Three days had passed since the Architect's System Awakening, and the world wasn't ending it was simply reorganizing itself at a violent pace.
Alister sat in a plush window seat of the Eurostar, the French countryside blurring past in a streak of green and grey. To the Muggles walking down the aisle, he was a young man reading a boring financial broadsheet about stock market fluctuations.
But through the lens of the Perception Altering Charm, the paper in his hands was screaming.
THE DAILY PROPHET
GRINGOTTS LOCKS DOORS! GOBLIN NATION DECLARES "SYSTEMIC INDEPENDENCE"
Alister's eyes scanned the article. It wasn't a violent rebellion—at least, not with swords. It was an economic strike.
"At 6:00 AM this morning, the heavy bronze doors of Gringotts Wizarding Bank slammed shut. A notice posted by the Goblin High Council states that until the Ministry of Magic do something about Architect all gold withdrawals will be limited.
Sources indicate the Goblins are furious. The new 'System Exchange' allows wizards to trade materials directly, bypassing the Goblins' centuries-old monopoly on banking. In retaliation, the Goblins have frozen the physical vaults."
Alister smirked as he flipped the page.
OP-ED: DO WE NEED THE MINISTRY?
"With the 'World Forum' allowing instant communication and the 'Archive' providing better education than Hogwarts, Minister Fudge's approval ratings have dropped to single digits. If the System governs our growth and trade... what exactly does the Ministry do?"
His plan was affecting the whole world faster than anticipated. He had just offered a better alternative, and the old world was tearing itself apart trying to compete.
A gentle tug on his sleeve broke his concentration.
"Brother?"
Alister blinked, the cold calculation vanishing from his eyes as he turned. Astra was sitting across from him, her legs swinging slightly, not quite touching the floor. She was holding out a steaming paper cup with both hands, balancing it carefully.
"Coffee," she said softly, her voice almost drowned out by the rumble of the train. "Black. Like you asked."
Something warm and entirely unrelated to the beverage settled in Alister's chest. "Thank you, Astra."
Astra settled back into her seat, looking out the window at the blur of trees. She was dressed in Muggle clothes—a soft wool coat the color of charcoal and a thick scarf that wrapped around her neck and hid the faint, lightning-bolt scar that she hated people staring at.
"How much time?" she asked, her voice small in the way it got when she was nervous but trying not to show it. "Until Paris?"
Alister checked the digital display above the door, then the ornate pocket watch.
"About twenty minutes," he replied, keeping his voice gentle. "Are you nervous?"
Astra nodded, clutching her own cup of hot chocolate. "We're meeting him. The Greatest Alchemist. Mr. Flamel?"
"Yes," Alister confirmed, taking a sip of the bitter coffee and immediately regretting not asking for sugar. "He has a wife. Madame Perenelle. I think... I think you might like her. She's very kind."
And wouldn't immediately terrify an eleven-year-old, which was more than he could say for some of the people in his new social circle. Looking at you, Grindelwald.
Alister leaned his head back against the headrest, the rhythmic vibration of the high-speed train humming through his skull. Behind his closed eyelids, the darkness was illuminated by the scrolling blue text of the System logs.
He pulled up the conversation from eighteen hours ago—the exchange that had solidified this entire trip and convinced him that taking the Eurostar to Paris was a better use of his weekend than, say, sleeping.
[Log: Private Channel - The Apex]
[Alister Potter]: mr. flamel, i had a thought.
[Alister Potter]: if we use your method of "spiritual memory" on inert matter... what happens if we treat a sword like a living thing?
[Alister Potter]: if i give a steel ingot a "memory" of being a square... and then i melt it... wouldn't it try to become a square again once it cools? without a mold?
[Nicolas Flamel]: ...
[Nicolas Flamel]: ...
[Nicolas Flamel]: Young man, I have been practicing alchemy for six hundred and seventy-three years.
[Nicolas Flamel]: I have seen empires rise and fall. I have witnessed the birth and death of entire schools of magical thought.
[Nicolas Flamel]: And in all that time, NO ONE has asked me something that made me want to set my laboratory on fire and start over from first principles.
[Nicolas Flamel]: Until now.
[Alister Potter]: ...is that a good thing?
[Nicolas Flamel]: That is... theoretically possible. But the energy required to imprint the "memory" would be immense. You would need a catalyst. Something with enough raw power to convince matter that it has opinions.
[Nicolas Flamel]: I have something which can provide that energy.
[Nicolas Flamel]: We need to meet. Come to Paris. Immediately. Just GET HERE.
[Alister Potter]: i can't leave my sister alone.
[Nicolas Flamel]: Then bring her.
[Nicolas Flamel]: Perenelle has been scolding me for centuries about the lack of guests. Apparently our home is "too quiet" and "smells like sulfur" and "normal people don't keep their experiments in the guest bedroom, Nicolas."
[Nicolas Flamel]: She misses the sound of young voices in the house that aren't me yelling about thermodynamic principles at 3 AM.
[Nicolas Flamel]: Your sister will be safe here. On my magic, I swear it. Also Perenelle would kill me if anything happened to her, and I've spent too long not dying to start now.
