Chapter 62 - Year End

The last few weeks of the year passed without any incident. Everything at Hogwarts was back to normal.

Gryffindor house seemed much happier with Professor Babbling as the Head of the House. In a few days she had stopped the unjust point deductions and detentions ȧssigned by Snape to them. She was furious when many students came to her to complain about that. She immediately went to the Headmaster with the issue and Dumbledore had to order Snape to control his tendencies despite him not being happy about it. With the current poor reputation of Hogwarts if this issue also reached the Prophet then Dumbledore would have no option other than fire Snape to appease the people.

Snape sneered and grumbled in his classes after that. Since his favourite source of enjoyment was taken away from him, he became more horrible in classes. McGonagall was depression when she saw Gryffindors losing respect for her when they saw how easily Professor Babbling helped them with their problem. She knew that she was wrong and decided to do her job properly from now on since she did not want to be hated by her students.

Despite the improvement in the points of other Houses due to this, Slytherin still won the House Cup since the improvement was made near the end of the year.

Due to the removal of the obstacle course in the third floor corridor, Dumbledore had no way to award points to Harry and his friends to make Gryffindor win the House Cup. I could see it on his face during the end of the year feast that he wanted Gryffindor to win.

Dumbledore was disappointed that he was not able to gain Harry's admiration by giving him and Gryffindor points. He had met him only once during this year which was not enough to make Harry see him as a grandfather figure which he wanted to be seen as. With him being busy with other things these last few weeks, he was not able to chat with Harry about things like the Voldemort which he planned on doing after Harry's confrontation with Voldemort. That would have brought him closer to Harry.

Coming to Harry, it seems like it was not possible for any improvement in his behaviour. His life at Dursleys had made him desperate for attention. So even though he does not like some of the habits of his two friends, he has not ditched them for new friends. He did not know that he was alienating himself from other children by doing this. The bossy attitude of Hermione and the whinny attitude of Ron made others stay away from them and since Harry was always with them, they stayed away from him too.

He clearly needed a lot of mental counseling. Due to my nutritional potions he has grown fast this year which meant that his robes had become short for him. Since he had bought only the basic robes without any charms they were not self-sizing. Despite this happening, Harry had not done anything to correct that. So he has spent the whole year wearing tight robes. He is scared to ask help from others due to his life with Dursleys.

There is no way I can correct his behaviour without some serious counselling which would take up a lot of time. So it was all upto him now. He needs to correct his behaviour fast if he wants my help in the future. I was happy that he continued to practice Occlumency despite all this while keeping it a secret from his friends. Maybe there was hope left for him after all.

The New marauders did make an appearance in the end of the year feast but there was no monologue or anything since there was nothing I wanted to say to everyone. They just set of a colourful display of fireworks and vanished quietly during the display.

Coming to my achievements of the year. This year was the most fruitful year of Hogwarts life. I was truly sad about Voldemort going away since I lost my unique educational YouTube channel with him. I learnt a lot from him.

My gains due to Tom Riddle's memory was enormous. I could now say that I am a Master Legilimens. I could even go around the protections of the Heir rings and read the minds of the Heirs without them detecting my presence. Riddle had already found the way and I just had to practice using it. It was impossible to read minds of people with Lord rings without them detecting my intrusion. Riddle had experimented a lot in that area and concluded it was impossible due to a mȧturė magical core powering up the ring which increased the power of the ring by many times.

I compensated for my lack of duelling experience by watching his duels through his eyes and learning from his mistakes. This was not the best way to become a good dueller but this was all I could do now to help me in the field.

I had learned silent and instantaneous Apparition from Riddle's memory. After practise I could use it effortlessly even during battle and use it to get an upper hand. Flying without a broom needed more magic reserves so I stored the knowledge away for later. I also learnt port-key making from his memories.

The rituals he had knowledge of were all of Dark type and were not useful for me but I did start my research on the Dark Arts subject with the help of his memories. It was not too helpful since Riddle concentrated more on the evil side of dark magic and the quick ways to power him up which I did not need.

My hunt in the forbidden forest had gained me a lot of harvest. I hunted almost a third of the total Acromantula population in the Forest. It was quite easy to find the small groups using mage sight while flying above the forests in my Falcon form. Mage sight also helped me detect the presence of Voldemort and the Centaurs while hunting and escape when needed.

Surprisingly my hunt did not cause the nest to react in any way which was confusing and I did not find any information to explain this. I was happy since this made the hunt easier for me but this also made me act more carefully while making sure that no one could trace the hunt back to me.

I even saved a couple of Unicorns from dying and gained me some drops of willingly given Unicorn blood and Unicorn tail hairs. They would be very useful for potions. I could not save all of them due to the danger of being found but I comforted myself by saying that I at least saved some of them when they were destined to die.

My Acromantula farm in the Black island now had 20 healthy Acromantula. It was quite easy to transfer them with the help of my five house elves. I would subdue the Acromantula and they would transfer them to the enclosure. 20 was enough for my enclosure since these 20 will reproduce quickly to create a big nest in my enclosure. Any more and the big island will quickly become too small for the nest.

The harvest from the hunt were sold by Sherry and others in various stores around Britain and France. I made nearly 200,000G from the hunt due to the high demand. It was a lot of money and was stored in my vault in the Black castle. Since the Gringotts vault was like a storage vault without any benefits, I did not plan on keeping a lot of money in there. Just enough to show my status as a rich Lord.

First thing I decided was what to do about the money I have in my home. After thinking about it a lot I finally decided to use this for investment too. I had Sherry exchange the money to pounds in batches so as to cause any trouble from many different branches of Gringotts around Europe. Now I had 1 million pounds to continue my investment. I bought more shares of the companies that I already had shares of. I knew the price would increase by 100 times in the future so this investment would become 100 million in about 25 years.

I also completed some of my shopping for the next year. The letter with the list of things would come only after a moth so I could not finish the whole shopping but the other things could be bought by Sherry and did not need me visiting Diagon Alley.

After finishing everything that needed to be done I was reading to leave Britain for my trip.