Regulus of Hogwarts: Lord of the Stars

Chapter 328 The Superposition of Index-Increasing Oscillations

Not long after, two young men came over from the greenhouse, carrying stones and miscellaneous items.

A man and a woman, both in their early twenties, were wearing thick work robes with rolled-up sleeves and dragon-skin gloves.

Agnes's apprentice, a young wizard who came to work on the plantation after graduation, or a descendant of someone who was originally an employee of the Black family.

He worked on the Black family's supply chain from a young age, studied at Hogwarts for a few years, and then returned to the system afterward.

The male apprentice was carrying a basket of stones—granite, sandstone, marble—of varying sizes and considerable weight. He was grimacing as he carried them, perhaps to appear to be struggling, and hadn't even used a levitation spell.

The female apprentice carried a wooden plank and an old iron pot. The bottom of the pot was blackened, and strips of cloth were wrapped around the handle.

They walked to the edge of the open space and put their things down. The male apprentice wiped his sweat, glanced in the direction of the willow tree, whose branches were still swaying overhead, and took a few steps back.

The female apprentice put the iron pot on the ground and glanced at Regulus as she straightened up.

Her gaze lingered on him for a moment, sweeping from his face to his robe and then to the spider perched on his shoulder, before moving away, her lips twitching slightly downwards.

The youngest son of the Black family, a second-grader, wants two willows that are meant to scare people.

Globally controlled resources, including live adult plants, are prohibited from trade.

They had worked on the plantation for two or three years, and the most valuable thing they had ever seen was the mandrake in greenhouse number three, which cost three hundred gallons per plant and was considered a high-end item.

The Whomping Willow is something else entirely. Aside from Hogwarts, this might be the only chance in your life to see a live, mature plant, and the reason it was acquired was because of a twelve-year-old child.

The female apprentice was probably experiencing the vicissitudes of life for the first time, but she didn't say anything. She couldn't say anything, and she couldn't say anything at all. They were classmates in school, but once they left school, they were no longer in the same social class.

The male apprentice glanced at Regulus, his mouth moved as if he wanted to say something, but the female apprentice nudged him with her elbow and shut him up.

After the two finished moving their things, they nodded to Regulus, turned around, and left, walking quite slowly.

Regulus ignored them and waited until they were far away before withdrawing his natural magic.

The willow tree reacted almost instantly; the restraints disappeared, and its aggressive instincts were reactivated.

The branches suddenly increased their swaying amplitude, switching from a leisurely patrol mode to full alert. Every branch was sweeping rapidly, repeatedly traversing every inch of space within its coverage area.

Regulus stood at a safe distance, lightly tapped his finger, and cast the Summoning Spell.

A granite stone the size of a fist flew out of the basket, arcing through the air and crashing into the fifteen-foot attack range.

The branches reacted so quickly that there was no interval.

The moment the stone entered the area, the nearest thick branch swept across, its sharp sound cutting through the air and leaving a white trail in the cold air.

Snapped.

The branch struck the granite, and the moment it made contact, Regulus's magical perception captured the entire process.

The oscillation had already taken shape inside the branch, and the magic had completed the entire process of narrowing and compression at the end, with the tip of the needle filled with compressed magic waiting to be released.

The moment the branch touched the stone, the needle tip released, and compressed magic exploded, instantly switching from ordered conduction to disordered oscillation.

The vibrations penetrated into the granite.

His senses followed the path of the vibrations within the stone, drilling inward along the structure of the granite, vibrating when it encountered the interfaces between mineral particles, and pulling when it encountered areas of stress concentration.

The stone cracked from the inside out.

Nothing happened on the surface at the moment of contact, but the internal structure was already destroyed.

The stone bounced off the branch, tumbled twice in the air, landed on the muddy ground, and broke into three pieces.

Regulus walked over, squatted down, picked up a fragment, and examined the cross-section.

The arrangement of particles on the cross-section was disrupted, gaps appeared between the originally tightly interlocked crystal lattices, and the joints were covered with fine white cracks.

It is completely different from the Disintegration Curse.

The Disintegration Curse acts on living organisms, causing their complete existence to lose its definition and return to the most basic unit that makes up life. Cells disperse, tissues disintegrate, and they become a pile of the smallest parts that make up them.

The effect before us is that the stone has shattered into smaller stones, and the granite has shattered into smaller granite pieces. The structure has been destroyed, but the material remains.

One is to make the definition disappear, and the other is to make the structure collapse.

One can only attack living beings, while the other can only attack physical structures.

The two paths diverged at the very beginning.

He stood up and threw another plank.

The branch struck the wooden board, and the vibration traveled along the grain of the wood, spreading out in a fan shape from the point of contact. The board split open from the middle, the crack was jagged, and the wood fibers were broken from the inside, leaving a rough, burr-like surface.

Then throw the iron pot away.

The branch was stuck to the bottom of the pot; the surface was intact, but the inside was covered with cracks that spread outwards.

I flicked it with my finger, and the sound the iron pot made was dull, unlike the crisp sound that good iron should have.

He weighed the iron pot in his hand, then threw it on the ground. The pot hit a rock and shattered into a pile of broken iron pieces.

Professor Sprout's words were proven true; the shattering of the Whomping Willow began from the inside.

Next, he wanted to see the effect of the continuous attacks.

He threw in a particularly thick piece of granite, about half the size of a head, very dense and with a tight structure.

