Chapter 184 - 184 Stories Drowned in History
Chapter 184: Chapter 184 Stories Drowned in History
With that forbidden spell on his mind, Harry slowly reached out and raised his wand.
He thought of Professor Dracula's demonstration in the open class on Defense Against the Dark Arts, and the image of the large rat that had lost all breath of life in an instant came to his eyes.
He also thought of the time he had spent with Tom Riddle when he was still writing in the form of a journal, and how the words on the pages of the journal had tantalized him, trying to get him to let go of the shackles in his heart and take up the path of dark magic.
Harry's lip trembled as he watched the grayish-white fire dragon that raced before him, the spell almost welling up to his lips but swallowed.
He remembered what Professor Dracula had told him once when he first found Riddle's journals--
Riddle had always wanted Harry to learn the Dark Arts, especially the worst of the Unforgivable Spells, because they would affect Harry's emotions to a great extent, and would also change his mental state and psyche in no small way.
Once Harry actually uses the Unforgivable Spell for the first time, he slowly realizes the goodness of this black magic that violates the rules of the Ministry of Magic.
Gradually, he would become dependent on it, and slowly become forbidden to do anything, never able to get out of the vortex of black magic ...
Finally, Harry gritted his teeth, and the incantation on his lips changed the moment it came out of his mouth-
"Except your weapon (Expelliarmus)!"
He shouted.
Attacking a stony fire dragon covered in scales with a disarming spell that didn't have any lethality or much aggressiveness certainly seemed a bit comical and ridiculous.
But it was as if a voice in Harry's mind was telling him to do so, as if he knew that he would be able to repel this fire dragon just as well without a dangerous Sobriety spell.
And so he did, without a care in the world, and recited the incantation for the Surrender Spell.
The next moment, a blinding red light erupted from the tip of Harry's wand, striking the dragon's grayish-white scales just before its fangs touched him.
"With a loud bang, the dragon seemed to be hit hard, and its brutal eyes became stunned and unbelievable before it flew backwards like an arrow off a string and landed heavily on the ground in front of the palace.
Seeing this, Rolf flew to the fire dragon's front and pressed his wand against its most vulnerable eye, and a spell to undo the transfiguration was quickly recited from his mouth.
And the fire dragon was knocked out by Harry's disarming spell and didn't slow down for a long time, so the spell made by Rolf, who grabbed the opportunity, struck a vulnerable eye hard, and was no longer blocked out by its hard skin.
Under the effect of the spell that undid the deformation, the huge fire dragon immediately changed its appearance - the
The pair of wings on its back retracted, and the four sharp claws on the lower part of its abdomen retracted into its body; at the same time, its entire abdomen thinned and elongated, gradually taking on the same thickness as its tail behind it.
The fire dragon once again changed back into the appearance of a giant snake.
"Sure enough, it's a fusion of morphing magic, fortunately the bet was right ... " Seeing the change in the fire dragon's body, Rolf heaved a sigh of relief.
He then urgently turned his head to look at Harry, "Hurry up, Harry! I don't know if it's going to change into another form again, get it back while it's still in snake form!"
Harry nodded, switching his language to the old snake accent and opening his mouth to make a 'hissing' sound:
"Go back to where you were and don't come back down!"
The serpent's green glowing eyes twitched for a moment, as if it had thought for a moment.
Then, its long body swung up and slithered on the ground, climbing up another stone pillar in front of the palace gate and wrapping itself tightly around it.
Eventually, it returned to its original position, and the green light in the snake's child quietly went out.
The entire stone pillar was transformed into the most plain appearance, and the huge snake entwined around it seemed to be merely a floating wither, without any danger ...
"We ... succeeded?" Harry looked incredulously at the wand in his hand, still somewhat dreamlike.
"Yes, we did it!" Rolf jumped up, exclaimed excitedly, and threw an arm around Harry's shoulders, "By the way Harry, I didn't hear the spell just now, what was that spell where you repelled the fire dragon? Teach me, that was awesome too!"
"Eh ... I don't know how to explain it," Harry glanced at Rolf's excited expression, somewhat unable to disturb his enthusiasm, "Anyway, ahem . . it's actually purely just a disarming spell."
He smiled awkwardly at Rolf with an innocent expression.
Rolf's excited expression immediately froze on his face.
"So that really was a Disarming Spell incantation?" He stared incredulously, "I just thought I heard it wrong, I really didn't expect that it was actually a Disarming Spell ..."
"Harry, you're probably the first wizard who can think of a Disarming Spell as a highly lethal black magic spell." Rolf patted Harry's shoulder and said meaningfully.
At that moment, Ginny also came over and examined Harry's whole body up and down, fearing that he would be harmed by the risky move he had just made to save himself from the mouth of the fire dragon.
"What you just did was so dangerous Harry, you didn't have to do it." She sobbed with red eyes, "You're the savior of the wizarding world, if anything were to happen to you to save me, then I wouldn't be able to afford to do that for the rest of my life ..."
"Ginny, the reason why you worship me is not because I'm a savior, but because of my kind of character. Isn't that what you told me?" He smiled, "Don't worry, I'll be fine, don't worry about me."
