Regulus of Hogwarts: Lord of the Stars

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Regulus paid no attention to these things.

Over the course of three days, he slept less than six hours a night, but the imprint in his mind became clearer and clearer.

The decomposing tendency of mandrake is no longer an abstract magical property; it begins to materialize, become tangible, and be invoked.

It's like carving a groove in the spiritual world; magic can flow out along this groove, already carrying that quality with it when it leaves.

On the morning of the fourth day, Regulus left the greenhouse.

The sea breeze rushed into his collar as he walked along the stone path toward the east side of the plantation, where a nest of goblins lay at the base of the eastern wall.

Regulus crouched down, reached his hand into the hole, and felt his fingertips touch warm, rough skin that was still wriggling.

He picked one out.

The goblin writhed desperately in his hands, its short legs kicking wildly in the air, making a piercing sound that was somewhere between a scream and a cough.

Regulus grabbed its fate by the scruff of its neck, but it didn't quiet down like a cat.

This thing is a pest.

Aside from skinning them to make cheap glove linings or feeding them to certain picky and unusual animals, they have no value whatsoever.

Perfect for testing magic.

Regulus returned to Greenhouse Number Three and placed the goblin on the edge of the empty planting trough.

It immediately tried to escape, but he used a levitation spell to lift it up, its four feet off the ground, and it struggled desperately in the air.

He extracted magic from the sixth mandrake.

After three days of practice, the extraction efficiency has improved significantly.

The moment the fingertip touched the leaf, the magic flowed back along the channel path, continuously and steadily.

In a short while, three balls of gray-green light appeared in his palm, with ripples spreading from the edges of the balls that were almost invisible to the naked eye.

Regulus fused three drops of magic into one.

The magic power increased a bit, to about the size of a little fingernail.

Regulus directly channeled the drop of magic and pressed it onto the goblin.

The goblin was still struggling, its short legs kicking so hard the air made a popping sound.

The moment the magic touched it, it stopped moving.

Unlike the petrification spell, which causes instantaneous stiffness, or the limpness of the stun spell, it suddenly causes the user to lose all will to move.

Then the decomposition begins.

Starting from the point of contact, the skin lost its color, but it did not turn white or gray.

It lost all the visual features that skin should have: texture, shine, elasticity, and boundaries.

That area appeared to be just a blur, something that existed in a state between existence and non-existence.

Then the edges expand outwards.

In this area, the skin is no longer skin.

The stratum corneum, granular layer, basal layer—all the layered structures that make up the organ of skin—have simultaneously lost their definition as skin.

They become a loose collection of protein fibers, lipid molecules, and melanin granules, no longer connected to each other.

The skin disappeared, but no blood flowed out.

Blood is also a whole composed of countless blood cells, plasma proteins and electrolytes.

When the magic of mandrake sweeps across, the connections between these components are severed.

Blood cells are no longer blood cells, but merely fragments of membrane structures carrying heme.

Blood plasma is no longer blood plasma; it is merely a mixture of water and solutes.

They were not destroyed.

During this process, the cells did not rupture, the molecular chains did not break, and no chemical bonds were forcibly torn apart.

They simply no longer constitute any functional whole.

The muscles are exposed.

Skeletal muscle fibers were once neatly arranged, each fiber being a multinucleated cell filled with precisely arranged myofibrils.

As the magic of the mandrake passed through, the striated structure of the myofibrils became blurred and then disappeared.

Actin and myosin filaments no longer interlock; they are simply long-chain protein polymers floating in the cytoplasm.

Then comes the tendons, cartilage, and finally the bones.

The goblin's entire body, from the outside in, clearly shows distinct layers, and its orderly structure has become disordered.

All the substances that once constituted this goblin remained in their most basic and original state.

In the end, only a small clump of dust-like residue remained at the edge of the planting trough.

This is the most thorough restoration.

Regulus stared at the clump of ash, squatting there for a long time.

The cry of a mature mandrake can be fatal, but the body of the victim will remain intact after death.

Skin is still skin, flesh is still flesh, bone is still bone, it's just dead.

The mandrake's inherent death-giving nature ends here.

But what he just did was completely different.

He extracted all the magic power of this mandrake plant, which would only be slowly released over the next few decades, in one go.

The quantitative change crossed an unseen threshold; the crying could only kill, but it invalidated the definition of the whole.

Regulus looked down at his palm; the magic had dissipated, leaving no trace.

