Headmaster Dippet nodded with satisfaction. Hagrid had already been expelled; as long as he could handle Tom Riddle, the situation would be easy to manage.
"It's getting late," Dippet said with a tired smile. "Go back to sleep, Tom."
After bidding farewell to the Headmaster, Tom left the office. However, he did not return directly to the Slytherin Common Room.
Concealed by the temporal magic, Damian followed Tom all the way to a second-floor girls' bathroom—the hidden entrance to the Chamber of Secrets.
Ever since Tom had opened the Chamber, the awakened legend had caused mass panic among the students. Under immense external pressure, the Hogwarts Board of Governors had even begun planning to close the school. If that happened, Tom would be sent straight back to the loathsome Wool's Orphanage.
He had long ago discovered that the oafish Gryffindor, Rubeus Hagrid, was secretly raising a dangerous Acromantula. Seeing an opportunity, Tom framed Hagrid and informed Headmaster Dippet, claiming the half-giant was the one responsible for opening the Chamber.
Dippet didn't want to close the school, but he also couldn't allow the legend of Slytherin's monster to ruin Hogwarts' reputation. He deliberately separated Myrtle Warren's death from the Chamber of Secrets, characterizing the tragedy as a foolish student's dangerous pet getting out of hand.
Tom desperately wanted Hogwarts to remain open, so he decided to seal the Chamber. However, he also created a diary, storing a sixteen-year-old memory of himself inside it.
He hoped that one day, this diary would guide another student to follow in his footsteps and complete Salazar Slytherin's noble cause of "purifying" the school. Using the murder of Myrtle Warren, Tom had fragmented his soul, turning the simple diary into his very first Horcrux.
Tom had initially left the diary inside the Chamber. Now, he intended to retrieve it before sealing the entrance for good.
In the center of the girls' bathroom stood a ring of sinks. One of the copper taps had a tiny snake etched into its side.
Tom stood before the tap and hissed in a cold, harsh voice. "Open."
The tap flared with a sudden, dazzling white light and began to spin rapidly. A moment later, the entire sink sank out of sight, shifting aside to reveal a thick, dark water pipe.
Damian watched from the shadows as Tom gracefully slid down the pipe. To avoid bumping into the young Dark Lord, Damian waited a full minute before following.
Clutching Nox tightly, Damian plummeted down the dark shaft. The pipe was incredibly long and twisted in a dizzying maze. It felt like a waterslide at a Muggle amusement park, except this one was much deeper and coated in centuries of grime.
After what felt like an eternity, the pipe leveled out. Damian and Nox shot out of the end, landing softly on the damp floor of a stone tunnel.
Damian quickly waved his wand over himself and the Kneazle. "Scourgify." The thick layer of slime stuck to them vanished instantly.
Extending his magical perception, Damian could sense Tom moving steadily ahead through the dark, winding tunnel.
The passage was eerily silent, the floor littered with the crunching bones of small animals.
After tailing Tom for a while, Damian stumbled upon a massive, twenty-foot-long shed skin lying empty on the ground. It was left behind by the Basilisk.
To avoid alerting Tom, Damian violently suppressed the urge to stuff the shed skin into his Undetectable Extension Pouch. This was top-tier alchemical material!
They turned another bend and arrived at a solid stone wall carved with two intertwined serpents. Their sculpted eyes were inlaid with glittering, fist-sized emeralds.
Once again, Tom hissed in that cold, harsh Parseltongue. "Open."
The two carved snakes slowly parted. The solid stone wall cracked down the middle and smoothly slid open, revealing the true Chamber of Secrets.
Damian chose not to follow Tom inside just yet. To avoid drawing Tom's attention or accidentally triggering the Basilisk, he had to wait for the future Dark Lord to leave.
Ten minutes later, Tom emerged from the Chamber, a small black diary clutched tightly in his hand.
Just as Tom began to hiss the command to seal the Chamber forever, Damian—who had been waiting patiently by the entrance—slipped through the closing gap.
Once the heavy stone wall sealed shut behind him, Damian pointed his wand at his own throat. "Felis Intellectus!"
This was a Feline Comprehension Charm, the very first piece of original magic Damian had ever created.
Before young witches and wizards attend school, they frequently experience bursts of accidental magic. For example, before Harry Potter ever received his Hogwarts letter, he had inadvertently vanished the glass of a reptile enclosure.
Damian had experienced something similar. One night during his childhood, he suddenly realized he could perfectly understand Nox's meows.
Although the ability faded the next day, Damian had memorized the magical sensation. After years of experimentation, he successfully recreated the effect, forging a spell that allowed him to communicate with felines.
He didn't fully understand the underlying arithmancy of the spell; he cast it entirely based on raw feeling and magical intent.
"Nox," Damian whispered. "Use your clones to scout ahead and pinpoint the Basilisk's exact location. Both you and I must keep our eyes squeezed shut the entire time. Making direct eye contact with the Basilisk means instant death, and even a reflection will petrify us."
"Got it, meow~"
To Damian's ears, the Kneazle's voice sounded like a young, pre-pubescent boy—a quirky side effect of the translation charm.
Nox gave his tail a hard shake. In a bizarre display of magic, the tip of his tail detached and fell to the ground, instantly splitting into ten squirming segments.
Each segment rapidly puffed up into a small ball of black fur. Within seconds, the fur balls expanded and morphed into perfect, identical copies of Nox.
Meanwhile, the original Nox simply grew his tail back.
Without hesitation, nine of the Kneazle clones darted forward into the cavernous room.
Because Nox possessed a Kneazle bloodline, he had inherited a Kneazle's splitting ability. He could freely create identical duplicates, and his original body perfectly shared their memories and senses.
Since advancing to a Second-Level Wizard Apprentice, Damian's magical perception radius had expanded to fifty meters. By combining this wide sensory net with Nox's clones, Damian dared to hunt the Basilisk entirely blind. Without the threat of its deadly gaze, the giant serpent was vastly less dangerous.
Damian scooped up the original Nox and placed him securely inside the hood of his cloak, leaving the last clone on the ground to act as a physical guide.
A moment later, the real Nox spoke from the hood. "Found it. The big snake is deeper inside."
The Chamber was impossibly large, lined with towering stone pillars that were intricately carved with winding serpents. The stone snakes looked as though they were physically coiling around the columns.
At the very back of the echoing chamber stood a colossal, monolithic statue of Salazar Slytherin.
The Basilisk was currently resting coiled up at the base of the statue.
"It's not looking toward the entrance right now," Nox reported.
Damian briefly cracked his eyes open, risking a lightning-fast glance to memorize the layout of the Chamber.
He quickly raised his wand and attempted to cast a Transfiguration spell on the nearest stone pillars, hoping to trap the beast. However, the pillars were physically fused with the ancient foundations of Hogwarts; Damian's magic harmlessly rebounded off the ancient wards.
The moment his spell left his wand, the Time Power concealing his presence shattered.
Damian and Nox instantly snapped their eyes shut.
Sensing the sudden magical fluctuation behind it, the colossal Basilisk twisted its massive, scaled body and swung its head around.
But Damian struck first.
"Avada Kedavra!"
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