An hour later, standing in the foyer of the Highgate mansion, Astra looked utterly shell-shocked.
She spun in a slow circle, taking in the soaring vaulted ceilings that seemed to reach toward the heavens, the magnificent crystal chandelier—already enchanted by Alister to burn with eternal, unwavering flame—and the grand staircase that swept upward to the second floor in an elegant curve of polished mahogany.
"Alister..." she whispered, her voice echoing in the cavernous hall like a prayer in an empty cathedral. "Did you rob a bank?"
"Technically, I prevented the bank from robbing us," Alister corrected, setting down her battered trunk with a decisive thud. "I liquidated a substantial portion of the Galleons our parents left behind. This place is ours. No mortgage, no Ministry records, and definitely—" his lips curved slightly, "—no Dursleys."
He strode across the marble floor toward a set of imposing double doors and threw them open with theatrical flair.
"The library."
Astra's breath caught in her throat.
It was magnificent—a cathedral of knowledge. Floor-to-ceiling shelves crafted from dark, gleaming oak lined every wall. A rolling ladder on brass rails promised access to the highest shelves. A massive stone fireplace dominated one wall, already crackling with welcoming warmth that cast dancing shadows across leather spines and gilt lettering.
Alister had systematically emptied his Extension Charm bags, populating the shelves with every book he had stolen, purchased, copied, or "borrowed indefinitely" from a dozen different sources over the past year. Grimoires sat beside Muggle science texts. Ancient tomes on magical theory neighbored modern treatises on quantum mechanics.
"It's... it's beautiful," Astra breathed, running her fingers reverently along a leather-bound spine embossed with silver runes.
"It's a classroom," Alister corrected, leaning against the doorframe with arms crossed. His expression was serious now, the playfulness gone. "Because you have considerable work to do."
Astra looked up at him, her brow furrowing. "Work?"
"You'll be attending Hogwarts in September," Alister said, his tone leaving no room for argument. "You've been practicing the Mana Circulation method I taught you."
"Every single day," Astra said proudly, straightening her spine. "I can levitate the sofa now. Well... for a few seconds before it crashes."
"Good start. But parlor tricks won't keep you alive," Alister said bluntly. He walked to the fireplace and selected a heavy iron poker from the tool stand. He held it out to her, the metal gleaming dully in the firelight.
"Hold this."
She took it, surprised by the weight. The metal was cold and solid in her small hands.
"By September," Alister said, his voice dropping to a measured, instructional cadence, "I want you capable of transfiguring that poker into a silver dagger. Silent casting."
Astra stared at the poker, then up at him with wide eyes. Most first-year students struggled to turn a matchstick into a needle with a wand and an incantation.
She gripped the iron tighter, her jaw setting with fierce determination.
"Show me how," she said quietly.
Alister's expression softened almost imperceptibly. That was precisely the response he'd hoped for.
"First," he said, moving behind her and placing a guiding hand on her shoulder, "forget about the final shape. That's irrelevant. Focus on the fundamental density of the material. Iron is rigid, brittle—its atomic structure resists change. Silver is fluid, malleable, willing to accept new forms..."
His voice took on the rhythm of a meditation as he guided her through the first principles of advanced transfiguration, feeling her mana circulation shift and adapt under his instruction.
This was how you built someone capable of surviving what was coming.
Later that night, after a dinner delivered by a thoroughly bewildered Muggle pizza boy who couldn't understand why the address didn't exist before, Alister sat alone on the balcony of his master bedroom.
Astra was asleep down the hall in her new room—a space he'd personally enchanted with a ceiling that perfectly mimicked the night sky, complete with slowly drifting constellations. Just like the Great Hall, but better. More accurate.
Alister gazed out over the dark canopy of trees toward the glittering sprawl of London. The city was settling into its nightly rhythm, millions of mundane lives ticking along in blissful ignorance of the magic that pulsed beneath their feet.
He finished the last of his wine, setting the crystal glass down on the stone balustrade with a soft clink. The city lights twinkled in the distance—beautiful, oblivious, fragile.
He closed his eyes and centered his breathing. The night air carried the scent of damp earth and distant car exhaust. Inside his veins, the Dragon's fire burned with steady, controlled heat—a banked forge waiting to be unleashed.
"System," Alister whispered into the silence.
[AWAITING INPUT]
"Initiate Astral Projection. Target coordinates: Planetary Core."
[WARNING: Direct interface with Planetary Core places extreme strain on mental lattice integrity. Maximum safe duration: 7 minutes. Catastrophic soul fragmentation possible beyond time limit. Proceed?]
"Proceed."
[INITIATING SOUL DIVE.]
There was no sound. No dramatic flash of light or mystical sensation.
One moment, Alister was sitting on weathered stone, smelling damp oak and London's perpetual petrol haze. The next, reality simply... inverted.
The darkness of the night sky became blinding, sterile white. Gravity released its hold completely. His physical body remained behind—a hollow shell slumped in a chair, chest rising and falling with autonomous breath—while his consciousness plummeted downward.
