Regulus of Hogwarts: Lord of the Stars

Chapter 544 Voldemort: Let's chat sometime

The day after the battle ended, at the crack of dawn, people were already on the wasteland.

The news spread so fast that nearly a thousand wizards on the hills watched the beginning, and three or four hundred watched the whole thing. After they returned, they couldn't stop talking. Before the sky had fully brightened, the muffled sounds of apparitions echoed throughout the ruins.

People came to watch the spectacle, to write reports, to take photos, to explore, to collect souvenirs, and for all sorts of other purposes.

The ruins became a temporary tourist attraction, with wizards pointing and gesturing everywhere, gathering in twos and threes at the edge of the fissures to look down, craning their necks and casting glowing spells down into the bottomless abyss.

Someone was rummaging through the crater from the explosion, rummaging through the ashes with a magic wand, picking up a stone with a hardened orange shell, examining it for a while, and then putting it in their pocket.

Two young wizards stood on the white line, bending over to try and touch it with their hands. Their fingertips barely touched the edge before they pulled back, their expressions changed, and they stood up and shook their hands a couple of times.

The entire wasteland was in an uproar.

Before noon, people from the Ministry of Magic arrived, and the Aurors set up a cordon, driving away any bystanders.

A few who were unwilling to leave were driven away by the Aurors' banishment spells, and they retreated while complaining, standing on tiptoe outside the blockade to peek inside.

Inside the blockade, a professional exploration team entered the site. There were three or four people in gray work robes with an inconspicuous symbol embroidered on the cuffs—the emblem of the Bureau of Mysteries.

They dispersed, took out testing equipment from their bags, and squatted down to start working.

One of them crouched at the edge of the fissure, his wand probing into the crack. The light at the tip of the wand began to change, light blue, pale green, dark yellow, each color lasting for two seconds before switching to the next. His other hand was quickly writing on parchment.

Another person stood in the center of the crater left by the cluster explosion, palms outstretched, suspended in mid-air, eyes closed, brows furrowed.

He sensed the remaining traces of spatial distortion; at the location where the anchor point once stood, the spatial structure left a faint indentation, which was slowly recovering.

His brow furrowed deeper and deeper as he sensed the locations of the seventeen dents.

Seventeen of them are distributed with a certain numerical pattern in terms of spacing and angle. At the same time, seventeen anchor points are inserted into the space to form a closed loop of mutual induction.

He couldn't do it, and none of the people he knew could.

The third person squatted at the edge of the muddy area crushed by the black mist, two steps away, and pointed his wand at it from a distance, causing a cloud of steam of a different color to rise from the ground.

Grayish-green, dark red, and deep purple were each placed into marked glass bottles, corked, labeled, and put into a waist bag.

The fourth person stood in front of the white line the longest.

The cross-section of the dent was extremely flat and strangely clean.

He reached out and ran a finger along the inside of the dent, then pulled it back and stared at his fingertip. There was nothing on his fingertip, not even a speck of dust.

He plunged the wand in, releasing a wisp of magic from its tip.

The tip of the staff changed from silvery-white to transparent, then to a color that was hard to describe, somewhere between gray and white, yet neither.

No response.

He spent a long time writing on the parchment, crossing it out several times, and finally replaced it with a few broader words.

A suspected magical purification effect of unknown nature has been identified. The residual characteristics are unclassifiable, and all known types of magic within the affected area are undetectable. It is recommended that this be reported and further investigation undertaken.

The report was submitted that afternoon, landing on an official's desk. It was flipped through, then stacked with several other documents and put into a cabinet.

Some content was marked, and a note was written in italics on the second page of the report, and that was it.

The people doing the work were highly skilled enough to understand most of the technical aspects: the oscillation traces of the Disintegration Curse, the anchor point remnants of spatial magic, and the component analysis of black magic. However, they were stuck on that white line.

It can describe, record, and sample, but it cannot classify.

But when technical reports reach the political level, they suppress everything, regardless of your background.

The wasteland remained quiet for a few days. The blockade line was still in place, and the Aurors took turns on duty. During the day, people would occasionally pass by, take a quick look from afar, and then continue on their way.

One night, the Aurors on duty received a message almost simultaneously, with only one message: retreat.

The middle-aged wizard leading the group tucked his wand into his sleeve, turned around and made a gesture to the others, then, without saying a word, Apparated away first.

The two people behind him followed closely, their expressions showing no surprise, almost as if they were waiting for this signal.

The other person stood still, glanced sideways in the darkness, and then left.

The young men's faces didn't look good; their fingers tightened and then loosened their grip on their wands.

In the end, they just looked at each other, said nothing, and disappeared.

At the same moment, from all directions of the wasteland, muffled thuds of apparitions rang out one after another. After landing, the figures flickered and apparitions moved to even more distant locations.

A few minutes later, the wasteland fell silent, not even the chirping of insects could be heard.

The clouds above the ruins began to change; the originally scattered thin clouds gathered from the edges inwards, forming a thick mass.

The moonlight was obscured, the starlight was also obscured, and the outline of the ground was plunged into pure black.

