The grave beneath Harry's feet split open. A small wisp of dust answered his summons and rose into the air, drifting gently into the cauldron.
The diamond-bright surface broke apart with a hiss, sparks flying in every direction. The liquid turned a vivid blue, poisonous at a glance.
Then Harry glanced toward the nearest Death Eater and waved his hand lightly. A silver flash swept past and cut off the Death Eater's left hand.
Amid the man's agonized howls, Harry continued without changing expression, "Flesh of the servant, willingly given, you will revive your master."
Judging from appearances, this Death Eater did not seem to have offered it willingly, but Harry was not worried. It was only a simple ritual. After a slight modification, he could discard the sacrificer's emotions and replace the incomplete part of the ritual with his own magic.
Harry temporarily erased the mouth of the screaming Death Eater, leaving him unable to make a sound. Then he looked at the cauldron, now a boiling mass of fiery red, and placed one finger above it.
A drop of blood seeped from his fingertip and fell into the pot.
The instant his blood touched the fiery surface, an even stronger magical reaction erupted.
The cauldron boiled completely. Diamond-like sparks splashed outward, dazzling as stars, dyeing everything around them the color of black velvet.
Harry studied the strange magical reaction before him and said with anticipation, "Blood of the enemy, forcibly taken, you will resurrect your foe. Although I wasn't forced, it can still be used after I modify it with chaos magic."
Suddenly, the sparks above the cauldron went out. A plume of white steam rose from within, covering everything around the cauldron.
Through the white mist, everyone saw the figure of a man slowly rising from the cauldron.
He was tall and thin, like a skeleton, but a powerful magical aura radiated from within him. It was far stronger than that of most wizards, and it even gave off the feeling of standing before Dumbledore.
"Robe me," that cold, distant voice sounded from behind the steam. But after waiting for a moment, he found that no one had responded to his words and immediately grew irritated. "Lucius, what are you waiting for?"
Even then, no one answered him. Only then did he realize that the atmosphere around him was strange.
So he had no choice but to manipulate his weakened body and cast a wandless, nonverbal spell, temporarily transfiguring a lump of clay into a black robe and draping it over himself.
Then he walked out of the white mist and finally saw the full scene around him.
His loyal Death Eaters were indeed there, but their condition seemed very poor. Most of them were sprawled on the ground in a sorry state, coughing blood. Only a few powerful Death Eaters were merely kneeling, though that did little to make them look any better.
Voldemort's expression changed slightly. He looked in the direction where the Death Eaters were kneeling and then saw a figure that filled him with deep dread.
It was a young man of about fifteen, tall and strong, looking less like a wizard and more like a handsome knight.
How could Voldemort ever forget who this figure was? He was Harry Potter, his destined enemy.
When Harry Potter had only just been born, he had relied on the ancient magic of love released by that damned woman, his mother, to rebound the Killing Curse and kill him.
When Harry went to school, he had also destroyed several of Voldemort's Horcruxes.
And now, under Voldemort's own manipulation, he had originally thought he would be able to use an ancient sealing array to seal Harry's magic and remove this threat.
But he had never expected Harry Potter to ignore it entirely, defeat all of his Death Eaters, and even arrogantly resurrect him without putting him in his eyes at all.
Voldemort's noseless face instantly twisted into a hideous expression. In a sharp voice like a venomous snake's hiss, he roared, "Harry Potter!"
After Voldemort was resurrected, Harry and the others all turned their eyes toward him.
Unlike ordinary people, his appearance was extremely strange.
His skin was like corpse wax bloated by water, an inhuman pallor clinging tightly to his jagged bones. Every rib stood out clearly beneath the skin, as if it might pierce through that cicada-wing-thin layer at any moment.
He had no nose, only two dark nostril slits with mucus congealed at the edges. Each breath came with a hiss like a snake flicking its tongue.
His eyes were pure scarlet, his pupils contracted into thin slits. As they moved, they glimmered with a venomous sheen, and when they swept across the Death Eaters, the bodies beneath those black robes trembled unconsciously.
Facing Voldemort, everyone else shivered and did not dare move, much less speak.
