Regulus of Hogwarts: Lord of the Stars

Chapter 358 Poison Tentacles and Avada Kedavra

Thursday afternoon, Herbalism class, Greenhouse No. 3.

In January, the Scottish Highlands rarely have such a beautiful sunny day. There are no clouds, a gentle breeze, and sunlight streams in through the glass roof, making the entire greenhouse warm and cozy.

The copper watering can on the stone wall reflected dappled light, and in the corner, several pots of glowing mushrooms were slowly turning their caps.

On the long stone platform sat six pots of poisonous tentacles, their vines dark green with purple tinges, their skin covered with a layer of fine, sharp thorns, gleaming with a waxy sheen in the sunlight.

The vines emerged from the potting soil, their ends swaying slightly with a small arc and a slow, rhythmic motion.

Professor Sprout stood in front of the stone platform, his gray-brown hair tied in a bun at the back of his head, with a few stray strands falling from behind his ears and clinging to his cheeks, glistening with dew.

She wore a thick, coarse cloth robe, covered with an old apron covered in mud, her pockets bulging, revealing half a small shovel and a ball of hemp rope.

Her fingers were thick and strong, with prominent knuckles, and dirt stuck in her fingernails that she couldn't wash off.

The second-year Slytherin and Gryffindor students stood on either side of the stone platform, facing each other across six pots of poisonous tentacles, with a passageway between them.

It was quieter in Slytherin, but there weren't many people in Gryffindor, and they were talking a lot. Some were whispering to each other, while others were craning their necks to examine the poisonous tentacles.

Professor Sprout clapped his hands twice, and the greenhouse fell silent.

"Today's task is simple," Sprout said gently: "prune the dead tips of the vines."

She picked up a long-handled pair of scissors from the stone platform and held up a basin of poisonous tentacles for the students to see clearly.

The tips of several vines had turned gray and withered, contrasting sharply with the dark green and purple of the living vines.

"The dead vine tips no longer secrete venom, but they are connected to the living vines and will continue to consume the plant's nutrients, so they need to be cleaned regularly."

She switched the scissors to her right hand, raised her wand in her left, and her lips moved: "HerbaProtego."

A pale green light shone from the tip of the staff, thinly covering her hands and forearms. The light film clung to her skin, appearing to be only as thin as a sheet of paper.

"Plant Shield Charm, HerbaProtego," she said, waving her arm. "A protective charm specifically designed to deal with magical plants."

Much lighter than the Ironclad Charm, it doesn't affect the feel, but it can block most plant toxins from directly penetrating. The dragon skin gloves provide physical protection, while these provide magical protection; both layers together are sufficient.

Then she reached out with her right hand and scissors, flicked her wrist, and snapped the withered tip off. The living vine reflexively twitched, but didn't touch anything.

The withered tip fell onto the stone platform, dry and crumbly, ready to crumble at the slightest touch.

"Have you remembered all the steps? First cast a protective spell, then start. Wear gloves up to your elbows, and only use the scissors on the dead parts. The dead tips are grayish and brittle, making them very easy to distinguish from living vines."

Make sure you choose the correct color when cutting; don't cut carelessly.

She put the scissors back on the stone and glanced at the whole class: "If the vines get tangled up, don't pull on them. The more you pull, the tighter they will become. Use a freezing spell to hold them in place, and then slowly peel them off."

In the wild, venomous tentacles like to cling to rock crevices and dead tree trunks. Wild venomous tentacles are much more ferocious than those in greenhouses, with longer, thicker vines and a higher concentration of venom.

The varieties grown in greenhouses have undergone several generations of selection, and their aggressiveness has been reduced considerably, but you should not be careless.

Even the most docile poisonous tentacles are still carnivorous plants; they can't tell if you're there to prune them or to deliver lunch to their doorstep.

A Gryffindor boy raised his hand, and Sprout nodded for him to speak.

He pointed to the fine thorns on the vine and asked, "Will I get poisoned if I get pricked?"

"The tips of the vines are the most poisonous, while the thorns on the sides are mainly used to cling to and secure prey. They are less poisonous, but can still cause paralysis."

Diluted venom is one of the ingredients in anti-inflammatory ointments. St. Mungo's experimented with using higher concentrations of venom as a local anesthetic decades ago.

She shook her head, her tone as if recalling something: "The dosage was too difficult to control, so it was stopped after a few years. If the anesthesia was too strong, the person would never wake up again."

She handed out the scissors, and gave one last instruction: "Wear the dragon skin gloves up to your elbows. Don't think it's too much trouble. One of your seniors thought he was thick-skinned and didn't wear gloves. His fingers were numb for three days, and he couldn't even hold his wand properly."

