At Hogwarts, the story begins with deconstructing Avada Kedavra.

As night deepened, the sound of the wind in the Ravenclaw Tower resembled the lament of some ancient musical instrument.

In the dormitory, soft snoring could be heard from one room to the next.

On the four-poster bed by the window, the curtains were not fully drawn. The cool moonlight streamed in, outlining Lucian's silhouette as he sat cross-legged in a silvery light.

He didn't sleep.

Or rather, he is performing a kind of "maintenance" that is deeper than sleep.

In his mental vision, the black storm within his chest, known as the Silent Storm, was being forcibly compressed by some kind of will. The violent energy that had been tearing at his blood vessels was being straightened and woven into extremely fine, dark gray threads by a pair of invisible hands, which then slowly traveled along the eight extraordinary meridians.

This is an extremely delicate operation that allows no room for error.

It's like restoring a broken masterpiece, requiring you to align the misaligned fibers one by one.

"call……"

With a breath that lasted three minutes, Lucien's body was enveloped in an extremely faint, metallic glow.

Just then, a rustling sound came from the next bed.

Terry Boot, the somewhat neurotic half-blood wizard, groggily got up to go to the bathroom.

As he rubbed his eyes and passed Lucien's bed, he suddenly stopped in his tracks.

He witnessed a scene he would never forget:

Under the moonlight, Lucian sat cross-legged with his eyes closed, the air around him seemingly distorted. His pale face, illuminated by the silver light, possessed an almost divine indifference. Even more terrifying, Terry vaguely saw wisps of black mist, like small, living snakes, obediently burrowing into Lucian's nostrils.

"Merlin... Merlin..." Terry was so frightened he was wide awake, his teeth chattering. "Lucian? What... what are you doing?"

That mysterious force field dissipated instantly.

Lucien slowly opened his eyes. The madness in his deep gray eyes vanished instantly, replaced by a deathly stillness.

He turned to look at his terrified roommate, his expression completely calm, his tone as if he were discussing tomorrow's breakfast:

"I'm sorting through the pieces."

"Broken...what?" Terry stammered.

"You can think of it as me giving the magic circuits a thorough cleaning." Lucian lay back down, pulling the covers over himself. "It's a meditation technique from the East. It helps with sleep. Would you like to try it?"

"No...no need." Terry looked at the face that screamed "keep away," swallowed hard, and rushed into the bathroom as if fleeing.

The dormitory returned to silence.

Lucian looked at the star chart on the ceiling and silently calculated the time in his mind.

"One hour and fifty-eight minutes. That's the limit."

This is the maximum his body can currently withstand.

The essence of the effect of internal alchemy is to reverse entropy, transforming chaotic and disordered silent energy (high entropy) into ordered and controllable gray magic (low entropy).

But this body is too fragile.

Like a poor-quality porcelain vase riddled with cracks, if too much high-density mercury is forcibly poured in, the vase will shatter. He must be extremely careful, repairing and transforming only a little bit each day.

This is destined to be a long project.

Exhaustion washed over him like a tide, and Lucien closed his eyes as his consciousness quickly faded into darkness.

……

He had another dream.

The dream was fragmented, like a shattered kaleidoscope.

One moment it's that Qianlong revolving vase in the basement of the Forbidden City in my past life; the next it's the memories of this body's childhood...

A cold stone chamber, a complex alchemical array.

"Hold on, Lucien! This is the Ashford family's last hurrah!"

The man's voice, Cassius Ashford, carried an almost manic obsession.

In his dream, Lucien was bound to an altar, and countless streams of molten metal were forcibly poured into his spine. It was an unfiltered crystallization of primal magic, unearthed from some ancient ruin.

"The mortal body cannot bear the legacy of the divine age..."

"Then reshape him! Rewrite his magic circuits!"

excruciating pain.

A deep, soul-piercing pain.

Lucian clearly "saw" that moment in his dream: the body's originally healthy magical meridians were broken inch by inch under the violent modification, and then entangled with those foreign primal forces, forming a knot that could never be untied.

It wasn't a naturally occurring, silent ruin; it was a man-made wasteland.