[Alister Potter]: okay. i'll be there in 24 hours.
[Nicolas Flamel]: Excellent. I'm clearing the crucible. This is going to be magnificent or catastrophic, and at my age, those are basically the same thing.
Alister opened his eyes, the blue text fading back into reality.
He looked across at Astra, who was blowing gently on her hot chocolate, her cheeks slightly flushed from the heat. She had a small mustache of foam on her upper lip and looked more relaxed than before.
"We're almost there," Alister whispered, more to himself than to her, watching the countryside give way to the outskirts of the city.
The train began to decelerate, the smooth glide becoming a more pronounced rumble as they entered the station. The announcement chimed overhead in crisp, professional French.
"Mesdames et Messieurs, nous arrivons à Paris Gare du Nord. Veuillez préparer vos bagages."
Astra perked up, looking at Alister with wide eyes. "What did it say?"
"It said 'please prepare your luggage and try not to look like obvious tourists,'" Alister translated with a small smile.
"That's not what it said."
"Close enough."
While Alister was navigating the streets of Paris, hundreds of miles away in Scotland, the air in the Headmaster's office was thick with tension.
Albus Dumbledore was not a man prone to nervous habits, but today, he was pacing.
He walked a tight circle around his desk, his purple robes sweeping the floor. Every few seconds, his eyes would dart to the shimmering golden window of "The Apex" chat floating in the center of the room.
The chat was active.
[Bathilda Bagshot] was uploading scanned pages of pre-Merlin era history.
[Newt Scamander] was live-updating the growth rates of a Demiguise.
[Severus Snape] was coldly analyzing the destabilization of standard potion ingredients due to the mana surge.
They were adapting.
But Dumbledore wasn't looking at the messages. He was looking at the User names.
He stopped pacing and sank heavily into his high-backed chair, steepling his fingers in front of his face. The portraits of previous Headmasters were sleeping—or pretending to—but Fawkes the Phoenix was wide awake, watching Dumbledore with bright, intelligent eyes.
"Why isn't he here?" Dumbledore whispered to the silence.
It didn't make sense.
The Architect had summoned the "finest minds" and those with the "highest potential." Gellert was here. Nicolas was here. Even young Alister, with his raw, untamed potential, was here.
"Tom..." Dumbledore murmured, the name tasting like ash. "You are many things, but you are not mediocre."
Tom Riddle was a prodigy. A monster, yes, but a genius of the highest order. He had pushed the boundaries of magic further than anyone in the last fifty years. If Architect didn't care about dark powers and was selecting for power and intellect, Voldemort should have been the on the list.
"And you are not the type to endure in silence," Dumbledore reasoned, his blue eyes hardening. "If you had access to this... to this 'World Mind'... you would have been the first to mock architect."
Dumbledore leaned forward, staring at the empty space where a name should be.
"There are only two possibilities," he said softly, organizing his thoughts.
"One: The world is right, and you are truly dead. Gone forever."
He shook his head slowly. He knew that wasn't true. The prophecy, the signs, the pain in Astra's scar... Tom was still out there.
"Two..."
Dumbledore's eyes widened as the realization hit him with all the subtlety of a Bludger to the face.
"Oh," he breathed, the word coming out strangled. "Oh, Tom. What did you do?"
"The System connects to the soul," Dumbledore said slowly, the horror of the realization mixing with a grim satisfaction. "It requires a complete soul"
Dumbledore stood with sudden, frantic energy that belied his considerable age, his joints popping slightly in protest. He crossed the circular office, his eyes scanning the shelves where he kept the books too dangerous for the library even the Restricted Section.
He reached up and pulled down a heavy, rotting volume bound in faded black leather. The gold leaf on the spine had long since tarnished, but the title was still legible to those who knew what to look for: Secrets of the Darkest Arts by Owle Bullock.
He carried it back to his desk, ignoring the faint, nauseating aura that radiated from the cover, and laid it open. The pages were brittle, yellowed with century of decay.
He flipped through them with a practiced hand, bypassing sections on necromancy and blood curses, until he landed on a page near the back.
There, inked in jagged, aggressive strokes, was the section: "The Horcrux."
Dumbledore's finger traced the text, skipping over the horrific instructions for the murder and the spell, stopping instead at the warnings—the paragraphs that most dark wizards, in their arrogance, chose to ignore.
"To split the soul is to violate the fundamental law of existence," the text read. "The soul is not merely a battery of life; it is the anchor to the World's Breath. To tear it is to sever the thread that binds the wizard to the greater cycle."
Dumbledore looked up from the book, his gaze drifting back to the floating golden window of the System.
"The World's Breath..." he whispered. "The World Core."
He looked back down at the final, damning sentence on the page.
"The fragment that remains in the body is no longer a complete consciousness. It is a shard. It may retain power, it may retain intellect, but it loses its resonance, unseen by the natural order."
Dumbledore closed the book with a heavy thud.
"Your soul is not just damaged, Tom. it is corrupted," Dumbledore said softly to the empty room.
