Hogwarts Raven

Chapter 417, Section 416: Love can give birth to greatness.
The old man sat in a wicker chair in the manor cottage, sunlight filtering through the leaves and casting dappled shadows. In his hand he held a rough wooden carving—a little boy riding on his mother's shoulders, the carving simple yet conveying a deep tenderness.

“We fell in love,” he said in a low voice, as if traveling through time, “and like all young lovers, we made an eternal vow.”

Ian listened quietly, expecting it to be a tragic story of forced separation.

But the old man's next words sent a shockwave through him. Ian was completely stunned; his brain seemed to freeze for a few seconds before he could barely process this entirely unexpected information.

You...you got married? And you had a son?
All the tragic grandeur, all the obstacles, all the heart-wrenching farewells he had envisioned, all pointed to a... happy and fulfilling ending? Then where did the unforgettable, almost tangible pain on Musa's face come from? Surely it couldn't have been all that buildup just to show off their love?
Musa didn't notice Ian's blank expression.

The strange expression on his face was gradually replaced by a deep, bittersweet recollection. His deep-set eyes gazed into the void as if piercing through the curtain of time.

I saw the distant past.

"my wife."

The old man's voice became unusually gentle, as if unwilling to disturb the light and shadow of his memories, "Like the most resilient thorn flower in the desert, beautiful, yet thorny, forever full of curiosity about the unknown. Our son, we call him Little Som, inherited everything from his mother—a radiant smile and an adventurous heart that can never be bound."

He sighed softly, a sigh filled with endless affection and a hint of helplessness. "To be honest, although I have traveled to many places with my teacher, I am ultimately an alchemist, a gourmet, and more accustomed to exploring the mysteries of the world in my study and laboratory."

"And Armani and Somme, they like to measure with their own feet and touch with their own hands. The hidden canyons at the source of the Nile, the ancient cities half-buried by the wind and sand in the depths of the Sahara Desert, the sparsely populated geothermal areas of the East African Rift Valley... many, many places have left their footprints."

“Sometimes I’ll put down my spice grinder and fermentation vat and go with them to gather rare herbs in the mountains and roast the game we’ve hunted around the campfire. Those are my happiest times. But most of the time, I’ll stay in this yard to take care of my crops and adjust my recipes.”

"Waiting for them to bring back exotic ingredients and thrilling stories from afar."

Musa's lips curved into a gentle smile, but then that smile collapsed as if crushed by an invisible weight, and his entire face was once again shrouded in a bleak despair.

"My lifelong regret... the root of all my pain... stems from that one time when I didn't go with them."

His voice suddenly became hoarse and dry, each word sounding as if it had been rubbed against sandpaper.

"That was in the summer when Somme was sixteen. They got the news from somewhere, or rather, Armani's insatiable thirst for adventure sensed something unusual—deep in the permafrost near the Arctic Circle on the edge of Siberia, there was a highly secretive underground nuclear defense facility left over from the Soviet era."

"It is said that during the height of the Cold War, it was a massive base integrating scientific research, defense, and survival, but it was hastily abandoned and almost completely erased from all official records. What attracted them, besides its historical mystery, were some...unverified rumors."

"It is said that after it was abandoned, it was affected by some inexplicable 'force,' which not only made the spatial structure strange, but may even have caused the growth of some strange fungi and plants that mutated in extreme environments and contained special energy." The old man's story seemed to finally get to the point here.

Ian held his breath; he knew the crucial turning point had arrived.

"Armani and Somme were ecstatic; they believed it would be the pinnacle of their expedition. They planned meticulously and prepared a vast amount of equipment. As for me... I was engrossed in deriving a crucial algorithm for the stability of energy during food cooking, and it was the most critical moment."

Musa's gaze fell on a plant in the corner of the yard with leaves that had an eerie, icy blue color. His voice deepened: "What attracts Armani is the unknown adventure and the possibility of 'ingredients' that have never been recorded. What attracts Little Som is the pure thrill of exploring the Lost Lands."