The young wizards laughed, with the Gryffindors laughing the loudest.

The grouping began, with Slytherin and Gryffindor each standing on one side, one pot for each of them.

The Slytherin area was relatively quiet and orderly, with only the snip of scissors and occasional hushed conversations.

Regulus and Avery are in the same group.

Avery pulled the dragon-skin gloves onto his arms, muttering, "These are too big. My fingers are dangling in them; I can't even hold the scissors properly."

He opened his palm and held it up to his eyes to show his hand; the finger covers of the glove were longer than his own fingers, and the five fingertips hung loosely.

Regulus ignored him, his gaze falling on the poisonous tentacles in front of him, his magical perception automatically spreading over them.

The Poison Tentacles' magic circuit and the Mantis Shooter's Willow are completely different systems.

The willow tree is linear; its magic flows upwards from the root along the main stem at a fast speed and in a clear direction. It branches at the forking points and then narrows, compresses, and releases at the end. The whole process is extremely fast.

This poisonous tentacle was different; its magic seeped from the roots to the tips of the vines, but it didn't follow a fixed path. It diffused everywhere, flowing wherever it ended up, only converging at the poison glands at the tips.

He also remembered Professor Sprout saying that the magical property of the poison tentacles was paralysis.

He hadn't seen what effect this thing had when it hit a living creature, so he couldn't determine how the paralysis attribute worked.

In terms of magic distribution, it has a completely different structure from the oscillation of the Willow Tree. The oscillation is directional, superimposed, and progresses layer by layer along the physical path.

This is diffuse, uniform, more like a general coverage.

He can only observe the characteristics of magic at the moment; as for how it works in living beings, he will have to wait and see the actual situation to make a judgment.

However, if it matches the distribution of its magic power, its attack method is probably a single trigger, taking effect as soon as it touches the target, and it works in one go.

A vague idea flashed through his mind.

If that's the case, then the attack logic of the poison tentacles and the shockwave complement each other perfectly: one is a pinpoint crusher, and the other is a full-area coverage.

However, he only thought about it briefly; he didn't intend to create a new spell for every plant he observed.

The Disintegration and Disintegration Curses are core achievements, one focusing on the level of existence and the other on the level of physical structure, and they have already covered most application scenarios.

Some magical properties may seem interesting, but their practical applications are limited, or they overlap with existing spell functions, resulting in a disproportionate return on investment.

Developing spells isn't like picking mushrooms; you can't just pick them every time you see one.

But the observations themselves are worth accumulating.

Avery fiddled around for a while, finally managing to tighten his gloves and cuffs. He picked up the scissors, brought them close to the poisonous tentacles, identified a gray, withered tip, and reached out to cut it.

With a snap, the withered tip broke off and fell onto the stone platform, shattering into several pieces.

A live vine reached out towards his wrist, and he quickly pulled it back, almost throwing the scissors.

"Shift!"

He muttered a curse in a low voice, then turned to look at Regulus, only to find that Regulus wasn't even looking at him, staring blankly at the poisonous tentacles.

He shrugged and continued cutting.

The sounds of scissors snipping intermittently echoed in the greenhouse, along with the rustling of leather gloves and occasional gasps of surprise.

Something happened in Gryffindor.

Colin McMillan's gloves weren't on properly, and while he was pruning, a live vine suddenly wrapped around his side, its tip scraping into the inside of his wrist through the gap between the glove and cuff.

He hissed as a shallow cut appeared on his wrist, but it didn't bleed. However, his fingers immediately went numb, and the scissors fell to the stone table with a clatter.

Gareth Diggory, who was opposite him, reacted quickly, grabbing him and pulling him back, turning his head and calling out, "Professor."

Sprout walked over and first used a freezing spell to freeze the still writhing vine. The vine froze in mid-air, and a thin layer of frost formed on the barbs at the end.

Then she took a thumb-sized glass bottle out of her apron pocket, unscrewed the cap, and poured a few drops of clear liquid onto the scratch.

She pressed her fingers on two points on McMillan's wrist and whispered, "It doesn't hurt, it'll be fine in a bit."

"The paralysis caused by the poisonous tentacles travels slowly upwards along the body from the point of contact, numbing wherever it goes."

She glanced at McMillan's wrist, her tone still gentle and unhurried: "It was just a scratch, not much venom, the numbness in my finger returned after a while."

The venom continued to seep in as the arm became entangled, and within a minute, the entire arm would lose all feeling. "If it's the neck that's entangled," she said, glancing at the entire class. "Then it's not a matter of numbness anymore."

The greenhouse was quiet for a while.