When the first branch was pulled up, the stone only cracked a thin fissure.

He didn't throw a new one, but instead used the Levitation Charm to adjust its angle, and the second one swept over, striking the same spot.

The seam widened, and several new cracks appeared around it.

He continued adjusting, and the third branch came down, striking precisely where the cracks met.

The stone burst open from the inside, shattering into powdery fragments that flew out, the tiny pieces like a cloud of gray mist scattering in the air.

The first blow only cracked it slightly, but the third blow shattered it into powder.

If you only look at the surface, you might think it's just a normal accumulation of force, as if anything would shatter if hit three times in a row.

But his magical perception caught the details.

The initial shock left a set of cracks inside the stone, which altered its internal structure, creating thousands of tiny fissures and cross-sections out of thin air.

The second oscillation penetrates deeper into these existing gaps, with a contact area more than twice as large as the first.

The third oscillation utilizes all the cracks created in the previous two oscillations. The three oscillations push and rebound against each other within the same crack system, tearing the entire stone apart from the inside.

Normal physical strikes can also stack damage, but that's only on the surface. Each strike draws energy back in from the outside, and you can't utilize the cracks created by the previous strike.

The vibrational magic of the Man-Beating Willow is different. With each strike, it automatically seeks out the internal cracks left by the previous strike, drilling deeper along the fracture and gap. Each vibration is twice as efficient as the previous one.

The fluctuations are superimposed.

This is completely different from simple force superposition. Ordinary continuous impacts are linear accumulations; ten hits equal ten times the force of one hit.

The cumulative effect of oscillations is an exponential increase; three strikes can be dozens of times greater than one strike. This is a chain reaction of destruction driven by magic.

The "Strike Willow" doesn't target the same spot; its attacks are indiscriminate. It strikes wherever it enters its range, regardless of whether you're facing forward or backward.

But Regulus encountered this characteristic.

If the oscillations could be precisely hit at the same point and repeatedly superimposed, how many times could they be superimposed if the magic was sufficient?

Is there an upper limit?

He kept the question in mind, not in a hurry to think about it further.

It was already dark.

In Cornwall winters, it gets dark early. By 4:30 pm, the sun has already set below the horizon, and the remaining light gradually diminishes until by 5 pm, only a dark orange afterglow remains on the western horizon.

The greenhouses in the plantation were lit up, one by one, lined up along the ridge of the greenhouse complex.

The warm orange light shines out through the glass roof; it's the color of artificial lighting. In winter, when sunlight is insufficient, plants need supplemental light at night.

The light from the row of greenhouses was hazy in the mist, like a string of lanterns suspended in the darkness.

He returned to the cabin.

Agnes had already set dinner on the table: roasted chicken legs with mashed potatoes, a vegetable salad, and a pot of hot black tea.

Baruch jumped off his shoulder to the front of the fireplace.

The fire in the fireplace was burning brightly, the flames licking the fireplace walls, and the orange-red light shone on Baruch's carapace, reflecting a dull luster.

It found a spot on the stone slab in front of the fireplace, about two feet away from the fire, and slowly spread out its eight legs and lay down.

The eight-eyed giant spider is instinctively afraid of fire.

There are no fireplaces or campfires in the Forbidden Forest. When winter comes, they huddle deep in their nests and survive on their body heat and spider webs.

But after Baruch followed Regulus, he seemed to gradually learn some habits of a species that were not originally his.

It knows that fire is warm, and it also knows that getting too close will be hot.

Last time, while warming itself by the fireplace in Grimmauld Place, it tried to move closer, but one of its bristles got burned and curled. It sprang up, kicked its legs wildly, and spun around on the ground three times before stopping.

From then on, it learned to keep a two-foot distance.

Now it lies in that warm but not hot spot, its eight legs fully extended, its body flat, its chelipeds gently opening and closing to absorb heat.

Regulus glanced at it, sat down to eat, and thought about the day's harvest.

The mechanism of end-stage transformation has been clarified: narrowing, compression, release, and explosion.

The characteristic of overlapping oscillations is also evident: each attack paves the way for the next, and the oscillations change the internal state of the target, allowing subsequent attacks to follow the weaknesses, resulting in an exponential increase.

The branches of the willow tree don't target the same spot repeatedly, but they will occasionally cover the previous spot in their random strikes. If it hits the spot enough times, even the hardest thing can't withstand it.

If oscillations can be stacked infinitely, theoretically any structure could be torn apart as long as there is enough magic.

He took a bite of the chicken leg and put the idea aside.

Next, we need to extract the magic and replicate this process in our hands.

As for the superimposed issues, we'll deal with them once we have the incantation.

The next day was a fine day, and the fog had completely dissipated.

The sun rises from the sea in the east, and its rays shine through the glass roofs of the greenhouse complex, casting warm yellow patches of light on the frost on the grass.

The sea breeze was still cold, but lighter than yesterday, carrying a salty taste, and felt cool when inhaled.

.

The sky changed from grayish-blue to light blue, with a few white clouds clinging to the high places, motionless.

Regulus walked through the wall of bushes toward the Mandarin Willow.

Compared to yesterday's gloom, the plantation felt like a completely different place today.

With ample light and a wide field of vision, one can see white waves on the coastline in the distance, and further still, the gray-blue sea stretches to the horizon.

Sea breeze, sunshine, plants.

He unleashed his natural magic, stepped into the attack range, and stuck to the tree trunk.

Start extraction.

>