A ruined Hogwarts

"Collapsed."

In the space surrounded by white mist, Owen held the wand in one hand, staring intently at the little nightmare knocked unconscious by the spell with his dark eyes, counting the time in his heart.

A few minutes later, the ghostly illusory creature on the ground moved its thin arms, blinked its red eyes, and then floated up as lightly as a balloon, continuing to float aimlessly in the air.

"About six minutes." Owen thoughtfully put away his wand and slowly sat on the chair. "It seems that this is the current limit. Although the advanced version of the coma spell can target the soul and can penetrate the iron armor spell, Defense, but it doesn’t last long... Well, the recovery speed of the soul is indeed very fast.”

Whether it's a few words in some forbidden books, or Voldemort and Grindelwald's answers to questions and answers, when it comes to the realm of the soul, their views are consistent in one aspect: the soul is a tough but fragile thing, perhaps. Contains the deepest mysteries of the magical world.

The tenacity of souls lies in the fact that they always have unexpectedly strong resistance in the face of various spells. The soul is difficult to be disturbed and injured. Even if it is slightly injured, it will recover quickly, even much faster than the body.

The fragile aspect of souls is that once they are severely damaged, it is often irreversible, and the consequences are much more serious than any physical injury.

Take the three Unforgivable Curses as an example. They may cause irreparable damage to the body, but the damage to the soul is actually insignificant and can be easily recovered. The body dies, but the soul lives on forever.

Owen's improved coma spell obviously also falls into this category. It can put a person's soul into a brief coma, but because of the soul's autonomous recovery power, the duration is much shorter than a normal coma spell.

Only very few soul spells—such as Horcruxes—can cause changes and damage to the soul that are difficult to recover from. This kind of damage truly involves the very foundation of the soul and is almost never recoverable.

After consulting a lot of information, and after a long period of research and experiments, Owen found that with his current ability, there was no way to upgrade the soul attack spell to the level of a Horcrux. The difference between the two is not just in power, but on a more mysterious level, because those spells that cause irreversible damage to the soul are all used on the caster's own soul.

Owen's summary of this is: It is easy to ruin one's own soul, but it is difficult to ruin other people's souls. If the fundamental principle causing this phenomenon cannot be understood, it is basically impossible to make a qualitative change in the power of the soul spell.

The deeper he delved into the mysteries of the soul, the more Owen marveled at its wonders. He increasingly felt that people's souls were like travelers who came to the world. After traveling around the world, they returned to the unknown land of the soul intact and untainted and unharmed by the world.

Human life is like a dream that the soul has outside the world. After death brings life to an end, the free soul is freed from the heavy body and begins another great adventure, or waits for the next dream.

Of course, at present, this is just Owen's beautiful imagination of the afterlife and his romantic expectations for the soul. But with this in mind, he is not so eager to strengthen the power of the soul version of the coma spell. Anyway, the current improvements are enough.

"It should be noted that due to differences in the souls of different individuals, the duration of this spell will also be different..." Owen wrote down the conclusion of the experiment and some thoughts on the soul on the parchment, and then put this research into Temporarily sealed.

Then he took out another piece of information and used the tip of his pen to write and draw on the paper, thinking about improvements to the Iron Armor Curse.

The Iron Armor Curse is the most practical defensive spell. Its two most famous advanced spells are "Super Armor Protection" and "Unified Protection". The super armor protection greatly improves the defense, and the total protection is a range of protection spell that can be used to protect people or buildings.

In Owen's view, there are two best ways to improve the Iron Armor Curse: one is the direction of the soul, so that the Iron Armor Curse can defend against the soul curse, which means it can resist the Unforgivable Curse; the second is to change the Iron Armor Curse from active release to Passive defense is used to deal with sudden dangers.

During the summer vacation, Owen has been studying this curse, and he was very helpless to find that the advancement of the Iron Armor Curse is much more difficult than the Stunning Curse. After all, it is an advanced spell in itself. Because the magic principles involved are relatively complex, the difficulty of improvement increases exponentially, not to mention that the two directions Owen chose have little previous experience to draw from.

For a month, Owen's research progressed slowly. He could only read through various books and materials while struggling to overcome difficulties, and recorded some things that he really couldn't figure out, and planned to ask Grindelwald's cheap teacher after school started.

After deleting, deleting, and correcting on the paper for a long time, Owen waved his wand to experiment, frowned dissatisfied, reached out, balled up the parchment on the table and threw it aside. The paper ball fell on the white ground and dispersed silently into wisps of white mist, blending together with the misty mist on the ground, indistinguishable from each other.

Owen held the back of his head with his hands, leaned on the armchair, squinted and thought for a while, then turned his attention to the worn diary placed on the table, reached out and opened its black hard cover.

"Tom, are you there?" He dipped his quill in ink and wrote on the yellowed page.

After waiting for a while, the handwriting he wrote was still there, not being sucked into the page, and no new handwriting emerged.

"Okay, you're dead again this time." Owen breathed out and put the diary aside.

Well, Schrödinger's Tom, sometimes dead and sometimes alive, has the same problem as the rabbit muse.

