From Hogwarts to Strixhaven.

Chapter 597 The Paradox of Possibility

"Avada Kedavra!"

After the house-elf's shrill voice and a flash of green light, the handsome black-haired boy collapsed to the ground, his face still bearing the grief of the professor's passing.

Voldemort, now in the body of a house-elf, squeezed his wand, then stepped forward to examine it with some skepticism before finally confirming that he had indeed fulfilled his wish and completely removed the last obstacle on the path to immortality.

"Hahaha..." Voldemort, the little elf, burst into maniacal laughter, his gray, wrinkled skin trembling uncontrollably, and even tears of joy welling up in his tennis ball-sized green eyes. "I won! I won! What the first Dark Lord, what Ivy Doom, are nothing but my defeated foe! The dark wizard who claimed to know the Killing Curse best, didn't he still fall to my Killing Curse in the end?"

"I will unify the entire wizarding world! I will etch Voldemort's name forever into the annals of history!"

However, just as Voldemort spread his arms, reveling in the tranquility and joy of success, a voice suddenly rang in his ears that sent shivers down his spine.

“Really? I don’t think so.” Ivy had just recovered from the discomfort caused by the time travel when she heard Voldemort’s laughter.

Upon hearing Professor Figg's dying words once again, Ivy immediately understood where she was—the ancient vault of magic built by the four guardians a hundred years ago in the depths of Hogwarts, containing a vast amount of magic plundered from wizards' bodies, and the place where Ivy had her final battle with the goblin Lanlock.

However, due to the lingering discomfort from the time travel, Ivy was unable to react for the time being until the chaotic colors and sounds around her returned to normal, at which point she was able to move freely.

Professor Figo died in front of him once again, and even his past self could not escape Voldemort's killing curse.

Yes, my past self.

Ivy has gradually come to understand everything.

Why would Mystra say that the spell he cast, which consumed the power of the supreme god and a whole host of artifacts that ordinary adventurers would never encounter in several lifetimes, was "already successful"?

The goddess of magic also said that the spell not only "included horizontal interference with spacetime, but also vertical manipulation."

It was a piece of history fixed by magic, as if a segment had been taken from the flow of time with a beginning and an end and shaped into a self-circulating structure like an ouroboros.

Rather than saying that Ivy was banished from Faerûn by her own magic and arrived at a deflected wizarding world line with "fifth-year students," it would be more accurate to say that the magic pulled Ivy back to the starting point of her journey.

This is not some kind of deviated wizarding worldline, but rather the game world after Ivy's first time traveling through time. The mentally challenged young man who collapsed to the ground after being hit by a Killing Curse was Ivy from a hundred years ago.

The little elf Voldemort was grabbed by the neck, and the laughter stopped abruptly.

He suddenly turned around, and there stood Ivy right beside him.

"This is impossible!" Voldemort, the little elf, tore at his bat-like ears and roared in disbelief, "You should have been erased from history by now!"

“Nothing is impossible with magic.” Ivy calmly raised her wand. “Farewell, Voldemort. Rest assured, I will completely forget you. Forget everything.”

A blinding light suddenly flashed, and the house-elf who had traveled from the future back to the past collapsed to the ground, his eyes closed and he lost consciousness.

The mind-body memes that once dominated its brain, belonging to Voldemort, have been completely erased by magic, and it has once again become a happy house-elf.

The cave where the ancient magic vault is located isn't exactly desolate; a few plants, streams, and man-made structures do serve as decorative elements. It's just that, illuminated by the ancient magical power surging with black and red light, it appears exceptionally eerie.

Ancient magical fluid began to seep from Ivy's past self, a sign that life was gradually fading away. If Ivy couldn't reverse her past death before this magic completely seeped out, then her present self would obviously be erased by the rewriting forces of history.

Within a linear flow of time, every cause corresponds to an effect; every beginning must have an end.

Resurrecting the dead is not a difficult task for Ivy now.

The Philosopher's Stone can be used to awaken the dead.

