be explained through the founders' genius he decided not to dwell on it.

Now the only thing left to do was practicing said spell so he could even cast it on his friends reliably if they didn't want to learn it themselves but still accompany him at night.

Well, that and Lia's part of the preparations of course, but from her behaviour Julius assumed she was already done, and coming from the rumours floating around the forum he guessed that Habol probably had something to do with it, which already gave him an idea what it could be that she wanted to do.

But if it was what he thought that would also be a rather big gamble.

Nothing that Lia would care about though.

…

The next day in the evening the three friends sat in the common room together after doing their homework.

Looking at the excited Lia Julius raised his visible eyebrow:

"Do you want to tell me about something? Or maybe just show it to me?"

As Habol tried to hide his grin Lia answered, still just as excited as before, if not even more so:

"I would love to. But can we please just quickly go to an empty room before that?"

"Of course we could, but I could also just use the wards from last time, is that also okay?"

Lia thought for a moment before nodding.

Then Julius cast the wards he had been getting much more exercise with in the time he had been at Hogwarts and Lia did it.

Her transformation was still done with a wand in hand as she probably hadn't had enough time to familiarise herself with it, but it went very smoothly.

At the blink of an eye, suddenly a gunmetal grey cat was sitting on Lia's seat, sporting something like a proud grin as she looked at the two boys.

And judging from her relatively small size, most of the pipes should not be that much of a problem for her.

…

As the three had decided to postpone their first adventure to the next day Julius found himself sitting on his bed trying his best to use wandless magic to transfigure his ball of steel into a lifelike tree.

Since he wasn't exactly an expert wizard yet, the tree still looked as if it was something straight out of of a muggle cartoon, with only the rougher features of a tree already being visible.

But then suddenly something felt different.

For just a moment Julius felt his magic escape his control and as the unfinished metal tree sculpture fell to the ground, released from the spell that was supposed to hold it in the air, a cool sensation spread through his body, starting from his belly.

Even before confirming it Julius already new what had happened; he had finally broken through the last threshold keeping him from using any of the usual spells any adult wizard could learn, he could even learn how to apparate with barely any risk involved now.

[MP 20]

This evening Julius had lots of fun just testing the new capabilities of his magic and feeling its new liquid consistence and when he finally went to bed he knew tomorrow would be a hard day, especially the „history of magic" class.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Hello author here, I'm sorry that it took me so long, but while I have so many plans and ideas for other fanfics, this fanfic and even my first real novel, I can just only write so much of it. Especially since I find it to be hard to write this fanfic in an interesting manner (content and writing style).

Still; thank you for reading and special thanks to the few people who just gave me very helpful comments and also those who said what they liked about this first project of mine, I wish you all the best until we see each other again!