During this period of time, Tom seemed to have finally accepted the cruel reality, his mood had stabilized a lot, and he was usually willing to help Owen with suggestions. The two often discuss the problems encountered when improving magic spells.

Although the Tom in the diary does not have the profound knowledge and broad insights of the Dark Lord, and his knowledge reserve may not even be as good as the current Owen, his clever mind is preserved in the diary without fail. When two top students communicate and research together, sparks of inspiration can often come out, which is much more efficient than thinking alone.

Owen didn't care whether Tom really accepted his fate or not. In his own thinking space, he only needed one thought to make everything here turn into white mist again. Tom couldn't change the situation no matter what.

Since Tom is dead now, Owen is too lazy to go out and refresh the status. He kneaded the rabbit boredly for a while, shared a whole bag of vegetables with the rabbit, and then started the next research topic in high spirits.

He first took out a stack of neatly bound parchment, opened it and added a few strokes. The top page of this stack of papers reads: Research on the Existence of Ether.

This was the inspiration he got last year, but because of the difficulty and the delays of messy things, this research has been put on hold. Owen is trying his best to improve it these days. Although it may not necessarily yield results, it is still good as a hobby.

Feeling that his inspiration was exhausted, Owen put down the information and took out a triangular prism-shaped gemstone that shimmered with dark blue light.

This was something he had robbed from an organization suspected of being a thief in order to deal with a minor problem in the bookstore. After using a connection point to copy the gems in, he studied for a long time but still couldn't figure out the use of this thing.

Owen thought about the skull and scepter pattern he saw in the suitcase, and thoughtfully raised his hammer and struck the gem hard. With a bang, the gem remained unchanged, just like when he hit it with some magic spell before, looking beautiful and fragile, but actually very hard.

He lit another small ball of fierce fire, and the purple flame transformed into a vivid little phoenix, which swallowed the gem. After a while, with a "click" sound, the gem cracked into colorless and transparent fragments, and the faintly flickering dark blue light completely disappeared.

"Huh? It seems like it's not naturally formed, but a man-made magic item?" Owen raised his eyebrows in surprise and collected the debris. He used instruments to test it and confirmed that the debris had lost its magical fluctuations and its composition should be diamond.

He wrote down the new findings in his notebook, then returned to the desk, took out a roll of parchment from the drawer, and his eyes suddenly lit up.

He got this from Voldemort when he was in first grade. It records Voldemort's flying magic. He didn't have the ability to master this spell before, but now his level of dark magic is almost adequate.

Although flying into black mist looks a bit evil, compared to its practicality, this shortcoming is nothing at all. This flying spell is much faster than Owen's flying with the Black Magic Guard. The body transformed into black mist can pass through small gaps, and is also immune to many magic attacks.

Owen opened the parchment with gleaming eyes. He felt that this spell suited him very well. Well, Voldemort is a really good guy.

After taking some time to memorize the contents on the parchment, Owen held his chin and thought for a moment, then said to himself: "Although it is very complicated and some places are not easy to understand, it is not a problem to learn it step by step. It just takes more time…”

"Well, time." He pursed his lips and murmured softly, "There is always not enough time. Maybe the time turner can bring me a little surprise."

"In that case, I have to brew a batch of energy-restoring potion in advance. The vitality potion should be enough..." Owen put away the parchment and closed his eyes slightly.

When he opened his eyes, he saw a familiar room in front of him. He was lying on a lounge chair in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, his body being heated by the afternoon sun.

Owen squinted his eyes and stretched, his dark eyes like warm black pearls in the sunlight. Melete lay on his belly, her head resting on his chest and fell asleep, purring reassuringly.

Nyx stood on the railing of the balcony, her gorgeous black feathers shining brilliantly in the sun. It flapped its wings with increasingly plump feathers, turned its head and looked at Owen with its ruby ​​eyes, then kicked its black paws on the railing and flew out lightly.

Owen watched the black phoenix flapping its wings hard in mid-air. After gliding for several hundred meters in the cloudless sky, it fluttered wildly and plunged into the rose bushes.

"Pfft." Owen couldn't help but laugh, waking up the catnives in him.

"Meow-" Melete called softly, yawned widely, flapped her big ears a few times like cattail fans, and then slowly licked her paws.

"Yawn...it's such a nice day." Owen also yawned and sat up from the recliner.

He glanced at himself reflected in the mirror next to him. His silky black hair was not messy, and his pale cheeks were almost transparent in the sunlight. Looking at his tanned complexion, he curled his lips in dissatisfaction.

He carried Melete out of the room, walked through the corridor with gorgeous carpets under the silent gaze of the portraits hanging on the walls on both sides, entered his laboratory, and spent the rest of the day brewing several pots of vitality potions. .

When the afterglow of the setting sun dyed the sky red, Owen walked out of the laboratory and walked down the stairs to the living room downstairs.

On the escalator from the second floor to the first floor, he suddenly missed his footing, and the wooden steps below crackled into a smooth slope, and oozed slippery oil. The carpet at the bottom of the slope was rolled aside, revealing a large, flat net.

