Regulus of Hogwarts: Lord of the Stars

Chapter 331 has a high ceiling and a high threshold.

This threshold has boundaries, and things with boundaries are easier to handle.

A piece of solidified pine resin, a piece of compacted rock salt, a section of coral skeleton—all have clear physical boundaries; one glance at their shape is enough to identify the whole.

Regardless of the material, as long as it is solid, has clear boundaries, and can be locked in the mind as a whole, it meets the conditions for casting a spell.

What about things that have no boundaries?

Regulus stood on the beach, looking at the churning seawater at his feet.

The gray-black waves crashed against the bottom of the reef, white foam rolled up and then receded. The sea has no shape; its shape depends on the container that holds it.

The same goes for air.

Everyone knows that water is water and air is air, but who can point to a piece of sea and say that this mass of water is a single entity?

It has no outline, no beginning or end, it is constantly flowing and changing, and it is impossible to say where it starts or where it ends.

He knew there was air above him, but which area? How big? What shape?

If he can't answer it himself, he can't lock onto the target.

The sky was overcast. He raised his wand, waved it casually, and randomly selected a patch of air as his target.

The yellowish-brown ray shot out, traveled a distance in the air, and suddenly exploded into a semi-transparent ripple at a certain position. The air was compressed for a moment, and then the ripple dissipated.

It hit something, but it only hit something that was randomly circled in his mind; the air itself wasn't shaken out in any real way.

He put down his wand, stared at the air for a few moments.

The approach is correct.

Cognitive convergence can frame a space as a target, and the spell does indeed run in that area, but the effect is approximately zero.

It's only half done; the other half is stuck on the medium.

The spacing between air molecules is too large, and the vibrations cannot find a wall to bounce off, so the energy dissipates directly.

He didn't try a second time, looked away, and continued to think.

Solids, liquids, gases, space—theoretically, as long as the caster's cognition and manipulation reach that level, there is no limit to what the Disintegration Curse can break.

The Disintegration Spell went from being a replica to a spell in one step, resulting in a finished product with extremely high potential, but it's unattainable in the short term.

Unlike the Disintegration Spell, it has revealed more adjustable parameters from the moment it was created, including continuous output, cognitive accuracy, and magical output.

Its upper limit depends on the quality of the spellcaster.

The higher the cognitive accuracy, the more abstract the target can be locked onto.

The stronger the magical control, the more stable the oscillations can be maintained.

But there's still a hurdle in front of us: the magic of the Disintegration Curse needs to change from an impact-type to a penetrating type.

When a regular spell hits a target, it's like a collision; the magic strikes from the outside in, and the spell takes effect upon contact with the surface.

The Disintegration Spell must penetrate deep inside. When the magic touches the target's surface, it must converge into a needle-like point, without exploding or dispersing, and forcefully penetrate inwards before unleashing a shockwave.

This transformation requires extremely high precision in controlling magic. The moment the tip of the staff is released, the magic form must converge from a surface to a point, from diffusion to penetration, with the convergence window taking less than one-hundredth of a second.

This precision threshold will exclude the vast majority of people.

Those who can learn this spell are either highly skilled wizards or possess extraordinary talent, having an innate intuition for manipulating magic.

He didn't think much about that, but there was something else worth considering.

What if the target is big enough?

A building, like the British Ministry of Magic, is a behemoth beneath London, dozens of floors, crammed with hundreds of wizards and countless departments.

Or the Magical Congress Building, MACUSA, that thing hidden in the Woolworth Building in New York.

Or Hogwarts.

He removed Hogwarts from his mind; that place belonged to someone, and he couldn't think about it.

Let's find something unclaimed, a mountain, an island.

When a goal becomes too large, it becomes difficult to mentally grasp it as a whole.

A rock the size of a fist, whose boundaries you can figure out even with your eyes closed, is just a rock.

What about a building?

You have to have the outline of the entire building in your mind, all the walls, all the floors, all the rooms, all the pipes and stairs, ignoring all the details, leaving only a general concept.

The bigger the building, the harder it is to maintain this framework.

Regulus's lips twitched slightly.

On the other hand, when knowledge is lacking, magic can make up for it.

Precise operation saves magic power, while brute force operation compensates for precision.

If the magic output is increased sufficiently, the requirement for cognitive precision may be reduced.

The caster doesn't need to precisely target the entire Ministry of Magic; they only need to pour enough magic into that direction.

The magic will spread the vibrations on its own; it's brutal, but effective.

The cost is a huge drain on magic power.

As for how big, I don't know, I haven't tried it.

But the logic should be sound.

Regulus snapped out of his reverie and turned his gaze to the depths of the sea.

Under the gloomy sky, the gray-black sea stretched as far as the eye could see, the horizon blurred, and it was impossible to tell whether there were any islands or reefs in the distance.

He Apparated back to the cabin.

We need to work on both forms.

The first-mode single-point directional output has been achieved; all the tests just now were based on this.

The second form is the scope.

The second form of the Disintegration Curse is infrasound propagation, below 20 Hz, inaudible to humans, and is used for area attacks.

The vibrations of the Disintegration Curse are physical and naturally compatible with sound waves. Sound waves themselves are vibrations propagating in a medium, requiring no additional conversion steps.

In his mind, he changed the end release port of the tree model from directional output to omnidirectional diffusion.

Originally, it sprayed from a single needle forward; now it sprays from the center of the ball in all directions simultaneously.

After the magic circled the inside of the model two and a half times, it was released simultaneously from all ends, radiating outwards from the caster as the center.

The omnidirectional diffusion version of magic distribution is much more complex than the single-point version. The magic power at each end release port must be evenly distributed and cannot be biased, otherwise dead zones will appear.

