Chapter 46
My third year at Hogwarts began... quite decently. The traditional welcoming feast went according to standard procedure, the sorting of the first-years no longer held any particular interest for me, and the introduction of the new DADA professor passed by almost entirely as a blur. I already knew Remus anyway, and had even secured a promise from him to give me some extra magic lessons if the opportunity arose.
Though in that regard, I'd have to wait a bit. Remus Lupin was unlikely to be able to organize any extra training for me before he settled into his new duties himself, and so... I wasn't going to press or rush him to fulfill his recent promises. Besides, I had plenty to do without that.
Specifically... I began reveling in my own paranoia once again, simply not knowing what to expect this school year. I had already resolved the third-year problems I knew from the movies back in my second year. And I didn't regret it in the slightest; meeting Sirius and gaining his support had already more than paid off any risks I had taken upon myself.
Just the ability to calmly hand Flitwick a permission slip signed by my official guardian to leave the castle on weekends could already be called a significant advantage. An advantage, by the way, that I fully intended to use at the very first opportunity.
Furthermore, Black had taken my improvised request to sort through and study his own family library quite responsibly... while simultaneously picking out a few books for "light reading" on topics and aspects of magic that interested me. In his last letter, Sirius promised to pleasantly surprise me with his findings by the end of next month.
In September, alas, we weren't allowed to leave Hogwarts yet. It simply wasn't customary to let students out beyond the walls of the ancient castle during the first month of the school year. But even without that, I had plenty to do, as the gradual mastery of new facets of mental magic was opening up more and more new possibilities for me.
Because of this, I generally adopted a completely insane pace for studying magic this year. And it wasn't just because the concept of laziness now ceased to exist for me entirely. Three minutes of pleasant meditation and a light pulse of willpower—that was all I needed now to get a charge of the most powerful motivation at any time of the day or night.
The latter, actually, became the main reason for my successes. Still, discipline and forcing oneself through training is one thing. And sometimes I did have to literally force myself, because no matter how much I loved magic, over the past two years there had been plenty of instances when I simply couldn't be bothered to engage even in an activity I deeply loved and enjoyed...
Besides, to be completely honest, some activities weren't particularly pleasant anyway. There's generally little that is interesting or pleasant about self-torture practices or the monotonous repetition of the same charms... But you can't become a powerful mage without them for a whole variety of reasons... so yes, sometimes I did have to force myself and work in spite of my own laziness.
Which yielded results. And quite good ones, I must admit, but... it still couldn't compare to training on a wave of enthusiasm and a charge of true inspiration. The right mood and the right mindset, without any exaggeration, could increase the efficiency of a training session two to three times over.
And since I could now summon the right mood almost at the snap of my fingers, well... training suddenly became somehow easier, more pleasant, and more efficient. Though I wasn't planning on overdoing it with this kind of mental magic. Constantly staying in a state of heightened productivity didn't work out anyway.
Rather the opposite, actually. For the ability to work like a dog during training and study sessions in the library, I paid the price with a heavy head and slight burnout throughout most of the school day. Alas, but the classes at Hogwarts didn't cater to my learning speed, which is why sitting through them had been consistently boring for me since last year.
Now, on top of this boredom, came some backlash from the artificial stoking of emotions during training. After all, nothing comes from nowhere, and for literally boiling enthusiasm during magical training, I had to pay with a certain apathy during regular school lessons. And for absolute concentration while reading in the library, I also had to pay with a certain absent-mindedness during those same classes...
Which, let's be honest, was a perfectly acceptable outcome for me. And even though I had begun to monitor my own emotional state much more keenly and attentively—including because such measures were necessary for the development of mental magic—at the moment, the side effects were definitely worth it to continue enjoying my productivity, which had jumped to an absolutely wild level.
Seriously, while everyone was just getting into the rhythm of studying and returning to their usual life in the castle—even the Greengrass sisters only remembered their tutoring from a certain humble hero of Magical Britain toward the end of September—in the first month of study, I managed to master an amount of knowledge and skills more fitting for a whole year of learning.
Well, at least, it would take other Hogwarts students exactly a year to master the program I had processed in a month. And even then—far from everyone would be capable of it. Someone like Ron Weasley, I had a feeling, wouldn't match my monthly successes even in a couple of years.
"Alright, wait, show me that again!" Moreover, this time my main topic of study wasn't exactly the simplest aspect of the magical arts... which was why Daphne was currently looking at me like a new wonder of the world. And Ginny, Luna, and Astoria weren't hiding their surprise at my skills either.
"..." And what was I supposed to do? I just went ahead and once again demonstrated a simple combination of spells, executed completely silently and with almost no extra wand movements. The latter, by the way, was especially difficult and hard; after all, the gesture of the magical focus meant even more than the verbal incantation in many types of magic, but...
"Damn! How did you even do that!? That curriculum is for fifth years at least, isn't it?" The girls, of course, weren't impressed by that at all. The very fact of silent casting bothered my friends far more than some wand gestures...