Owen's body leaned to the side, but the expression on his face was extremely calm. He calmly reached out and grabbed the handrail of the stairs. He twisted his waist and jumped up from the ground like a big flexible cat. He sat on the edge of the handrail and slid down.

When he was about to slide to the corner, he supported his body with his arms, turned over lightly and nimbly and sat on the handrail behind the corner, and slid leisurely to the first floor.

Melete, who was following him, was in bad luck. The moment the stairs turned into a slide, Mao Lizi was so frightened that he jumped up and turned around to run upstairs. However, the oiled ground was extremely slippery, and Maoluzi's four legs ran out of the afterimage, but he still couldn't stop his body from sliding downwards. Finally, he rolled onto the big net and was hung up high.

"Meow--" Melete scratched her paws feebly and cried out sadly and indignantly.

Owen stepped firmly on the floor and said helplessly to his father who was hiding behind the corner, "Dad, what are you doing?"

Mr. Shafik pretended to be nonchalant, coughed slightly and said, "Oh, I was just going to come over and remind you that the magic in the house has been a little out of control recently..." He glanced at the man hanging in mid-air. Mao Lizi, as if he had just seen it, said with a surprised look on his face: "What are you playing at?"

Owen couldn't help but roll his eyes at his exaggerated father, waved his wand to free Melete, and held her in his arms for comfort. Mr. Shafiq chanted a spell to restore the stairs to their original state, and then said very naturally: "It's time to have dinner."

Melet was lying in Owen's arms, squinting her golden cat eyes and glaring hard at Mr. Shafiq, secretly showing her sharp claws. Well, I decided to scratch this guy's precious oil painting into a thousand pieces another day!

"Good idea." Owen pinched her ears knowingly and walked towards the restaurant with a smile. Mr. Shafiq followed him with his hands behind his back and a smile on his face.

The door to the restaurant was closed. Owen suddenly quickened his pace and ran over to open the door. He hid behind the door panel with extremely smooth movements.

With a "whoosh" sound, a bunch of sparks shot out from the restaurant. In the blink of an eye, they rushed to Mr. Shafiq before he could react. They rushed out of the window with him and went up to the sky, turning into fireworks in the sky. .

"Ah ah ah -" Mr. Shafiq's cry dragged on for a long time.

Mrs. Shafik walked out of the restaurant with a funny look on her face and stood side by side with Owen behind the window. The two of them looked up at the fireworks outside the window in unison.

The fireworks carried the figure and ran rampantly in the sky, scurrying everywhere, and it took a while before it landed lightly on the grass. Mr. Shafiq stood there dazedly for a while, then came back with a smile and his hands behind his back, and said with some unfinished content: "Hey, this fireworks is quite fun."

"How did you find out, Owen?" he asked again, squinting.

"It's so obvious, Dad, when did the dining room door ever close during dinner?" Owen suppressed a laugh and shook his head. Since the last prank education failed, Mr. Shafiq began to design various traps for him without belief, and this has become almost a daily routine.

"I see." Mr. Shafiq nodded, putting his fist to his chin in thought. Although Irving was never tricked once, and at most he caught a cat or a bird, he was inspired to refuse to admit defeat.

When things have reached this point, education is no longer important, the main thing is to win.

Mrs. Shafiq stood aside gracefully, looking at the two naive and competing guys, one big and one small, with a calm and gentle smile on her lips, with a bit of expectation and indulgence as if watching a show.

After dinner, the family took a walk on the green grass outside, then sat on a bench in front of the fountain, smelling the fragrance of flowers brought by the breeze.

The snow-white owl Hedwig flew over in the night, dropped a letter into Owen's hand, and then flew to the fountain to clean her feathers.

Owen opened the letter and listened to the conversation between Shafiq and his wife:

"...Dumbledore is a qualified politician. Fudge has been trying to reduce his influence, but Dumbledore relied on the Sirius Black incident to directly put his hands into the Ministry of Magic. Recently he is taking the lead in setting up a magical Research department, hey, maybe it will become the Magic Research Department in the future..."

"...They need to transfer some people from the Department of Mysteries and recruit a lot of researchers. They also plan to start a special newspaper, the Daily Magic News or something... This is a good thing, but to be honest, I think I don’t quite understand what he wants to do…”

After listening to Mr. Shafiq's words, Owen opened the letter in his hand thoughtfully and looked at it.

“Dear Owen, I hope you are doing well.

"My life was much better during this period, because Sirius came to visit. When the Dursleys knew that I had a godfather who was sentenced for murder and released from prison, they were less afraid to treat me. I spoke up. You know, I didn't tell them that Sirius was wrongfully accused.

"Sirius found a house to live by himself, and I would stay with him for two days from time to time. He plans to hold a birthday party for me, which will start at seven o'clock this Wednesday night. I wonder if you have time to attend?

"The location is at 12 Grimmauld Place. I really hope you can come over. You are also welcome to bring your family and friends with you. Harry"

Owen thought for a while, wrote a reply and gave it to Hedwig, watching the owl fly into the endless night sky.

My hand was injured before and it hurt whenever I moved it, but now it's almost healed. I will try to make more in the past few days, hoping to make up for it...