[Day 91 | 08:17:26]
The system date hovered quietly at the edge of Thaddeus' vision, its translucent blue glow steady and unchanging. The numbers ticked forward with mechanical patience, marking time in a way that felt almost indifferent to the person watching it.
Three months.
He let the thought settle without resisting it. It wasn't nostalgia or satisfaction—just a quiet, factual acknowledgment of time passed, the kind that made him briefly wonder if the system came with emotional buffering or just enjoyed watching him process things slowly.
"Three months," he said under his breath.
The words didn't echo in the cabin, but they felt heavier than sound. His gaze drifted to the cup in his hand, its surface etched with faint, elegant patterns that caught the low light of the room. Inside it, Helga's wine shimmered with a deep amber hue, almost too rich to be natural.
The first sip always reminded him of the same thing: this wasn't just alcohol. It was a refinement shaped by magic and time, something way beyond anything he had ever had in his previous life.
As it slid down his throat, a slow warmth spread through his chest—not the kind that made his head fuzzy, but the kind that just made everything feel… right for a moment. Like his body briefly agreed, yeah, okay, this is unfairly good. He exhaled through his nose, eyes narrowing slightly as he thought about it.
Even now, he could admit it without hesitation: everything he once considered "premium" back on Earth didn't even come close to this world's baseline. The system's rewards were so over the top it felt like whoever was in charge had no concept of moderation—or just didn't care.
A faint smile formed as he set the cup down carefully.
"Not bad for a sign-in reward."
His attention shifted forward.
The chessboard was already set on the table, waiting like it had nothing better to do than be summoned into his attention. The pieces weren't just carved decorations either. They moved—subtly, almost lazily on their own, like objects that hadn't fully decided whether they were alive or just very well-trained.
Thaddeus leaned in slightly, studying the board.
"Move," he said casually. "Take the bishop."
There was no delay.
One of the soldiers stepped forward from his side, its movement clean and purposeful, like it had done this kind of thing more than once and didn't feel like overthinking it. It crossed the board, reached the opposing bishop, and drew a small blade from its back with quiet efficiency.
One strike.
The bishop broke apart into pale dust, as it had never been anything solid to begin with.
No struggle. No drama.
Thaddeus leaned back a fraction.
"Checkmate," he said, almost absentmindedly.
The remaining pieces reacted in subtle celebration—some shifting positions, others lifting their weapons slightly as if acknowledging victory. The entire board felt alive in a controlled, obedient way, not chaotic but structured, like a system operating within rules only it understood.
He observed it for a moment longer, then dismissed it with a flick of his hand.
The board folded in on itself, pieces dissolving into faint particles of light before reorganizing into a compact sealed form. It floated across the room and settled onto a shelf without a sound.
A trivial reward, but not without value. Entertainment, if nothing else.
He stood.
He set the cup down and let his focus settle for a moment, more out of habit than need. The space around him tightened subtly as his intent locked in on the upper deck.
Then he vanished.
The upper deck greeted him with wind.
Cool air hit his face the moment he arrived, carrying salt and the wide, endless scent of the sea. His maroon robe shifted with the wind, its fabric moving naturally, as if it truly belonged out here rather than just being worn through it. A few strands of hair lifted off his neck before settling back down as the breeze passed.
Three months.
The thought returned, but this time with more weight.
On the first day, he had been nothing. A drifting body in open water, half-conscious, starving, and dangerously close to death. There had been no certainty of survival, no guarantee that anything would intervene on his behalf.
And then the system had activated.
From that point onward, everything had changed.
He had grown in ways that weren't just about the accumulation of spells or artifacts. It was understanding, refinement, and control. He wasn't simply stronger. He was becoming something closer to complete.
Four branches of magic—fully mastered, including Mind Arts, the most recent and most unsettling of them all.
His gaze drifted upward to the endless sky.
That development hadn't been intuitive at first. Mind magic, or what the system categorized as Mind Arts, was not a simple discipline. It wasn't about casting spells outward—it was about turning inward and treating the mind as both battlefield and domain.
When he used it with a master card, it didn't feel like learning at all.
It felt like he had crossed a threshold—like he wasn't studying the mind anymore, but entering it.
His consciousness had collapsed inward without warning, not into darkness but into structureless space. There was no physical sensation, only awareness expanding beyond its normal boundaries. Then, gradually, something formed around him.
Memory.
