Chapter 206 - Architect’s Puzzle

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The link is also in the synopsis.

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In the dark, dimly lit entrance hall, a figure could be seen doing a moonwalk from one end of the enormous hall to the other. The figure was, of course, Quinn, who had gotten tired of sitting in front of the Architect's Statue and had decided to think while walking, which somehow turned into him doing moonwalks on the entrance hall's marble floor.

"It's night, and I'm lonely~," he softly sang in whispers, "the one who defies the destiny, waoho~ yeah~, I'm fate's enemy~, uh-huh, can someone listen to me maybe~ — because right now this boy needs this problem's re-re-remedy."

Quinn was so engrossed in his ugly singing that he didn't notice when he reached the end of the path. His back bumped into something pointy, startling himself, and he ended up jumping forward in surprise. He turned in a hurry to see what he had bumped into and saw Founder Rowena Ravenclaw cast in pure gold, standing with a diadem in one hand and a tome in the other.

He let out a sigh of relief and stepped forward with a smile. Quinn knelt in front of the statue. "My fair lady, this student of yours asks for your guidance. This poor one's wit has reached its limit, and only your divine intellect could grant me the hope to succeed the Architect's arduous trials," he said, exaggerating every word that came out of his mouth.

There was a widespread belief that a change in perspective could help things along and sometimes allow a breakthrough when stuck at a problem. And technically, Quinn was looking from a different perspective — he was looking at Rowena Ravenclaw's golden statue while kneeling instead of standing. . . . and in doing so, he noticed the palm on which the tome rested.

It was a tiny thing, and at any other moment, he wouldn't have noticed it, but as he looked up at the end, he noticed a ring on Rowena Ravenclaw's middle finger, but that wasn't the odd thing; the thing that popped out to Quinn was that the ring wasn't melded into the finger as it would in a sculpture or stature — the ring looked like it had been put into the finger separately.

Quinn stood up at once and looked around the entrance hall. There were, in total, six golden statues in the hall — Godric Gryffindor, Rowena Ravenclaw, Salazar Slytherin, Helga Hufflepuff, Architect Stigweard Gragg, and the unnamed one-eyed witch.

He hurriedly jogged to the nearest statue and reached Godric Gryffindor's statue — the man with the portly stood tall dressed in leather armor under his robes; his hands rested on top of a vertically standing sheathed sword with the only very tip of the blade touching the floor. With both hands laying on top of each other, the lower hand was partially hidden from sight; Quinn bent his knees and got in close to finally get a glimpse of a ring on Godric Gryffindor's ring finger.

"That's two," he muttered quickly before excitedly running to Helga Hufflepuff's statue and the homely plump woman holding a small golden cup with two finely-wrought handles with a badger engraved on the side. Here too, the ring was placed in a hard-to-spot place on the Hufflepuff's curved index finger grasping the cup's handle.

The fourth founder, Salazar Slytherin's bald head and cold eyes were perfectly depicted in gold. The ancient and monkeyish man with a long thin beard that fell almost to the bottom of his sweeping robes had so many rings on his hands that Quinn hadn't noticed that one of Slytherin's pinky was also not melded with the finger and was a separate entity.

He looked at the founders' statues standing in different corners of the room. "Four founders, four statues, four rings," said Quinn in but a whisper.

His hand instantly snapped into a fist, and his magic flowed. The 'ringed' fingers of the four founders straightened out with the power of transmutation as the gold heeded the command of Quinn's magic. The four rings (one from each founder) slowly rotated around the fingers as Quinn pulled them out, and the second the rings left the fingers, they zapped through the air and arrived in front of Quinn in mere seconds.

He stared at the rings and noticed the common denominator of the rings except that they were made from gold: "The four mascots," he voiced. The rings had etchings of the four house animals: lion, eagle, snake, and badger.

Quinn knew what he had to do. He walked towards the Architect's statue and rested his eyes on the Architect's hand holding the model of Hogwarts with the fingers digging into the ground below the model — all of his digits were bare with not a single ring in sight. Once again, the magic worked its course — the Architect's golden fingers were pulled out from the model and straightened out so Quinn could insert the rings.

Rowena Ravenclaw's eagle inscribed ring taken from her middle finger went into the Architect's middle finger,

Godric Gryffindor's lion inscribed ring taken from his ring finger went into the Architect's ring finger,

Helga Hufflepuff's badger inscribed ring taken from her index finger went into the Architect's index finger,

Salazar Slytherin's serpent inscribed ring taken from his little finger went into the Architect's little finger.

Quinn stepped back and used transmutation once again to curve the fingers back into Hogwart's model and then waited for the show to happen. . . . but nothing happened.

"Hmm?" he stepped forward to see if the fingers weren't properly inserted or had he made a mistake in the ring placement. . . . but all the things seemed to be in order.