Ginny then averted her gaze from Harry, but her eyes were still red and a fleck of color was on her face.
"Alright, you two don't get all mushy here ...," Rolf said, a bit unable to watch the two's mushy behavior, and voiced a reminder from the side, "Let's just go in first and find out where Luna is. "
"She's been stuck here all day by herself and I don't know how she's doing now."
Harry and Ginny blushed slightly and nodded, and the three of them walked through the palace's doors together.
After the fierce battle just now, the three young wizards were all disheveled and dirty, but their eyes were bright, striding confidently with high fighting spirit high on their faces.
...
"Aren't you letting off a little too much steam, Dumbledore?"
In a room in Dracula's castle, Dracula looked at the Hogwarts deed parchment taped to the wall from across the room, and looked at Dumbledore with a slightly irritated expression.
He felt that this good show should have gone on for a while longer, and now it was over a little too soon to be enjoyable to watch.
"That's not the way to put it, Professor Dracula?" Dumbledore said with a smirk, "Don't you slander me, I've been doing my best to contribute to this good show!"
"Is it hard for you to tell me that a great wizard, a former professor of Transfiguration at Hogwarts, and the top of the wizarding world, that your Transfiguration is capable of being this bad?" Dracula gritted his teeth.
"First, it was sent flying by a second year wizard with a disarming spell, and then another second year wizard disarmed the Transfiguration spell on it! If this is the level you're at, then the future of the magical world is afraid to have a gray future."
Dracula stared into Dumbledore's eyes wistfully.
"You have truly misunderstood me this time, Professor Dracula." Dumbledore said innocently, "I would have thought that facing two second year and one first year wizards, a Transfiguration of this intensity would have been quite a challenge for them."
"But I didn't expect that either, and these two little guys really gave me quite a surprise."
He smiled and stroked his waist-length white beard, unable to hide the smile in his eyes, clearly very satisfied with the little wizards' performance.
"Was it really a surprise?" Dracula bristled and snickered, "Seeing as how you were the most nervous when Potter stepped in front of Weasley just now, I can see you wanting to stop that snake-turned-fire-dragon at any moment."
"And you should have seen it too, right? Potter was going to use the Sorcery spell ... He has a fragment of Voldemort's soul inside of him, so I'm guessing he wouldn't have been able to use the Sorcery spell any worse than he did, and probably would have been able to take care of that fire dragon you turned without you having to put a stop to it."
Dracula gave Dumbledore an interested look, teasingly flirting with the idea that
"Can't wait to see what kind of behavior you're going to put on if he does use the Unforgivable Spell because of the pressure you put on him, and therefore becomes obsessed with black magic and ends up going down Voldemort's old path of learning black magic?"
"I won't let that happen." Dumbledore's expression also became serious, "At that time, when Tom embarked on the path of studying black magic, there was actually my responsibility for not guiding him well in it."
"So I have also learned some lessons and will pay good attention to Harry's mental health development. If he really has the tendency to study black magic, I will personally pull him back!" He said.
"Now it seems like Potter shouldn't have much use for getting all that dark magic either." Dracula quirked the corners of his mouth slightly, "Although the Disarming Spell he temporarily casts does have a somewhat unorthodox look to it, the attack power really isn't inferior to normal black magic anymore."
"That's really interesting, I'm considering training him in this area in the next school year's black magic defense class, maybe we can create a brand new school of disarming!"
"I'll leave it to you then, Professor Dracula." Dumbledore smiled gently.
Both of their eyes simultaneously went to the image shown on the deed parchment, the three young wizards had managed to walk inside the palace of the relic that was Slytherin ...
Harry was the first to step onto the tiles of the interior of the palace.
He raised his wand in his hand and looked around warily under the light of the wand lighting spell, only to be slightly relieved to see nothing but emptiness and no danger around him.
Rolf and Ginny also stepped into the middle of the palace and curiously looked around.
Unlike the luxury, atmosphere, and grandeur they had imagined, the former golden and magnificent palace had actually long since become dilapidated under the erosion of a thousand years of time.
The dome was pierced through and the moonlight leaked down, the illumination spell and the dark glow of the moonlight clearly reflected the fine dust floating in the air. Looking around, I saw dense spider silks covering the corners, and patches of peeling wall paint remained on the interior walls.
When the cold wind blew, the cobwebs between the tattered walls fluttered with the wind, and occasionally you could see broken stones and rubble scattered on the ground, a desolate and miserable scene.
Time is the most merciless, nothing in this world can defeat time.
All the glory, splendor, humiliation, and sadness ... are all integrated into the vicissitudes. Time will erase everything, even as powerful as the four giants of the great sorcerer can not escape the wash of time and baptism, and ultimately dissipated in the long river of history.
Dracula is accustomed to seeing the passage of time and the demise of friends, this is a very deep feeling, so later he has no interest in life, can only look around for interesting things to pass the endless time.
At this time, however, the three young wizards inside the palace of the Slytherin ruins were still too young to feel anything about this tragic scene.
They first felt that the situation inside was too different from what they had imagined, and then they quickly lost interest and devoted themselves to finding Luna.
