Dumbledore's announcement didn't just change the curriculum; it ignited the school.
The lethargy of the approaching winter vanished. The Hogwarts grounds, usually deserted as students huddled by the common room fires, became the epicenter of activity. From dawn until curfew, the sky above the Quidditch pitch was a swarm of motion.
A permanent queue formed at the entrance to the Gauntlet. Students from every House and year stood in the freezing wind, clutching their brooms, eyes fixed on the shimmering Hall of Records. They watched with bated breath as riders launched themselves into the Velocity Rings, only to be spat out moments later, spinning out of control or knocked off course by the shifting winds.
The Gauntlet was brutal. It didn't care about blood status or family name. It cared about physics and reaction time.
Day after day, the Hall of Records remained stubbornly, mockingly empty. To qualify for the board, a rider had to complete the course without crashing or bypassing obstacles. So far, the Gauntlet had a 100% victory rate against the student body.
The Ice Tunnel claimed victims by the dozen, and the Nebulus fog bank left fourth-years flying in circles until they had to be rescued by Madam Hooch.
Alister watched it all with cold satisfaction. He had raised the standard of the entire school. Weakness was being burned away by the necessity of skill.
________________________________________
While the school obsessed over flying, Alister continued his own relentless grind. He spent his free periods hovering in the offices of Professor McGonagall and Professor Flitwick.
The dynamic had shifted. It was no longer strictly teacher and student.
"Mr. Potter," Flitwick squeaked one afternoon, looking at a diagram Alister had drawn regarding charm-layering on the cloud rings. "This varying frequency... if we applied this to the Shield Charms around the castle...?"
"It would reduce energy consumption by forty percent," Alister replied, sipping tea. "And make the wards harder to break, as the frequency would be constantly shifting."
Flitwick stared at him, his quill hovering over parchment. The professor was taking notes. Alister's intuitive grasp of magical engineering—fueled by the System and his otherworldly perspective—was providing insights that seasoned masters hadn't considered.
McGonagall was much the same. She had stopped questioning his methods and started analyzing his results. They didn't mention the chaos outside or the obsession gripping the school. To them, Alister was a fellow researcher, a prodigy pushing the boundaries of their fields.
But the most surprising reaction came from the dungeons.
Alister continued his detentions and his extra credit work in Potions. He walked into the classroom expecting an interrogation. Surely Snape, who hated fame and arrogance above all else, would flay him alive for building a giant monument to his own flying skills? Surely he would mock the "Aviator's Cup" as another Potter vanity project?
But Snape said nothing.
He moved through the shadows of his dungeon, his black robes rustling softly. He would pause near Alister's workstation, his black eyes boring into the boy's profile. He would watch Alister chop roots with mechanical precision, watch him weigh ingredients with a steady hand.
There were no sneers. No biting comments about "celebrity flying courses."
Snape simply watched, Alister noted the silence and accepted it. If the viper wasn't striking, he wouldn't poke it.
______________________________________
The morning of December 20th brought a silence, Alister opened his eyes, and for the first time in months, there was no rhythmic breathing from the other bed.
He sat up and looked across the room. The bed usually occupied by Enzo Nott was stripped bare, his trunk gone. The holidays had officially begun. The Hogwarts Express had departed an hour ago, carrying the noise, the chaos, and the prying eyes back to London.
Alister was alone.
He swung his legs out of bed, the stone floor biting cold against his feet. He didn't mind.
He moved to his desk, where a small stack of parchment lay. The topmost letter was from Astra. He picked it up, his eyes scanning the neat, childish handwriting for the tenth time.
She was well.
Alister allowed a cold smirk to touch his lips. It wasn't the Dursleys' kindness that kept her safe. He used Hogwarts's owl with a very specific package. It contained ten Galleons and a letter detailing exactly which curses he had learned this semester that left no physical marks but caused eternal itching.
