The common room smelled of wax and wet stone, the lake's green light pooling across the cushions like a slow tide. Students drifted in and out—laughter, whispered gossip, the dull scrape of a quill. They were ordinary things, small noises of a world that took itself for granted.
I sat in the corner beneath the Slytherin banners, palm resting on the cold marble, and called the Eye of Insight to me.
The magic unfolded like a map. Where the eye scanned, the air shimmered and labeled the potential within a person—latent power, affinity, temperament, loyalty likelihood. Faces became data: flickers of rune-light showing where skill lay, where weakness lived, who would bend and who would break.
There were many useful people. Not everyone could be a Knight—few had the spine or the spark—but those with the spark were everywhere if you knew how to look.
Pureblood name, high control, decent dueling reflexes—useful.A witch with rare charm affinity and unusually deep Occlumency—valuable.A Hufflepuff with uncanny resilience—good for logistics.A Ravenclaw with a dangerously quick mind—essential for theory and research.
My thoughts ran ahead of the Eye's labels. The world outside the wizarding veil was accelerating. Muggle technology—small machines, big bombs, satellites and sensors—would not remain ignorant forever. I had been a muggle once. I had felt the gravity of their numbers, their tools. A hundred thousand wizards hidden among billions of humans was a fragile equation. If the balance shifted the wrong way, we would be extinguished—not because we were weak in magic, but because we were few and naive.
That truth hardened into a plan before the thought had fully formed. Protect the kind. Secure dominance before discovery. Take over, not out of spite but out of survival.
A dark idea, by any moral calculus. A necessary one, by mine.
As these thoughts arranged themselves—logic above rhetoric, contingency above sentiment—the system chimed, and a cool page of light unfolded before my inner sight.
[Notification: Beginnings of the Death Eaters — Reward Pack]• Complete schematics for the Dark Mark (creation and binding).• Incantation unlocked: Morsmordre.• Unforgivable Curses (AVADA KEDAVRA, IMPERIO, CRUCIO) — Mastery: MAX LEVEL.• Talent Unlocked: WIZARD KING
The words hung like a verdict.
I tasted the syllables in my head—the names of spells that could snuff life, bend will, and rend mind. They were weapons. They were horrific in the abstract, and undeniably effective. To possess them was to own a terrible lever.
Below the generalities, the system printed the talent description in cold, precise lines. I read and re-read until the mechanics were as familiar as the veins in my wrist.
WIZARD KING — Talent Mechanics
Subordinate Talent Boost: All talents of identified subordinates receive a +10% enhancement while under your aegis.
Accelerated Teaching: When you personally instruct a subordinate, their learning efficiency increases by 60%, reducing training time and improving retention.
Loyalty Modifier: Upon recruitment (ritual or pact), the probability of sustained loyalty rises to 80%.
Permanent Power Amp: Anyone who enters your direct control permanently gains +20% to their magical capacity.(Stacking rules: boosts stack multiplicatively with external bonuses; recruitment rituals enforce binding clauses.)
Overpowered. Ridiculous. Unscrupulous. Precise.
I let the implications settle.
If the talent functioned as described, it resolved the chief problem of any would-be leader: scale. My personal ceiling is high, but even a king is only as strong as his vassals. With Wizard King, a single loyal cadre—trained hand-in-hand by me—would outpace ten rivals taught by ordinary means. Recruit a network of the right people, accelerate their learning, and you transform a faction into an army of experts.
The loyalty modifier was especially cunning. Eighty percent loyalty is not obedience; it is a psychological lock. Men and women who entrust themselves to you would be far less likely to betray the cause. The permanent power increase was the cruelest incentive: those I recruited would appear stronger, more useful, more dangerous—their capacity literally raised by association.
I outlined the math in my head. A lieutenant with raw talent X becomes X * 1.2 by joining me. Their subsequent talents, improved by the subordinate boost, made them X * 1.32 effectively—then teaching them personally accelerated their rise so that the time-to-mastery shortened dramatically. One recruit turned into a force multiplier; ten recruits, into an apparatus of dominance.
My eyes flicked around the common room. Faces blurred into percentages, affinities, contingency values.
This was power far beyond a clever charm or a wand duel. It was structural. It would allow me to mold an entire movement—skilled, loyal, trained with terrifying efficiency.
And with the Dark Mark and Morsmordre and the Unforgivable mastery, I would have the tools to bind them, to signal them, to strike with certainty. The moral cost of those tools was extreme, but morality, in its soft form, is a luxury in an existential calculus.
I breathed, slow and deliberate. The outward Tom—the calm, respectful student—smiled at someone passing by, and the charm stuck. Inside, I was doing calculations and ethical rough drafts. The means were abhorrent; the ends were survival for the kind I now belonged to and for the order I intended to impose.
This talent makes me a monarch of competence, I thought. Not merely a wielder of power, but the nucleus that raises power in others. It's not domination by force alone. It's domination by scale and craft.
Practical steps unrolled without fanfare:
Seed recruits: Start within Slytherin—pureblood families, influence networks, old grudges that can be redirected into loyalty. Use the Eye to identify those with capacity and character.
Silent training: The Room of Requirement will do; perfect cover for teaching the finer mechanics of magic and the harsher lessons of Occlumency, dueling, control. Abraxas and Orion are initial lieutenants—trustworthy, ambitious, malleable.
Ritual binds: The Dark Mark is not mere symbolism. It will be a practical tether—an unambiguous signal and, if necessary, a conduit of command. Morsmordre will be the broadcast.
Acceleration: Use Wizard King specifically during early instruction—teach personally, accelerate their learning curve, then let them spread the techniques under my strategic oversight.
Integration: Recruit beyond Slytherin when necessary. Power needs diversity: planers from Ravenclaw, logisticians from Hufflepuff, muscle and reach from select Gryffindor converts—if they can be found and bent.
I considered the risks. Dumbledore's gaze was a constant variable. The Headmaster suspected things—always suspected in the old timeline—and suspicion was an enemy to be managed. I had Occlumency, memory charms, a silver tongue and public persona. I had patience. Patience would be my buffer against premature exposure.
Outside, a few first-years tumbled past, laughing. Innocence is such a fragile commodity.
The system pulsed again, approving the quiet calculus. It did not moralize. It distributed tools.
I let myself acknowledge the truth I had known for some time: to protect the future of wizards, I might have to become an architect of fear. To build a structure that could withstand discovery, I would forge loyalty and teach cruelty as a tool, not as a vice.
Then, as casually as one might open a book, I closed the Eye and slid my hands under the table, palms flat on the cool stone. The outward mask set back into place—soft smile, deferential posture—ready for the Hall, for tutors, for the little politics of a school year. Inside me, plans assembled like clockwork: lists of names, timetables for instruction, the first whispered tests for loyalty.
I would begin quietly, with three confidants, then ten, then fifty. Each recruit would be better than the last, shaped with my hand, bonded by a mark they would be too invested to betray.
I allowed myself one final, private thought, cold and precise: If the world will not yield to reason and restraint, then perhaps it must be remade with resolute hands. The system had given me a crown of influence. I would wear it deliberately.