He performed the first ritual on the seventeenth of July.
The Ravenclaw notebook had contained the ritual sequences in the third section — the specific chapter he had found in late third year and had been working through since the summer before fourth year, the methodical process of understanding what each ritual required and whether the requirements were achievable and what the cost of the achievement was. The notebook's author had been specific about costs in a way that most magical texts were not, treating the body and the magical core as systems with genuine limits rather than as resources to be drawn down without accounting.
The first ritual: peak physical condition. Not beyond the natural limits of the body — the notebook had been very clear about the difference between enhancement and augmentation, and the cost of augmentation in the long term was not something he was willing to pay. What the ritual did was precisely realize the body's existing potential — the specific condition that was achievable with the body Ron Weasley had, at fifteen, if every inefficiency in the system was removed and every resource directed toward its optimal use.
He did it alone, at two in the morning, in the flat section of the Wulfhall's grounds.
The ritual required three hours — two of preparation and one of the working itself. He had gathered the components over the previous week: materials from the potion stores, three specific conditions of his own blood at different temperatures, the Ravenclaw notebook's sequence inscribed on the ground in the specific formation the notebook described. He had checked the sequence against his own runic knowledge and found it structurally sound. He had checked it twice more because the cost of being wrong was the kind of cost he was not willing to pay.
It worked.
He could not describe, afterward, precisely what was different. It was not dramatic — not the sudden sensation of new capability, not the specific quality of an augmentation. It was more like the removal of static: the specific quality of a system that had been operating with friction now operating without it. His body felt like his body, which he knew it had always been, but more completely his in the way of something that had been fully realized rather than partially operating.
He sat in the July grass for twenty minutes afterward and let the integration settle. Then he went back to bed.
The second ritual — peak reflexes — he performed three days later, following the same structure. The reflexes ritual was subtler than the first: less about the body's physical capacity and more about the gap between the brain's signal and the body's response, the specific milliseconds that accumulated across the distance between intention and action. The notebook described this as the musician's problem — the gap between reading the note and playing it, which was not the hand but the pathway between the brain and the hand.
He noticed the difference in training the following morning.
Not dramatically. But the Stunner he threw at the practice dummy landed at a speed he had not been achieving before, and his footwork in the movement drill had the quality of something whose gap between intention and execution had simply reduced, cleanly and without fanfare.
He noted it in his training log and moved on.