"So, tighten the gloves."

She walked back to Slytherin's side, checked the progress of a few groups along the way, glanced at Alex's pot, nodded, and left.

While Regulus was tending to Sprout's wound, his magical senses swept across McMillan's wrist.

He detected the diffusion path of the paralyzing properties under the skin.

Just as he had predicted, the magic of the poisonous tentacles, once inside the human body, permeates, diffuses, and spreads evenly along the neural network, without following a fixed path; it touches wherever it touches.

A clearer idea flashed through my mind.

This diffusion logic is very similar to his own perception of magic.

When his magical perception covers a target, he also penetrates along the target's magical pathways, going through if there is a passage and going around if there isn't.

The paralyzing magic of the poison tentacles does the same thing, except it doesn't use the magic loop; it uses the neural network.

The two diffusion methods share the same underlying logic; the difference lies in that his perception is merely observation, while the paralysis caused by the poisonous tentacles is the actual effect.

Almost all the attack spells he had seen operated in the opposite way: after the spell hit the target, the magic was forced inward from the point of impact, regardless of the path, covering the entire target.

The contrast between finding its own way to spread and overall suppression reminded him of an extreme example: the Killing Curse.

The green light is fatal to any living being it touches; there is no intermediate state. It kills instantly upon contact, requiring no precision, only a direct hit.

However, the prototype of the Killing Curse is not a murder curse.

Its root word, AvadaKedavra, comes from Old Aramaic and means "to destroy this thing."

Originally a healing spell, it was used by ancient healers to precisely kill lesions, plagues, gangrene, and tumors.

Only kill what deserves to die, and don't touch anything that doesn't deserve to die. Let the disease die, but don't let people die.

But perhaps because it is too difficult, it requires extremely high precision, accurate delivery, and the ability to distinguish between target and non-target in order to kill the damned.

Or perhaps because it's too simple, all of these are omitted. A beam of green light shines through, and the disease and the patient, those who deserve to die and those who don't, die together.

In short, it has become what it is today: a single shot can kill, causing widespread devastation; anyone who touches it dies.

But what if we could solve the accuracy problem?

If a way could be found to allow magic to paralyze like poisonous tentacles, following the neural network to find its own destination, then this spell might be able to return to its original purpose when it was invented.

Kill the diseased tissue, kill the invading magical parasites, kill the cursed and corrupted magical nodes, and preserve all healthy parts.

However, this idea is still far from being implemented; the precision threshold is too high, and a slight mistake could lead to mutual failure.

Moreover, even if it were theoretically feasible, there are currently no practical applications.

Thinking of this, Regulus's lips twitched slightly.

But he is warm-hearted and kind, and cannot bear to see human suffering. We can give it a try later.

He withdrew his magical senses, picked up the scissors, and continued pruning the withered vines.

Nothing else happened for the rest of the time.

Sprout walked back and forth between the stone platforms, stopping every now and then to check on the progress of each group. He squatted down in front of a Gryffindor student's basin and helped him straighten the section that had been cut off.

After the pruning was completed, the professor checked the results of each group one by one.

The Slytherin group met the standard, while the Gryffindor group was a bit worse. Two or three pots were cut unevenly, with dead tips not being cleaned properly, and some living vine tips being accidentally cut off.

Sprout shook his head, not getting angry, but simply reminding them to make sure the gloves were tied tightly next time, and then pointing out the correct trimming position to the other groups.

Colin McMillan's finger, which had been scratched, had recovered, and he was waving it around while Diggory mocked him for almost being disarmed by a plant.

After class, the students packed up their tools, took off their gloves, and headed towards the greenhouse entrance.

Avery placed the gloves on the stone and glanced at Regulus.

Regulus was slowly wiping the scissors clean and putting them back on the stone, showing no sign of leaving.

Avery shrugged, took the gloves, and went out, with Alex and Hermes following behind.

The greenhouse fell silent, with only two people remaining.

Sprout was cleaning up the remaining withered vine tips on the stone platform, his fingers covered in mud and sap, which he casually wiped on his apron.

She bent down to pick up the few pieces of vine tips that had fallen to the ground and threw them into the compost bin, then hung the scattered scissors back on the hooks on the wall.

After finishing all that, she straightened up, glanced around the greenhouse, and seemed to be thinking about what to do next.

Then her light fell on Regulus, her tone gentle, with a hint of understanding: "Mr. Black, you were looking at the magic of the poisonous tentacles during class, what did you figure out?"

Regulus walked to the opposite side of the stone platform, not at all surprised.

He used magical perception, without even using natural magic, yet the professor was still able to detect it.

Indeed, Professor Sprout was a powerful witch.