"They were excitedly preparing, getting gear for the extreme cold and studying maps. As for me... I was obsessed with recreating an ancient seasoning that was said to enhance the flavor of food using several types of polar mosses and volcanic salt, and I was at the crucial stage of the process. I felt that although the place was dangerous, Armani was experienced and little Som was grown up enough to handle it. Besides, I promised them that next time, I would definitely go with them and help them identify any unusual plants that might exist."

Musa's voice was filled with endless regret and self-mockery.

"'Next time'... How many tragedies in the world are caused by these three light-hearted words?" This seemed to be a summary of his life's work on melancholic literature.

Actually, there is some truth to it.

Many things, many regrets, do indeed arise from this. He closed his eyes, as if unwilling to see what followed, but those images were already etched deep into his soul, indelible.

"They set off. According to the plan, they should have returned before the short polar summer ended. But summer passed, autumn passed... and there was no news. I tried every method I could think of, even exchanging my alchemical tools for the help of a diviner to conduct several long-distance tracking divinations, but in the end I only received a vague and cold revelation: they entered that underground project, and then... they never came out again."

The courtyard fell into a deathly silence, with only the soft bubbling of the soup in the earthenware pot, as if mourning this past event.

"I settled everything here and set off for the ice field," Musa continued, his voice seemingly carrying the chill of Siberia. "I found the entrance, hidden deep within a glacial crevasse, cold and solid, like the silent maw of a behemoth. I went in, relying on the concentrated food and refined energy potions I carried, searching for who knows how long. It was larger than I could have imagined, its structure completely defying logic, a labyrinth of cold concrete and rusted steel. But I found nothing. No trace of their camp, no abandoned supplies, not even a familiar footprint. It was as if they had been completely swallowed up by that cold darkness."

He looked up at Ian, his eyes filled with raw, decades-long pain and bewilderment. “Neither alive nor dead. Can you understand this feeling, Your Majesty? For someone accustomed to creating with their own hands and tasting the real with their own palate, this illusory, unresolved loss is the cruelest torment.”

The old man's voice was filled with sighs.

Ian felt a tightness in his throat, and he nodded silently. Looking at the old man who kept company with the land and the kitchen, he could better understand the sense of emptiness that came after the collapse of a world built on "reality".

“So…” Ian began slowly, a thought flashing through his mind like lightning, connecting all the previous clues—Musa’s unconventional application of time technology, his profound knowledge beyond the realm of ordinary gourmet alchemy, and the obsession hidden deep in his eyes all seemed to stem from this.

"You study time technology, and even incorporate it into cooking. Is your real purpose... not to pursue the ultimate taste experience, but to... find the truth about their disappearance? Do you want to go back to the past?" Ian asked, wanting confirmation from the other party.

Musa nodded readily and picked up a small, intricately designed device that looked like it was made of copper and brass, resembling a pocket watch.

It's also like a miniature still. "Applying it to cooking, such as accelerating certain fermentation processes or allowing the flavors of spices to reach their ultimate fusion in the subtle changes of time, is just a side practice and... a way to pass the time. It helps me understand the 'taste' and 'texture' of time. What I've really been pursuing has always been time travel. I want to go back to before they entered that place, or... at least back to the point in time when they were still inside."

He confirmed Ian's guess, but then a bitter smile appeared on his face.

“Yes, I succeeded, in a way. I created this ‘Time Spice Bottle,’ which is essentially a small-scale time converter. More than once, I adjusted its scale and went back in time. I went back to the days before Armani and Som set off, to the days when we ate together in this courtyard.”

"Back to when they had just arrived on the ice field and were cooking hot soup in their tents to keep warm; even... I followed them countless times into that damned underground project."

The old man's voice was filled with helplessness.

"Ok?"

Ian's eyes widened.

Time travel!

This is a forbidden realm that researchers in almost every field dream of but dare not easily touch! This seemingly ordinary old farmer is actually touching the realm of God for the sake of his beloved!
To know.

