He asked the Room of Requirement to sort the coins by type, and the magic obliged at once. Neat little stacks appeared, and that was how he discovered the disappointing truth. Most of the pile was plain bronze Knuts, with silver Sickles making up most of what remained, and golden Galleons coming in a very distant last place.
When he counted properly, there were only sixty two Galleons in the entire heap.
Julian still took everything, of course. Money was money, and he was not about to turn his nose up at free coin. Still, he could not help feeling a little let down, having secretly hoped for a much larger windfall.
The realization only hit him after he had swept every last coin into Greed. It made perfect sense that the house elves would gather up most of the lost money and turn it over to Dumbledore. What he had just collected was almost certainly the leftovers, the small bits that had slipped through their net or been overlooked for some reason.
With that thought in mind, he stepped back out into the corridor. The moment he closed the door behind him, it vanished from the wall as though it had never existed.
...
Julian immediately began pacing past the tapestry again, this time with a very different request fixed firmly in his mind.
I want all the lost magical metal objects.
He repeated it with each pass in front of the wall, and once more a plain door formed out of the stone, solid and inviting. When he opened it and looked inside, his jaw nearly dropped.
The room was filled with metal. Not just a scattering of items, but a small mountain of objects piled up almost to the ceiling, and every piece was made from some sort of magical metal.
Most of it was everyday material, things like dragon steel, which was essentially ordinary steel forged in dragon flame. That technically made it magical, though not particularly rare or precious. Interesting, yes, but not all that useful for his purposes.
Still, buried within the cluttered mass, he found the real treasure. There were gleaming pieces of mithril, dull but heavy segments of orichalcum, bars and scraps of goblin silver, and, tucked away here and there, a few slivers and chunks of the extremely rare star metal.
The valuable metals were a clear minority, scattered thinly among the less remarkable pieces, but Julian was patient. He sorted carefully, separating out every bit of the good stuff before feeding it into Greed.
By the time he finished, all the high grade metal just barely fit inside the ring without touching anything else stored there. That alone told him it was time to stop, before he overloaded his storage and made a mess of his careful organization.
Even at a glance, he knew that this collection of metals was worth a small fortune. In truth, it was far more valuable than the coins he had gathered earlier.
With the seventh floor offering nothing more interesting than what he had already discovered, Julian decided he was finished there for now and headed out.
The shortcut he had found leading back to the third floor made it easy to drop down one more level, so reaching the second floor was quick work. He began a thorough search of the area, eyes sharp for anything useful.
He located the Defense Against the Dark Arts classroom, took note of the route to the headmaster's office, and found the gloomy, echoing bathroom haunted by Moaning Myrtle.
As far as secret passages went, this level was packed. The second floor seemed to boast a hidden route to almost every other level in the castle, sometimes more than one. It was like a spiderweb of shortcuts, weaving Hogwarts together behind the scenes.
Julian was strongly tempted to carry his exploration a step further and break into the Chamber of Secrets itself, especially knowing where the entrance lay. Logic, however, finally asserted itself. He decided against it, at least for the moment. There was no sense in poking that particular sleeping basilisk before he was properly ready.
He continued downward instead.
The first floor housed the Arithmancy classroom, the Ancient Runes classroom, the library, and the stairway leading into the dungeons. There were a few hidden passages scattered around, but most of the secrets here were well known to generations of students, used frequently as simple shortcuts to get to classes faster or dodge crowded corridors.
Julian took mental notes as he walked, quietly mapping the routes. Even the common secrets, after all, were still useful when you knew how to string them together.