Hogwarts and the Holy Grail War

"Understood, understood." Ethan nodded hurriedly. Just as he was about to take this opportunity to flatter Dumbledore, he was grabbed by the collar by the back of his neck and dragged out of the principal's office by Professor Garrick.

"Albus, is this really okay?"

Snape watched Ethan's figure disappear under the floor outside the door along with his wailing, and asked with a dark face:

"After all, he is still just a child. After causing such a big trouble, I think it is better to keep a close eye on him and not just let it go. If he thinks that we are turning a blind eye to him and is not ashamed but proud of it, it is hard to say what big trouble he will cause in the future. By then, none of us can protect him."

"It's hard for me to agree with you, Severus." Professor McGonagall held her wand tightly and shook her head slightly. "I can understand your concerns, but you should be able to see in the past six months that Ethan is not the ignorant person you said. You can even say that he is a bit of a good guy. If no one provokes him, he will never take the initiative to provoke others."

"That's because he hasn't realized what this power of his can bring him! He has great talent, and you and I both know that, Minerva. But this will certainly bring him temptations that are beyond the reach of ordinary people. Are you sure he can really resist it and not go astray?"

Snape almost squeezed out the words from between his teeth:

"He's too young! Now he's just a student. We can still use our professor's authority to suppress him and correct him when he makes a mistake. But he will grow up sooner or later. Who will be able to control him then? Before that, he must be well guided. If we continue to indulge him like this, sooner or later he will..."

"Are you worried that he might become the next Voldemort, Severus?"

Dumbledore glanced at Snape with his calm eyes. Snape nodded with a droopy face, and the muscles on his face twitched obviously due to the fluctuations of emotions:

"I have used Legilimency to read his mind, and I am sure you have done the same. But what did you read, Albus? Apart from the trivial things that float on the surface of his thoughts, the thoughts engraved in the depths of his mind are almost blank! Minerva just said that he is a good person, and I agree. His daily actions do leave us with such an impression, but no one knows whether it is just a disguise!"

"Calm down, Severus." Dumbledore pushed his glasses down and said calmly:

"I don't think you need to worry about this. Ethan is different from Voldemort. At least he knows what it means to love and be loved. Just based on this point, he will never follow Voldemort's old path in the future."

"Although he behaves a bit unorthodox, he still agrees with the most basic morals and rules in his heart. He knows that he will be punished if he makes a mistake, and he will take on responsibilities that do not belong to him out of consideration for other people's feelings. When have you ever seen those vicious dark wizards take all the crimes themselves because they are afraid that their companions will be punished?"

"And we are not the only ones who can bring him back to the right path. Apart from anything else, as long as Miss Shanans - we don't need to question her values, right? As long as she can stay with Ethan, with Ethan's personality, he will never go astray."

"When did we fall to the point where we actually need a girl as a guarantee?" Snape choked, sighed deeply, and looked at Dumbledore again:

"Are you so confident, Albus?"

"It's not that I'm confident, but that I believe in Ethan."

Dumbledore shook his head slightly, walked to the Pensieve, and leaned over to look at a face floating in the basin that was constantly rotating - it was Ethan's.

"Trust him, he will prove himself."

"Believe it or not... Compared to Ethan, I am more worried about Mirabelle. She has been emotionally unstable these past two days." Professor McGonagall suddenly sighed:

"I'm sure you've seen the relationship between her and Ethan. She must be treating Ethan as... Plus, what Ethan did this time was indeed a bit dangerous. I'm very worried that she will say it out loud on impulse. By then, this incident may very well become a rift between the two of them that can never be repaired."

"We can't keep this secret forever, Minerva. Mirabelle will tell Ethan sooner or later, and she must tell Ethan. If we keep it secret until Ethan himself realizes it, then this matter will become a rift between the two of them."

Dumbledore used his wand to pick up a thought from his mind and gently threw it into the Pensieve:

"It's a good thing to talk it out earlier. The later you confess, the more harm it will cause, for both of them."

