Keeping everything to himself might have made Wade stronger, but he had long realized that strength alone wasn't sufficient to accomplish anything.
He had already tried that approach when he first entered Hogwarts.
The result was that he had to handle everything personally, leaving himself endlessly busy and with no one he could hand work to.
Later, inspired by Miravia, he began distributing tasks to people who could actually help him instead of trying to do every piece of work himself.
After taking control of the goblin workshop, he came to understand this principle even more deeply than before.
So Wade had no intention of becoming a lone commander ever again.
He wanted a group of highly capable companions gathered around him, people he could send out without having to follow behind them.
Grindelwald had done the same.
Even Voldemort would do the same in the future.
And if Wade wanted that to work, he had to make sure the people around him could always keep pace with him as he grew stronger.
Only then could they properly carry out the tasks he assigned them without falling behind.
And only then could Wade place greater trust in them.
…
After strengthening his companions, Wade handed the task of guiding them into Hydra over to Tom and André and left them to it.
He then returned to his suitcase. On one hand, he continued putting the finishing touches on the moving castle. On the other, he worked on further improving the Hogyoku's purification ability whenever he had a spare hour.
Although the amount of "residue" extracted from Miravia had been considerable, Wade still wanted to minimise the losses during purification as much as he could.
Once he could reduce the loss rate to the lowest possible level, he would be able to produce large quantities of purified magic without wasting so much of what he already had.
That way, aside from greatly strengthening himself with the pure magic, he could also dilute it and turn it into lower-grade capsules with a weaker enhancement effect.
As long as those capsules could increase magical power even slightly, they would be enough to attract many people who desperately wanted to become stronger to Wade's side.
After all, aside from his core members, Wade also needed a large number of powerful peripheral personnel to handle the dirty work.
Wade considered himself a good person, but he was still planning to become a Dark Lord.
Just like that, more than a month passed in the suitcase without much notice from the outside.
Wade's improvements to the Hogyoku finally reached another bottleneck he could not push past.
At present, the loss during purification of the "residue" had been reduced to thirty percent.
That was still considerable, but it was already the limit of what Wade could achieve with the materials he had.
Most importantly, the purification speed had increased by at least ten percent, which was the part that mattered more to him at present.
"This is barely enough for now... It's impossible to truly reach zero loss." Wade reluctantly set down the mithril pen in his hand.
He could also vaguely sense that, aside from technical limitations, the material strength of the Hogyoku itself had reached its limit and would not take any more forcing.
"I wonder if there's anything in this world more suitable than sapphire..." Wade murmured as he prepared to remove Ravenclaw's Diadem from his head.
Ravenclaw's Diadem was extremely useful to Wade, so he always wore it while conducting research of this kind.
That was why he had no intention of returning it to Hogwarts for the time being, no matter how many people might want it back.
Dumbledore knew about this as well, but had chosen to turn a blind eye for now.
Wade grasped the Diadem and was just about to remove it and put it away when a sentence suddenly appeared in his mind, as though another consciousness were speaking directly to him.
"There is... a stone more suitable for this kind of power than sapphire..."
Wade's hand paused where it was.
He knew perfectly well that he was not suffering from any mental disorder, which meant the voice speaking inside his head...
He slowly removed the Diadem and studied it in silence for a long moment.
Ravenclaw's Diadem remained as dazzling as ever, without the slightest trace of age on its surface.
"Was that you speaking?" Wade asked softly.
The Diadem remained silent in his hands.
Wade hesitated for a moment before placing it back on his head, as if testing whether the voice would return.
"What stone is more suitable than sapphire?" he asked quietly.
Sure enough, the voice appeared again inside his mind as soon as the Diadem settled into place.
"The legendary pinnacle of alchemy... the Philosopher's Stone..."
Wade's heart stirred at once.
That actually made sense the more he thought about it.
No matter how pure sapphire might be, it was still merely a natural material that had never been refined.
The Philosopher's Stone, however, was considered the pinnacle of alchemy and contained an unimaginably powerful amount of magic.
But there was now a question even more important than the Philosopher's Stone.
"Who are you?" Wade asked. "Are you Ravenclaw?"
"I am not... Ravenclaw... and yet I am Ravenclaw..." the voice replied intermittently.
"What does that mean?" Wade pressed.
The Diadem began speaking again, but this time the voice suddenly became extremely faint and distorted. Wade could barely make out anything at all.
It was almost like...
A recording device running out of power.
Wade stood up at once, no longer interested in sitting there and listening to a fading voice.
Without wasting another moment, he took the Diadem with him and hurried toward Ms. Paris's office.
In this world, no one understood the four founders better than the founders themselves, and he was not about to pretend otherwise.
Why waste time standing there guessing when he could simply ask?
"Toby!"
As Wade stepped out of the wooden house, he casually summoned his house-elf without breaking stride.
"Young Master Wade! Toby is here!" Toby Apparated directly in front of him and bowed respectfully.
"Go to Ethiopia. Tell the old man to come back and meet me in Ms. Paris's office!"
"At once!"
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Read 12 Advance Chapters—P@t- Captain69