He mentally recalibrated the branching nodes, confirming that the flow ratio of each branch was consistent, and then opened his eyes.

He went outside to the open space, moved more than a dozen stones, and arranged them in a circle around himself. The stones were of different sizes, with the closest one a meter away from his feet and the furthest one more than fifteen meters away.

Regulus's wand hung at his side, tip pointing downwards: "Quassare."

The tremor spread outward from the tip of the staff, without light or sound, and tiny ripples in the air pushed outward from it.

The granite block at my feet shattered into powder instantly, the one two meters away cracked into several pieces, the surface seven meters away developed a dense network of cracks, and the one ten meters away only developed a thin crack, which could be considered to have had some effect.

Beyond that, there was nothing.

He went over and looked around.

The intensity of the oscillation decreases from the center outwards, decreasing by about 10% for every meter it moves outwards, and by the time it reaches nine meters, it is less than 30% remaining.

With a radius of ten meters, the effective killing range is approximately seven to eight meters. Beyond that, it can only create cracks, and cannot be considered lethal.

The mana consumption is much greater than in the first form. With the same output, the first form can shatter a granite rock the size of a person, while the omnidirectional diffusion is only enough to crack rocks within a radius of seven meters.

Efficiency has been traded for coverage, which is reasonable; oscillation attenuation is also reasonable.

Regulus put away his wand.

Both forms are stable: single-point collapse and range oscillation, a dual-form configuration similar to the Disintegration Curse.

The fireplace in the cabin was still burning. Agnes had been there sometime earlier, and there was a food box and hot tea on the table.

He sat down and took a couple of bites, chewing bread, but his mind was already wandering.

Next, I should try to find a bigger goal.

He came out of the stone hut and walked west along the north side of the plantation.

After passing through the last patch of windbreak bushes, the terrain began to slope towards the sea. The withered grass was bent to one side by the sea breeze, the soil underfoot became thinner and thinner, and the rock layers became closer and closer.

After walking a few hundred meters, the bushes and weeds suddenly disappeared, and there was a cliff in front of us.

The vertical drop is nearly forty meters, and below is the sea.

The seawater churned with white foam on the overcast day. Waves crashed against the cliffs, shattered, and fell back down, being whipped into fine mist by the wind in mid-air, which felt salty and cold on the face.

The sound of the wind and the waves mingled together, filling your ears; if you stood here and spoke, you had to shout to be heard.

He stood on the edge of the cliff and looked down.

In the waters southwest of Cornwall, the continental shelf extends for tens of kilometers before reaching the deep waters, while the seabed in the shallow waters is scattered with numerous granite reefs and scattered small islands.

During high tide in winter, all the reefs are submerged, with only a few of the largest ones showing, their dark backs pushed up and down by the waves, appearing and disappearing intermittently.

The sea stretched into the distance, the gray-black water merging with the low-hanging clouds, the horizon blurred, making it impossible to distinguish where the sea ended and the sky began.

Regulus Apparated and appeared high in the sky.

The flight spell carried him, making him float in mid-air, his robes fluttering in the sea breeze.

Visibility was poor; the gray clouds hung low, and the sea reflected no light, so all you could see below was a hazy gray.

He hovered in the air, looking towards the sea. His field of vision widened a bit, but he still couldn't see very far; beyond a kilometer, it was all fog.

He moved westward in a phantom-like manner, jumping approximately every kilometer.

The first jump landed in mid-air, and I caught myself with a flight spell. Looking down, I saw a gray-black sea with white waves, but no islands.

The second jump was also to the sea.

The third jump: the sea.

On the fourth dive, the seawater turned a little darker, indicating that the continental shelf was descending.

On the fifth jump, I vaguely saw something.

The grayish-brown outline emerged from the mist, clinging to the sea surface in an irregular shape; from this distance, it appeared as a flat, dark patch.

He jumped again and saw clearly: a small island.

About eight kilometers offshore, it's neither big nor small, roughly half the size of a Quidditch stadium. The gray-brown rock formations are stacked from the sea surface, with the highest point protruding from the water by nearly five stories.

The constant crashing of the waves has carved countless horizontal grooves into the bottom.

Some are as shallow as knife marks, while others are deep enough to fit a person inside. The deepest ones have almost hollowed out the bottom rock layers, with only the remaining stone pillars in the middle supporting the upper part.

The part near the sea surface was soaked into a near-black color by seawater, gradually becoming lighter and grayer as you move upwards, and becoming drier as you go higher.

There is a relatively flat area on the top of the island where seabird droppings, after drying, leave large white marks that seep down along the cracks in the rocks, forming streaks that look like they've been splashed with white paint.

Several clumps of salt-tolerant low-growing plants grew out of the rock crevices, their roots penetrating deep into the cracks of the granite.

The leaves were blown by the sea breeze and clung to the rock wall, their tips withered and curled, but their roots still stubbornly clung to the rocks.

He hovered in the air and scanned the surroundings. The sea was gray-black, the sky was pressing down, and the clouds were so low they almost touched the top of the island. It was all gray, dull, and oppressive.

There are no buildings, no docks, and no signs of human activity on the island. It is just a forgotten granite boulder in the sea, which has probably not been stepped on for thousands of years.

He descended from the sky and hovered at a height of twenty meters above the island.

This distance is just right; if it's too close, the falling debris will affect you, and if it's too far, the magic will diminish too much in the air.

The flying spell supported his body, and the sea breeze blew his hair to one side.

He mentally outlined the island, ignoring all the sharp edges, concave surfaces, cracks, and holes, covering them with his perception and leaving only a concept.

All the rocks, rock layers, cavities, plants, and bird droppings are all part of a whole.

Regulus raised his wand and aimed it at the lower center of the island.

Magic began to circulate within his body, this time at full power.

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