Luna's POV
Understanding Harry's explanation about his research would have been easy if Luna was a regular Hogwarts student.
He would have say the bare minimum to make sure she understand and they would have moved on.
The problem was that Luna weren't a regular Hogwarts student.
Luna was someone whose mother used to have experiments near, someone who could see magic and auras, someone who learned a lot from Harry and his books for the last two years, enough to pass 10th grade science class.
Yes, Luna wasn't someone who would leave explanations like- "so I am trying to find a way to change her body so she won't die nor become an animal" be. Luna wanted an explanation and she wanted it now!
"Explain better, I know you can."
"Fine, fine, you are a scary lady when you want knowledge you know that?"
And this started Harry's long explanation about what he did until now- the DNA testing, what he found out- the real reason for the curse, and his plans for the future about the subject- fixing the DNA by adding the needed chromosomes.
By the time he finished Luna has one question
"Are you a moron?" She hissed, scaring Harry as she never talked like that. "Have you learned nothing from my story about my mother? You don't mess with anyone's body, ever!" She couldn't believe it, it was like he is a child who sees a fire, no matter what he heard about it, until he gets burned he won't learn.
"Luna," he said softly, something that would have made her heart stop if she wasn't so damn angry. "I will take precautions, many of them, but I have to do it, not only for Astoria, the little girl who will die if I won't help her, but for science."
She knew it, she knew what he was about to say the second she told him not to, as much as she prided herself in talking after her mother she knew that in the matters of the heart she took after her father and as he once told her 'the Lovegoods always fall for those whose pursue for knowledge know no bounds, not even their own life.'
Luna's angry look changed into a determined one.
"Fine, but from now on I will help you in this research."
"Well if you do," Harry said "then you must know about how I have time for it, you see, I have something called a time turner."
For years into the future, if Luna were to be asked what was the point in time that truly changed her life, she would have said it was that moment.
Harry's POV
The next day was mostly uneventful until the evening.
He got his time turner back from Professor Snape with the condition that he would help make the potions for the infirmary, had a few classes he didn't listen to, in which he studied books GAI read to him, traveled back in time and worked on the final touches of the song the band prepared for tonight.
Making the illusion was not only a way to avoid being revealed, but also a way to improve his ability with runes.
You see, after learning about the spiritual part of magic, Harry finally had the final part he was missing about runes, arithmancy and their rules.
If enough people believe about something being true for enough time it becomes true, especially in magic rules.
Runes and old languages weren't magical until weren't magical until enough people made them so and the ways to write rune scames and say spells didn't come to be until people made them so.
That wasn't to say there aren't basic rules to magic that are true even without belief, it is just that as magic is divided to spiritual and physical, and each of the kinds of magic works in contradiction to the other, as long as you have enough magical energy you can do anything you want.
There are only two problems.
The first is the belief of other people, if their belief contradicts yours it becomes a fight between beliefs, and the stronger you get the more you need to fight the beliefs of the world, so while a weak wizard need to fight the beliefs of 0.1% a strong one would need to fight 3% and someone at the level of Dumbledore would have to fight 10%, something that explained most of today's magical people's problems and Harry's fast progress.
You see, while in the past most of the world population believed in miracles and magic, today most believe in science, so when wizards fight the beliefs that changing one thing to another by saying some words is impossible, and that magic isn't real, Harry only needed to fight the second part, as he transfigure by using science at the core.
Not to mention that by using knowledge about the physical world, his need to use spiritual magic became smaller and his available will to fight the belief of the world was larger, the only problem that is left is training his will, belief and connection to the spiritual realm, something non of the western magical people do, as they let their spells, which are almost entirely spiritual connect them to it, and eastern people only start after the third stage, by using their connection with the chosen physical aspect of the world as their connection, which meant Harry had to find his own way to straighten his connection to the spiritual part of magic.
It took some thinking and some history book reading, but eventually Harry found a way.
While it is true that most western people who move past the second stage use the method of belief gathering to become Demi-gods, there are some that use a method closer to the eastern, in a few of the eastern books there were some mentions of a western group that tried to use the eastern method to progress yet took it too far by instead of trying to study one thing about the physical world, they were trying to study everything, even the spiritual world- they were called philosophers.