"So that's how it is..." Lucian in the dream coldly observed all of this, "In pursuit of so-called pureblood evolution, he forcibly burned a fine piece of unglazed porcelain into waste."

……

His biological clock woke him up precisely at six o'clock.

Lucien opened his eyes, his gaze clear and bright, devoid of the confusion of waking. Last night's dream had given him a deeper understanding of the hatred this body harbored, but he had no intention of seeking revenge.

For an art restorer, restoring a damaged work to be even more perfect than the original is the greatest mockery of the clumsy vandal.

Get up, wash up, and get dressed.

When he stepped out of the Ravenclaw common room, the entire castle was still shrouded in morning mist.

The corridor leading to the main building was deserted, save for the crackling of torches on the walls. Lucien walked slowly, his gaze sweeping across both sides of the corridor.

The castle is breathing, but he seems quite ill.

As Lucian passed a portrait of a medieval knight, who was fast asleep, he stopped, his gaze not falling on the knight, but fixed on the edge of the frame.

"The varnish has oxidized severely, causing a lag in the transmission of magic. The background of this painting is already fading."

Further on, an empty suit of armor emitted a piercing creak without being touched.

Lucian frowned slightly. Through his mental vision, he could clearly see that the magical lubrication spell at the knee joints of his armor had weakened by 40%.

"The drive shaft damping is too high. In another three months, this leg will fall off on its own."

He resisted the urge to take out his wand and restore it to its original condition; that was the job of the school janitor, Filch, though that Squib would most likely only be wiped with a rag.

With this concern for the dilapidated building, he arrived at the main stairwell on the fifth floor.

For new students at Hogwarts, the biggest nightmare of the first week isn't Peeves or Filch, but those self-aware staircases.

There are 142 staircases, some wide and some narrow; some lead to different places; some suddenly disappear halfway up.

At this moment, the marble staircase in front of him was making a loud rumbling noise, about to detach from its original platform and turn into another dead end.

He saw Hermione, who had gotten up early, standing on the platform, waiting helplessly for the stairs to be reset.

"This way... Oh, damn it!"

Not far ahead of him, two Hufflepuff freshmen let out a wail. The staircase beneath their feet suddenly changed course at the last moment, rumbling and taking them to the trophy display room on the third floor instead of the classrooms on the first floor.

Lucien stood on the edge of the fifth-floor platform, calmly gazing at the bottomless, crisscrossing stairwell before him.

In his mental vision, there were no mischievous staircases.

What he saw was a vast, sophisticated, and strictly mathematically logical automated system.

Enormous magical gears meshed in the void, emitting a piercing grinding sound. But in Lucian's eyes, these chaotic movements were instantly deconstructed into countless shimmering data streams.

"The infrastructure follows the golden spiral, with a rotation angle θ approaching 137.5 degrees..."

"External disturbance variable." Lucian's gaze swept over the two still screaming Hufflepuff freshmen. "Estimated total weight: 310 pounds. Changes in gravitational potential energy cause an increase in the friction coefficient of the transmission gears."

Lucian's pupils contracted slightly, his brain worked at high speed, and countless linear algebra formulas flowed through his mind.

He viewed each suspended stone step as a rigid body in a three-dimensional coordinate system. Each swing of the staircase was, to him, nothing more than a simple matrix transformation.

X t+1=A⋅X t+B⋅ut

"State matrix established. Magic tide trough on Tuesday morning, parameter μ adjusted to 0.8."

"Next command prediction... Z-axis downward translation, XY-plane right rotation 35 degrees."

Just then, a suspended stone staircase slowly moved towards the platform where he was. At normal speed, it would take another five seconds to connect.

But Lucian did not wait.

He stepped onto the stairs when they were still two meters away from the platform and moving at high speed.

This is an act that appears to be suicide.

One wrong step and you're plunged into a hundred-meter abyss.

"Calculate the relative velocity vector... solve the collision equations."

However, just as the sole of his leather shoe was about to touch the void—

Click.

The staircase seemed to be designed to match his steps. Due to the slight deformation of a gear under the changing load, it suddenly accelerated and vibrated, then "slid" precisely to his feet.