In fact, Luna's hiding wasn't that deep, Harry, Rolf and Ginny bypassed the main hall and found Luna's figure after just two or three rooms inside the side hall -
Next to a side wall, an oil lamp was placed on a small stone platform, a small witch sitting on a small stone next to the platform, holding a copy of "Singing Counterpoints" upside down, through the light of the oil lamp excitedly "reading".
The little witch had disheveled, waist-length, dirty blonde hair, her eyebrows were tantalizingly pale, and she had a pair of darting, bulging gray eyes hidden under a pair of strange glasses made of two colored pentagrams.
She wore a fuzzy bunny slipper on one foot, while the other foot was bare and dangled over the side of the stone platform with a flop.
Upon seeing the figures of Harry, Rolf and Ginny enter from the main hall, she looked up happily and greeted them warmly:
"Rolf, Harry, and Ginny, you're here?"
"Ah, er ... right, we're here." The words Rolf had been brewing for half a day, wanting to be the first to appease Luna's emotions once he found her, choked in his throat, and in the end, he only managed to hold back such a sentence.
Harry and Ginny also looked at Luna with strange expressions.
Luna felt too settled and laid back and relaxed, it felt like the kind of feeling she got when she stayed home nicely and the three of them came over to visit and hadn't brought any presents yet.
"Luna, have you been staying here since last night?" Ginny hesitated, but decided to ask.
"I sneakily butchered out after curfew last night, and it took me quite a while to find this place." Luna cocked her head and thought for a moment, "Not last night, I think I've been here since almost this morning."
"You really weren't mistreated in any way, or taken captive here by anyone, Luna?" Harry asked from beside him, "And don't you feel hungry after being here all day without eating?"
"There's no one else oh I came here by myself!" Luna said with a flutter, "And I've stocked up on snacks ahead of time that I haven't fed the animals, there's enough of those to last me for days."
She patted a small satchel she was carrying on her side.
"But ... how did you find such a hidden relic?" At this point, Rolf couldn't help but ask, "How did you find a relic so hastily that Hogwarts hadn't found in so many generations?"
He really didn't want to believe that such a normally out-of-tune little witch like Luna had just taken a few random steps in the Forbidden Forest, and had accurately discovered the way to enter the Labyrinth Magical Formation, and had come unharmed to the interior of this palace that they had fought desperately for half a day to get into.
"Because someone taught me to come here!" Luna said rightfully, "Ever since I entered the Forbidden Forest, there's been a voice in my ears guiding me to a direction, and making me jump and enter this place according to his method!"
"That's because an unknown voice told you to go that way, and you went that way?" Rolf glared at her with a heartfelt season, "If we run into some unsuspecting dark wizard, he'll sell you out and we won't even know it."
"It won't happen, I can tell he's not malicious." Luna tossed her hair, still smiling, "And I always thought the voice sounded a bit like Professor Dracula's."
"I'm guessing you might be hallucinating, Luna." Harry shook his head, "How could Professor Dracula be in the Forbidden Forest when he's taken all the professors to a potluck?"
"But I really think it sounded like Professor Dracula." Luna's eyes darted around, "Even though the timbre, tone, and inflection are nothing like it, I just feel like Professor Dracula's voice."
Harry opened his mouth to speak, but Ginny tugged on his sleeve behind his back, interrupting his thoughts of continuing the argument.
"Come on Harry, there's no point in arguing with Luna, you can't be stubborn with her." Ginny said, "It's good that we were able to find Luna, we should get back now, we'll be fighting Mr. Filch again later."
"Ginny, you seem to be forgetting that Mr. Filch is going to Professor Dracula's potluck tonight as well, we don't need to avoid him tonight." Rolf chuckled, "But it does seem to be getting a little late, so it's time to head back."
"Come with us, Luna?"
Luna nodded pleasantly and put away the sing-song anthem in her hand.
Together, the four young wizards walked out of the palace's gates and left the ruins of what Slytherin had once built from the location of the massive tree trunk.
But what a few of them didn't know was that two others had seamlessly arrived in the midst of the palace after they had gone-
"Miss Lovegood is quite clever." Dumbledore laughed softly.
He took out a silver lighter and pressed the button on it with a click.
A bright ball of light rose from the lighter high into the sky above the palace, illuminating the entire palace with a bright light that was countless times more effective than a wand lighting spell.
"Yes, Miss Lovegood is indeed a magical little witch." Dracula glanced at the light extinguisher in Dumbledore's hand and nodded approvingly, "I thought I had disguised myself well enough, but I didn't realize that she could still associate me with it on a gut level."
"Speaking of which, it's the first time I've ever known that Slytherin actually built such a spectacular palace around Hogwarts after his split from the other three founders." Dumbledore tsked and surveyed the surroundings, "That's a lot of work, and I'm surprised the other three founders didn't notice?"
"Yes, at that time, Saracha's magical attainments were actually already vaguely above the other three founders by a thread." Dracula sighed deeply and his tone became silent.
"Oh? Is there some more to this story that I don't know?" Dumbledore asked.
"Yes, if you want to hear it."