In the distance, an owl that came out to hunt at night was circling low in the air when it suddenly changed direction and flew frantically in the opposite direction, flapping its wings rapidly and wildly. In a few moments, it disappeared into the darkness.

The air was stretched out; one second the space was empty, the next second someone was standing there.

The dark robe, in the moonless night, shimmered with a deep, somber purple hue, neither reflecting nor absorbing light, looking like a shadow frozen by magic.

The robe was thin, clinging to the body, rising and falling slightly with each breath, its edges fluttering, unrelated to the wind.

Voldemort appeared at the edge of the ruins and walked in, his hem trailing behind him, his footsteps making no sound.

He came to the edge of the fissure and stood there for a moment.

The trace left by a powerful and destructive spell.

He saw the brightness and size of that beam of light in the Death Eater's memories. Such a large reserve of magic power and such a high output of magic power, yet it only shattered the ground.

Purely physical destruction.

The massive amount of magic power only resulted in a design devoid of any magical elements, essentially no different from an ordinary explosion spell.

Such a reserve of magic was simply wasted by its unleashing.

The way magic is released is very primitive. In the hands of any wizard who pursues magic efficiency, more can be produced with the same amount of output.

He didn't linger on the crack, turned around and continued walking forward, not even bothering to glance at it again.

He arrived at the deep crater left by the cluster explosion, where traces of spatial magic still lingered in the air.

The attack involved detonating at more than a dozen locations simultaneously, coordinating attacks from multiple directions, and was structured, computationally efficient, and pre-designed.

For a thirteen-year-old wizard, this level of spellcasting precision and skillful control is indeed rare and can be considered outstanding.

But no matter how exquisite the technique, it is still just a technique.

A first-year student uses a levitation charm to make a feather float, while an elite Auror uses a combination spell to blow up a castle. The complexity of the operation differs by hundreds or thousands of times, but the nature is the same: both are wizards using wands to execute spells.

He had seen it all, and continued walking. As he passed through the mud crushed by the black mist, the hem of his robe brushed against the edge, and the mud automatically parted to the sides. The remaining black magic instinctively avoided him upon contact with his presence.

He walked up to the white line, stopped, and looked down at the straight indentation on the ground, stretching from his feet into the darkness in the distance.

There was nothing above it; even the background magic in the air didn't exist here. It was as if everything around it had withdrawn from its state of existence.

He stood at the edge of the white line for a moment, then squatted down, stretched out his hand, and hovered over the indentation.

I felt nothing at all; there was zero feedback whatsoever.

He stood up and looked at the line.

His thoughts about existence were deeper and longer than anyone else's, and he spent more time than anyone else ensuring that his existence would not end.

He knows what existence is, what kind of damage existence can withstand while maintaining continuity, and how to disperse the fragments of existence onto multiple carriers so that the whole will never disappear.

The question he studied his whole life was how to prevent existence from disappearing.

Now he saw the opposite of existence, the trace left after existence disappeared, that white line.

Someone touched the boundary of existence and pushed something across that boundary.

Willpower is involved here, and to some extent, this goes beyond the scope of casting a spell.

The child infused his will into the magic, causing it to produce effects beyond what the spell was originally designed for.

He had seen it at the Christmas dinner; Regulus had already touched that threshold, able to integrate his personal will into magic and change the way magic was expressed.

The Ironclad Spell's defensive capabilities exceeded normal levels, and the power of several offensive spells was amplified.

Back then, Regulus was just standing on the threshold; now it seems he has crossed it.

Voldemort's thoughts suddenly drifted back to the past.

What was he doing at the end of his second year at Hogwarts when he was thirteen?

At that time, he was reading books and frantically stuffing things into his head.

Having spent eleven years in a Muggle orphanage, there's so much to catch up on after entering Hogwarts.

He used every book he could borrow, every notebook he could find, and every professor he could contact. By the end of his second year, he was already studying fifth and sixth grade textbooks on his own.

What he is doing is building a framework for understanding magic as comprehensively as possible, starting from scratch.

Regulus Black was born into the Black family, a pure-blood family with hundreds of years of heritage, and grew up in a magical environment.

He doesn't need tutoring, he doesn't need to start from scratch, he has the same talent, but the starting line is worlds apart.

His gaze refocused, his eyes falling once more on the white line, which piqued his interest.

When Dark Enlightenment was sent out, he felt that it was a young wizard who would eventually be corrupted and submit to the system; he was talented, but he couldn't escape it.

At the Christmas dinner, the boy survived his Legilimency, which he found amusing.

And now, a thirteen-year-old wizard has begun to influence magic with his will. He's on the right track and moving fast, but he still has a long way to go.

On our side, a young man like this might be worth talking to in person someday.

His gaze lingered on the white line for a final moment before shifting away, turning around, and walking into the depths of darkness.

The clouds were still closed, completely obscuring the moonlight, and the entire wasteland was plunged into utter darkness.

The white line is still there, stretching straight and clean from the center of the ruins into the distance, remaining even in the darkness when nothing can be seen.

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