The Prayer spell can simulate the resurrection spell of invocation.

His self-developed Phoenix Holy Flame can even achieve the incredible effect of reviving after self-destruction.

Even if none of these methods can be used, the golden dragon clone at the Stryhaven University of Magic, far away in the world of Akavievo, can still serve as a new vessel to carry Ivy's soul.

However, reviving oneself is never an easy thing. One wrong move and one will fall into the trap of paradox, never to escape.

What Ivy is trying to do is, in fact, to resurrect herself, but she cannot leave behind the obvious paradox of resurrecting her past self in history.

Because resurrection presupposes death, once the past self dies, the future self immediately ceases to exist. This is a paradox even simpler and easier to understand than the grandfather paradox.

After placing his past self on the stone platform he had casually created, Ivy began preparing his spell.

That was a time-manipulation spell he had to traverse two or three timelines to truly complete—the Paradox.

The effect of the paradox is quite simple: by magically recreating Akavievo's unique spacetime structure, the "present" is banished to the distant "future," thereby achieving the effect of negating a given fact.

What Ivy needs to do now is to throw her past death into the present, thereby effectively resurrecting herself.

Because history has been completely denied, the deaths that should have occurred in the past have not happened; instead, it is the present self who has to bear the weight of death.

In a world where souls are taken by Death after death, it is clearly more appropriate for the present self to confront Death than for the past self.

After all, possessing the divinity of the sun, he was a demigod, on par with the Grim Reaper who controlled the spirit world, making them evenly matched opponents.

The materials needed to cast this spell were readily available on the house-elf, allowing Ivy to use them without any hesitation. After all, Voldemort had just used it to travel through over a hundred years to the past and cast a Killing Curse on Ivy.

Voldemort's Time-Turner looks like a small golden timer with a long, fine gold chain. However, the metal connecting the chain and the timer looks quite worn and can only be considered to be connected. It seems that even if Ivy doesn't use it as a spellcasting material, this thing doesn't have much of a lifespan.

Besides the chain, something else caught Ivy's attention.

It was a wand held in the hand of a house-elf. As a wizard, Voldemort preferred to use a wand to cast spells rather than snapping his fingers like a real house-elf. So when he retrieved the Time-Turner from the Headmaster's office, he also grabbed a wand that had been kept in storage.

From Ollivander's wand shop, this is a work by Garrick Ollivander's grandfather, a silver linden wood wand with a phoenix feather core, commissioned by a famous customer over a hundred years ago.

However, as that name became taboo, it was never known to anyone again.

When Voldemort searched the world for traces of ancient magic, he finally found the custom wand of the first Dark Lord at Ollivander's. However, compared to the unruly silver linden wand, the Elder Wand, which was much older, was more appealing to Voldemort than the Elder Wand he had taken from his old enemy Dumbledore.

However, Voldemort was forced to enter the head of a house-elf, so he had no time to worry about the slightest inconvenience.

“It’s hard to believe that the first spell cast by this wand was the Killing Curse…” Ivy took the old Silver Linden wand in her hand, wiped it clean, and then put it in her pocket.

What follows is the reversal of death.

Ivy lifted the chain of the time converter and swung it into the air. The golden timer immediately froze in mid-air. Then, thousands of rainbow lights accompanied by incantations rushed around at high speed. Within the range of these rainbow lights, Ivy saw the same scenery as when she was passively traveling through time and space.

Colorful clouds and their shapes, a noisy, booming atmosphere, the voices of men, women, and children all talking at once...

It felt like a long time had passed, yet it also felt like only a moment.

The black-haired boy lying on the stone platform began to breathe again. Ivy knew that she had completed her mission and that what followed was death, the inevitable consequence of her exile.

Raising his arms, Ivy found his body gradually becoming transparent again, and the divinity from the sun began to show a dazzling radiance. He was no longer unfamiliar with this state.

After all, he was an immortal divine being; even facing death was done with considerable dignity. Not to mention, he had many backup plans to resurrect himself.

