days at Hogwarts

Chapter 600 Mysterious Room
The torches in the corridor cast long and narrow rays of light from behind. Hermione, who entered last, closed the door behind her. The room suddenly became dim, with only the blue flames on the wall swaying slightly, reflected on the floor which was as smooth as a lake.

Everything here is black, including the floor and the ceiling.

Loren looked around at the candlelight and the door, carefully examining the room. There were twelve black doors embedded in the wall. They looked exactly the same from the outside. There were no house numbers, so it was impossible to guess what was hidden behind the doors. There were no handles either, as if they refused to be opened by outsiders.

The Department of Mysteries, the most secretive department in the Ministry of Magic.

Compared to the Law Enforcement Department, International Cooperation Department, Accident and Disaster Management Department, Magical Creatures Management Department and even the Transport Department and Sports Department, which have long appeared in newspapers, the Department of Mysteries has never appeared in public reports and is rarely mentioned in various books and materials.

The wizards who work here are called Unspeakables. All tasks are top secret and no one ever knows what they are doing.

Some speculate that they are analyzing ancient forbidden magic and studying the nature of magic, while others speculate that they specialize in handling unspeakable events for those in power and silencing opponents.

Boom...

Along with the sound of the boulder moving, the walls of the entire room began to rotate, faster and faster, and the phosphorescent blue candles gradually blurred and dragged into a circle of light, like the neon tubes on a Muggle street.

Sirius was alert and glanced around cautiously: "Be careful..."

"Don't be nervous, this is the normal protective measure of the Department of Mysteries."

Hermione explained quietly, and as if to confirm her statement, the spinning wall stopped and the blue candlelight calmed down, burning silently on the candlestick.

The strange silence gave rise to depression, filling the circular room. Ron couldn't help but mutter in a low voice: "Have Voldemort and the Death Eaters really controlled the Ministry of Magic? I mean, it doesn't look like there are any people here... Not only are there no Death Eaters, there are no Ministry of Magic staff, nothing..."

"Harry, how did you find my father and Voldemort?" Ron asked.

George and Fred looked at him eagerly, and even Ginny's face was full of anxiety.

"I remember……"

Harry's eyes reflected the blue firelight, and he said in a trance, "I walked out of the elevator, opened the door at the end of the corridor, and entered a black room. This is it... So far, everything has been exactly the same as in my dream."

"I walked through a door and entered a room that seemed to be... a room that seemed to glow. After passing through that room, there was a room full of display shelves. On the shelves were countless crystal balls..."

Harry looked at the doors opposite him, trying to remember which one to enter through.

Loren turned to look at Hermione beside him.

"The Hall of Prophecy, that is the Hall of Prophecy." Hermione said thoughtfully, "Dumbledore and Professor Moody have brought me here before. To reach the Hall of Prophecy, we need to pass through the Hall of Time. We need to find the door leading to the Hall of Time among the twelve doors... I don't know how Dumbledore identified them, so we can only try one by one."

An adult wizard and seven little wizards, who were in a safe house protected by the Fidelius Charm just a few minutes ago, came to the Department of Mysteries in the blink of an eye, with the purpose of rescuing two Ministry of Magic employees from Death Eaters and Voldemort. For some reason, Hermione couldn't feel nervous.

It’s as if behind everything, there are several invisible hands pushing things forward, making things develop according to some pre-set plan.

Hermione felt that she must have been influenced by Loren, and she didn't feel anything when she was about to face Voldemort.

"The glowing house..."

Loren listened carefully to what Hermione said, then walked to the wall at the edge of the room to check carefully, holding the wand tightly in his right hand, pressed the door with his left hand and slowly pushed it open, making sure there was no ambush, then put away the wand and walked into the first opened door.

The others followed closely behind, and Sirius remained alert, looking back from time to time to see if there was any noise in the surrounding rooms.

There were several chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. The room was spacious and bright. In the center was a glass tank filled with dark green liquid, almost as big as a swimming pool, with faint pearly white light floating in it.

"What are these?"

"Is it a fish?"

"can not see clearly."

Loren didn't pay attention to the conversation between Harry and the others. He was squinting his eyes and observing the things floating and swaying in the water tank.

