The black flames of Snape's final threshold had barely flickered as Arthur stepped through them, the light curtain around him disappearing, replaced by the Silencing barrier.
He did not emerge into the final chamber in a flashy way; he simply entered into the room like a ghost, his presence fully masked by the Sensory-Deprivation Ward.
Arthur moved toward a patch of deep shadow beneath a crumbling stone archway. He folded his arms, his pale blue eyes narrowing as he began a high-speed scan of the environment.
In the center of the vast, high-ceilinged room stood the Mirror of Erised. Before it stood Harry Potter, looking small and fragile, and Professor Quirrell, who had finally discarded the stuttering, neurotic act he had been running all year.
Arthur ignored their conversation. To him, the exchange of words between the boy and the teacher was merely a distraction. He focused entirely on the Mirror.
Arthur activated his mana sense, causing his irises to shimmer with a cold, blue light that was invisible beneath his stealth shroud. The world shifted. The stone walls faded into gray outlines, and the Mirror of Erised erupted in a blinding, intricate lattice of gold and silver mana threads.
"Fascinating," Arthur whispered into the void of his ward.
He wasn't seeing a mirror that showed "heart's desire." He was seeing a cognitive interface of unparalleled complexity. The artifact wasn't passive; it was radiating a low-intensity psionic field that permeated the entire room.
Arthur's mind raced, categorizing the magic into advanced level mind magic.
He could deduce the working of this amazing artifact by seeing its complex mana network.
The mirror was emitting a wide-spectrum Legilimency-like pulse. It wasn't "reading" memories in a straightforward fashion; it was scanning the subject's subconscious thoughts, identifying the strongest ones—those associated with longing, grief, and dopamine spikes. Once the desire was identified, the mirror's surface acted as a fully functional display, projecting a customized visual simulation.
"It's amazing and functional," Arthur noted, his eyes tracking the way the mirror's gold threads were currently reaching out to probe Harry Potter's mind. "This blueprint might come handy."
He filed the mirror's energy signature into a dedicated book inside his mental library. The artifact was a masterpiece, but it was still limited by its singular purpose. Arthur's ambition was to turn such technology into a portable and useful way.
The "Drama" in the center of the room escalated. Quirrell, frustrated by his inability to solve the Mirror's puzzle, turned his back on Harry.
"Use the boy!" a high, cold voice hissed.
Arthur's attention snapped away from the mirror. The voice didn't come from Quirrell's mouth. It came from the back of his head.
Quirrell reached up and began to unwrap his purple turban. Arthur didn't panic; instead, he leaned forward, his focus sharpening to a lethal edge. This was something he had been curious and waiting for all year.
As the cloth fell away, Quirrell turned around. Where there should have been a bald scalp, there was a face. It was flat, snake-like, with crimson slits for eyes and a nose that was nothing more than a pair of gashes.
Voldemort.
Arthur was fascinated more than surprised by the revelation. He felt a pure, ecstatic rush of a scientist discovering a new species. He pushed his mana sense to its absolute limit, ignoring the strain on his optical nerves.
"Show me your secrets, Voldemort," he murmured.
1
In the manna spectrum, the sight was grotesque and brilliant. Quirrell's body was a flickering, dying candle, but he was not alone. Overlapping his pale, blue mana signature was a second, jagged, obsidian-black aura.
Arthur watched as the black aura—Voldemort—intertwined itself with Quirrell's nervous system. It was like watching a high-voltage power line being forced into a circuit designed for a 9-volt battery.
He could sense the flaws in this type of symbiotic life form. As per his discoveries, Quirrell's physical body was literally overloading by the sheer amount of mana the body wsn't meant to handle. Then again, Hosting two souls in a single body was also causing massive cellular degradation. Arthur could see the necrotic rot beginning at the base of Quirrell's spine and spreading outward.
The two magical cores were constantly rubbing against each other, creating a high-energy "friction" that was bleeding away Quirrell's life force to sustain the parasite.
"The human body can't hold that amount of mana," Arthur realized, a cold chill of clarity washing over him.
He watched Quirrell's hands tremble as he reached for Harry. The professor's movements were jerky and failing. The soul of Voldemort was too powerful for the body of a standard human wizard. Even a wizard as talented as Quirrell was being burned out from the inside.
'If I want to go further...' Arthur thought, his cold eyes reflecting the crimson glow of Voldemort's gaze, '...I cannot remain purely human. A single, standard magical core is a limitation. If I try to hold that much mana in this body, I will end up like Quirrell—ash and failure.'
This was the epiphany that would define his future progression. He needed to somehow remove limitations of his own biology to handle the high quality and quantity of mana. He needed to evolve.
The climax of the drama began. Harry, terrified, struck out, his small hands connecting with Quirrell's bare skin.
An agonized shriek ripped through the chamber.
Where Harry's skin touched Quirrell, the flesh erupted in blisters and smoke. It looked like an acid attack. Quirrell backed away, his face contorted in a scream that was doubled—the human and the parasite wailing in unison.
"Kill him! Kill him!" Voldemort shrieked.
Quirrell lunged again, grabbing Harry's throat, but his own hands were turning to ash.
Arthur stood in the shadows, his mind calculating the mechanism of this special barrier surrounding the 'hero.'
Arthur analyzed the barrier. Someone seems to have raised a sophisticated spell that had encoded against a specific target into Harry's body. Because Voldemort's soul was currently "hosting" in Quirrell, the moment the two mana signatures touched, destructive interference was triggered.
"Incredible," Arthur whispered. "A sacrificial blood ward that acts as a passive, defensive field. The headmaster might call it the power of "love" to simplify it for the boy, but the arithmancy required to calculate that information must be legendary."
As Harry passed out and Quirrell crumbled into a pile of gray dust, the obsidian-black soul of Voldemort tore itself free. It let out a frustrated, ethereal roar and surged through the room, passing right through Harry's body before flying out of the chamber.
Arthur didn't move as the dark spirit rushed past his hiding spot. He held his breath, his stealth ward absorbing the chill of the parasite's passing.
The room grew quiet. Only the crackle of the remaining flames and Harry's shallow breathing remained. The Philosopher's Stone, a small, blood-red pebble, lay on the floor where it had fallen from Harry's pocket.
Arthur stepped out of the shadows.
He deactivated the Silenceing barrier for a moment.
He didn't look at the boy. He didn't look at the ashes that used to be a teacher. He walked straight to the Stone.
He didn't pick it up but used a simple levitation charm. He knew the Stone was placed here by Dumbledore. If he touched it, he would trigger some sort of alert. So he quickly activated his mana sense to its full capacity.
His eyes scanned the stone. He saw the way a huge amount of pure mana was compressed into a solid state—a singularity of alchemical structure. He saw the complexity of mana and pure energy woven together in a structured net, as if it had its own mind. If the structure of the mirror was complex, then this was on a different level of complexity.
'It's difficult but practical...' He had it. The data required to synthesize his own version of the stone in the future.
A soft pop echoed from the corridor. Dumbledore was arriving.
Arthur didn't panic. He turned on his heel, his cloak billowing like a shroud. He activated the silencing barrier once more, stepping into the wall behind the archway just as the headmaster's frantic, colorful robes entered the light of the torches.
Arthur moved via the secret passages he had mapped out months ago, returning to the higher floors.
As he reached his dormitory, Arthur sat on the edge of his bed and looked at his hands. They were steady. They were pale. They were human.
"Not for long," he said, his voice as cold as the basement he had just left. "I need to work on this limitation."