When Sherlock woke up, he was already lying in a bed in the Hogwarts Hospital Wing.
Although there was no strong smell of disinfectant here, opening his eyes still revealed only a vast whiteness.
"Very nice, I like white very much."
This was the first sentence he cheerfully uttered after waking up.
"It seems your mood hasn't come down yet."
A calm voice sounded from beside him.
Sherlock tilted his head and saw Vera Hilke sitting nearby.
"Oh! We've already come out from underground, what a happy thing!"
Vera Hilke rang the bell by his bed to help call Madam Pomfrey over.
"You are already happy enough."
"Don't always keep a straight face, Vera. Be happier. We should smile, just like me right now. I feel like I'm doing great! My state is excellent. I even feel like I could keep being this happy forever!"
Just as Sherlock was rambling on about very happy topics, Madam Pomfrey walked over with a bottle of potion.
"His state is indeed as you said, a bit overly excited." Madam Pomfrey confirmed Sherlock Cavendish's condition with her own eyes again. "It's a bit like having drunk too much jubilance potion."
"This bottle of sorrow potion should be able to help suppress it. It's just that I'm not quite sure about the exact dosage." Madam Pomfrey said with concern.
Sherlock shook his head joyfully.
"Sorrow potion? I don't want sorrow. Isn't happiness good? Why make people sad?"
However, no one took his words seriously now. Madam Pomfrey studied Sherlock's current state for a while longer, finally determined the dosage, and then personally supervised him drinking the entire bottle of sorrow potion.
Vera Hilke didn't leave; she stayed by the hospital bed to accompany him.
After drinking the potion Madam Pomfrey had prepared, Sherlock's state clearly eased up a lot. The smile on his face gradually faded, and he was able to communicate with others normally.
"It seems I need to be cautious about using this kind of Patronus Charm in the future." Sherlock said with a headache.
Although the overflow of positive emotions wasn't a big problem—even without Madam Pomfrey's potion, he would have recovered after being happy for a week or two at most.
But if something like this happened during a critical battle, it would still be very troublesome.
Just as he was feeling a bit down about this, Sherlock suddenly discovered that there was an old locket around his neck that he had never had before.
"What is this?" He held the dark golden circular locket and frowned.
Vera noticed this object at this moment too.
"Before going underground, didn't you have it with you?" Her tone became slightly serious.
Sherlock shook his head.
"No, I have never seen this thing before."
He tried to take the locket off his neck, but found that it was simply impossible!
It was as if there was an invisible obstacle on his body, blocking the locket's chain between his neck and head; no matter how he tried, he couldn't take it off.
Sherlock's expression grew serious.
He stopped trying to take it off his body and looked at Vera instead.
"Was this thing on that straw man?"
Vera also realised that things were out of the ordinary.
"No, when it escaped, it didn't have this thing on it."
Suddenly, she seemed to think of something.
"Its power relies on fear to increase. If it were at its peak strength, it wouldn't be as weak as it is now. But after it escaped to Britain, all its actions were low-key, and it didn't mean to spread fear to restore its power, but instead came directly to Hogwarts."
"It was looking for something."
Sherlock looked down at the locket hanging on him, trying to open it, but without success.
There was clearly no clasp on the box, but there was just no way to open it from the outside.
"Is it possible that this thing is what it was looking for?" Sherlock said dully.
For some reason, his mood suddenly started to turn bad again, feeling a bit sorrowful and a bit lost.
He looked at Vera.
"Now can you tell me what that straw man actually is?"
Vera said calmly.
"This is a top secret of the German Ministry of Magic, and it is also the main object that the Department of Mysteries has been monitoring for the past hundred years."
Hearing her say this, Sherlock thought she was refusing, but didn't expect her to continue.
"Its name is Fedetick, and it originally came from the island of Azkaban."
"Azkaban?"
Sherlock's eyebrows raised.
The Original Owner was an expert in studying Dark Arts creatures, and the most famous among them, the Dementor, was his main object of study.
And Dementors and Azkaban were almost symbiotic existences.
Azkaban is now the most notorious Wizard prison in the entire Wizarding World, but in the beginning, it was just an ordinary small island in the North Sea.
At the beginning of the fifteenth century, this island never appeared on any map, neither Muggle nor Wizard maps.
Until one day, a Wizard of unknown nationality named Ekrizdis came to this island, built a Castle here, and lived there alone ever since.
After Ekrizdis came to this island, he had already gone mad.
His magic was extremely powerful; he often conducted extremely evil Dark Arts experiments and took pleasure in luring, torturing, and murdering Muggle sailors passing by.
The Ministry of Magic at that time was just a prototype, not truly established; only the Wizards' Council—the Wizengamot—exercised weak management over the Wizarding World.
Azkaban, far from the British mainland, naturally did not receive their attention. It wasn't until after Ekrizdis died and the concealment charms he had set on the island failed that other Wizards discovered the island.
But it was already filled with hundreds of terrifying monsters capable of feeding on human hope—Dementors.
This was the earliest record in the history of the Wizarding World regarding large-scale colonies of Dementors.
The island was later used by the Ministry of Magic as a prison for Wizard criminals, and all the Dementors inside became jailers.
But Dementors and the Ministry of Magic were never in an employment relationship, but a cooperative one.
The existence of monsters like Dementors is entirely anti-human.
It wasn't that no Minister for Magic had proposed destroying the island, but the island could be destroyed, yet the Dementors could not be truly wiped out.
They were afraid that these monsters would escape to the British mainland and cause bigger trouble.
Thus, building it into a Wizard prison, actively sending prisoners to the island, and letting the Dementors feed to prevent them from running out became the most perfect solution.
