The Black Bloodline of Hogwarts

Grindelwald hadn't finished speaking when a tremor came from the tower—a sign that the key to Ophelia's Rose Gate was malfunctioning and would pull Lian back to Bavaria.

"Time's up, little Black." Grindelwald put away the stone tablet.

"Go back. Tell Ophelia that her rose is still on time. Tell Dumbledore—if he asks you—that you saw an old man's delusions, and nothing more."

"Remember, the rose is a portal; you can come here every day. Of course, it's up to you to choose."

Julien felt the folds of space tear open once more. In the final instant before disappearing, he heard Grindelwald's voice, as soft as a sigh:

"But remember, Schilling Julien Black: the Stargate is not the end, it's a mirror. It doesn't reflect another world, it reflects what you most want to change in this world. When you're ready to face that answer, Nurmengard will always be open to you."

---

The light engulfed Julien.

When Julien stood in the rose garden again, he found himself clutching a withered petal in his hand. Elizabeth ran from afar, tears welling in her icy gray eyes:

Are you alright?

He looked toward the planetarium at the highest point of the castle, knowing that Ophelia was observing from there. The old woman's plan had succeeded, and she had achieved her goal of inviting Julien: she had arranged for him to meet Grindelwald.

"Where have you been?" Elizabeth grabbed his arm anxiously. "You disappeared for a full seven minutes. I thought—"

"Niumongard," Julien said softly, looking into her eyes, "I saw Grindelwald."

He paused, choosing his words carefully.

"What, Nurmengard! You faced... Gellert Grindelwald alone!"

“I’m fine, and he’s not what people think.” Julien smiled and gently stroked Elizabeth’s long hair. “He told us that the seal on Azkaban is festering. The Dementors aren’t the guardians; they’re the symptoms. And we need to fix it.”

Elizabeth froze. Her fingers slowly loosened their grip on Julien's arm, moving towards the family crest on his chest—a withered rose entwined with stars.

"Does Grandmother know?"

"She orchestrated my trip," Julien nodded. "But she probably doesn't fully know what Grindelwald said. That part only applies to us."

"us?"

He held her hand, feeling the same tremor. They had made a promise at the bottom of Falling Star Bay; they had fought side-by-side in the secret chamber; and now, Azkaban awaited their choice.

"Together?" Julien asked.

Elizabeth Rozier took a deep breath, and a look of weariness and hope, a look that transcended a thousand years, flashed in her icy gray eyes, just like that of Evanna's ghost.

"Together."

---

In the last few weeks of summer vacation, Julien's life turned into a strange cycle.

He awoke in the mist of Rosenkreuzburg at dawn, and later went to the rose garden to touch the black rose called "Midnight Corridor"—named by Grindelwald himself, supposedly taken from a poem by an ancient Germanic tribe. The folds of space tore and reformed, throwing him to the highest level of Neumungard.

"The essence of alchemy is not the transformation of matter, but the transformation of relationships," Grindelwald said in the first day of the course. "The distance between lead and gold is smaller than the distance between love and hate, but the latter is what we really have to cross."

Julien soon discovered that this old man, defined by history as the Dark Lord, was a teacher who was strict to the point of being cruel.

He will not tolerate any vague concepts or any "probably so" explanations.

When Julien tried to answer the question "Why can the Philosopher's Stone prolong life?" with the standard answer from "Intermediate Alchemy Theory", Grindelwald simply stared at him with his silver-grey eyes until Julien himself realized how barren his answer was.

But Julien has an advantage that others don't.

As night falls and he returns to Bavaria, lying on his four-poster bed staring at the ceiling, he calls out to Murphy in his mind.

"I need to understand the fourfold nature of matter—heat, dryness, coldness, and moisture—and their dynamic equilibrium within the alchemical matrix."

"It's already generating," the black cat's tail flicked impatiently. "Hermesianism and Element Topology... Generated complete. Also, your new teacher is quite difficult to deal with, hmm?"

The books generated by the Magic Resonance Library never disappointed him. They were not simply piles of knowledge, but precise answers to his specific questions—as if the library could sense the moment he got stuck in the classroom in Nurmengard.

The next day, when Grindelwald asked the same question, Julien's answer elicited a look of near surprise from the old man for the first time.

"Heat and dryness are forces of separation, cold and wetness are forces of union. But this is not a static classification—in the alchemical cycle, they devour and give birth to each other. Like…" Julien paused, searching for a metaphor, "like your relationship with Dumbledore."

After Julien finished speaking, he subconsciously stuck out his tongue and secretly glanced at Grindelwald.

Grindelwald remained silent for a long time. The fjord outside the window was receding, revealing black reefs that looked like the spine of some enormous creature.

"How so? Continue."

"You were once allies of heat and dryness, or cold and wetness, trying to separate the old world and create a new order. Then you became opposites of cold and heat, or dry and wetness, trying to unite but tearing each other apart."

Julien pondered, "And now, you are in a more complex cycle, neither enemies nor friends, but... the 'transformation' stage in alchemy, seemingly opposed, but actually unified."

"Where did you get this idea from?" Grindelwald's voice was very soft.

"Guess. Observe." Julien naturally didn't mention the library. It was his secret, even to Grindelwald.

The old man stood up, walked towards the flowing wall, and pondered for a long time.

"What Dumbledore learned in forty years, you learned in just fourteen days," he finally said. "Of course, I'm not referring to specific knowledge, but to the essential principles."

“It’s not because you’re smarter—you are, of course, but that’s not the reason.” Grindelwald turned, a certain assessment gleaming in his silver-grey eyes. “I think it’s because you don’t have our baggage. You have nothing to prove, and nothing to deny.”

---

By mid-August, the course had entered its most dangerous phase.

"Azkaban," Grindelwald unfurled a map of memories—images he had extracted from the walls of Nurmengard in a way Julien hadn't yet grasped—"not a prison, but bandages. A failed bandage."

On this map, Azkaban appears as an isolated island, but the island's outline is distorted by a certain regular pulsation.

“Long, long ago,” Grindelwald traced his finger across the center of the island, “a group of ancient wizards—Dumbledore and I called them the ‘Silent Ones,’ because their names were never recorded—discovered this wound. Older than Falling Star Bay, deeper than Nurmengard. They constructed an alchemical artifact to seal it.”

When the image was magnified, Julien saw it—

A sundial, dozens of times larger than the desolate sundial in Rozier Castle, cast from some kind of black stone that seemed to absorb light.

The gnomon was not metal, but a huge, spiraling, bone-like object—Julien was unwilling to guess what creature it came from.

The sundial has no markings, only countless concentric circles, each slowly rotating in a different direction.

"The eternally dark sundial, that's what we call it," Grindelwald explained, "because it never points to the sunlight, only to the depths of the wound."