Snapped.

The leather shoes landed with a crisp sound.

Lucien stepped onto the stairs with an unperturbed expression, without even shifting his weight. Then, the stairs turned again, like a sophisticated elevator, smoothly transporting him to the fourth-floor corridor.

"Mechanical delay of 0.4 seconds, turning radius error of 3 centimeters."

As he walked, he made notes in his mental notebook: "The damping coefficient of drive shaft number three is too high; lubrication is recommended."

……

Transfiguration classroom.

When Lucien pushed open the door, the room was empty and quiet. The morning sun shone through the tall arched windows onto the desks, and dust motes danced in the beams of light.

The classroom was empty.

No, it wasn't completely deserted.

On the platform, a spotted cat sat upright, its eyes surrounded by patterns resembling eyeglass frames.

Lucian stopped in his tracks.

He looked at the cat.

In the realm of the mind's eye, it was a humanoid magical structure that was extremely compressed and folded. The complex transfiguration incantations were like a bodysuit, forcibly binding the body and magic of an adult wizard into the form of a cat.

This structure is extremely stable, with no magic leakage whatsoever; it's practically a textbook example of animagus.

Good morning, Professor McGonagall.

Lucien bowed slightly to the cat, his tone carrying a genuine respect for perfect craftsmanship.

The tabby cat's ears twitched, seemingly surprised that the newcomer had seen through it so easily. But it didn't revert to its original form; it merely let out a reserved "meow," as if in response.

Lucian didn't say much, and went straight to the last row by the window to sit down. He opened the book "Elementary Metamorphosis Guide," but his thoughts were actually replaying the scene of the original owner's father in his dream last night.

About ten minutes later.

It was Hermione with messy hair, she looked a bit disheveled, and she was carrying several heavy books in her hands.

Then she saw Lucien sitting in the back row by the window, leisurely twirling a pen.

"You?!" Hermione's eyes widened in surprise. She strode over, looked at Lucien, then at the door. "This is impossible! I clearly saw you behind me at the bottom of the stairs... How did you get through that dead end?"

In order to calculate the pattern of the stairs, she waited on that platform for a full three minutes, and even flipped through "Hogwarts: A History of the School".

Lucian looked up at the future know-it-all, and lightly tapped the edge of the notebook with his pen.

"The logic behind the staircase's changes is essentially an iteration of the Fibonacci sequence in three-dimensional space. The first floor's rotation follows the golden angle, as long as you introduce a time variable 't' based on the castle's magical tidal cycle..."

Hermione was stunned, her mouth slightly agape.

Lucian ignored her stunned expression and continued:

"Treat each section of the staircase as a rigid body and establish a spatial coordinate system. The rest is simply solving a system of linear equations with parameters, plus some basic matrix transformation operations."

Seeing Hermione's bewildered expression, he casually added the last sentence:

"If you do a simple linear algebra problem like this, they're just elevators."

Hermione: "..."

As a Muggle-born high-achieving student, she understood every word: Fibonacci, linear algebra, matrix transformations. But she never imagined that these Muggle mathematical tools could be used to interpret magic in this way.

At this moment, Hermione looked as if she had been hit on the head by a troll.

As the classroom gradually filled with students, the noise slowly subsided.

The classroom door was suddenly kicked open.

Harry and Ron burst in, panting.

"Thank God we made it!" Ron gasped for breath, clutching his knees. "That damn staircase...it almost sent us to the forbidden area on the third floor! If Professor McGonagall were here—"

"Hi Lucian, you're here early! Can we sit next to you?" Harry said.

Lucian tilted his head slightly and gestured to the spotted cat on the podium.

"Instead of worrying about the stairs, let's sit down first. The professor has been observing you for a long time."

"Professor?" Ron looked around. "Where?"

The next second, the spotted cat on the podium leaped up, stretched and deformed rapidly in mid-air, and landed as a serious-looking Professor McGonagall.

Professor McGonagall gave Lucian an approving look, then turned sternly to Harry and Ron:

"A truly spectacular entrance. Perhaps I should turn you two into pocket watches, so that at least you'll be on time once."