Ch. 66 Summer progress, Blackbolt’s birth

After that initial success, I began to study and adjust the two successful recipes. The next step was to make them long lasting and to accomplish that, the trick was to maintain the effect of the injections while fusing it with the effect of the blood regeneration potion, in an effort to make the body produce the lunar energy blockers on its own. The end result should hopefully be the continuous creation of the blocker for an extended period of time, hence lengthening the effect. That's the theory anyway. So I began the testing phase while the original volunteers will be strictly observed for the next year minimum, for side effects or unexpected changes in their transformations. Extra attention will be paid to the successful six, to know what is going on in their bodies every step of the way, and the reports being sent to me.

With the trial for this month over, I began having Harry over a few more times during the summer, making sure he was progressing properly, giving him some nutritious food on top of the potions, getting him to exercise more and helping him with his homework.

"So how come you're making me exercise? I already do it for Quidditch and it's not like it helps with magic." Questioned Harry one day as he was catching his breath.

"That's actually incorrect Harry." I respond. "You see two things happen as wizards get older: Magic increases in the body and the body toughens thanks to magic. Meaning as we grow older, gain more experience casting spell and/or live in magical areas, our bodies increasingly absorb more magic and refines it to improve our own. But magic needs to be contained within the body, hence it passively toughens the bodies of witches and wizards to endure it. That's why Quidditch as such a low mortality rate for such a dangerous sport, or we have people still being spry well into their 90's or 100's, and why you don't really hear of people exploding because they have too much magic." I explain to the boy, simplifying the matter greatly.

"Um alright, but what does that have to do with me exercising?" He asked, not seeing the full picture yet.

"Well Harry. If a body needs to be stronger to contain more magic, can you think of a benefit if your body is already stronger?" I ask to let him ponder. I've been asking these types of questions during his visits to help him get over the psychological blocks over his intelligence. I ask him brain teasers, if he's right he gets a small reward like a fun spell or some candy, and if he's wrong I simply gently explain the real answer and praise him for his effort. You know, positive reinforcement of the desired behavior to counteract the negative reinforcement those scum put him through. And it's been showing some results.

"Would it let you absorb magic quicker?" He asked, unsure of his answer.

"Very good Harry. Yes it does. Another benefit is that it helps during duels and combat a lot. Not being there when someone casts a spell at you can often be the best defense. I mean take the killing curse. They say it has no defense, but they heavily telegraph its casting, even V-cunt couldn't get around it, so dodging is good to know. You still need to be very brave to face the curse in that manner, but this is an extreme example." I answer the kid as I ruffle his head lightly, with him smile shyly at the praise.

"So on the topic, here's your first actual combat spell. My modded Expelliarmus. Made it stronger, faster, more accurate and with slight course correction. Perfect for a young wizards self defense." I say with a smile as he gets excited at the reward.

"Wicked! Your going to teach me to fight?" He asked excitedly as he look at me expectantly.

"I'll get more spells into you first and beef your muscles up more, then we can learn to fight. But for now I'll teach you some spells and get you to practice on stationary targets and moving ones. Baby steps need to be taken before you can start going properly." I answer to the boy who gets a bit disappointed, but then perks up when he hears he's going to learn more magic.

This was the general manner in which my time with Harry went during the summer. I also decided to take him and Susan out to the movies or a fair for him to have fun over the summer, even getting Hermione involved in the fun since Harry could write to her. Harry thought it was unfortunate Ron couldn't make it, but he still had a great deal of fun. The kid really needed more of those kinds of memories.

Interestingly enough, Harry would still experience Dobby trying to stop him from going to Hogwarts, getting a warning from the ministry, but because of my threats the Dursley's can't really do anything to the kid anyway. But at least the scene with the floating cake didn't happen this time, helping mitigate the anger. After which Harry would thank me for everything I had done for him this summer and headed to the Burrow. After I arranged for him to receive the rest of his potions of course.

But that's a bit later in the summer, going back to my activities before the school year.

My businesses were continuing in their upward trends, becoming the dominant forces in their fields. Breaking Grounds Apothecary was treated as the potion holy land in Britain. Having developed a reputation on their incredible products, extremely popular competition they offered, and their constant unveiling of new products with every single one doing exactly as they say. I got a report saying even Snape went to the place to submit his own work and was approved.

