Chapter 285: Battle Strategies for Nature Magic
Evans stared at the spot his finger rested on and felt a jolt of shock.
The map in his hands wasn't an ordinary Muggle world map. It was a gift from Senior Newt when he graduated.
Newt had drawn it himself during his travels around the world, a magical map marking every magical creature habitat he had discovered and highlighting the regions he considered especially dangerous.
If the Dark Wizard King's description was accurate, then the place she meant was that stretch of ocean known as the most dangerous prison in the wizarding world.
Unlike Azkaban, the Sea of Wraiths was not a region the Norwegian Ministry could truly control. It was less a prison and more a dumping ground.
The so‑called Sea of Wraiths prison was, in reality, a colossal Undetectable Extension Box rammed into the seabed by countless wizards. Inside, it was divided into innumerable special compartments, with just enough food and water to barely sustain life.
Crucially, the extended space did nothing to block the aura of the dead. Powerful wraiths could drift in and out of it at will. The only thing they could not enter was the specially structured prison cells themselves.
It was not hard to imagine what life was like for the wizards locked inside.
Getting out of the Sea of Wraiths was, frankly, a nightmare‑tier challenge.
Prisoners destined for the Sea were first taken through a special checkpoint and sent into the cell complex via a dedicated Floo link.
Once the transfer was complete, that stretch of the Floo Network was dismantled. The fireplaces inside lost all connection to the outside.
From then on, the prisoners spent the rest of their lives surrounded by an endless tide of malice and terror.
Since the Sea of Wraiths had been turned into a prison, Evans had never once heard of anyone making it back out.
He set the map down in front of the Dark Wizard King and had her confirm the marked location. After she nodded, he lowered his head again, thinking for a while before saying:
"After Christmas, I have something to take care of in the Forbidden Forest. If that goes smoothly, I should be able to spare a few days."
The Sea of Wraiths was extremely dangerous, but if the person they wanted wasn't actually locked inside the prison complex, searching the waters around it shouldn't be too suicidal.
There was, however, one more point worth mentioning.
"That sea is enormous," he went on. "And the danger level is very high. Are you sure you'll be able to find Merlin there?"
He had his doubts. In his sixth‑year holidays, he had travelled near the Sea of Wraiths. He knew first‑hand how lethal the place was. Back then, he had merely pushed a little too close and immediately attracted the notice of dozens of wraiths. If he hadn't already been very confident in his Flashing, able to slip away in an instant, he'd have lost half his life on the spot.
He was far stronger now than he'd been then. But that endless sea of murderous spirits was still nothing to take lightly.
Hunting for someone who had maxed out every stealth skill imaginable in a place like that did not sound promising.
"We have to try." She brushed a lock of hair back from her face and glanced towards Merlin's fragment, a look in her eyes that was part fury, part bitter grievance.
"After all, he owes me far too much. I intend to take it back."
By the time they returned to Hogwarts, it was nearly midnight. Evans parted from Sothia by the Black Lake, thanked the Sprite King for its help, and sent Dobby back to the kitchens before heading alone to the Magical Creatures Hut.
Thanks to her day‑two leave of absence, Sothia would have to cram two lessons' worth of content into one period tomorrow. Combined with the Hogwarts students' painfully shallow combat skills, her workload for the coming term would be crushing.
Whipping this lot into battle‑ready witches and wizards who could handle danger alone, in just six months, was anything but easy.
She could, if she wanted, simply coast—explain some basic tactics for dealing with dark creatures, arrange the occasional practical session, and still surpass ninety‑nine per cent of recent Defence Against the Dark Arts professors.
But Sothia was not the type to coast. If she could do something, she wanted to do it properly.
Evans shook his head, pushed open the hut door, and went into the back room. He scooped Nana off the bed, where she had spread herself out like a Niffler pancake, and sat down with her in his arms. Then he laid out parchment and a quill on the desk and began sorting through everything he had learned that day.
Dragged from sleep, Nana gave a disgruntled little grumble, then flopped across his lap and relaxed into a Niffler pancake again, drifting straight back into dreams.
"Nature magic…"
Rolling the term over in his mind, Evans brushed his fingers lightly along the quill. The supposedly dead feather lifted, rose into the air, and settled point‑down over the parchment. Slowly, it began to write out the thoughts forming in his head.
It moved clumsily, and the writing was childish, but there was no question: it was moving under its own power, writing while simultaneously absorbing the information about nature magic that Evans fed into it.
This was the simplest application of nature magic: granting a dead object a faint spark of life, enough to make it follow the caster's will.
Even this basic use, however, costs several times more mental strength than an ordinary spell. Worse, once cast, it required a constant trickle of attention to sustain that life. The moment you stopped feeding it, the quill went back to being nothing more than a feather.
Evans spared a sliver of his mind to keep the quill going as it recorded the day's lessons, and with the rest, he began weighing how to weave his new knowledge together.
Thanks to Merlin's explanations, he now had a clear conceptual framework for nature magic. But understanding the theory and putting it to work were two very different things.
Take the quill, for example. "Giving life" sounded impressive, but if other branches of magic could achieve the same effect more efficiently, then nature magic was just a parlour trick.
Hogwarts had those roaming, self‑playing orchestras in the corridors. The spells used to animate them produced a similar effect, and once the magic was anchored in the instruments, they needed no further mental input.
Give them sheet music, and they would play whatever the notes demanded.
Then there was Rita Skeeter's quill. That feather not only wrote on its own; it delightfully twisted and embroidered every word, slandering its subject in the process.
Set against that, nature magic had no advantages at all.
So how was he supposed to make it truly useful?
He thought for a long time. By the time the quill had finished taking down everything he had learned, an idea finally sparked behind his eyes.
He still hadn't worked out where the other aspects of nature magic shone, but when it came to nature mimicry, he suddenly had a solid combat approach in mind.
It would need polishing, of course.
He snuffed the life out of the quill with a thought, then picked it up, set the tip to fresh parchment, and began sketching and writing, line after line, working the idea into shape.