Harry heard Voldemort roaring at him and looked at the pale figure staggering up beside the cauldron. The corner of his mouth curved into the faintest cold smile.
"Look at you, Tom. A shell pieced together from your father's bone, a servant's flesh, and an enemy's blood. As expected, you look just as rotten and cobbled together as that pitiful little soul of yours."
Voldemort's scarlet pupils shrank slightly, and his snake-like hiss turned vicious.
"Heh. I wondered who it was. So it's the so-called Boy Who Lived.
"What is it? Did defeating a few scraps of my soul make you truly believe you were my equal?
"Today, I will tell the entire wizarding world that this so-called prophecy was nothing but a joke. The savior they placed their hopes in will die miserably tonight."
Harry's voice was as calm as the surface of a frozen lake, each word wrapped in a crystalline chill.
"In the end, you're only a failed weakling, a remnant of an old age, destined to fade away in this era.
"In fact, without my help, you would not even have been able to return.
"Perhaps I need to use absolute power to wake you from your delusions completely, and use your blood to honor my parents' spirits in heaven."
Not even Dumbledore had ever insulted Voldemort like this. Facing Harry's undisguised mockery, Voldemort's face twisted violently as he said in rage, "It seems your past victories have given you confidence far beyond your ability. Come, Harry. Let us duel. I will shatter that confidence and make you understand exactly what level you truly stand at."
Harry remained unmoved by Voldemort's counterattack. His wizard robe snapped loudly in the graveyard wind. The instant he raised his wand in his right hand, the clouds split open with a vertical tear. Purple-gold lightning slithered out like living snakes, condensing into a spinning orb of thunder at the tip of his wand.
"Taste this, Tom."
He sneered. The instant the thunder orb left his hand, it split into thousands of electric whips. Their crackling tips tore the black mist around Voldemort to pieces.
The light of lightning reflected in Voldemort's scarlet pupils. Just as he was about to wave his wand, the ground beneath his feet suddenly collapsed.
Harry's left hand had already formed the runes of a gravity spell. A silver-black force field, like an invisible palm, slammed Voldemort down into the cracked earth.
For every inch he sank, gravity increased tenfold. Voldemort's new body let out the crisp sound of compressed bones. His ribs beneath the black robe caved in as if struck by a giant hammer. His nails clawed into the cracks of the frozen soil, but only tore out a few bits of grass charred by lightning.
"Damn it, these strange ancient magics again. Do you think you're the only one who knows them?" Voldemort hissed, spitting out a green Killing Curse, only for it to be reduced to dust the instant it touched the web of lightning.
However, he quickly changed strategy. Multicolored light gathered at the tip of his wand, erasing all elemental power like a rubber eraser.
Whether it was the violent lightning or the ungraspable gravity below him, all of it was wiped away by Voldemort. The few square meters of space around him returned to its original state.
Clearly, this was also some form of ancient magic. During Harry's second year, Voldemort's residual soul had once used this magic to duel Harry, but the current Voldemort was far more familiar with it.
The range affected by their battle was vast. In the blink of an eye, it covered an area a thousand meters across.
If Harry had not made Cedric use the Portkey to return to Hogwarts beforehand, and if the other Death Eaters had not used Apparition to move thousands of meters away, they would probably have been killed by the aftermath just from watching the fight.
Even from several thousand meters away, they could still feel the unbelievably violent collision of magic ahead.
This was a magical clash far beyond their level. Even the aftershocks could easily kill them.
Voldemort, who had mastered ancient magic, was stronger than he had been in life, even though he was currently in a weakened state.
Voldemort's strength still made sense, but what was going on with Harry Potter on the other side?
One Death Eater said in disbelief, "So this is the destined savior? He actually possesses such powerful strength. No wonder he could become the savior. It turns out the prophecy was real."
The other Death Eaters did not join the discussion, but all of them were deeply drawn to the terrifying power ahead.
They also longed for power like that. It was life's instinctive yearning for strength.
In the battlefield, Harry hovered in midair, riding the rising currents of lightning. Thunder whips wove an airtight net behind him, and the lightning flowing between the mesh lit the coldness in his eyes.