'ɪꜰ ʏᴏᴜ ᴡᴀɴᴛ ᴛᴏ ʀᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴏʀᴇ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀs, ᴘʟᴇᴀsᴇ ᴠɪsɪᴛ Novel(B) in.ᴄᴏᴍ ᴛᴏ ᴇxᴘᴇʀɪᴇɴᴄᴇ ꜰᴀsᴛᴇʀ ᴜᴘᴅᴀᴛᴇ sᴘᴇᴇᴅ.',

"Then why isn't something happening. . . . was my assumption wrong?" he muttered in contemplation, but then the bare fifth finger caught the attention — "the thumb is still unoccupied, there must be a fifth ring for it, yes. . . . the question is, where's it?"

He wondered for a few moments, whereafter he turned to the one remaining statue in the entrance hall and stared at the ugliest statue, which for some reason was also drawn in gold. Quinn walked towards the statue of the unnamed one-eyed witch — hair haggard, unsightly bumps on the skin, heavily hunched back, ragged robes, and a crooked staff — nothing about the one-eyed witch was pleasant, yet it was stationed in the entrance hall for an entire millennium.

"It makes wonder, doesn't," he mumbled and observed the statue of the woman blind in one eye. He first looked at her hands, but unexpectedly there were no rings on her bony fingers.

"Okay, what else?"

He looked at her staff which had big hoops on the top, but they were melded into the staff, which indicated that they weren't what he was looking for.

"Eyes. . . eye, singular."

At first, Quinn thought it was because of the general vibe of the statue that the woman's 'good' eye was bulging and looking in an off direction, but the more he stared at it, the more he thought that the direction in which the statue was looking in was of significance.

Quinn raised a hand and rubbed his index finger and thumb — when he pulled them apart, there was a thread of red Empyrean connecting them. He took the end attached to his thumb and stuck it right in the middle of the eye.

"Alright, let's see where this goes," said Quinn and started walking in the direction in which the statue was looking in. Soon, he reached a wall, but the statue wasn't looking near the floor level but higher above.

He looked up, then at his feet and tapped his heel against the floor twice for a platform of glowing red Empyrean develop beneath his feet which then pushed him up, and soon he was standing atop a solid pillar — he had gotten decent enough to create massive concrete structures.

The line of Empyrean was still in Quinn's hand, and he pulled it a little for it became taut, then positioned it so that the glowing red line was perfectly perpendicular to the eyeball. When he looked at his end of the line, it pointed right in the middle of a very small-framed photo (there were hundreds of magical portraits in the entrance hall).

When Quinn looked at the photo, his eyes widened in surprise — what he saw was a photo of the entrance hall — a perspective of the entrance hall as seen from the eye of the one-eyed witch.

"That's some cool planning," he said in amusement.

The picture was too small for Quinn to discern anything valuable with the naked eye, so he conjured a magnifying glass and began observing the magnified picture inch by inch. From the viewpoint of the one-eyed witch, she could've seen all other statues, but because her field of vision was higher, she could only see the wall of photo frames.

Minutes went by as Quinn tried to spot something of value, and just as he was about to give up, his breathing hitched, and Quinn gulped — he was looking at the very same spot that the statue was looking — at the photo in the small frame. . . . he could see the frame, but. . . . the picture inside the frame was different.

He looked at another picture of the entrance hall from the one-eyed witch's viewpoint, but this time there was an old man with tornado-like curls for a beard staring back at him as if knowing that Quinn was looking at him.

It was the architect — it was Stigweard Gragg. . . . and he was standing right where Quinn was standing right now, next to the photo wall. The architect in the magical portrait smiled and turned to where the small frame should have been, but instead, there was nothing in that spot. The architect pointed at the empty square before turning back towards Quinn and continued to smile while staring squarely at him.

He leaned back away from the frame, the magnifying glass in his hand vanishing in the process. He gazed at the square frame and the picture-in-picture inside it, thinking about what he had seen; at the very least, him spotting the architect meant Quinn was on the right path.

Deciding to act on what he had seen, Quinn undid the sticking charm on the frame and pulled it off the wall to reveal an unnaturally white square area of the wall previously hidden by the frame. But when Quinn brushed his fingers against the newly exposed wall, his lightest touch sent the piece of wall caving in with a click before the entire white square popped out with another click.

"Woah," Quinn wasn't expecting this to happen; nevertheless, he braved forward and pulled the cube of wall out — the surface of the cube felt smooth against his fingertips, and the exposed brick he was expecting was absent. He turned the wall cube around, and saw that it was painted white all around.

"This isn't brick at all, is it?" Quinn felt the cube through his magic and knew what he held was a wooden block — wood that had gone through heavy processing to make it feel and look like a piece of wall.

Quinn folded his legs and sat down, the wall cube in front of him. His fingers felt a faint lip around the cube, and with a flick of magic, the box opened up to reveal a hard cream-yellow material filling what would have been a hollow wooden box.

"I know what this is." A heat produced through magic traveled from his digits into the cream-yellow filling, and immediately the solid substance gave way, and Quinn's fingers sunk into a gooey viscous emulsion, making Quinn's lips turn up on the successful guess.