__________________________________________________
The narrow streets of Paris's 3rd arrondissement were quiet, the afternoon sun casting long shadows against the limestone facades.
Alister stopped in front of a stone house that looked like it had been carved out of history itself. 7 Rue de Montmorency. It was the oldest house in Paris, a fortress of alchemy disguised as a relic.
"Is this it?" Astra whispered, her grip on Alister's hand tightening. She was looking at the strange symbols etched into the stone archway faded engravings of angels and flowers that seemed to shift if you stared at them too long.
"Yes," Alister said, sensing the heavy, ancient wards that wrapped around the building like a warm blanket. "This is where the oldest wizard in the world lives."
"How old?" Astra asked, still staring at the symbols.
"Six hundred and seventy-three."
"That's... that's older than Hogwarts."
"By about three hundred years, yes."
Astra processed this. "Is he going to be scary?"
Before Alister could answer, the heavy oak door swung open silently before his hand could even rise to knock.
Standing in the entryway was a woman. She wore simple robes of periwinkle blue, and her white hair was braided in a crown around her head.
Perenelle Flamel.
"Alister Potter," she said, her voice sounding like dry leaves rustling in a gentle wind. She didn't look at him, though. Her dark, twinkling eyes went immediately to the small girl hiding half-behind his coat.
"And you must be Astra."
Astra shrank back slightly, but Perenelle smiled—a genuine, eye-crinkling smile that dissolved the tension in the air.
"Oh, you poor thing," Perenelle cooed, ignoring Alister entirely to kneel down—surprisingly agile for a woman over six hundred. "That train ride is dreadful, isn't it? All that rattling and the seats that make your back ache and the coffee that tastes like someone's grudge against humanity."
Astra blinked, startled into a small smile.
"Come inside, child," Perenelle continued, her voice gentle but brooking no argument. "I have hot cocoa—real cocoa, not that sludge they serve on the Eurostar that's mostly sugar and lies. And biscuits. Do you like biscuits? Of course you do, everyone likes biscuits except Nicolas when he's working, and then he forgets food exists entirely."
Astra blinked, looking up at Alister for permission. He nodded with a smile.
As Astra timidly stepped over the threshold, drawn in by the promise of chocolate, a frantic figure burst into the hallway from a side door.
"PERENELLE! STOP CODDLING THE GUESTS AND SEND THE BOY DOWN!"
Nicolas Flamel looked exactly as he did in the history books, though perhaps a bit more manic. He was pale, thin, and vibrated with a nervous energy that made his robes flutter. He didn't even look at Astra. His eyes locked onto Alister with the intensity of a starving man spotting a feast.
"The Inverted Binding," Flamel demanded, striding forward and stopping inches from Alister's face. "Did you bring the draft? I cleared the crucible. But the stabilization rune—I still don't see how you account for the thermal expansion of the soul!"
"Nicolas!" Perenelle scolded, standing up and dusting off her knees. "Let the boy take his coat off! He has traveled hundreds of miles!"
"Distance is irrelevant!" Flamel waved a hand dismissively. "We are on the verge of inventing a alchemy miracle! Coats can wait!"
Alister chuckled, reaching into his pocket space. He pulled out a rolled parchment his theory for the Soul-Iron.
"I brought it, Mr. Nicolas," Alister said. "And I think I solved the thermal expansion issue on the train. We use it to temper the memory."
Flamel snatched the parchment, unrolling it right there in the hallway. His eyes darted across the ink.
"Use the heat... to temper..." Flamel muttered. Then, his eyes went wide. He looked up at Alister, a grin stretching across his face that made him look decades younger.
"Brilliant," Flamel breathed. "Absolutely mad. But brilliant."
He turned on his heel and marched back toward the basement door. "Don't just stand there, Potter! The furnace is lit! History waits for no one!"
Alister looked at Perenelle, who rolled her eyes but offered him a sympathetic smile.
"Go," she said gently, placing a hand on Astra's shoulder. "I will take good care of your sister."
Alister nodded and followed nicolas.
"Thank you, Madame Flamel."
Soon he reached the end of hallway and started descending through the stairs.
The stone steps of stairs descended spiraling into the earth, far deeper than the foundation of the house should have allowed
"Careful on the last step," Flamel called out, his voice echoing.
Alister stepped onto the flagstone floor of the sub-basement and stopped dead.
The room was vast, the ceiling lost in shadows. But dominating the center was a massive, spherical crucible made of a dark, unrecognizable metal, etched with thousands of glowing runes that pulsed in a rhythmic heartbeat. Pipes of brass and glass ran from the crucible into the walls, pumping coolant that hissed and steamed.
But it wasn't the size of the furnace that made Alister's eyes go wide. It was the aperture at the very bottom—the fuel intake.
There was no coal. There was no magical fire.
Hovering in a magnetic suspension field, bathed in blinding red light, was a jagged, blood-red crystal. It wasn't just glowing; it was screaming with power, pouring a torrent of pure, liquid vitality into the intake valves of the furnace.
" The Philosopher's Stone," Alister breathed, the red light reflecting in his wide eyes.
(END OF CHAPTER)
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