Not abstract recollection, but something tangible in a way logic struggled to describe—a place within the mind he could actually move through.
Every moment he had ever experienced existed somewhere in that mental expanse. Some were clear enough to replay like he was actually there again, while others were faded or broken, like scenes cut up and left unfinished.
His memories from his previous life were different—clean, ordered, easy to access without resistance.
But the memories of this body weren't like that.
They were fractured, like pieces of glass that didn't quite fit together no matter how he looked at them.
He had tried once to dig deeper. It hadn't gone well. It felt like something was pushing back—subtle, but deliberate—as if the memories themselves resisted being seen.
After that, he stopped.
Not because he couldn't force it.
But because even with Mind Arts, he should have been able to.
And if he couldn't, then there was a reason for it.
His instinct agreed with that conclusion. Whatever was behind it wasn't something to pry into blindly. Not yet.
So he left it alone.
Instead, he shifted his focus.
A memory surfaced again—Marco, speaking casually, half in jest, half in warning. The idea that the mind wasn't untouchable. That it could be invaded, read, and controlled. Used like a weapon by the right kind of wizard.
Back then, it had sounded like an exaggeration, knowing it was fantasy.
Now, it didn't. It was his reality.
The system's knowledge on Mind Arts confirmed it without ambiguity. It wasn't a theory. It was a capability. And if it were a capability, then somewhere, someone was already using it.
That realization changed the framework in his mind.
In the conventional sense—at least from what he understood of Occlumency in the wizarding world—the answer was simple. A practitioner would empty the mind, suppress thought, and maintain a blank, controlled surface that made intrusion difficult. A passive defense built on mental silence. Effective only as long as the user remained composed enough to keep everything out.
But that approach had limits.
Silence could be disrupted. Emotions could leak. Pressure could break it.
What he needed wasn't emptiness.
It was structured.
If the mind could be entered, it could also be breached. And if it could be breached, then it needed more than resistance—it needed design.
So he built one.
Not standard Occlumency, but a structured version of it.
Not a wall, but a system that worked in layers.
He started with structure.
A shield formed through Occlumency, refined through deliberate mental engineering.
The first layer handled what anyone would see if they tried to read his mind. Instead of exposing real thoughts, it showed a constructed surface—ordinary memories, stable emotions, and believable thinking patterns. Something that looked natural enough to pass as real.
The second layer dealt with deeper probing. If someone tried to push past the surface, the information they received would start to break down. Details would become unclear, thoughts would not line up properly, and attempts to read deeper would turn unreliable.
The third layer was the final barrier.
If someone still managed to break through, they would find nothing usable. What awaited them was not truth, but collapse—fragmented memories, emotional noise, and scattered thoughts designed to break coherence and mislead any attempt at extraction.
It wasn't his memory that broke. It was their perception of it.
Only after completing this did he turn to the core.
A tower.
It rose at the center of his mental domain like a fixed anchor, formed from pure intent and reinforced with runic logic drawn from spell theory. Inside it, he stored the memories he considered stable and important—especially those from his previous life.
He no longer trusted memory to remain stable on its own. So he gave it structure.
Its surface was layered with protections—magical and conceptual safeguards designed to prevent distortion, corruption, or external influence. Even within his own mind, nothing was left unguarded.
When he finished, something else became clear.
There were still anomalies.
Dark orbs.
They lingered at the edge of his mental domain, faintly pulsing like echoes of something unfinished. Even before he reached one, he already understood what it was.
Emotion.
But not in any ordinary sense.
These were residues—compressed traces of negative states left behind and intensified by exposure to dark magic.
And at the center of them, something familiar surfaced.
The Killing Curse.
He had mastered it through a learning card, but mastery did not erase consequences. The spell demanded a level of intent that left something behind in the mind, even if it was never used.
When he examined the orbs more closely, he realized they weren't corruption in the usual sense. They were byproducts—psychological echoes left behind by incompatible magical intent.
Instead of removing them, he studied them.
Then he adapted.
Using Mind Arts, he created ways to contain them—not destroy them. The orbs were kept under control, their influence reduced and stabilized inside his mind.
Balance, not elimination.
That difference mattered.
Dark magic itself wasn't unstable.
What made it dangerous was an unchecked mind.
If controlled properly, even its side effects could be managed.
That thought settled in him quietly, without resistance.
