The twins' disastrous attempt at cultivating the Dragonblood Ink left more than just the bitter echo of wasted Galleons in the dormitory. The air itself carried a scent of scorched material and warning.
Alan's fingers brushed against a charred shard of a bottle. The texture reminded him that any creation lacking absolute rigor is, at its core, a gamble. And he never gambled.
His gaze finally fell on a slightly rough oak tablet on his desk—"Guardian 1.0."
A name that sounded weighty, yet its core was laughably fragile. It had successfully blocked Peeves' water balloon, but that was more luck than certainty. Bundling a complete Protego spell with a passive rune was like connecting a landmine's fuse to a doorbell—it might ring, or it might explode.
Unstable. Old-fashioned. Foolish.
Deep in his mind's palace, the chapters on mental energy construction from The Fortress of Thought had been deconstructed and reconstructed countless times. Knowledge was no longer flat text; it was a three-dimensional, manipulable structure.
It was time.
He needed a true upgrade—a thorough overhaul at the logical source. What he would create was no longer a simple charm. It would be a programmable, miniature defense system.
For the entire weekend, Alan isolated himself completely. Dorm windows and doors were tightly shut, curtains drawn, as if to block all light and sound from the outside, preserving the purity of his mental palace.
In his mental world, a basic Protego floated in its purest magical form. It was no longer a vague, holistic spell, but a precision instrument woven from countless silver threads.
Alan's will became an invisible scalpel, beginning a meticulous process of reverse engineering.
He first stripped away its perception layer—the initial magical fluctuations that react to external threats before the spell activates. Alan captured, magnified, and analyzed it. Using a highly complex Intent Rune as the core, he rewrote this logic. Its function was refined to the extreme, leaving only one task: within one-hundredth of a second, detect any hostile magical structures directed at the wearer.
This was the Trigger Module—a highly sensitive neural endpoint.
Next came the Energy Core.
The original Protego drew power directly from the wizard's instantaneous output—crude and wasteful. Alan's design was far more sophisticated. He constructed an array of twelve micro-runes, interlinked to form a dynamic, self-regulating mana pool.
This array could slowly absorb ambient, unclaimed magical energy, compress and purify it, and store it in the nodes of the rune array.
Once the Trigger Module activated, the micro-mana pool would release the accumulated energy through Alan's optimized pathways in a thousandth of a second, like a high-pressure pump delivering precise, controlled bursts.
This was the Energy Supply Module—the powerful heart of the system.
Finally, the Execution Module.
Alan extracted the portion of the original spell responsible for generating the shield. He eliminated all redundant energy conversion processes, keeping only the pure form-generation function. It no longer needed to think—only to faithfully execute commands, converting received energy into a micro-Protego of specified shape and strength.
This was the Shield Generation Module—a sharp and obedient weapon.
Three independent modules, one entirely new magical program.
Alan opened his eyes. Streams of silver data gradually disappeared from the depths of his vision. He picked up a new oak tablet—denser and finer-grained than any before. He opened a vial of specially prepared Dragonblood Ink, the liquid shimmering with golden veins in the lamplight.
His quill touched the surface carefully, yet with absolute confidence.
In a way incomprehensible to ordinary wizards, he engraved the three modules' rune arrays onto the small tablet, layered, hollowed, and interwoven.
"Guardian 2.0" was born.
To obtain accurate feedback, Alan invited the Weasley twins and Lee Jordan into the dormitory.
"Product testing?"
Fred curiously picked up the seemingly ordinary wooden tablet. It felt far heavier than expected, its smooth surface revealing faint traces of ink flowing deep within the grain.
"Ready?"
Alan gave no further explanation, placing the tablet neatly on his bedside table.
"Start with the simplest test: physical attacks."
George grinned and grabbed a soft pillow from nearby.
"Watch my full-power strike!"
He shouted, swinging his arm with all his might.
Just as the pillow was about to hit the tablet—
A low hum…
A faint sound, like the pluck of a string.
A pale blue, palm-sized, semi-transparent shield appeared out of nowhere in front of the wooden tablet, completely unannounced. Its surface shimmered with an extremely faint, hexagonal grid pattern, precisely intercepting the impact of the pillow.
The soft pillow was lightly deflected and fell to the floor.
"Success!" Lee Jordan let out a suppressed cheer, his eyes wide with amazement.
"Don't get ahead of yourselves. This is only the first step."
Alan's expression remained completely unchanged as he gestured for them to continue.
"Fred, try a Disarming Charm."
Fred's joking expression vanished. He raised his wand, pointing it at the calm wooden tablet.
"Expelliarmus!"
A blinding red light tore through the dormitory air.
Almost simultaneously, the pale blue shield reappeared. But this time, it didn't merely stand rigidly. The surface tilted at an almost imperceptible angle, calculated with incredible precision.
The red Disarming Charm struck the shield, but there was no violent collision, no explosive energy. It was as if it hit a slick, oiled surface at the perfect angle and was effortlessly deflected.
"Bang!"
The spell hit the wall, leaving a shallow scorch mark.
Fred's mouth formed an "O."
"…It… reflected it?"
"Not reflected," Alan's voice was calm, like stating a physical law. "The Energy Supply Module instantly analyzed the spell's magical structure and calculated that deflecting it would consume far less energy than blocking it rigidly. It automatically chose the optimal solution."
The twins and Lee Jordan exchanged glances, completely awed by the "intelligence" displayed by this small wooden tablet. This was no longer magic—it was practically a living entity.
"Let me try something stronger!"
Lee Jordan, now fully fired up, raised his wand, face alight with excitement.
"Stupefy!" This spell's structure was far more complex than Expelliarmus.
A thick, furious red beam shot toward the tablet with a whistling roar.
The shield appeared as expected.
But the moment the red beam touched it, something went wrong.
Sizzle…
The runes on the wooden tablet erupted with a blinding flash, accompanied by a shrill, electric-overload-like screech. The pale blue shield flickered violently twice, and the hexagonal grid shattered in an instant.
Bang!
The shield completely disintegrated into a cloud of sparkling fragments.
Then, to the three onlookers' horror, the high-density oak tablet Alan had painstakingly prepared cracked right down the middle.
A sharp, heartbreaking snap.
Lee Jordan's Stupefy, now unimpeded, slammed into the innocent bedside table, shattering it into a pile of burning debris.
The dormitory was a mess.
Despite this catastrophic failure, Alan showed no hint of frustration. Calmly, he walked forward, ignoring the still-smoking wreckage, and picked up the two broken halves of the wooden tablet.
The break revealed a charred black section, emitting a faint burnt smell.
His gaze swept over the destroyed rune nodes. In his mind's palace, all the data from that instant replayed, analyzed, and modeled at terrifying speed.
He understood.
"The magical structure of Stupefy is too complex. When my Energy Supply Module tried to analyze it and calculate the optimal defense, the data load instantly exceeded the carrying capacity of the rune array."
His voice was terrifyingly calm.
"The data flow overload literally burned out the runes serving as the hardware."
He reached a conclusion, even sounding almost satisfied.
"My software is advanced enough. But the hardware—the ordinary oak itself—couldn't keep up."
He lifted his head. In his deep eyes reflected the two charred wooden halves, and a new, more formidable goal had already taken shape.
"I need… a material capable of carrying far greater computational loads."
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