Greed and fear. The two universal languages. The Dursleys were behaving perfectly.
"Good," Alister whispered, placing the letter down. With Astra safe, his mind was free of its last tether.
he looked at the notification he received last night.
[Proficiency Update: Potion: Tier 1 >> Tier 2]
Then, he dressed with deliberate slowness. The dungeon was frigid, the heat of the castle dialed down with the departure of the students. He pulled on a thick wool sweater over his shirt, then his heavy winter cloak. He fastened his dragon-hide boots, ensuring the fit was tight.
He walked out of the empty dormitory, through the silent common room where the fire had burned down to embers, and out into the corridor.
He ascended the stairs, moving toward the entrance hall. When he pushed open the massive oak front doors, the world turned white.
A blizzard had swept through in the night. The grounds were buried under three feet of pristine, untouched snow. The Black Lake was a frozen expanse of white, merging seamlessly with the banks. The Forbidden Forest was a wall of frosted grey and black. The castle itself looked like an ice sculpture, icicles hanging like daggers from the eaves.
The cold hit him like a physical blow, biting at his exposed face. Alister took a deep breath, the icy air filling his lungs, sharpening his senses.
He turned back inside, the heavy oak doors booming shut behind him, sealing out the winter.
For the rest of the day, Alister moved like a ghost haunting the castle. He attended lunch in the Great Hall, which had been transformed. The four long house tables were gone, replaced by a single table for the few students and staff remaining over the holidays.
Alister sat at the far end of the table, as far from the convivial atmosphere as possible. He ate with grim determination—steak, kidney pie, potatoes—loading his body with calories. The ritual described by Egbert the Egregious burned through metabolic energy as fuel for the transformation. If he went in hungry, the magic would consume his muscle mass instead of the potion.
He ignored the few remaining students—a cluster of Hufflepuffs and the other students arguing over a game of chess. His mind was already miles away, stepping through the complex arithmancy of the brewing process.
After eating, he didn't go to the library. He returned to the dungeons. He slept.
He woke as the sun began to set, the green light of the lake outside his window fading to black.
He dressed in loose, comfortable clothes—black trousers and a simple shirt. He checked his pockets one last time: Wand. Pouch of materials. Phial of Re'em blood. The Book.
He moved out.
The corridors were silent shadows. The portraits were snoozing in their frames. Alister ascended the stairs. He reached the intended floor and slipped into his base—the abandoned classroom.
Once inside, he didn't immediately reach for his wand to cast the usual protective charms. instead, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, heavy box.
It was a rough, unassuming cube, carved from the dense Ashwood, but its surface was etched with a dense, microscopic web of runes filled with silver. This was his latest creation, the culmination of his late-night Alchemy studies and his mastery of Runic arrays. It was a portable fortress.
He placed the box in the exact center of the room.
"Clauditis," he whispered, tapping the top of the box.
The runes on the wood flared with a dull, grey light. A hum, low and powerful, emitted from the cube. Then, a pulse of distortion expanded outward like a shockwave. It passed through Alister, washing over him with a sensation like static electricity, and slammed into the four walls, the floor, and the ceiling.
Instantly, the room felt different. The air grew still and heavy. The faint, ambient sounds of the castle—the settling stones, the distant wind, the hum of the pipes—vanished completely.
The box had expanded an Isolation Field. It didn't just lock the door; it severed the room's connection to the castle's sensory grid. To anyone walking past in the hallway, this door wouldn't just be locked; it would be unnoticeable, a blank spot in their perception. Inside, Alister could scream, explode a cauldron, or channel enough magic to light up a city, and not a whisper of it would escape.
Satisfied with his absolute privacy, Alister turned to the stone table he had transfigured earlier. He set up his pewter cauldron and lit the blue magical fire beneath it.
He took a deep breath, steadying his heart rate. He reached into his expanded pocket one last time and pulled out the heavy, black-bound tome. It felt cold to the touch, vibrating with a low, malevolent energy.