Aside from this, his mastery of the Mind Arts helped him learn a new magical ability—Apparition, the skill of teleporting from one place to another. His enhanced mental focus and resistance to panic gave him a significant advantage in mastering it far earlier than most.
However, at his current level of attainment, he still does not fully understand the limits of this ability. So far, his experiments have been simple yet revealing—Apparating and Disapparating across the sky, or to different parts of the ship.
He looked forward again.
Land was visible now—distant at first, but slowly gaining shape. He could even make out faint silhouettes of other ships and the rising outline of mountains beyond the coast.
It had been two weeks since he last saw the massive ship that had originally been traveling alongside him.
They had separated quietly, rerouting in a different direction after what felt like a reluctant farewell. He still remembered their expressions—uncertain, even a little sad. They had offered him more than he expected in return for their journey together, including a fair amount of gold, which he had accepted without much hesitation.
Their departure had brought him an unexpected sense of relief.
For a while, he had assumed they were heading the same way. That assumption had come with a rather inconvenient side effect: the possibility that he might end up in a place where he couldn't even order food without starting a diplomatic incident.
But their change of course quietly fixed that concern.
If they weren't going the same direction, then his earlier assumptions about shared destination—and shared language—were probably wrong.
Which also meant something simpler: the place he was heading to now might actually use a language he understood.
That realization was… mildly reassuring.
Still, it remained an assumption. One he would only confirm once he set foot on land.
That uncertainty had been sitting at the back of his mind for days, slowly fading as the coastline finally came into clear view.
He calculated the ship's current pace. At this rate, landfall would happen in two days.
That night, he prepared accordingly.
His briefcase had already been expanded into a structured internal space—segmented, organized, and reinforced for storage. The most valuable items were sealed inside, including the Hogwarts founder relics. Helga's Cup was hidden under layered concealment charms. Godric Gryffindor's sword was stored separately, under stricter containment, treated less like an asset and more like a problem that could technically solve itself if ignored too long.
He didn't ignore risk. He just separated it in his mind.
On his person, he carried only a simple bag with basic supplies. No enchantments, no magical signatures, nothing that would announce "suspicious wizard with baggage" before he even understood the place.
If something went wrong upon arrival, he preferred to look like someone who had absolutely nothing worth interrogating.
Caution wasn't weakness.
It was efficiency.
He had seen enough in his past life to know efficiency outlasted confidence.
The ship finally slowed as land came fully into view.
A port.
People gathered along the docks, voices rising as the vessel approached. There was no hostility—only coordination. They moved with practiced ease, guiding the ship into position and clearing space for its arrival.
A ladder was lowered from the dock and secured against the ship's side.
Thaddeus observed them briefly before moving.
The people at the port wore light, loose linen and cotton suited for heat and sea wind. Most were dressed in pale, sun-faded tones, with cloth wraps or scarves around their heads for sun protection. Dock workers stood barefoot or in simple sandals—everything about them practical, built for heat, movement, and long hours under the sun.
He raised a hand.
A quiet snap followed.
One by one, the ship's remaining enchantments dissolved. Extension charms collapsed. Reinforcing spells unraveled. Within moments, the vessel settled back into its original form—a simple merchant ship.
His gaze lingered briefly on those who had helped guide the docking. The harbor was busy, but orderly, filled with steady movement.
A reward was reasonable.
He stepped forward.
Down the ladder.
Each step steady, unhurried.
Until finally his foot met solid ground.
It was at this moment that the system window interface appeared in his sight.
A burst of confetti explode in the screen.
---
[J.K Rowling Wizard System Online]
[Congratulations to the host for reaching Westeros!]
---
Thaddeus stopped in his tracks, nearly losing his footing on the dock.
The system interface, however, did not stop.
--
[You have achieved your first milestone in Planetos! A reward has been granted.]
[PLANETOS LANGUAGE PACK ×1]
--
His mind paused as it processed the word.
Westeros.
Planetos.
Neither aligned with what he had expected.
Wasn't it supposed to be Old England? Wasn't he in the Wizarding World?
"I thought I was in Harry Potter," he murmured, disbelief slipping through his usually steady tone.
Then his gaze shifted, slower this time, taking in the surroundings with growing certainty.
It stopped on a distant ship.
A banner hung from its mast—clearly visible even from afar. A familiar three-headed dragon, red against black.
His thoughts went quiet for a moment.
"…Then I reached Westeros?"
TBC
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