Through the stone foundation of the mansion. Through layers of earth and sediment. Through bedrock and magma. Through the metaphysical substrata of reality itself.
He fell for an eternity that lasted precisely one second.
Then, abruptly, he stopped.
He floated in a vast, cavernous space that defied conventional geometry—not carved from rock, but woven from pure, condensed light.
Before him hung the World Core.
When he had first arrived in this dimension over a year ago, this place had been a graveyard. The Core had been a shriveled, grey cinder—barely flickering, choked by centuries of stagnation from a wizarding society that actively resisted innovation. It had resembled a dying coal in a long-cold hearth, the last ember of a fire allowed to starve.
Now?
Alister smiled, his astral form shimmering in the overwhelming radiance.
The Core was alive.
It was a massive, beating heart of pure, iridescent mana—a star cradled in the planet's chest. It pulsed with a deep, rhythmic thrum-thrum-thrum that resonated through every layer of his consciousness.
Thick veins of luminous energy—the Ley Lines—radiated outward from the Core like arteries from a heart. No longer brittle and thread-thin, they were now engorged with vitality, glowing with robust health. They pumped raw magical energy toward the surface, feeding the thousands of new "reactors" Alister had seeded across the population.
Every student practicing the Spiral Circulation. Every Squib breathing through the Restoration Cycle. Every magical creature instinctively adapting to the new paradigm. All of them were sending energy cascading back down these channels, feeding the heart, sustaining the system.
It was a closed loop. A perpetual engine. Beautiful in its efficiency.
But Alister wasn't admiring the veins.
He was examining the Shell.
Encasing the brilliant, pulsing heart was a fractured crystalline sphere—translucent, ancient, and clearly failing. This was the "Level Cap," the self-imposed limitation the world had enacted eons ago to prevent catastrophic magical overflow and dimensional collapse.
Massive fissures spider-webbed across the crystal surface. Entire shards were peeling away, dissolving into ethereal mist and vanishing into the void beyond.
"Beautiful," Alister murmured, his spectral form drifting closer with deliberate care.
He extended one translucent hand. He didn't dare touch the Core directly—the raw energy would vaporize even his soul-form in microseconds—but he hovered his palm over one of the largest cracks, feeling the heat radiating from within.
The world was feverish. Growing too quickly for its ancient constraints. Evolving beyond the safety parameters set by forgotten architects.
Stabilizing the mana flow was only half the battle—perhaps less. A civilization could possess infinite energy reserves, but without the spark of creativity to harness that power, without the infrastructure of communication to disseminate breakthroughs, that energy would inevitably stagnate.
The beings living on this rock would remain primitive—isolated tribes gazing at a sun they couldn't comprehend, much less utilize.
They needed a catalyst. A framework. A network.
Alister narrowed his spectral eyes, focusing his intent to a razor's edge.
He needed to synthesize an artifact of unprecedented complexity—a server, a beacon, a collaborative muse—using the highest quality material in existence: a fragment of the World Core itself.
It was absolute madness. His Alchemy was barely Tier 1—adequate for basic potions and simple transmutations, nothing more. Attempting to work with World Core essence at his level was like a child with finger paints trying to restore the Sistine Chapel.
But his Runecraft was Tier 3.
For three hundred sixty-five days, he had studied the ancient runic languages without a single moment of rest. He had burned the patterns into his consciousness, etched them onto his soul, practiced until the symbols flowed from his intent as naturally as breathing.
Where his Alchemy failed, his Runes would compensate.
"System," he projected, his thought sharp and precise as a surgical blade. "Divert all available processing power to auxiliary calculation and error correction. Compensate for the Alchemical skill gap using Runic structural integrity frameworks."
[Affirmative. Warning: Soul Form stability will degrade by 25% per minute during active compensation. Current time remaining: 5 minutes.]
"Execute."
He had five minutes before his soul unraveled from the strain.
Not a second more.
His spectral hands became a blur of motion.
He didn't summon a cauldron or alembic. In this state, in this place, reality itself was his workspace. He plunged his fingers directly into the feverish aura surrounding the Core, hooking a wisp of the golden-red origin essence with pure will.
It lashed out immediately—a viper of primal energy, thrashing and burning, threatening to consume his inadequate alchemical intent and unravel his consciousness.
But he was ready.
He slammed a geometric cage of shimmering runes around the volatile essence.
Tier 3 Rune: Stasis. Time within the cage slowed to a crawl, giving him precious seconds to work.
Tier 3 Rune: Connectivity. The fragment remained linked to the greater whole, preventing rejection.
Tier 3 Rune: Amplification. The energy's natural properties were enhanced, making it more responsive to direction.
His fingers moved faster than thought, weaving an impossibly complex lattice of light around the struggling fragment. He was bypassing the traditional alchemical requirement for gradual transmutation by forcing the energy to obey the mathematical certainty of runic geometry.
Where his Alchemy couldn't elegantly blend materials, his Runes stitched them together with brute-force logic and overwhelming structural integrity.
The wisp of World Core essence thrashed violently, emitting soundless screams of protest, but he didn't slow. Couldn't slow.
