The "deal" Alan struck with Penelope opened a door, a door into the very heart of Hogwarts's intellectual power.
Behind that door lay the forbidden terrain he had hungered after since his first day wearing Ravenclaw blue.
The parchment permit, bearing joint signatures from Professor Flitwick and Albus Dumbledore, was warm in his hand with a strange mingling of magical auras. It was more than authorization. It was a silent endorsement, weighty trust expressed without a single spoken word.
At last, Alan crossed the threshold.
The deepest chamber of the Restricted Section.
Here, Hogwarts had sealed away its most profound, most dangerous, and most alluring secrets for nearly a thousand years.
The air was different.
Not the dry, familiar scent of parchment and dust that filled the main library, but something denser, an ancient corrosion of vellum mixed with the faint, acrid sting of spells long forbidden. Even the smell served as a warning.
The shelves were not wood but forged of a dark, cold metal. Row upon endless row formed a silent, iron labyrinth.
The books were not stored here.
They were imprisoned.
Thick black chains, each as wide as a child's wrist, wrapped around the spines of the tomes, their links engraved with dulled runes that squirmed faintly, as though alive. These chains pinioned the volumes to the shelves with merciless force.
They were not books.
They were sleeping beasts bound in iron.
Even in slumber, they exhaled waves of malice, subtle but unmistakably predatory. Alan felt invisible tendrils brushing the edges of his mind like probing fingers.
Any witch or wizard lacking firm mental discipline would have been overwhelmed merely by standing here.
But Alan's gaze remained steady, unshaken.
He ignored the gilded or bloodied titles he passed:
The Cutting and Reforging of Souls
A Comprehensive Ritual Guide to Abyssal Demon Summoning
The Thirteen Deadliest Variants of the Killing Curse
None of these tempted him.
His purpose had been fixed from the moment he stepped inside.
His mental palace engaged fully. Since arriving at Hogwarts, he had devoured every book in the public collection and built a detailed internal database, cross-referencing the castle's architectural history, catalog updates, and numerous memoirs. Piece by piece, he had reconstructed a high-resolution map of the Restricted Section's deepest vaults.
He passed a shelf hung with a goblin skull. Then, with precise finality, he stopped in a shadow-drowned corner that looked utterly unremarkable.
The floor was cluttered with ruined books and brittle fragments of parchment. Thick dust lay over everything, as though centuries had erased all footsteps but his.
Alan knelt.
Brushing aside the uppermost layer, a volume so decayed it was nearly charcoal, he uncovered what had truly been hidden.
A book without ornament.
No black leather.
No blood-red lettering.
No curse-bound chains.
Only a thin cord, looking disturbingly like sinew, held it shut.
Mind Palace.
Alan's breath caught.
He had searched for it for a full year.
A legendary treatise on the pinnacle of ancient mental defenses, a book every scholar whispered about, though none would speak of its contents. Those who had read it either lost their sanity or refused to recount what they found.
It was forbidden, yet not guarded with the paranoia given to dark tomes.
That contradiction alone hinted at deeper danger.
He touched the binding.
Cold. Tough. Wrong.
Dragon sinew.
Only the strongest magical fibers were used to seal a book that looked harmless. That truth alone said everything.
Alan drew his wand and pressed its tip to the knot, murmuring an obscure counter-contract charm.
The sinew slackened instantly and recoiled like a living thing.
He lifted the book with a reverence bordering on ritual.
Its pages were brittle at the edges, yellowed with age. But Alan did not begin at the first chapter; he had already mastered every conventional form of Occlumency and mental fortification.
He turned straight to the end.
To the page the legends said had been torn out.
The page that decided whether this was merely a book, or an abomination.
It was intact.
It had been folded and disguised as part of the back cover, sealed seamlessly into place.
Alan unfolded it carefully.
And finally saw the secret hidden for centuries.
His pupils contracted to narrow points.
A lance of cold shot up his spine.
What he read was not a technique for building an impregnable mental fortress.
It was the opposite.
It was a method of attack, subtle, silent, perfect.
A forbidden spell its creator had named, with chilling amusement:
"The Thought Backdoor."
The principle was brutally simple.
During Legilimency, Occlumency clashes, or any psychic interaction, the user was instructed not to attack or defend conventionally.
Instead,
Plant a seed.
A microscopic, nearly untraceable conceptual fragment composed not of foreign magic, but of the caster's own memories, logic, and cognition.
This seed would camouflage itself as one of the victim's spontaneous thoughts.
Not an intrusion.
Not an attack.
A momentary idea.
It triggered no alarms.
No counter-spells could detect it.
No shield could reject it.
It settled quietly, like a Trojan file disguised as part of the core system.
And once planted…
At any time, from anywhere, the caster could bypass even the strongest Occlumency walls, walking freely into the victim's mind.
To read.
To insert.
To rewrite.
Even to alter personality.
This exceeded Legilimency.
It was total, invisible enslavement.
Alan's fingers trembled.
His soul recoiled with an instinctive dread, a deep primordial recognition of a monstrous genius.
But fear was swiftly eclipsed by something fiercer:
A blistering, intoxicating exhilaration.
His heart hammered; heat swirled behind his eyes.
He had found it.
He had finally found it.
The one technique he needed, the core weapon that could confront Tom Riddle's diary, that paradox-woven fragment of Voldemort's soul that resisted all conventional destruction.
To fight logic with logic.
To crush a paradox using a deeper paradox.
To defeat Riddle on the battlefield of thought.
Alan's eyes shone with a near-maniacal brilliance.
He snapped the book shut and marched straight to Madam Pince's office to secure the borrowing records.
Then he broke into a run, toward the Room of Requirement high in Ravenclaw Tower.
He needed absolute isolation.
He needed a sanctuary where no eyes could watch, no mind could spy.
For there, within the indestructible walls of his own mental citadel, he would begin practicing this forbidden technique, again and again, until he could wield it with surgical precision.
He would forge this insidious key into a blade sharp enough…
…to pry open Voldemort's soul.
~~----------------------
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