"My Lord, give this to me." Bella was on her feet, eyes fixed on Voldemort with absolute certainty. "I will find whoever it is and bring them to you."
Severus let out a quiet breath.
Right. Wait. I forgot that the cube turns invisible the moment it is activated and stays that way until it takes a hit or the magic gives out, and that feature does not apply to me because I am the owner. How was I supposed to remember that when I had only seen how this toy worked once, and barely paid attention even then? There are genuine holes in my head. Still, if someone like Bella was actually paying attention to her surroundings, she might be able to see me, but given how furious she was just now, I doubt very much that she is. He filed the thought away without worrying about it.
"Hmm. Fine. I am giving you this task. But if you dare fail—"
"My Lord! I will absolutely find whoever is distributing these artefacts and—"
"Do not kill him. Bring him here. Talented artificers are not to be wasted fighting for that old man."
"As you command, my lord!" Bella said eagerly, her eyes locked on the Dark Lord like someone hearing their name called in a crowd, drinking in every word and every glance.
Severus looked at Voldemort again, at that flat noseless face, and sighed.
What does she see in him? I genuinely want to know. Women have strange tastes these days. Perhaps liches are fashionable now.
And this so-called Dark Lord. What a disappointment. Tearing his own soul apart, for what? It damages the magical core, keeps it from functioning at capacity. And it means he can never progress past Master. Becoming an Archmage requires the fusion of a wizard's spiritual, magical, and physical aspects; it is essentially a rebirth, a transformation into something categorically different and more powerful. This man shattered the very thing he needed to get there, and did it to himself. Severus thought, with genuine pity underneath the contempt.
He watched them a while longer. Nothing else came up that interested him. He withdrew from the vision and simply went to bed.
The next morning, early, Severus stood in the training room with a jar of dark green liquid in his hands. The moment he opened it, mint flooded the air.
"This is pure masochism." He tipped his head back and started swallowing. "I sincerely hope I do not get used to it."
A few seconds later his face twisted as a fierce heat erupted in his chest. The pallor left his skin, replaced by a deep flush, and veins stood out all over his body. A dark green aura rose around him, strong enough to crack the floor beneath his feet. He had planned for this, or the room below would have a new skylight.
"If I had not been through this before, I would have blacked out. Damn baptism. I never thought I would have to go through it a second time." He hissed through his teeth, fists clenched so tight his nails had broken the skin. He barely noticed. The heat in his chest was intensifying, consuming his upper body and spreading downward with the unhurried thoroughness of something that had all the time it needed.
What Severus was enduring was called baptism by fire. It burned out almost all fat and impurity, strengthening and renewing the body at every level, right down to the skeleton. Not many people attempted it deliberately, and wizards least of all, being known for fragile constitutions and a low tolerance for sustained pain. Warriors were another matter. His teacher had been a true knight in robes, and it was only because of this process that Alan, in his former life, had been able to reclaim the use of his own limbs.
Half an hour later, the pain dissolved into something faintly cool and clean, accompanied by a sharp smell of mint that made his pale face twist in a different kind of discomfort.
"Now I know how shrimp feel when they are dropped into boiling water while they are still alive." He sat with his shirt soaked through, sweating as though he had been wrung out. And yet, underneath the irritation, there was a smile he was not quite managing to suppress. He had taken the first real step toward his former strength and toward something that might eventually resemble a peaceful life.
With effort, he pushed himself upright and dragged his bag over. A moment later the floor was covered with food, enough to rebuild what the baptism had taken out of him. He looked like a skeleton dressed in skin and needed to recover quickly, because the Strengthening Potion required active training to reach its full effect.
The potion worked by steadily improving the user's physical condition whether they exercised or not. But if they trained, its effectiveness scaled with the effort they put in.
It could only be taken for a month. After that it became a poison, beginning with the bones, making them brittle enough that a strong gust of wind would technically be dangerous.
Which was why, even after what he had just been through, Severus ate a full meal, recovered what he could, and got straight back to it.
For the next two weeks he barely left the training room, breaking only for food and ingredients.
By the end of it he had regained a human silhouette. He no longer looked half-starved, and there was muscle visible in places. He could walk through Diagon Alley without a cloak and not draw attention.
The two weeks were otherwise quiet. No visitors. He worked undisturbed, adapting two more recipes from his old world, both of them likely to sell well, particularly to women.