The dark, thick, dark green liquid filled the entire tank. It was not the result of algae blooming due to water enrichment, but more like a magical potion. The liquid, full of vitality, fed the plankton inside. Many white lumps floated around in it, flashing strange lights and appearing and disappearing, looking like slimy cauliflower. Hermione approached the wall of the glass tank and her body suddenly froze.

Through the water tank, she suddenly saw clearly that there were grooves of different shapes and depths on the surface of the white mass. She had seen things of that shape in Loren's anatomy book.

Hermione looked at the white masses floating in the dark green liquid, her pupils trembling slightly.

"They are some brain specimens..." Loren gently pressed her shoulders and observed the floating brains inside. He analyzed calmly, "The surface color is whitish and greenish. This is because the lack of oxygen supply has caused the hemoglobin to lose its color. The brain tissue has softened and shrunk, proving that a certain degree of autolysis has occurred. It looks like they were taken from a corpse that died not long ago and placed in a potion to maintain its activity."

"I don't know whether it was collected by the Ministry of Magic or confiscated from dark wizards..." Loren frowned slightly and guessed thoughtfully: "It seems that someone is studying the brains of wizards."

These brains had little external damage and were removed cleanly. The intact grooves and thin blood vessels attached to the surface proved that the removers had superb skills.

It shouldn't be a Muggle's brain. A Muggle's brain is not worth the trouble to preserve.

He suspected that someone was observing wizards' brains, conducting research on the source of magic, or studying wisdom, but there seemed to be no results so far.

After Loren's explanation, Harry and the others felt a little less strange, but they still felt uncomfortable staying in this room: "Let's leave here, this room is not right, we need to find another door to try."

So they hurried back to the dark circular room they had been in, and Hermione marked the door with her wand to show that it had been checked.

Loren was still thinking about the brains in the water tanks. At the same time, he kept walking and came to another door. He held the magic wand in one hand and slowly pushed forward with the other hand, opening another closed black wooden door.

The room was arranged like an amphitheater, with rows of stone benches in a stepped outer circle and a stone pit about twenty feet in the center. In the center of the pit stood a stone arch with a tattered black curtain hanging on it...or rather, a drapery.

There was no wind in the room, but the curtains were fluttering gently, and an ancient and decadent atmosphere permeated from inside the curtains.

Harry and the others nearby already knew that this was not the room they were looking for, but they still walked into the stone pit and approached the archway curtain.

"Did you hear anybody talking?"

Harry asked the question very abruptly. He was very close to the curtain and had a very strange expression on his face.

Several people watched him walk sideways around the archway, but there was nothing behind it and he could only look at the tattered black curtain on the other side.

"No one is talking, Harry!" Sirius looked at him with a serious expression, frowning, and looked very nervous. "Let's go, this is not right, Harry, let's go."

Harry turned his head and glanced at the curtain. This tattered curtain had an indescribable beauty that made people want to pass through it and enter the archway behind it.

"No one is talking, Harry!" Sirius grabbed him and pulled him towards the door.

"Death Veil..."

Loren muttered to himself, his perception seeping into the archway through the curtains, but he did not detect anything ominous, only a gentle breeze, like the autumn wind blowing outside the window at dawn, very peaceful.

His mind sank into the curtain, and the calm and warm autumn wind suddenly accelerated, as if passing through the forbidden forest covered with dead leaves. Some rustling sounds came into his ears and gradually became clearer. They were some familiar voices calling in a low voice.

However, when he concentrated and listened carefully, the sounds became vague and distant, and he could not hear anything clearly.

Loren withdrew his gaze and relaxed his mind. The rustling whispers in his ears gradually faded away, and the tattered curtains were still fluttering gently, like a warm breeze.

The Curtain of Death seems to have the same properties as the Thestrals. Only those who have witnessed death can feel the whispers from the world of death.

He once again thought of the story of the Grim Reaper and the three brothers. The second brother asked the Grim Reaper for the resurrection stone in order to summon his dead wife back to his side, but the couple was unable to reunite and live happily together.

There was always a curtain between the two. The beloved was close at hand, but difficult to touch and communicate with. The second brother was finally unable to bear the torture of missing his wife and chose to commit suicide to meet her.

Harry's state of being tempted is somewhat similar to the story of the Resurrection Stone...

(End of this chapter)