Quinn further dunked his fingers and reached around to feel something solid in the emulsion; he grabbed the small object and pulled a goo-covered ring out of the box.

"I knew it," said Quinn sounding pleased with himself. A strong gust of wind blew the goo away to reveal a platinum ring with a black gem fitted in the crown.

Quinn then jumped down from the Empyrean, his robes fluttering for a short moment before his feet touched the ground, and he went running towards the architect's statue. He slipped the ring onto the statue's thumb.

It was almost instantaneous.

'',

The four founder rings blazed in clear colored flames — red flames covered the lion ring, yellow wrapped the badger, green glittered across the serpent, and blue illuminated the eagle. On the other hand, the jeweled thumb ring didn't burn, but the black gem roused to throw out a deep, dark, and disturbed blackish-teal glow.

Quinn immediately threw an illusion around him and the statue in case a ghost or house-elf was attracted by the glow of the rings. The flames grew brighter in a flash before they went out, and the only light was from jeweled ring glowing in a teal light. But it seemed everything wasn't over yet as the founders' rings started to shake, and suddenly their bottoms separated, and the rings flew out from the fingers, zooming through the sky and flying to their initial positions in the hands of the golden founder statues.

The only remaining ring sat in front of Quinn's eyes; he sent a pulse of magic — the thumb straightened out, and the ring spun out of the finger. He raised his hand, and the ring slowly floated down into his palm. Quinn noticed that the black gem had transformed into a dark teal gem, and as the ring sat on his palm, he felt a slight constant thrum from the ring as it vibrated in his hand.

Now that the ring was in his hand, Quinn did the only logical next step he could think of and put it on his ring finger — the ring, as many magical rings, adjusted to fit his finger.

"In brightest day, in blackest night, no evil shall escape my sight! Let those who worship evil's might, beware my magic. Teal Lantern's light!" By the end, Quinn had his hand raised up, expecting the ring to shoot a beam of light above, but it did no such thing.

"Yeah, thought so," Quinn brought down his hand and, in earnest, began observing the ring. He felt that the ring was no longer warm, and his skin touched the cool of the metal, but like before, the vibration was still present.

"What's the mean of this?" he touched the ring with his other hand while contemplating the significance of the vibration, but after thinking for a while, he couldn't arrive at a conclusion.

He raised his hands up, stood up his toes, and stretched his body from top-bottom, and groaned while doing it. "I should go to sleep; I'll see what it does in the morning."

He turned towards the direction of the grand staircase to climb up to the Ravenclaw dorm room entrance, but the moment he reached the ground floor level of the stairwell, Quinn noticed a glint from the corner of his eyes and turned his gaze towards it just in time to see the ring jewel flashed brightly and shoot a teal beam of light towards the front.

"Holy shit, it really shot a beam of light." He watched with wide eyes as the teal light beam hit the staircase, and at once, the every moving grand stairwell stopped moving.

The feeling of shock was something Quinn couldn't describe. In all the years he had been here, Quinn hadn't seen the sight in front of him once — not once had he witnessed all the stairs stopped in one place, especially not in the middle of them changing platforms.

The complete stoppage only lasted a moment as Quinn's gaze was attracted to a set of stairs moving, and he watched as the stairs connected with each other all the way to the sixth floor; the second the connection completion happened, a teal radiance covered the side-railings, marking a path for him to follow.

"I. . . . wanted to go sleep," he sighed, and from the looks of it, if he didn't climb the prescribed path, the stairs weren't going to return to normal.

He climbed the illuminated stairs to reach the sixth floor and looking behind, the teal was gone, and the stairs were once again moving. He looked back ahead, and a clear line of teal was going through the middle of the floor. Following the teal line had him arrive at a dead-end in the corridor.

The wall he faced was plain with simple tan paint, but just like all other things, the presence of teal was evident on the wall — the line that aided Quinn to arrive at the wall climb up the wall and in the dead center of the wall, it made a small circle ring.

Quinn glanced at the ring in his hand; he walked forward and touched the jewel in the ring to the center of the circle.

Teal overflowed the wall, with the light flooding the entire corridor. Quinn opened his squinted eyes and lowered his arm to see a layer of swirling teal had replaced the wall. He conjured a ball and threw it in; the ball disappeared into the teal leaving behind a single ripple as it vanished.

"There's definitely something behind here."

Quinn gingerly advanced a hand into the teal, which like the ball, disappeared behind the layer. He stepped forward, and soon, Quinn had left the corridor, leaving behind nothing but a ripple in the teal layer, which disappeared the next second, and all that left was a simple tan-colored wall in the dead of night where silence reigned supreme.

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Quinn West - MC - The Architect is sure a creepy guy. . .

FictionOnlyReader - Author - Ugh, I had written 2/3rds of this chapter before going to sleep yesterday and was in a good mood that I didn't have much to write tomorrow. But today, I saw an article on "Show, not tell," which disrupted my entire rhythm as I became conscious about my writing, and the last 1/3rd took so much time.

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The link is in the synopsis!