'Wonder how he'll feel when he finds out it's mine?' I thought to myself with a smile when I heard about it.

Natural Cultivation Farms has become The producer of magical herbs in the country, partnering and absorbing various other producers, introducing some of the innovative cultivation methods I've designed, successfully staring the underwater farms with the help of the merpeople, and now beginning the formation of the Herbology paradise island project with the help of the Centaurs. The FIRM center has become an established landmark in Diagon Alley because of their products and multitude of services. They've been helping hundreds find jobs or improve themselves, whilst helping the image of muggle-borns and spreading the accurate information on them which others have tried to bury. The Herald has been becoming the official rival of the Prophet, with thought provoking articles, insightful commentary, interesting stories, unbiased viewpoints (for the most part), and the fact that they even sometimes question about me, their owner, helps people think better about them and me by coincidence, because I don't do anything to stop them.

BonesWorks products are universally approved by pretty much everyone so far, even the darker families. They are purely magical products, made by a genius of an established wizard family, owned and founded by its heir, from magical Britain and offer incredibly useful products. The only thing they aren't comfortable with is that I employ mainly werewolves, but even their arguments and comments about that are loosing a lot of traction because of our track record. No incidents of werewolves losing control in almost two years. It's unprecedented in modern magical Britain that so many of them gathered together and none have done anything remotely bad. There has actually been a decline in overall criminal activities in Britain as well as a great rise in the economy due to the increasing number of productive members of the community. I am literally changing the views people have on werewolves the more time passes with absolute success. And the best part is that my employees are actually policing themselves because they don't want to ruin things for everyone and lose my support. People have tried to introduce aggressive or unstable werewolves into my businesses and current workers have caught every single one of them and notified my managers.

Overall I've slowly but surely been shifting the mentality of witches and wizards in the country. They are being exposed to bettering living conditions, products and supply. Reduction in crime and boost of the economy. Better news coverage and information. And all of this stems from muggle-born owner and operated businesses, and from an established family's business operated by werewolves. These facts are what will change the ordinary witches and wizards views on all groups involved slowly but surely. With the ultimate goal of having them experience a sort of cognitive dissonance with what they are being told and believe, compared to how things are and have been happening.

It is a large scale populace mentality change, but it must happen to move out of this medieval mentality influential families have tried to enforce for centuries now. And I believe this will happen through my efforts.

The rest of my time this summer was spent in a few ways. My first is that I continued to test the vaccine properly. We've held the second round of testing with a new batch of volunteers, not wanting to take any chances to obtain clear results, and keeping the original successes under observation. The six from the last months test were put in the facility as well, but were not given any new doses to see how long the benchmark recipes will last, with the rest getting the new versions to increase the effect duration. The results were spectacular, with the 6 not experiencing anything so far and the rest also having a perfect passing rate. It means that so far, everyone injected with the brew have accepted it and only further test and observations will be needed. We've built a second facility to observe the progress everyone is going through, with Geri in charge of security for both now. My second project was finishing off the broom completely by running it through a battery of tests with James looking at our work with me. We tested the endurance, speed, maneuverability, toughness and everything else we could think of to the extreme. We then analyzed it thoroughly to see what the damages were after such rough tests. We were very satisfied with our results.

"Next is to make the official version isn't it?" Asked James with an excited smile.

"Yeah, and make Christian use the thing during the season. Wether he wants to or not. I'm not letting the guy not ride our baby." I agree with a goofy grin.

"Christian will agree without a doubt. He knows us. He knows we would never do anything to hurt him." Replied my saintly friend, not taking his eyes off our hard work.

"We better get started. I want to make sure this broom knocks the socks off everyone at Hogwarts, then the world." I said, stretching myself to prepare for the process of making the broom.

"But what is its official name be?" Asked a curious Christian.

"It's going to be the brother of Randolph's Firebolt, so we agreed on making it a sort of brand. The name of this beauty is Blackbolt." I say to my friend with an excited smile.

"A fitting name indeed." He nodded in agreement.

We then headed back inside the workshop to create the first ever Blackbolt series broom.