The last deep night of the term wrapped Hogwarts in a veil of stillness. Towers and turrets were swallowed by darkness; not a sound drifted through the ancient stone corridors.
But inside the Room of Requirement, it was bright as noon.
A vast magic array sprawled across the floor, occupying nearly the entire chamber. Dozens of suspended logic light-pens hummed softly, their crystalline tips projecting gentle silver beams. The intersecting lines wove themselves into a geometric star-map so intricate that any casual observer would have felt dizzy simply looking at it.
At the heart of the light, Alan sat cross-legged.
The radiance of the array fused around him, compressing the air until it felt dense and perfectly still, as though even the tiniest ripple had been ironed flat by the force field.
Before him hovered the black diary.
Tom Riddle's diary.
It emitted no visible miasma, no enchantment that could be seen with the naked eye. Yet a wrongness clung to it, the sort of conceptual malignance that made the ambient light seem subtly twisted.
Fred, George, and Lee Jordan stood at the far edge of the room.
Their wands remained drawn. Their bodies were taut. Their eyes never left Alan or the diary. Even their breathing had been reduced to shallow, controlled inhales. Every fiber of them was committed to their duty as safety observers.
Alan exhaled once, quietly, then let his eyes close.
The external world faded instantly.
The racing pulse of his friends, the soft thrumming of the pens, even the whisper of blood through his own veins, each sensation was sealed outside the gates of consciousness.
His world condensed into pure mental space.
In the deepest core of that space, he drew his entire reserve of mental strength together, compressing, refining, and tempering it with a precision he had never before achieved.
A single, invisible mental probe formed.
Thinner than spider silk, yet containing the whole of his will, sharp enough to cut through the strongest of barriers.
Alan guided the probe with absolute precision, letting it drift toward the diary suspended before him.
Contact.
No physical resistance.
The probe slipped inside without a whisper.
A cold, dark world exploded into perception, a domain full of malice, volatility, and shapeless chaos.
He did not attack.
He was a ghost infiltrating the heart of an enemy database. Every motion was silent. Every trace erased.
The forbidden technique from The Fortress of Thought, the Thought Backdoor, allowed him to bypass the outer defenses forged by the Horcrux's embedded soul fragment.
He entered the sea of consciousness.
A roiling ocean of negative emotion and shadowed knowledge.
Within that sea, he began constructing a structure of almost impossible complexity.
A structure that bore only one name:
The Logic Bomb.
He placed the fundamental philosophical riddle, "Who am I?", as its absolute nucleus.
That was the foundation. The detonator. The fuel source.
He twisted the Liar's Paradox into a self-negating trigger.
He reshaped the Barber Paradox into a recursive, self-consuming mental loop.
Each logical construct became a piece of code.
One by one, with surgical precision, he implanted these constructs into the deep layers of Tom Riddle's cognitive framework.
This process allowed no error, not even the slightest tremor of attention.
Any slip would alert the target.
One spike of mental leakage would ruin the entire operation.
Alan's focus sharpened to a blade. His thoughts accelerated beyond any physical limit. The logic structures fell into place like perfectly machined gears.
The logic bomb neared completion.
Victory was within reach.
And then,
It happened.
Without warning.
The soul fragment within the diary, until now seemingly docile, seemingly unaware, shed every pretense.
Not crushed.
Not cornered.
It chose to drop its disguise.
The sixteen-year-old Tom Riddle, the boy who would become Voldemort, laughed silently somewhere in the depths of consciousness, a sound dripping with venomous amusement.
He made no attempt to resist Alan's invasion.
He did the opposite.
With an almost suicidal ferocity, he threw open the gates to his core.
The center of his being, formed of rage, ambition, cruelty, and cold brilliance, yawned wide like the maw of a beast.
The next instant,
A tidal wave of darkness surged along the mental probe still connecting them.
Not a surge of force,
A surge of information.
A catastrophic torrent of corrupted knowledge and emotion:
Every shard of teenage Voldemort's negativity, jealousy, hatred, pride, violence.
Every piece of dark lore, curses, forbidden rituals, the secrets underlying Parseltongue.
Every ounce of his contempt and venom for the world.
This torrent did not aim to shatter Alan's probe.
It aimed to travel along it.
Straight into him.
Straight into his mind, into the mental fortress constructed from logic and order.
A single realization exploded inside Alan just as the black flood swallowed his awareness.
This was a trap.
A trap so perfect he hadn't even glimpsed it.
Tom Riddle had anticipated the entire plan from the beginning.
The "logic bomb" was never something he feared.
It was bait, for Alan's own initiative.
His true goal was simple:
To use the link Alan himself had created, this rare, unshielded connection,
to force his vast, polluted consciousness into Alan's mind,
to overwrite it,
to corrupt it,
to replace it.
He envied the mind before him, young, brilliant, orderly.
And he intended to make it his new home.
He intended to,
Take. It. Over.
~~----------------------
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