At this moment, in the hall on the first floor of Hogwarts Castle, students who were walking away from the hall in groups of two or three after dinner were pointing and whispering to the two people who were walking one after the other in a corpse-dragging posture.

"Sister, please let me go. I can walk by myself!"

Ethan was dragged behind Professor Garrick, holding onto his collar with both hands, and struggling with his feet. But he soon realized that this halfhearted struggle would not help him escape the situation, so he immediately changed his attitude and began to act pitiful:

"At least relax a little, sister~, I can't breathe..."

Professor Garrick walked ahead on his own, ignoring Ethan's pleas for mercy and the students' discussions along the way, and just dragged him through most of the Hogwarts Castle.

Professor Garrick didn't stop until they reached the office in the greenhouse area and threw Ethan directly onto the sofa in the living room.

"Cough-cough-"

Ethan curled up on the sofa with a red face, covering his throat with his hands and coughing continuously.

After coughing for a while and not getting the care he expected, he immediately stopped coughing, sat up and looked at his adopted sister with a resentful look on his face.

Professor Garrick still stood beside the sofa without saying a word, looking at him coldly with a sullen face and his arms folded.

"Sister, is it really necessary to do this?"

Ethan's face was filled with pity, and he wailed quietly, "One and a half months of confinement! You might as well just kill me, and cut my flesh with a blunt knife. Killing someone is heartbreaking, killing someone is heartbreaking~"

"...Tell me, what happened to you in Red Tomb City these days?"

Professor Garrick interrupted him, his usual friendly smile completely gone, and the coldness in his eyes was almost as cold as a freezing spell:

"Don't think about getting away with it like you did at St. Mungo's. No one will believe your excuses. You're not the kind of bastard who would drag others into your affairs. Even if others don't know who you are, don't I know you? What is going on?"

"I..." Ethan was speechless for a moment.

Professor Garrick had always been gentle and considerate to him, and usually condoned his careless violations of discipline. Why did he suddenly become so cold and indifferent? This really puzzled him.

And why was she so obsessed with this matter? Did I finally reach her bottom line? Or...

"Don't want to talk? Okay."

Professor Garrick sneered, and suddenly pulled out his wand and pointed it at Ethan:

"Disrobe!"

A gust of strong wind suddenly made Ethan unable to open his eyes. The wind seemed to have grown hands and deftly unbuttoned all the buttons and zippers on his clothes, pulling the clothes wrapped around his body off him.

Fortunately, this wind with arms was considerate enough to leave him with a layer of underwear, so that he would not stand in front of Professor Garrick, a member of the opposite sex, in an unsightly posture.

Professor Garrick glanced up and down at Ethan's muscular body without a trace of fat. His eyes paused when they passed the almost invisible strawberry mark on his neck, and finally stopped at the scar on Ethan's left chest that was about the thickness of a wrist.

This was the wound left when Marcus used Cu Chulainn's Spiritual Shadow to attack him. Although he had used the Invigorating Potion to treat it immediately, it still left a few marks on his body, but they were not as hideous as before. If he had used the White Fresh Essence to treat it, there would not be any scars left.

The invigorating potion is different from the dittany essence. The dittany essence can only be used to heal external injuries, but it is extremely effective and will not leave any scars if applied in time.

Compared with Dietary Essence, the use of the Invigorating Potion is wider. It can be applied externally or taken internally. It can be used to heal all non-spiritual body tissue damage, except for the soul, which is an area that no medicine can touch. However, compared with Dietary Essence, the healing effect is a little worse. If you use it to heal a wound, no matter how timely it is, it will still leave a slight scar.

But for Ethan, leaving scars was just an insignificant detail and not worth worrying about too much, so if he was asked to choose a blood-restoring potion to carry with him, it would be more practical to choose a more general medicine like the invigorating potion.

