Hogwarts Castle.
Night had fully fallen, but the castle remained brilliantly lit. Pumpkin lanterns and all manner of decorations hung everywhere.
In order to calm the fear left behind in the young wizards by the recent string of incidents, this year's Halloween atmosphere was even more elaborate than it had been in previous years.
Professor McGonagall had put tremendous effort into it, even giving each House a generous budget to prepare its feast.
"It's such a pity Theodore and the others aren't here."
"They're missing a banquet of this scale. What a shame."
"I do wonder how the wizard's chess tournament is going."
By this time, the feast in the Great Hall had already ended. Dumbledore and Professor McGonagall both wore smiles as they prepared to send the students of each House back to their common rooms.
Each House still had its own celebration waiting there.
But at that very moment, Quirrell came stumbling into the Great Hall, panic written all over him.
He looked as though he had been utterly terrified. He was gasping for breath, shaking violently, and when he saw Dumbledore he let out a strangled cry.
"Dumbledore…"
"Theodore… dark magic…"
"I thought you knew!"
The entire Great Hall fell silent in an instant.
Dumbledore's face was full of astonishment, and he was about to question Quirrell further—
when suddenly, his heart jolted inside his chest.
A sense of dread came over him.
Along with it came a strange, blood-bound tremor, and Dumbledore's expression became heavier than it had been in a very long time.
The last time he had felt something like this was on that terrible day he could never forget.
He turned toward the direction from which the sense of dread and heart-piercing omen was coming.
Then Dumbledore vanished.
At the same time, outside Hogwarts, in Hogsmeade, inside the Hog's Head Inn—
the glass in Aberforth Dumbledore's hand shattered against the floor.
He too had turned to look in that very same direction.
Then he roughly drove all the customers outside.
"Closed! Closed! The Hog's Head is shut for the day!"
Aberforth's heart was in turmoil. His grip tightened around his wand as he felt an almost irresistible urge to rush in that direction.
But just then, from the portrait of Ariana hanging in his room, the girl who was usually so gentle and shy now displayed a terror deeper than anything before.
She had shrunk into the corner of the painting, as though something in the darkness around it frightened her.
"Brother, I'm scared!"
Aberforth abruptly came back to himself and immediately abandoned the thought of leaving Ariana behind.
"It's alright. It's alright, Ariana. I'm here. I'm always here."
And yet the ominous feeling in his heart continued to intensify, making his expression worse and worse.
"What in Merlin's name is happening?"
…
At this same moment, inside the wizard's chess venue, Theodore wore a grave expression.
The refinement method of the Judge's Brush flowed continuously through his hands. One phantom seal after another sank into the blurry outline of the brush.
As each seal entered, the ten souls that had already poured into the Judge's Brush stirred along with them.
The brush still remained vague and indistinct, but its outline—especially the outline of the tip—was becoming clearer and clearer.
A fierce heat filled Theodore's eyes.
Suddenly he opened his mouth, bit the tip of his tongue, and spat out a mouthful of golden blood mist.
"Condense!"
In the very next instant, a point of dim black radiance gathered before Theodore, like the cold gleam of the Judge's Brush's tip.
The Judge's Brush had taken its first true shape.
Its tip had manifested.
Wild joy appeared on Theodore's face.
The Judge's Brush represented the authority of judgment within the underworld itself. To souls, it was an instrument of absolute life and death.
At this moment, even though only the slightest fraction of its tip had manifested, the might it carried along the path of the soul was already astonishing.
When Theodore reached out as if gripping that brush, the feeling was like seizing hold of a towering mountain.
The sensation made even him inhale sharply.
It was not as though he had never possessed treasures before.
The Purple-Gold Crown of Auspicious Clouds was itself a treasure of destiny, boundlessly powerful.
But compared to the Judge's Brush, it was entirely different.
This was not merely a treasure.
It symbolized an astonishing authority over the lands of death.
Only one who held this brush could truly be said to stand as a Judge of the Underworld.
At this moment, Theodore could clearly sense that the magical world also possessed an underworld of its own.
It was the world of the dead.
But unlike the orderly underworld of the primordial world, the magical world's underworld had neither a true court of the dead nor reincarnation.
The souls of the dead had no future lives and no next existence.
They simply wandered there.
Yet the moment the Judge's Brush manifested, a great ripple spread through that underworld.
The Judge's Brush had been born.
In the primordial underworld, such a brush held authority of judgment itself.
How much more, then, in the underworld of the magical world?
A law for judging souls had just come into being within the magical world's underworld.
All the bewildered spirits wandering there instinctively bowed in reverence, as though worshipping the sovereign of the dead.
At that very moment, Theodore's expression suddenly shifted.
He looked up into the sky.
One petal after another of purple-gold lotus light drifted down before his eyes.
A mysterious power descended onto him.
"This is…"
"Merit?!"
"I only just partially refined the Judge's Brush. How could merit descend onto me already?"
Merit was difficult to obtain.
In the primordial world, it was something countless mighty beings dreamed of.
If enough great merit were amassed, even becoming a Saint was not impossible.
Empress Houtu transformed herself into reincarnation, allowing souls to cycle through life and death, and by that great merit she attained sainthood.
Lady Nuwa created humanity and later repaired the heavens with divine stones, and by that vast merit she too became a Saint.
Since merit had such uses, it was naturally sought after by uncountable great beings.
What Theodore had never expected was that simply refining the Judge's Brush would bring such an amount of merit onto him.
It was certainly nowhere near the level of the great merit required for sainthood.
But it was far from ordinary. At the very least, it was comparable to the merit earned by saving millions of lives.
If such a quantity of merit were refined into a treasure, it could produce a true treasure of merit.
Then uncertainty flashed through Theodore's eyes.
"Could it be because the magical world's underworld had no laws at all, and every soul that died could do nothing but wander there, with no hope of reincarnation?"
"And by refining the Judge's Brush, I brought into this world a rule of judgment over souls inherited from the primordial underworld."
"That would mean that, from this moment onward, the magical world's underworld has laws for the first time."
"If that's the case… then it isn't strange at all for this much merit to descend onto me."
At once, another thought leapt into Theodore's mind—one that made his heart race.
"Then what if I built a true Court of the Dead within the magical world's underworld?"
"What if I went even further and established reincarnation here, in the manner of Empress Houtu?"
"If the merit from that were great enough—could it make me a Saint on the spot?"
"And even if it couldn't, the merit would still be vast beyond measure. Refining it into a supreme treasure of merit might not be impossible at all."
"That would be a fortune beyond imagining."
"The magical world may be poor and barren compared with the primordial world, but it truly does still hide treasures."
But before Theodore could fully emerge from that ecstatic realization, fresh chaotic script suddenly surfaced across the System screen.
[You have begun to wield the Judge's Brush and touched upon the laws within the underworld.]
[And because of this, from the deepest part of the underworld, from within reincarnation itself, a gaze from Empress Houtu has fallen upon you!]
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