The opponent was at most an elite wizard, the kind that the four heads of Hogwarts could easily kill, yet he was able to do something like this.

love.

It really is a wonderful thing.

It can unleash boundless power within a person.

Just as Ian was marveling at the story, the other person continued speaking.

“But,” Musa’s tone shifted, filled with helplessness, “the rules of time are like an insurmountable iron wall. I cannot directly stop them from going there.”

“Every time I try to do that, I encounter a powerful ‘corrective force.’ It could be that the dishes I’ve carefully prepared to persuade them are accidentally spilled, or that my words are interrupted by a sudden gust of wind or the sound of ice cracking. Once, I almost caused a paradoxical turbulence in the timeline and got lost because of my forceful intervention.”

"Time... it doesn't allow things to directly alter major historical moments, especially when they are closely related to your own existence."

He paused, a flicker of fear crossing his eyes. "So, I understand that forcibly stopping them won't work. The only thing I can do is 'follow' them. Go with them into that place and see for myself what's going on inside, but as I just said, it's pointless."

"So...did you lose them?"

Ian couldn't help but ask, "Losing your target in a huge maze seems quite reasonable."

Musa slowly shook his head, and that strange expression on his face, a mixture of confusion and a hint of fear, reappeared.

“No, it’s not that I lost track of it. That place… it’s very ‘eerie.’” He searched for the right words. “It’s not a magical realm as we usually understand it, there are no illusions or curses. It’s just a cold, hard Soviet-style underground fortress made of steel, concrete and huge pipes.”

“However, its internal space… is ‘chaotic’.” Musa seemed unsure how to describe it either; it was indeed strange that even an alchemist like himself couldn’t see through it.

"Chaos?" Ian asked, puzzled.

“Yes,” Musa affirmed. “Once you pass through the main entrance and enter the core area, the space is no longer continuous. You will be randomly ‘launched’ into some area inside the building. I’ve tried it many times, no matter which entrance I entered from, what time I entered, or even trying to enter right next to Armani and Somme… the result is the same.”

“After crossing that invisible boundary, we will inevitably be separated and appear in different places. I cannot control it, I cannot predict it. I have gone back to the past countless times and followed them in, but each time, I cannot appear in the same area as them. I can only search in vain in the area I am randomly assigned to.”

"Smelling the unique spice scent that Armani might have left in the air, or the smell of pine torches that Little Som was used to, but in the end, everything disappeared into the smell of cold steel and dust..." The old man's voice trembled slightly, a sense of frustration in the face of a strange phenomenon that was incomprehensible and impossible to resist.

“I explored many corners of that underground project, saw abandoned, enormous kitchens, cold storage rooms containing frozen, unknown meats, cultivation rooms filled with eerie, glowing mushrooms… I even suspected that the spatial anomalies there might be related to some taboo experiments conducted by the Soviets involving space compression or dimensional superposition. But I could never… I could never find them. I couldn’t find out where they ended up or what happened to them.”

The Soviet Union's underground nuclear defense project... affected by an unknown force... its internal space is chaotic and random... and may contain strange ingredients...

Ian's mind raced. Suddenly, a thought struck him, connecting it to what Musa had mentioned earlier about the mysteriously sourced "frozen goods from the former Soviet Union" in the cellar!
He abruptly looked up at Musa, his eyes filled with astonishment: "Wait! Mr. Musa! Those...those canned goods, meats, and vodka from the Soviet Union fifty years ago in your cellar...were they...brought back from that place?"

Musa seemed unsurprised that Ian had made the connection so quickly. He nodded calmly: “Yes. When conducting time travel experiments, especially when locating a specific point in time, it is inevitable to come into contact with things from that era and that place.”

"I brought back some insignificant things as part of testing the stability of time travel and the ability to 'carry matter'," he said, seemingly calmly stating a terrifying fact.

An alchemical achievement that even Nicolas Flamel never accomplished.

(End of this chapter)