He could also use ancient magic to treat injuries that the invigorating potion could not treat, such as mental disorders or abnormal physical conditions such as hormonal disorders. He had used this method to treat Professor Garrick's greasy hair before. To put it bluntly, it was the disorder of hormone secretion caused by too much stress, which was equivalent to an abnormal physical state. He just needed to use magic to restore it to normal.

He is the hexagonal warrior who can output damage, resist damage and heal.

"What is this?" Professor Garrick walked around behind Ethan and looked at the wound in the same position on his back, his eyes slightly red.

"...It's a scar." Ethan lowered his eyelids and said softly.

At this point, he thought he had nothing to hide from his sister, whether it was his own body or the truth of the matter.

"It's still a penetrating wound...Looking at the marks, it must have been from the past two days!"

Ethan nodded: "Yes."

Professor Garrick walked back to Ethan and reached out to touch his uneven skin. His voice was a little choked up: "What on earth is going on?"

Ethan was a little afraid to look Professor Garrick in the eye: "...I was ambushed accidentally. Although I noticed it in time, I wanted to use a self-torture trick to let the enemy down, so I didn't dodge."

"Don't make it sound so light! 'Careless'? Do you know what's in this place?!"

"Lungs and heart." Ethan whispered unconfidently, "They are all important organs."

"You still know! Then do you know that if anything happens, you will..." Professor Garrick started to cry as he spoke, "Why do you have to do such worrying things? Can't you just stay in Hogwarts? Can't you make people worry less?"

Ethan's Adam's apple moved, and he stammered, "Sister..."

Although he knew that Professor Garrick cared about him, her condition today was indeed a little strange. Her emotions fluctuated too much and she was really capricious.

Professor Garrick knew that he had lost his composure, so he wiped away the tears from the corners of his eyes. In just a moment, he returned to his usual calmness, then turned around and quickly walked up the stairs in the corner of the office.

She turned around on the stairs and told Ethan in an unquestionable tone:

"Come here, follow me upstairs."

-

Come on professor

Chapter 253: This brother and sister can no longer be together today

"Follow me upstairs."

Professor Garrick instructed Ethan in an unquestionable tone.

Ethan half opened his mouth in a daze, but finally nodded. Under Professor Garrick's gaze, he quickly put on his clothes, put on his robe, and followed her steps up the stairs.

I hope things won't develop the way I think. After all, teacher-student love is too immoral.

At least wait until I graduate or Professor Garrick resigns or something...

Opposite the stairs is a half-open wooden door. Behind the door is Professor Garrick's bedroom. The sliding door on the right is connected to the bathroom. This is the layout of the entire second floor.

Don't ask Ethan why he knew it so clearly. The reason is that when he was doing Professor Garrick's hair care, she had easily asked him to do the cleaning work more than once.

After all, Professor Garrick claimed that he was "not good at cleansing spells" and was unwilling to trouble other professors for "such a trivial matter", so he could only ask his younger brother for help.

However, this was the only bedroom he had never entered. Firstly, he had never thought of entering a girl's bedroom, and secondly, Professor Garrick would not allow him to enter.

Professor Garrick pushed the door open and held it open to make room for him:

"come in."

"Oh." Ethan walked into the house hesitantly. He had seen the layout of the bedroom through the window crack on the night of the beam raising a month ago, so he didn't have any curiosity to look around now.

The only thing occupying his mind at the moment was the reason why Professor Garrick brought him into the bedroom... and what she had said in her sleep that night.

"Please sit down." Professor Garrick pointed to the dressing stool next to the bedside dressing table and sat down beside the bed.

As soon as Ethan sat down on the stool, he heard Professor Garrick's voice asking, "Little Ethan, how old are you?"

"I just turned fifteen last month." Ethan answered without thinking.

Yes, I am only a fifteen-year-old child. Sister Mirabelle, it is not too late for you to stop now. Don’t go further down this wrong path!

"Fifteen years old..." Professor Garrick muttered, "About the same age as him."