Alister placed Secrets of the Darkest Art on the stone table. He didn't hesitate. He flipped the heavy cover open, bypassing the warnings of Herpo the Foul, bypassing the Horcrux theories, until he landed on page 394.
The jagged handwriting of Egbert the Egregious stared up at him, illuminated by the cauldron's blue fire.
The Blood-Forging of the War-Mage.
Alister scanned the instructions one last time, his mind burning the complex sequence of stirs, temperature shifts, and ingredient interactions into his memory. The Ascension System overlaid a countdown timer in his vision, syncing with the lunar phase outside.
He began.
First came the base. He poured the purified water into the cauldron, bringing it to a rolling boil. Then, with a steady hand, he uncorked the vial of Re'em blood. The liquid was thick and golden, glowing with a faint, inner light. It was the universal binder, the diplomatic envoy that would force the other violent magics to coexist.
He poured it in.
The water hissed, turning a violent, churning gold. The smell of ozone and hot iron filled the isolated room.
Next came the Dragon scales. Alister had spent hours the previous night grinding them into a fine, glittering dust using a diamond-tipped mortar. He sprinkled the dust into the vortex. The potion turned a muddy, angry grey, and the cauldron began to shake. The essence of the dragon was resisting, trying to harden the liquid back into stone.
Alister countered immediately. He lowered the flame and stirred counter-clockwise, seven precise turns. His magic flowed down his arm and into the stirring rod, breaking down the magical resistance of the scales, forcing them to dissolve.
Then, the Thunderbird feathers. He dropped them in whole. A crack of miniature thunder echoed inside the cauldron, and a spark of blue electricity arched up, stinging his hand. The potion began to froth, turning a volatile, electric blue. It was unstable, chaotic energy that threatened to blow the cauldron apart.
"System," Alister gritted out, sweat beading on his forehead. "Track thermal variance. Don't let it spike."
["Thermal variance holding at 98%. Destabilization imminent without binding agent."]
Alister reached for the final component: the Phoenix feather sheddings.
He dropped the fiery red down into the bubbling blue chaos.
The reaction was immediate and silent. The frothing stopped. The lightning arcs vanished. The potion turned a deep, blood-red color, pulsing with a slow, rhythmic heat. The Phoenix magic—the essence of rebirth and stability—had clamped down on the chaos, locking the power into a liquid stasis.
But the work wasn't done.
For the rest of the night, Alister was a slave to the cauldron. The recipe demanded constant vigilance. Every twelve minutes, the mixture tried to separate, the dragon dust trying to sink, the thunderbird energy trying to vaporize. Alister had to stir, adjust the heat, and infuse his own mana to keep the essences bound together.
Hours bled into one another. The heat in the room grew stifling. His arm ached, his eyes burned, but his focus never wavered.
As the first grey light of dawn began to bleed through the enchanted blackened windows of the classroom, the potion finally settled.
It was no longer boiling. It sat in the cauldron, a heavy, viscous liquid the color of dried blood. It didn't shimmer or sparkle; it seemed to absorb the light around it.
Alister extinguished the fire. He was exhausted, his physical stamina pushed to the limit.
He carefully ladled the mixture into a large, glass jar he had prepared, etched with stasis runes. He sealed the lid tight with wax and magic.
According to Egbert's text, the potion was now in its "Gestation Phase." The conflicting magics needed to marinate, to break down completely until they were a single, homogenous source of power. It needed to sit, undisturbed, in absolute darkness for ten days.
Alister placed the jar into his expanded pocket, treating it like a bomb.
"Ten days," he whispered, his voice raspy from the smoke and silence.
He dispelled the isolation field, cleaned the room with a wave of his hand, and slipped out of the base. He returned to the dungeon dorms just as the sun broke over the horizon, collapsing onto his bed for a sleep that felt less like rest and more like a coma.
(END OF CHAPTER)
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