In the center of London, on a bustling commercial street, there stood a bar that ordinary people could not see.
It was a gathering place for wizards—the Leaky Cauldron.
The lighting inside the bar was dim, the walls stained and peeling, and the air was filled with the cheap, buttery scent of butterbeer.
Sean Grylls, an eleven-year-old boy, was carrying two overflowing mugs of buttered honey beer as he walked toward a table.
"Poor little Sean, old Tom's got you serving beer again," said a bald wizard as he took one of the mugs and shouted toward the counter.
"Damn it, Jamie, don't make me sound so heartless," Old Tom replied loudly. "Sean lives here and eats here. What's wrong with asking him to help out during his free time?"
"If Dumbledore finds out that you're making the Boy Who Lived work as a waiter, he'd be furious."
Sean grinned.
"Compared to staying in that storage room upstairs, I'd much rather help down here."
Old Tom nodded with a satisfied smile.
He liked the boy very much—not only because Sean was sensible and well-behaved, but also because his fame brought the bar a considerable amount of business.
Sean Grylls.
A boy just as famous as Harry Potter—the other child who survived the Killing Curse.
But the one who cast the curse on him wasn't the Dark Lord Voldemort.
It was Voldemort's fanatical follower, the madwoman Bellatrix Lestrange.
She had tortured the Longbottoms into insanity, and years later, when Harry was in his fifth year, she would kill her own cousin—Sirius Black.
As for why she tried to kill Sean, that story began with his small family.
The Grylls family was a minor wizarding family, nothing compared to the pure-blood houses that had existed for centuries.
Sean's grandfather had been the first wizard in the Grylls family.
Sean's father was also a wizard.
But his uncle, Hearns, was a Squib.
During the dark decade when Voldemort ruled with terror, the wizarding world lived in constant fear.
Sean's grandfather had worked for the Ministry of Magic, but out of fear of Voldemort, he defected and joined the Death Eaters.
Ironically, Sean's father—who had secretly been a Death Eater himself—betrayed Voldemort in 1980 and joined the Order of the Phoenix.
The Death Eaters were never merciful toward traitors.
The madwoman Bellatrix led a group that murdered Sean's parents.
Then she coldly cast the Killing Curse on the infant Sean.
Little Sean died on the spot.
After all, his mother did not know the ancient protective magic that Lily Potter had used.
And the Sean of today was someone else entirely.
After the child's death, the soul of another person—from the twenty-first century—had taken his place.
In his previous life, Sean had just graduated from high school. During the summer break, after finishing his driver's license, he went out for a drive and died in a car accident.
When he opened his eyes again, he had become a two-year-old child.
After waking, Sean was rescued by Aurors who had rushed to the scene and was sent to the Leaky Cauldron to live with his Squib uncle, Hearns.
Hearns was the cook at the Leaky Cauldron and Sean's current legal guardian.
Sean was secretly protected in the Leaky Cauldron.
Bellatrix never knew that the child she had personally struck with the Killing Curse was still alive.
A year later, Voldemort went to kill the Potter family.
But the protective charm on Harry rebounded the Killing Curse, leaving Voldemort gravely injured and causing the Death Eaters' power to collapse.
Only after that did the news that Sean was still alive begin to spread.
Bellatrix was stunned.
The madwoman tried to kill Sean again.
Unfortunately for her, she had already been imprisoned in Azkaban.
When Sean was five years old, his magical talent awakened.
His Squib uncle Hearns was overjoyed.
"Sean, you're the hope of the Grylls family," Hearns said, hugging him tightly and showering him with kisses.
Sean shuddered inwardly.
He didn't care about the Grylls family at all.
What concerned him far more were his eyes.
One day, Sean discovered that whenever he looked at other people, a faint white glow surrounded their bodies.
"Ever since my magic awakened, my eyes have been acting strange… Did I get glaucoma or something?"
But Sean soon dismissed the idea.
Because in his previous life, he had read Harry Potter.
Although his knowledge of the wizarding world wasn't exhaustive, compared to most Hogwarts students, he probably knew quite a bit.
After a month of observation and experimentation, Sean finally figured out what was going on with his eyes.
His eyes only revealed that white glow when he looked at wizards, magical creatures, or magical objects.
And when he watched another wizard cast a spell, he could even see the magical framework forming on the wand.
After living in this world for several years, Sean realized that casting magic wasn't as simple as chanting a spell and waving a wand.
In his understanding, magic consisted of three major elements:
The magical framework, the incantation, and mental power.
The magical framework was the complex three-dimensional structure made of lines that he saw forming on a wizard's wand during spellcasting.
Mental power included emotion and will.
Sean himself already had decent magical talent, and with these eyes that could see through magic, he knew he had essentially been given a special ability.
"With these Magic vision, learning spells in the future will be twice as effective with half the effort."
The Leaky Cauldron attracted all kinds of wizards.
Sometimes they would perform small spells for entertainment.
Whenever that happened, Sean carefully memorized the magical frameworks that formed on their wands.
He had once watched Bald Jamie cast a very basic Levitation Charm.
It was a spell taught in the first-year curriculum at Hogwarts.
Sean had carefully memorized both the spell's incantation and its magical framework.
Afterward, he asked Hearns to get him the textbooks used in Hogwarts' first year—even though he was only five and a half years old and still years away from attending school.
Hearns happily agreed.
In his eyes, Sean was destined to attend Hogwarts sooner or later, so getting an early look at the textbooks would simply help him prepare in advance.
The Leaky Cauldron stood right at the entrance to Diagon Alley.
It didn't take Hearns long to acquire several battered first-year textbooks that had probably passed through nine previous owners.
"Judging by how worn these books are, they were probably picked up from some junk shop."
Sean didn't mind.
He only wanted to use the textbooks to verify his theories about magic.
He flipped through the books and quickly found the section about the Levitation Charm.
The section spanned four pages.
The first two pages explained the origin of the spell.
Sean had no interest in that.
He immediately flipped to the page about how to cast it.
The top two paragraphs described the incantation and wand movement.
At the bottom was a description of the Levitation Charm's magical framework, along with a three-dimensional diagram.
"Damn… it's this complicated?"
"If someone tried to learn this purely from the textbook, unless they're a genius like Hermione, ordinary students probably wouldn't manage it in just a day or two."
Sean silently felt lucky.
A single picture with a paragraph of explanation was nowhere near as straightforward as directly observing a spell's magical framework in action.
He had seen Jamie construct the Levitation Charm's magical framework twice.
It wasn't very difficult.
But Sean also knew that more advanced magic often consisted of several—even a dozen—magical frameworks combined together.
Even if he could see those frameworks, memorizing them all would still be extremely challenging.