The first was the Rejuvenating Potion. As the name suggested, it restored the drinker to whatever age they chose as optimal for a period of twenty-four hours, then returned them to their original state. It did not grant immortality. Drinking it every day for the rest of your life would not change when you died.
In his old world, Alan had also known the recipe for a true rejuvenating potion, one that made a person thirty years younger permanently, usable only once in a lifetime. But several of the ingredients did not exist in this world, or had not been discovered yet, and finding workable substitutes would take time and experimental patience. He planned to run those experiments at Hogwarts, using three willing lab rats and one Animagus.
The second was simpler in name but broader in effect: the Beauty Potion. Unlike the versions sold at Madam Pomfrey's, this one worked holistically. Skin: slower aging, improved elasticity, cleared blackheads and blemishes. Hair: strengthened, thickened, made softer and easier to manage, with hair loss slowed. Internally: fat reduction, enhanced regeneration, teeth whitened, various small physical flaws corrected over the course of a week.
That was only a partial list. The most commercially significant feature was the duration, exactly seven days. It was a version of this potion that Alan had once used to build a small fortune at his old magic school, which catered largely to children from wealthy families for whom a few dozen gold pieces simply was not a meaningful sum.
After another gruelling session, Severus was heading toward the shower, which was considerably more satisfying than a Cleansing Charm, when someone knocked at the door. An image resolved in his mind: silver hair, two wizards in expensive clothes standing just behind.
I hope he remembered the ingredients.
He used magic to clean himself, pulled on a shirt, went downstairs, and opened the door. Lucius stared at him as though he had opened the wrong door, mouth moving without producing words.
"Come in. Why are you standing there?"
Only then did Malfoy seem to come back to himself.
"What happened to you?" The last time they had met was roughly three weeks ago. In that time, Severus had changed more than three weeks should allow. He was taller than Lucius now. His whole bearing was different, as though years had quietly passed rather than weeks. The muscle visible through a shirt that was slightly too large only underscored it.
"The Strengthening Potion." Severus sat at the bar. "I take it this is about the other matter?"
"No. Not yet." Lucius was still staring. The two men behind him were exchanging looks. "These are good friends: Matthew Goyle and Jonathan Crabbe." He reached into an inner pocket and produced a small pouch. "What you asked for."
The moment it was in Severus's hands, his eyes lit up.
"Perfect timing. Thank you." He tucked it away with a satisfied smile and pulled several vials from his pouch instead, setting them on the bar. Red and purple. "And these are for you. I made them myself. The red one is a standard restoration potion. The purple one temporarily increases magical ability by half, no side effects. I am not certain how well the red performs on wizards specifically, but a single dose brought a Muggle back from the edge of death. The purple has been tested. Both are solid, but they need wider trials, which is where I am hoping you can help. In exchange, you get the first batch free, and exclusive supply until I open a shop. After that, first priority is yours. And I imagine you understand the registration and patenting process, licensing to sell, all of that is months of work even with Professor Slughorn's involvement."
Lucius's expression shifted partway through this. By the end of it his hand was around Severus's wrist.
"Wait. You actually made a potion that increases a wizard's magical ability by half, with no side effects?" His grip tightened.
The reason for his reaction was plain enough. Potions of that kind were rare, and the ones that existed came with a brutal cost: doubled or tripled power during combat, and then a rebound that could leave the user unable to move, which in a fight was a death sentence. Almost no one used them. The risk simply was not worth it.
"Calm down. Ninety-nine percent certain on the no side effects. There is still one percent." Severus waited. Lucius collected himself and let go, looking faintly embarrassed.
"Ahem. My apologies. Of course I will help my good friend." The smile that followed was the sort of smile that made Severus want to hit him, but he held back. "By the way, the Strengthening Potion."
"I can sell it. As it happens I have exactly one jar left."
"A jar?"
"A litre of dark green mixture." It appeared in Severus's hand. "A thousand Galleons. Assuming, of course, that you are not afraid of a little pain."
"Me, the future Head of the Malfoy family, afraid of pain?" Lucius lifted his chin, flicked a hand at the empty table, and a stack of gold appeared. He reached out and took the jar.
"I warned you. And it all has to go down at once."
"Understood. If that is everything, we will be off."
"Safe journey." Severus waved them out and barely managed to hold his expression until the door closed.
You are absolutely going to need it.
Lich: in modern fantasy, a necromancer who has become undead, in some versions through death, in others instead of death.
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