"Sister?" Ethan looked confused. "What do you mean by generally big?"

Professor Garrick's eyes wandered around the room, but she never met Ethan's eyes. Finally, she must have made up her mind. She took a deep breath, opened the drawer on the dressing table, took out a wooden photo frame, and handed it to Ethan:

"Here, take a look at this."

Ethan took the photo frame, and inside it was a colorful half-length photo of a young man with chestnut hair making a V sign. He had a standard Germanic face, somewhat similar to Professor Garrick, but the sunny smile on his face had some of Ethan's charm.

Ethan moved his eyes back and forth between the boy in the photo and Professor Garrick, comparing them repeatedly, and finally took a breath:

"Sister, your son is this big already?!"

"Go to hell, that's my brother!" Professor Garrick raised his eyebrows and glared at him with gritted teeth. He took the photo frame back from Ethan and stroked it gently:

"His name is Etan, and he's about the same age as you... He's also very similar to you, a noisy kid who won't settle down."

"...I see. No wonder you are so nice to me, sister. It turns out I am just taking advantage of him." Ethan looked at Professor Garrick with a hint of sadness in his eyes. In the end, he just smiled and said, "When can we meet and get to know each other?"

"He's gone." Professor Garrick looked up at Ethan, his eyes full of sadness, "Three years ago."

"...I'm sorry." Ethan's throat twitched. "Your brother's death...was it caused by some disease? Or was it an accident?"

"It was a dark wizard who did this."

Professor Garrick placed the photo frame upside down on the dressing table and reminisced about his past:

"I grew up in a Muggle family in London. My parents... were somewhat patriarchal, so they only loved my younger brother, Etan, and barely cared about me. Before I became a student at Hogwarts, I didn't really feel the sense of home from them."

"But Etan is different from my parents. He has always cared about me as his sister. When my parents scolded or beat me, or when I was bullied by other children, he would always stand in front of me to protect me. So in my heart, he is my only family member."

"It was not until I entered Hogwarts that I felt the warmth of home and the care of elders from professors and classmates. I showed my extraordinary affinity for magical plants in the Herbology class. The Herbology professor at the time, Pomona Sprout, told me that I was very talented in Herbology and would definitely achieve great things in this field in the future."

"I thought at the time that this was probably something I could devote my life to, and I had finally found the meaning of my life."

"So after Professor Sprout had to retire from her position due to health reasons, I took over her position and became the youngest Herbology professor in Hogwarts' history, as well as the youngest Head of House."

"I have no attachment to that home. The only reason I go back home every Christmas is Etan."

"But he died, at the hands of a dark wizard."

"At that time, I had just taken over the position of Professor of Herbology at Hogwarts. I was overwhelmed by the teaching tasks that I had not yet started, so I could not go home for Christmas that year. As a result, on that Christmas, a group of dark wizards attacked our community and kidnapped a large number of people. My father, mother, younger brother, and nearby neighbors were all..."

"When the Aurors found them in the suburbs on the other side of London, they had been tortured to death by the Dark Arts. When I arrived at the scene, I saw Etan lying in the cold snow, his face pale. I could no longer see the smile he had before on that face, and I could no longer hear him call me sister."

"A neighbor who lives next to my house went out to do some work that day and came back a little late. He happened to see some of the events outside the community. He said that Etan was playing with other children in the open space outside the community that day. He could have escaped, but when he saw the dark wizard carrying the neighbor's little sister out, he rushed forward without caring. As a result, he was killed by the dark wizard... At that time, he was only fifteen years old, just like you."

"Since then, I have often wondered if things would have been different if I had gone home that Christmas. But that is only if. It is irreversible. The same goes for the hour reversal spell."

"So I put all my attention on Hogwarts, enriched my life with plant care and teaching, and forced myself not to think about it. Maybe it was because I was too involved, after a long time I almost forgot about it and really returned to normal."

"Until I met you, little Ethan."