It can be said that the island has been the most evil place in the Wizarding World for the past hundred years.
"Before the British Ministry of Magic established a prison on that island, someone had explored it and brought out an evil soul—Fedetick."
Vera recounted softly.
"It has no fixed form, but when necessary, it can create a physical entity for itself, which is the appearance of that straw man."
"It is even more terrifying than Dementors. Dementors only feed on hope, while it wants to create fear, taking pleasure in devouring souls filled with fear, and becoming stronger by doing so."
"In the eighteenth century in Northern Europe, it caused a series of brutal massacres; in some places, even an entire town of Muggles was killed by it."
"Repeating the last words of the dead is its greatest pleasure, and using the words that living people fear most to torture them is its favourite game."
"A scarecrow holding a scythe in one hand and a lantern in the other is the most widely circulated horror story among Muggles from that period."
"Until one day, a powerful Wizard defeated it but found that it was impossible to kill it, so he could only capture it and bring it back to the newly established German Ministry of Magic."
"Since then, Fedetick, the demon that manipulates fear, has been imprisoned in the Department of Mysteries of the German Ministry of Magic, guarded by Unspeakables. To this day, the person guarding this demon is me."
"But it has actually never stopped resisting. During the nearly two hundred years it has been locked in the Ministry of Magic, it has been secretly accumulating power until it escaped four months ago."
After Sherlock finished listening to Vera's full account of the events, he felt even more worried.
"Locked up for over two hundred years, and the first thing it does upon escaping isn't thinking about how to run away and not get caught, but to find this thing—it sounds like trouble."
Vera, however, noticed something wrong with Sherlock's mood again.
"The dosage of that potion seems to have been a bit too much for you."
She rang the bell again to call Madam Pomfrey over to check on Sherlock's current state.
"How do you feel now?" Madam Pomfrey asked seriously.
Sherlock replied weakly.
"Not good, I feel terrible. Nothing feels meaningful, I feel like my days are numbered and I'm not going to live."
Madam Pomfrey nodded with some satisfaction.
"That's fine, the sorrow potion wasn't overdosed too much, just enough to feel like you're not going to make it. If you felt suicidal, I would have to feed you some more jubilance potion to neutralise it. As it is, you should recover naturally in less than a week."
Sherlock left the hospital feeling dejected.
"This thing is very likely something it found in the abandoned Goblin headquarters. I can contact the Goblin I communicated with at the Ministry before; maybe he knows something."
Vera and Sherlock parted ways in the fifth-floor corridor.
He continued to walk to the third floor alone, intending to go straight to find Dumbledore to see if he could help take this locket off his neck.
Sherlock walked down the stairs unsteadily; at this time, the students had just finished class.
Because Black had broken into the Gryffindor Common Room last night, all the students in the school had been arranged to sleep in the Great Hall for the night.
After the Professors had searched the entire Castle and determined that Black was not hiding in any corner of Hogwarts, normal teaching order returned to the school the next day.
When he walked slowly to the third floor, he happened to run into Harry and his two friends who had just finished class.
"Professor, where did you go last night? Why didn't you come to the Halloween feast? Do you know that Black broke into the school last night?"
As soon as Harry saw Sherlock, he couldn't help but fire off a series of questions.
Sherlock looked at him weakly and said sorrowfully.
"Ah, I wanted to attend the Halloween feast, but unfortunately I missed it. As for Black breaking in, that's truly bad news, Harry. It seems your luck these past two days isn't very good. I have to go talk to Dumbledore about something, no time to chat with you guys, goodbye."
After saying this, he continued to walk downstairs slowly and listlessly.
Hearing Sherlock's words, Harry stood frozen on the spot, and Hermione and Ron were stunned too.
"Did you hear that!" Harry realised after a moment and shouted excitedly, "The Professor said my luck these past two days isn't very good!"
Ron looked at him with envy.
"You're about to have a change of luck, Harry. You'll definitely be the luckiest person in the whole Castle next."
Harry was full of longing.
"The best thing I can imagine is Black getting caught, and then someone being willing to sign my permission form so I can go to Hogsmeade this weekend!"
Hermione frowned and said.
"Professor Cavendish seems to be in a bad mood today."
"Though it's not nice to say, if the Professor were in a good mood, we would be done for after greeting him just now." Ron shrugged and said.
"Think about how to spend the next two days, Harry. I think you could ask around if The Daily Prophet is holding any prize draws lately, then sign up and win a big prize."
They quickly focused their attention on this matter excitedly, while Sherlock had already walked to the gargoyle on the third floor.
"I want to see Dumbledore, can you announce me?"
The gargoyle didn't speak; it seemed to have asked Dumbledore in the office in some way, then stepped aside to make room for Sherlock to enter.
Sherlock arrived at the eighth floor and pushed the door open into the Headmaster's Office.
Dumbledore looked up at Sherlock and immediately saw that his state seemed to be poor.
"You're in a bad mood? Sherlock."
Sherlock sat opposite Dumbledore, his upper body slumped on his desk as if he had no bones.
"Madam Pomfrey gave me an excessive dose of sorrow potion, so I am indeed very sorrowful right now."
Dumbledore's brow furrowed slightly.
"I know you went out with Vera Hilke yesterday, so what did you experience last night?"
Sherlock recounted their experience last night in a sorrowful voice, and finally placed the locket around his neck that wouldn't come off in front of Dumbledore.
"Do you know what this is? Professor, or if you could help me take it off my body, that would also be fine."
Sherlock's posture slumped on the desk was just right for Dumbledore to pick up the locket.
He looked at the old, dark golden circular locket, and his brow furrowed tighter and tighter.