He realized what he had just done; he had destroyed the very foundation of life.

If life is likened to a building, the Killing Curse is like removing the load-bearing walls, causing the building to collapse instantly, leaving behind a pile of rubble.

His approach was to make bricks no longer bricks, cement no longer cement, and steel bars no longer steel bars.

His approach was to make bricks no longer bricks, cement no longer cement, and steel bars no longer steel bars.

Not a single rubble remained.

Regulus remained silent, sweeping the clump of dust from the edge of the planting trough into the empty flowerpot.

He succeeded, but he didn't feel the satisfaction of achieving his goal.

The decomposition tendency of mandrake can be extracted and released independently, but this is only the first step and far from the end.

This is not a sustainable model.

Does he have to carry mandrake with him every time he needs to break down magic?

If he needs to use it in an emergency during battle, will the enemy wait for him to extract the magic first?

It's less like magic and more like a work of art—beautiful and powerful, but unusable.

The Black family was perfectly capable of supplying him with an unlimited supply of mandrake, it was just a matter of time, effort, and money.

He could also extract enough magic from these plants in advance and pack it into special containers to carry with him.

Like a witcher with potion bottles hanging from his waist, he pulls out a bottle before the battle, twists it open, and smashes it.

But in the end, this is just a short-sighted approach that drains the pond to catch all the fish.

Like carrying a gun when you go out and having enough ammunition, but every bullet you fire is one less bullet you have, and there will always be a time when you run out of bullets.

Once the gun is used up, it's just a fire poker.

Is magic such an inconvenient thing?

Regulus pushed open the greenhouse door.

It was still late at night outside, the clouds were so thick that the moon was not visible, the distant horizon was slightly lighter than the darkness, and a faint line of gray could be seen on the eastern horizon.

It's still some time before dawn.

He took a deep breath, letting the salty air fill his lungs, then slowly exhaled. He closed the door and returned to the planting trough.

Twenty mandrakes sat quietly in their respective pots, six of which had died from the depletion of their magic.

Regulus sat down in front of them.

Extraction is just the beginning; next, he needs to understand.

To understand this tendency to decompose within the core of the mandrake's magic, he needed to dismantle it, see its texture, and figure out every turn.

Regulus placed his hand on the leaf of the seventh mandrake and began to extract it.

This time, he didn't pursue quantity. He turned his magic perception to maximum power, condensing the magic into extremely fine threads, which then invaded in reverse along the extraction path.

The magical circuits of the mandrake spread out in his consciousness, more clearly than he had perceived three days ago.

Then he found the core, the barrier through which all magic flowing through was tainted with the disintegrating properties.

Regulus's magical tentacles circled around the core, not touching it directly; he wanted to observe first.

Observe how the magic flows into the core, how it circulates inside, and how it flows out with new attributes.

The entrance and the exit are not the same; what flows in is neutral and pure life magic, and what flows out has become something else.

Regulus watched for a long time, and then he began to etch every detail of the process into his mind.

The location of the entrance, the angle of the exit, the number of loops within the core, and the speed at which magic flows.

He mentally imitated these conditions, building a miniature model in the blank space of his consciousness.

failure.

The model doesn't turn; the magic enters, stops at the entrance, and refuses to move forward.

Regulus adjusted the angle of the inlet to make it closer to the curve of the mandrake core, and tried again.

The magic flowed forward an inch, then stopped.

He thickened the diameter of the magic, making the input channel to the Mandrake core wider than he had imagined; he had previously built it too thin.

Try again.

The magic flowed in, completed a full circle, and came out through the exit.

However, it did not bring up the decomposition attribute.

Regulus paused for a moment, then disassembled the model and started over.

He had not yet succeeded when he had completely extracted the magic from the seventh mandrake.

The eighth plant, the ninth plant.

Failure, failure, failure.

He wasn't impatient. Every time he failed, he would stop and compare the differences between the actual core of the mandrake and his own model.

Sometimes it's because the loop is half a loop less, sometimes it's because the magic flow is too fast, and sometimes it's because the entrance angle is off.

On the tenth stem, he began recording the magical fluctuations as magic flowed within the core.

With the eleventh plant, he successfully brought out the decomposition attribute of the magic in the model, although it was only one-tenth the concentration of the original.

The twelfth plant, one-third.

The thirteenth plant, one-half.

The fourteenth plant...

Regulus withdrew his hand from the leaf of the fourteenth mandrake.

Something was floating in front of him.