The Black Bloodline of Hogwarts

Just before the leading Dementor was about to swoop down, a voice suddenly rang out.

"Praesidium Patronum! (Guardian Shield)"

The sound wasn't loud, but it was like a sharp silver knife, cleanly slicing through the despair in the night sky.

A silver beam of light shot out from the edge of the Forbidden Forest—not a thin ray, not a misty haze, but a huge, circular shield covered in runes, slowly rotating in the moonlight, as if it had descended directly from some ancient legend.

The shield features a raven with outstretched wings in the center, a symbol of Ravenclaw and the Black ancestors.

Every feather is meticulously sculpted, and the arc of the outstretched wings carries a sense of power frozen in an eternal moment, appearing incredibly ancient and majestic.

The raven's eyes were two inlaid sapphires, their almost lifelike gleam flowing within the surging silver light, as if they might leap from the shield at any moment, tearing apart any darkness that dared to approach with their beaks and claws.

Julien stood behind the shield.

A gust of wind swept past him, ruffling his black hair and lifting and lowering the collar of his dragonskin jacket, but his arm holding the silver linden wand remained motionless, the tip of the wand steadily pointing to the sky obscured by the Dementors.

Those emerald eyes, illuminated by the silver light, shone with an inhuman brightness—like two emeralds meticulously polished by moonlight, scrutinizing the black cloaks churning in the night sky, formed from despair.

Elizabeth and Lyria followed behind.

The two didn't exchange glances or words; their tacit understanding was like two hearts beating in the same body.

They simultaneously drew their wands, pointing precisely at Julien's back, and chanted in unison the spell they had practiced countless times: "Potentia Maxima!"

Two pale golden beams shot from the tip of the staff, accurately piercing Julien's back. Runes amplifying his magic power lit up layer by layer within his body, like lamps being lit one after another, instantly increasing his magic power limit by more than three times.

Julien felt that what flowed in his veins was no longer blood, but some kind of hotter, purer energy.

Hermione stood not far away, still cradling the unconscious Harry in her arms. She opened her mouth, as if to say something, but found her voice swallowed up by a deeper shock.

She had seen the Patronus Charm, she had seen Dumbledore cast it—that enormous phoenix, utterly devastating. But she had never seen a spell like this. It wasn't a banishment, not a repulsion, not a destruction; it was something she hadn't yet found the right words to describe.

The shield began to rotate.

At first it was very slow, so slow that you could hardly see it moving. But after just one breath, the speed suddenly increased, and it became a silvery-white halo with blurred edges.

The runes engraved on the shield—ancient symbols taught by Grindelwald himself and repeatedly verified on the alchemy table in the Room of Requirement—began to light up one by one, like a string of stars being lit in sequence, or like a language that had been dormant for thousands of years finally being awakened at the right moment.

These are not decorations, nor are they ostentatious engravings; rather, they are the core of the entire spell: a set of alchemical formulas that dismantle, filter, and recombine dark energy into pure magic.

The Dementors have crashed into us.

The first one, upon contact with the surface of the light shield, emitted a silent shriek. The shriek was imperceptible to human ears, yet it directly shook the soul—everyone present felt a bone-chilling cold.

But this time, the Dementors were not repelled.

They were sucked in.

The shield's surface, like a giant, invisible millstone, grinds and grinds away bit by bit the darkness, despair, and nothingness on the Dementor's body.

The tattered cloak disintegrated in the light of the runes, like paper thrown into a flame, curling, charring, and turning to ash from the edges.

Beneath the cloak, an even more ethereal core was revealed—without substance or shape, merely a pure, thick mass of darkness, as if extracted directly from the void before the birth of the universe.

Then, even the core was dismantled. The runes, like precise, invisible scalpels, cut the darkness into the smallest, indivisible fragments, and then transformed these fragments into silver specks of light through some kind of alchemical reaction.

The points of light rose from the surface of the shield like a reverse meteor shower, slowly, gracefully, and irresistibly traversing the night sky and disappearing above the clouds.

This is the perfect embodiment of the oldest and most mysterious law in alchemy: equivalent exchange.

The darkness of the Dementors is broken down into the most basic energy particles and then reassembled into light. The darkness doesn't disappear; it simply transforms into another form—a form that no longer harms anyone but instead illuminates the night sky.

Julien felt the magic surging wildly.

This is a perfect cycle. A magical equation that transforms despair into hope.

One, two, five, ten, twenty...

Illusions began to appear at the edge of Julien's vision.

He could see the energy trails of each Dementor as it was dismantled, like intricate, ever-changing water flow diagrams.

He could see the ancient darkness, transformed by the dignity of the hippogriffs, returning to its most primal form in his incantations, and then being re-imbued with the attribute of light.

"You...you're absorbing them?" Hermione finally found her voice. She gasped for breath, each word laced with shock. "How...how did you do that?"

"It's a transformation," Julien said briefly, his voice carrying a calmness beyond his years.

On the lake, the last group of Dementors that had arrived stopped.

A dozen or so figures hovered in mid-air. They had no faces—there was nothing under their hoods, only nothingness—but at this moment, they seemed to exude a kind of emotion akin to fear, if creatures formed from nothingness could feel fear.

Their hoods trembled in the night wind. They hovered and hesitated, like a swarm of flies driven by the heat, afraid to approach the still-spinning shield that emitted a silver light that made them instinctively tremble.

One Dementor turned first. Then came the second, the third, and the fourth. They fled in disarray, like the receding tide, like the morning mist scattered by the sunlight, scattering into the night sky.

The shield slowly dissipated.

It wasn't a collapse, it wasn't out of control—it was an elegant and composed exit.

Julien consciously reduced his magic output, slowing down the shield's rotation speed and dimming the runes, causing the silver light wall to gradually melt into countless tiny points of light, like ice melting in the sunlight.

The points of light did not fall; instead, like a reverse meteor shower, they slowly and solemnly rose into the sky, merging with the real stars.

The edge of the Forbidden Forest was plunged into darkness again, but that darkness was no longer oppressive or suffocating. It had returned to the normal, adaptable darkness of the night.

Julien put down his wand and turned around. His dragonskin jacket was covered with night dew and bits of grass, shimmering in the remaining starlight.

His breathing was steady; he simply stood there, calm and composed, as if he had merely taken a stroll along the shore of the Black Lake rather than engaged in an epic battle against dark creatures.