Ivy didn't rush to do the next thing, but instead opened the Grimoire of Destruction to check her current state.

The attribute panel is not much different from the last check, except for the change in the [Traits] section.

The original "perfect part-time job" has disappeared, replaced by the "possibility paradox" and a brand new trait, "destiny self-determination".

——Special trait——

【Paradox of Possibility】: A person who is paradoxically not supposed to exist, who combines the possibilities of infinite parallel universes, is considered to have met the prerequisites when choosing a profession/specialty/talent, or using magic/weapon/item/style of moves.

【Destiny Determined】: You have used magic that shook the multiverse to adjust your destiny. Any timeline attack targeting you will automatically summon your current self. Any prophetic magic or similar means targeting you will automatically fail if the caster is not a deity. If the caster is a true god, it will lead to a seemingly plausible conclusion, and no matter how many times the prophecy is repeated, the same conclusion will be reached. If multiple gods cast spells at the same time, they will each reach different conclusions.

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

Both traits were very clear, which made Ivy understand even more the consequences of the super-tier magic she released at Baldur's Gate.

It directly altered an entire period of history, allowing Ivy to construct her own origin, interfere with her own destiny across multiple timelines, and even the manifested cheat code, the Grimoire of Destruction, was a manifestation of this super-level magic.

In short, all of Ivy's journeys so far have been the ultimate manifestation of the "paradox of possibility" and "destiny and self-determination." Next, he will place his past self in Hogwarts in 1991 on another timeline, completely gluing the two ends of the Möbius strip together.

The Philosopher's Stone was used to rejuvenate the fifteen-year-old boy, allowing him to seamlessly integrate into the first-year students at Hogwarts. Compared to the epic interdimensional travel, that playful school life was probably a rare moment of relaxation, wasn't it?

He commanded the "Wizard's Practical Guide" in his arms to fly out, and then used the possibilities from multiple parallel universes to transform it into a brand new book of destruction.

Don't forget to slip a Strychwen acceptance letter into the Grimoire of Destruction, and then add a luxurious one-way interdimensional portal spell to the letter.

Gazing at the ten gleaming points of the Star of Strelhaven, Ivy paused slightly as she signed her name. Could this be considered some form of academic theft? Or forgery of an acceptance letter?
Admitting oneself is a bit too advanced.

However, he is now a legitimate Defense Against the Dark Arts professor at Strathaven University. Although he hasn't taught a single class yet, he must have a few spots for exceptional admissions, right?

With all that sorted out, it was quite simple for Ivy to do next.

Reawaken the ancient magic in the vaults of Hogwarts, causing these droplet-like magical elements to condense into crystals, replicating his appearance when he awoke in the Chamber of Secrets.

The ancient magic floating around his past self was unusually tamed. Ivy didn't even have to exert much effort to seal his past self inside a crystal.

"It's really simple and easy to understand." Ivy glanced around at the surroundings. The vault had been almost completely destroyed by his past self and Lanlock.

Besides himself, sealed within the crystal, only the house-elf who had been possessed by Voldemort was still breathing. Aviathan's dutiful and devoted professor—the white-haired Figo—was already dead.

“Although the Grim Reaper of this world has a history of kidnapping people, this is over a hundred years ago, so there shouldn’t be any major problems, right?” Ivy scratched his chin, and then a beam of holy light descended, enveloping the respectable old man who was both a teacher and a friend to him.

"Fall out!" Before Professor Figo could even open his eyes shakily, Ivy cast another stun spell. "Sorry, the current situation might be a little confusing for you, so for the sake of your worldview, it's best to sleep a little longer. This world will soon be devoid of ancient magic."

“It’s almost done. So, is the next step another journey through time?” Ivy went over the events that had happened since she woke up in the Chamber of Secrets at Hogwarts, then sighed deeply. “Cassandra. Did I actually bring Cassandra back with me? That’s a bit too unfair to her, isn’t it? Selling her soul just to eliminate her enemy… How about exchanging one life for two? That would be much more worthwhile.”

(End of this chapter)