Chapter 297: Bad News

The award ceremony went well, nothing "feared" happened. Felix felt that Professor Trelawney had once again seen things wrong. Moreover, he couldn't exactly enter the Hall of Prophecy of the Department of Mysteries to see if a new prophecy had been formed. The Department of Mysteries is located on the ninth level of the Ministry of Magic, and a secret department of the Ministry of Magic, that conducts secret research on specific mysteries. The majority of its operations are top secret, and even the staff of other departments of the Ministry of Magic keep their mouths shut about this place.

The wizards who worked in the Department of Mysterious are known as Unspeakables. They were prohibited from revealing any details about what they did, where they work, and Felix speculated that they may have signed harsh non-disclosure pacts - and while they are permitted to conduct dangerous research, they are also subject to more restrictions.

These may also be rumours. However, there is a claim that a mysterious room exists in the Department of Mysterious, where a Prophecy Orb will automatically appear for every prophecy that appears in the world. Since the establishment of the Department of Mysteries, there may have been thousands of prophecies recorded and waiting to be verified by future generations.

...

Felix played with a gold medal with a purple ribbon for his "achievement or endeavour beyond the ordinary", and Belby told him that the first-class medal came with a green ribbon, representing Slytherin House.

"Merlin is not from the Middle Ages, he and Slytherin House can be related?" Felix asked curiously.

"Heh, some pureblood families tracing their genealogy and claiming that their ancestors once followed Merlin ..."

"Really?"

"Who knows! But some families do have such a long heritage."

Felix returned to his office, and with the next two weeks of Easter break, he could freshen up his recent work. But the first thing he had to deal with is the pile of Easter eggs that filled half the room, and he suddenly got a little toothache, these chocolates and candies can simply let him eat them till a decade from now.

He took some of them and gave them to Sirius, passing on the result of his recent attempt in analysing the Marauders' Map.

It is rather a simple map, only palm-sized and with irregular design, like the result of a child's scribbling. The map is simply marked with the castle, the forbidden forest, the black lake, and Hagrid's hut.

Sirius took it with a disgusted face, it is dense with dots, dizzying to look at, but some names marked out in small golden letters, those are the people Sirius cares about - Harry Potter, Remus Lupin, Severus Snape, Albus Dumbledore ...

"Actually, there's Peter Pettigrew, only unseen."

Sirius tore open the wrapper of an Easter egg with his teeth and took a hard bite of the chocolate on it, "Thanks, or I'd be suffocated." He kept staring at the palm-sized piece of paper.

Kreacher lowered his voice and said, "The Loser Young Master goes to the Muggle community every day to play chess and returns with a stench ..."

"Shut up, Kreacher." Sirius growled in annoyance.

Day by day, Felix took the time to rearrange the magic items he had researched this year. Including the research files of the thinking room.

Mundungus made a trip to the Far East as planned, bringing back many magical items, and Felix made only one request - ancient.

While enriching his insight, he also felt more and more like the young Filius, mastering too many runes, but only a small percentage of them could really be used.

"This is also the reason why I intend to write a book about magic runes in the first place."

Felix thought to himself, and as his thoughts raced - one after another Magic Rune appeared in the air, gold, red, blue, green ... like rivers of colour, as they flowed through the office.

"Next - the unnamed book, ha, I remember Ron Weasley calling it the ghost book, it's kinda like that."

In front of Felix, a half virtual, half-real book appeared. The first few pages, which were solid and physical, and after that were all virtual. It is very similar to the nameless book Harry had, but there is no comparison between the two.

He opened a new page, and one after another magic rune flew out of the coloured rivers, leaping into the pages, and the pages manifested with various types of magic forms -

A waterfall falling from the sky, a lightning bolt cutting through the sky, a bridge connecting two places, an ever-spreading green mist ...

Felix looked at it all with satisfaction; if he included all the magic runes he knows, it would mean that he had completely mastered those runes. Although this process might take a long time.

A question suddenly occurred to him, where did the original ancient magic and runes come from?

Is it somewhat unrealistic to think that wizards were born with it? He is inclined to think that ancient wizards were studying magical creatures and magical plants when they accidentally got this result.

The difference between the two is that for magical creatures, their talent is an instinct that does not need to be learned, just as people can run and jump, they are born to release lightning and change their forms. But inevitably, they are also limited by their bodies.

Ancient wizards, however, were accidentally freed from this restriction when they transformed their talents into ancient magic. Their dilemma, in turn, was that they had to exhaust themselves trying to control it from getting out of control, but on the other hand, they also made the magic more powerful.

Felix's thoughts turned, and he took out a stack of parchment, a manuscript left behind by Slytherin. He once decided to seal the information because of the cruelty of Salazar Slytherin's methods and the fact that it did not fit his path of magic runes, but now it seemed that the two had crossed paths.

Unknowingly, he had been able to use his own path to analyse the paths of others.

Felix skipped over the bloody, brutal methods and looked at a record of magical creatures, especially the three parchments he had picked out earlier that he considered suitable for himself, which recorded the thought process of Slytherin's early research in bloodline magic: how to strip magical creatures of their gifts to transform them into spells used by wizards.

This seemed to coincide with Felix's speculation - Salazar Slytherin had thought of retracing the ancient wizard's path and gaining inspiration from the wider magic world.

But unfortunately, he eventually gave up on that line of thought.

Felix couldn't help but guess, if Salazar Slytherin chose to give up, then what was it that he was pursuing? Associated with what Helena had told him, Salazar Slytherin went deeper and deeper into the realm of the forbidden and became more and more terrifying in appearance, which seemed to imply that Slytherin was experimenting on himself, incorporating the bloodline of magical creatures; most likely, there could be more than one species.

Did Salazar Slytherin finally become completely inhuman?

Lady Rowena Ravenclaw's words still ringing in his ears, "We count as magical creatures in our own right."

What qualifies as a magical creature? Or to ask it differently, what happens to a wizard when he qualifies to be considered as a magical creature? Felix had no way of knowing that, but he thought that since Lady Ravenclaw had told him so solemnly, it meant that it is a huge threshold.

And most likely, Salazar Slytherin was relying on the transplanted bloodline to cross this threshold. What about the other three, and what did they rely on?

So far, he only knew a little about Rowena Ravenclaw, and from the manuscript, she left behind, she was a true all-rounder, alchemy, transfiguration, magic spells, potions, all of them. But she researched most deeply into memory magic.

As Felix delved deeper and deeper into the field of memory magic. The more he wondered: Was the Rowena Ravenclaw he saw in the Room of Requirement at that time really just a memory?

Or is that she herself?

What will the memory node develop into in the end, and is it related to the soul?

He had so many questions, but no one could answer them. All he could do is travel alone.

On the last day of the Easter holiday, Felix prepared himself for the last part of the school year. But then Dumbledore suddenly appeared with a gloomy expression, bringing him a piece of bad news.

"Nick is about to leave, and he wants to see you one last time."

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