He layered array upon array, compressing the vast, chaotic conceptual energy of "Earth" and "Origin" into an increasingly dense, manageable sphere.
Four minutes remaining.
Hairline cracks appeared on his spectral forearms, white light bleeding through gaps in his astral form.
Three minutes.
He introduced the concept of "Mind" to the construct, carefully etching neural pathway patterns onto the sphere's surface. Each rune was a synapse, each connection a potential thought. He linked the nascent artifact to the Ley Lines he'd spent a year stabilizing, creating channels for information flow.
Two minutes.
The Alchemy finally began to take. Under the crushing pressure of Tier 3 Runic compression, the World Essence surrendered its volatility, reluctantly changing state from chaotic plasma to crystalline solid. The transmutation was crude, but it was working.
One minute.
He brought his trembling hands together for the final seal. The spiritual pressure was unbearable—a weight that threatened to erase his individual consciousness entirely, dissolving his sense of self into the cosmic whole.
With a final, thunderous exertion of pure will, he fused the thousands of hovering runes directly into the crystalline structure.
The frantic blur of motion stopped instantly.
Hovering between his translucent, fracturing palms was something that defied simple categorization. Not a mere rock. Not simply a gem. It was a perfectly spherical construct of endlessly shifting geometric light.
A World Mind Node.
The artifact pulsed once—a single heartbeat of pure, synthesized intellect that rang out like a crystal bell across the spiritual plane.
Then, the timer in the corner of his vision flashed red.
[00:00]
There was no dramatic explosion.
The energy sustaining his Soul Form evaporated instantly, like water in a blast furnace.
The protective lattice of stabilization runes he'd woven around himself—the only thing keeping him coherent under the Core's overwhelming pressure—shattered into glittering dust.
Without the System's auxiliary processing power, his consciousness could no longer maintain cohesion against the crushing weight of the world's metaphysical center.
His azure form didn't fade gracefully.
It collapsed.
He was yanked backward with savage force by the desperate gravitational pull of his own empty shell.
SNAP.
The magma, the light, the harmonic hum of the Ley Lines was instantly replaced by the nauseating sensation of being forcibly compressed and squeezed through a space far too small.
SLAM.
His physical eyes flew open, pupils dilating wildly as they struggled to process actual photons again. He pitched forward violently, his lungs seizing as they remembered their function.
"Hhh—hhhgk!"
He retched, a dry, ragged cough that tore at his throat like broken glass. The transition was too fast, too violent. His heart hammered against his ribs.
Every nerve ending in his body screamed in protest, overloaded by the sudden, brutal re-connection to physical sensation.
He collapsed forward onto his hands and knees, sweat pouring off him in rivulets, instantly soaking through his shirt.
But even as he trembled, fighting waves of nausea that threatened to empty his stomach, he became aware of something clutched in his right hand.
Slowly, with shaking fingers, he unclenched his fist.
There, resting against his sweaty, trembling palm, was a small sphere roughly the size of a large marble. It was matte black, its surface covered in microscopic, endlessly shifting blue runes that pulsed with a faint, rhythmic heartbeat.
Thrum. Thrum. Thrum.
He had pushed the time limit to the exact second. And succeeded.
With a shaky, triumphant exhale, he carefully avoided dropping the precious artifact. He focused his battered mind, triggering the spatial distortion of the System's dimensional storage.
The air beside his hip rippled like water disturbed by a stone. A small, dark void opened—a tear in reality just large enough for his hand. He slipped the pulsing marble-sized sphere inside.
The moment it crossed the threshold, the residual magical pressure saturating the balcony vanished, swallowed by the dimensional pocket.
He slumped back against the chair, wiping a smear of cold sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. His physical body was running on absolute fumes, every muscle screaming for rest.
But his mind was already racing ahead, calculating variables for the next phase.
"System," he croaked, his voice hoarse and raw. "Initiate control protocol with stored item. Begin deep synchronization sequence."
A translucent blue holographic panel flickered into existence before his exhausted eyes.
[Command Acknowledged.]
[Target Identified: World Mind Node (Tier ???)]
[Current Status: Dormant.]
[Initiating Interface Bridge...]
A progress bar appeared, filling with agonizing slowness.
[Syncing Runic Logic with System Database: 1%... 2%...]
"Keep it running in background processes," he murmured, closing his burning eyes. "Don't activate the core functions yet. Let it acclimate to the server architecture. I want a complete integration before we go live."
He didn't want a soft launch. A quiet introduction.
No.
Tomorrow—or perhaps the day after, when the synchronization was complete—he would activate the Node at full capacity. He would introduce a global neural network, a creative engine, and a revolutionary exchange system to a primitive, fragmented civilization in a single, catastrophic instant.
He was going to electrify the entire planet.
A faint, exhausted smile touched his lips as the darkness of complete physical and mental depletion finally claimed him.
He slumped in the chair, unconscious before his head hit the stone.
The World Mind Node pulsed softly in its dimensional storage, counting down the hours until its awakening.
Thrum. Thrum. Thrum.
(END OF CHAPTER)
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