The gravity spell suddenly reversed, and Voldemort, who had been pinned underground, was violently flung into the sky. His body warped slightly under the tearing force of extreme gravity.
Harry's lightning whips wrapped around his limbs in the same motion. Electricity rushed through his skin and into his blood vessels. Each convulsion made blackened patterns rise across Voldemort's skin, like countless electric snakes burrowing beneath it.
When he was dragged back to the ground, his knees smashed heavily into the Riddle headstone. The entire stone monument shattered under the crushing force of the gravity spell. Amid the flying shards, he saw Harry standing in his own shadow, the thunder orb in Harry's palm already swollen into a dark purple sphere that swallowed light.
"Your Dark magic relies on bloodline and fear," Harry's voice mixed with the roar of thunder. "But my magic comes only from my own will."
He pressed his left hand downward. The space around Voldemort suddenly warped, and the gravity field became a spinning vortex, swallowing the fragments of the stone coffin and all the surrounding earth.
Lightning wove itself into a circular wall around the vortex. Purple-gold electricity collided with the silver-black force field, erupting in a glare bright enough to blind the eyes.
Voldemort's body was torn apart again and again by the dual magic. His newly grown skin split open like paper, while the exposed bones glowed with a strange gray sheen in the lightning.
He tried to use evil necromancy to summon Inferi from the graveyard, but the corpses that broke through the soil were crushed into blood-red powder the moment they touched the gravity vortex. The powder burned against the lightning wall, turning into ghostly fire that illuminated Harry's face.
When Harry pressed his hands together, the thunder orb and gravity vortex abruptly fused into one, forming a constantly collapsing dark purple sphere.
It hung above Voldemort's head, its surface flowing with a light of chaos that seemed both destructive and creative.
"This is something you will never learn," Harry's voice pierced through the hum of magic and drilled clearly into Voldemort's ears. "You are still confined by this world. You can't broaden your vision, just as you remain obsessed with blood.
"You know your own lowliness, so you tried to make yourself noble. And once you became noble, you began to discriminate against those who had once been lowly alongside you."
The instant the sphere fell, the entire graveyard sank into absolute silence.
Inside the vacuum torn open by lightning and gravity, Voldemort's roar was compressed into soundless vibration. His body became like dust thrown into a black hole, disintegrating into the most primitive magical particles within the dark purple light.
And Harry stood within that rain of particles, the electric light clinging to his wizard robe slowly fading away.
In the distance, the instant Voldemort disintegrated within the dark purple light, the Death Eaters' black robes stiffened in unison like corpses whose bones had been pulled out.
The first to break down was Bellatrix. Her scream was like the cry of a hawk being cut short, miserable and piercing.
"No! My master! How could you?!"
Her nails dug deeply into her own cheeks, beads of blood sliding down with her tears. But when they met the cold gaze Harry cast from afar, she suddenly froze as if struck by a Freezing Charm. The scream in her throat turned into hoarse gasps, and she no longer dared cry out.
The other Death Eaters were the same. In the distance, Rodolphus Lestrange suddenly fell to his knees, while his wife Bellatrix burst into loud sobs.
They had prepared for Voldemort's resurrection for several years. Just when Voldemort was about to truly return, he had been killed by Harry Potter immediately after being resurrected.
Then what meaning did all their efforts over the past few years have?
Harry stepped out and crossed space, arriving in front of the Death Eaters.
He stood several meters in the air, coldly watching these Death Eaters, each of them guilty beyond redemption. Then he said flatly, "Now, your former master Voldemort is dead. You have two choices.
"The first choice is to die with Voldemort. Of course, Voldemort still has a chance to return because of his Horcruxes, but you will die permanently, and your deaths will have no value at all.
"The second choice is to abandon Voldemort and follow me. I can give you what Voldemort could not, and I can do what Voldemort could not. I can offer you excellent treatment, but your lives and even your souls will be under my control."
Hearing Harry's words, the Death Eaters looked at one another and suddenly felt that this scene seemed strangely familiar.
It was as if a similar scene had once happened when they first followed Voldemort.
One Death Eater's eyes lit up. Summoning his courage, he said, "Honored lord, do you intend to become the third Dark Lord?"
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