Adrian walked through the tall bookshelves in the library, his lit wand making shadows dance on the book spines. He walked past the normal books and went straight to the Restricted Section where all the forbidden books were kept.
Just the titles were exciting: "Advanced Transfiguration Theory," "Ancient Magical Bloodlines," "Legilimency: Reading the Mind's Secrets..."
He stopped to look at several books about mind magic - stuff he'd really wanted to learn. With unlimited Study Genius cards, he could spend weeks here learning things that would make him much more powerful. But points cost too much, and tonight he had something specific to find.
He followed the system's directions to the seventh row, twelfth shelf. At first, nothing looked different - just more magical books packed together. He felt around the book spines, looking for hidden switches or secret compartments.
His elbow accidentally hit a thin black book and knocked it to the floor.
The book fell open, and the pages started flipping like there was wind. Black smoke poured out of the old pages and turned into a ghostly face that looked like it was screaming. Even though he couldn't hear anything, Adrian's ears hurt and his vision got blurry. The dark magic was somehow making him feel pain.
The ghost head tried to push out of the book completely.
Adrian slammed the book shut, trapping the ghost back inside. Right away, the scary feeling went away.
"Just a book," he said, rubbing his sore head. "A bit much, don't you think?"
The cover said "Advanced Dark Arts Exposed" in faded gold letters. The binding felt weird - too smooth and too warm. Adrian thought it might be made from human skin, especially after seeing that tortured face.
Definitely not what I'm looking for, he decided. The system hadn't done anything when he found it.
As he put the cursed book back on the shelf, Adrian noticed something had changed. Before, the bookcase had looked normal, but now there was clearly a gap. Five sections where there should have been six.
One whole section was missing, but somehow the shelves still looked like they were spaced right. It hurt his eyes when he tried to look at it directly.
"Confundus Charm," Adrian figured out. Someone had hidden part of the bookcase with a confusion spell that made people not notice the hidden section. The screaming book's attack on his mind must have messed up his sight enough to see through the trick.
Knowing something was hidden and actually finding it were two different things. Adrian hadn't learned advanced counter-spells yet, so he had to try basic ones.
He remembered Snape using a spell in the books to show hidden writing.
"Aparecium," Adrian whispered, touching his wand to what looked like solid bookshelf.
The whole thing shook. A crack appeared in the middle of the twelfth section and got wider until it showed a hidden cabinet full of old books.
Adrian looked at the newly revealed books one by one. When he touched the last one, the system finally worked.
[Ding! Reward collected successfully.]
"That's it?" Adrian said, annoyed. "If I hadn't been lucky with that screaming book, I'd still be looking everywhere."
Other people probably had helpful systems that actually told them what to do. His seemed to like making everything as hard as possible.
Even though he was frustrated, he was still curious. The book he'd found was bound in old leather with "Blood Origins" written on the cover. The pages were yellow and fragile from being kept for hundreds of years.
Adrian opened it carefully, thinking it might be another book of dangerous spells. Instead, it looked like a history book about the wizarding world from long ago.
The first chapters told a very different story about magical society. Wizards hadn't always been in charge of other magical creatures. In fact, they'd been some of the weakest beings in the magical world. House-elves, dragons, giants, and other naturally magical creatures had been much more powerful than human wizards.
Humans had survived by having more people and being clever, not by being magically strong.
But humans had always refused to accept their limits.
Some wizards worked on normal magical research, making better and better spells. But others looked for shortcuts to power. Specifically, they wanted to steal abilities from more powerful magical creatures by mixing their blood with wizard blood through special rituals.
The successful experiments had worked terrifyingly well. Wizards who managed to mix creature blood into themselves gained amazing abilities. Even better, they could pass these powers to their kids. Even if the bloodline powers got weaker over time, the first discovery had made countless wizards try similar experiments.
Most of the failures had been awful. Most test subjects died horrible deaths during the mixing process. The ones who survived often became monsters themselves. Werewolves, vampires, and other cursed beings were apparently what happened when blood magic experiments went wrong.
Some wizards had even started breeding magical creatures just for experiments, creating new species that were perfect for blood mixing research.
That explained creatures like the giant snake sleeping in the Chamber of Secrets, or the giant spider colony in the Forbidden Forest...
The book's last chapters talked about the most disturbing thing of all: wizards who chose to have children with magical creatures directly, hoping their kids would naturally inherit good traits instead of needing dangerous rituals.