"Actually, they only start seriously studying nonverbal charms in the sixth year. They don't require nonverbal casting from students on the O.W.L.s," I smirked just a tiny bit smugly, having actually been thinking about seriously mastering silent casting for a long time.
Without nonverbal magic, it was impossible to achieve truly significant success in combat magic. Silent casting affects the speed of spellcasting too seriously... Besides, I had been showing some success in this area for a long time, which is why the question of what exactly I should focus on in the new school year didn't even arise for me personally.
My exercises in wandless magic, after all, were a couple of orders of magnitude more complex than tricks like these with nonverbal charms. But I only deigned to seriously tackle reworking my own arsenal into a silent mode now. Which I was currently showing off, having decided not to hide too much from my friends this one time at least.
I still prefer to keep wandless magic a secret. It could be far too serious of a trump card... and concealing such skills doesn't require much effort anyway. You can cast without a wand even while holding a wand in your hand, or more accurately—a previously transfigured, exact, but completely non-functional replica of your usual focus. I had always done exactly that for training sessions where someone might notice me, hiding my truly extraordinary skills from the local mages...
But nonverbal charms... you can't just hide them like that. Shouting incantations while trying to cast silently—that's just some kind of total oxymoron. Magic just doesn't work that way—you either cast silently, or you use a verbal formula, which, by the way, slightly amplifies the spell in any case...
"Which makes what you just showed us look even crazier..." Daphne Greengrass sighed heavily meanwhile, peering at my smiling face with some suspicion. "Did you really master all this over the past month, or were you working like a dog over the summer?"
"Well, I already knew a bit of nonverbal magic last year, even if it wasn't that much... Over the summer I had a whole bunch of other activities with my godfather, so yeah, most of my current success is the result of my September training," I confidently answered the other's doubts, somewhat unexpectedly making Daphne lower her eyes to the floor a little awkwardly and even thoughtfully.
"Will you teach me to do that too?" In this whole situation, Ginny, on the other hand, seemed to care about practically nothing. Or rather, the girl was clearly surprised by such successes on my part, but... her education, I thought, simply wasn't enough to realize the full complexity of the feat I was demonstrating.
And mastering nonverbal charms at my current level in just a month—was exactly that, a feat. Even without taking into account my age and other minor details... An ordinary mage could spend months or even years trying to achieve this, all while having far more experience with spellcasting in general.
But no, I was once again ahead of the rest of the planet. And if my attempts to get ahead of the curriculum were less obvious before—I was more focused on growing in breadth. And simply trying to deepen my understanding of magic as a phenomenon. Now... I had enough strength for far bolder leaps in my own education. Besides, I had already built a general foundation of knowledge and skills by this point, feeling a certain confidence in my own abilities and talents.
"I will, of course," I surfaced once again from my own thoughts, which habitually flashed through my head with astonishing speed, not interfering with my conversation with the girls in the slightest. "If I wasn't planning on teaching you this, I wouldn't have bothered showing off my nonverbal charms."
"Is that so?.. And do you have many more surprises that you just... aren't showing off?" my peerless fiancée asked, with some... intonation in her voice I didn't fully understand, seemingly somewhat stung by my demonstration.
"Not that many. In the end, I demonstrate the majority of my skills during our training sessions anyway... And in front of your parents, I went absolutely all out relatively recently," I lied a little, not intending to embarrass my friend unnecessarily.
Daphne is a very proud and vulnerable girl, no matter what anyone in Slytherin might think of her. At the same time, she is talented and hardworking enough to have quite obvious reasons for this very pride. Among the witches of our age that I know, she is, without a doubt, the best of the best.
She combined literally everything—from an excellent home education received even before school and supplemented during the summer holidays, to banal magical talent and decidedly unfeigned intellect. The Greengrass heiress was smart, hardworking, magically powerful, and excellently educated for her age.
Except that compared to me, none of that held any weight at all. I was many times stronger than the girl, knew how to work with far larger volumes of information, suffered from a pronounced form of workaholism, and didn't complain about my own brains either.
I wouldn't call myself a genius, of course, but studying came to me an order of magnitude easier than to many, many of my acquaintances, even in my past life. In this life, with a brain accelerated by mental magic, things were even better, and so... I really did surpass Daphne by far too much.
Which I myself could hardly be proud of—I mean, seriously, with my experience, celebrating a victory over a simply diligent and smart little girl? But the witch herself didn't know about my background, and so... she wasn't particularly pleased with my demonstration of nonverbal magic. To her, it seemed, my forced bragging was yet another signal that the gap between our skills only continued to widen...
And that's not very good. More accurately, the very fact of my progress couldn't help but please me, but the way my sort-of-fiancée perceives it... I need to do something about that. And do it quite urgently—before this smart and diligent girl develops unnecessary and completely unfounded problems with her self-esteem.
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