"I never imagined pure-blood families would have such interesting customs."
After Neville's grandmother left, Lynn and Neville chatted in the library while house-elves brought them refreshments and tea.
"Actually, I didn't know about this before either."
Neville looked at the Stone Heart tree core in his palm, clearly fascinated by it.
"Lynn, what kind of magical creatures do you think the Ollivander and Borgin families were connected to?"
"Maybe the Ollivanders were Bowtruckles?"
Lynn guessed casually. "After all, they make wands. Perhaps because they deal with magical wood... but aren't Bowtruckles a bit too weak? Forest sprites might be a better choice."
"The Borgin family must be connected to some dark creature then." Neville recalled what he knew about the Borgins. "They keep a low profile, but they've had a dark magic shop in Knockturn Alley for ages. Even the Ministry of Magic has never interfered with them—maybe they don't dare?"
Neville pondered, "If we're talking about what magical creatures they're connected to, it definitely wouldn't be anything friendly. Probably some dark creature similar to Dementors."
"Yeah, a black magic artifacts shop that's either ignored or protected by the authorities, operating openly—that's pretty absurd."
Lynn had a strong urge to criticize many things about the wizarding world. The Ministry of Magic claimed to be an official organization, but no matter how you looked at it, it was just a puppet propped up by wizard families. They didn't manage what they should and meddled where they shouldn't. After Voldemort's fall, a bunch of Death Eaters escaped punishment through family connections—that was a clear example.
There were even cases of individual wizards drafting laws. Arthur Weasley single-handedly wrote the regulations prohibiting the misuse of Muggle artifacts, and even left himself a loophole so he could tinker with that old car. Don't say it was purely for research—the Weasley family drove that thing to take the kids to school, purely for convenience.
And this kind of thing couldn't possibly be an isolated case. Arthur Weasley was considered quite upstanding in the wizarding world. Those less scrupulous than him, who preferred underhanded dealings—who knows how many loopholes they'd exploited in the Ministry.
By comparison, what Arthur Weasley did was nothing. No wonder that after Ron's impulsive "let's drive the car to Hogwarts" and Muggles photographed the flying car, Arthur Weasley only got a warning. Nothing happened to him at all.
"But how do we use this thing? Steep it in water?"
Lynn laughed at his own joke. This thing looked like a tree seed but felt like stone—it definitely wasn't some exotic food.
"I'm not sure either, but Grandmother didn't explain, which means we don't need to worry about it."
Neville understood his grandmother well. If there was something you needed to do, she would tell you everything in great detail. After all, Neville used to be so forgetful that Madam Longbottom had to teach him over and over. She seemed strict, but she truly loved Neville.
"Don't worry about it? Oh."
Lynn nodded, pulled a thin thread from his pocket—he'd picked up bad habits, learning from Hagrid to make cord from unicorn hair—and tied the Stone Heart tree core into a pendant using a simple but sturdy knot, then casually hung it around his neck.
"Want me to make one for you?"
"No need." Neville shook his head. "I'm planning to make it into a bracelet so it won't get in the way."
Considering his practical needs, Neville declined Lynn's kind offer.
"By the way, Lynn, if you like reading, why not stay at my place for a few days? Although my family's collection isn't as large as the school library, there should be quite a few books you can't find anywhere else, if you're interested."
"Of course! I was going to ask you that anyway. A wizard family's collection—that's a real treasure."
In the wizarding world, hoarding knowledge was all too common. Just at Ollivander's, Lynn had borrowed quite a few books that the school library didn't have at all. In the magical world that still maintained family traditions, there were far too many buried treasures.
"I need to visit Fred and George mid-month. They said they have something to show me. Would staying at your place for half a month be inconvenient?"
"Not at all!" Neville grinned happily. "I'd love for you to stay longer, otherwise I'd only have Hannah to play with."
"You've known each other a long time?"
"Mm." Neville nodded. "Almost since I can remember, Hannah's been visiting my house. We're related as cousins through marriage. Hannah's two months older than me, but she looks younger, so she seems like my little sister."
Neville had the house-elf butler prepare a bedroom near the library for Lynn, though he didn't come to visit frequently.
Neville had set himself a training schedule for the holidays, much more intensive than at school. The house-elves helped Neville train too. Don't let house-elves' low status in the wizarding world fool you—they were completely treated as servants—but in reality, their magic was quite powerful. It was only because of magical contracts that house-elves had been enslaved for so long.
It sounded cruel, but the circumstances were complicated.
There had been two documented wars between goblins and wizards, and a third nearly occurred a hundred years ago, but was handled by that mysterious Hogwarts alumnus.
The first Goblin War occurred a thousand years ago, after the Hogwarts founders established Hogwarts and subsequently passed away.
When those four pillars disappeared, the goblins' ambitions expanded unchecked and they launched a war against wizards, seeking to compete for control of the magical world. Due to the founders and Hogwarts' existence, England had been the center of European magical society for a long time.
House-elves didn't always have "house" in their name. They were a branch, or subspecies, of goblins, already ruled by goblins, but with softer temperaments and more affinity toward wizards than goblins had.
When war broke out, wizards paid a terrible price to crush the goblin rebellion. This was a war between two species.
The defeated goblins were severely weakened. To preserve their remaining strength, they signed a treaty with wizards, offering the wizard-friendly elves as reparations. By selling out this branch of their race, they bought the wizards' forgiveness. From then on, elves lost their freedom and were dubbed "house-elves."
The brand of magical contracts was deeply embedded in their bloodline, passed down through generations.
Goblins were despicable, but house-elves weren't entirely innocent either—just unlucky. Their leaders were goblins, creatures who did terrible things. During the Goblin Wars, house-elves participated in battles against wizards. They were just relatively more friendly toward wizards; fundamentally, they were still part of the goblin camp.
During breaks from reading, Lynn would also call on the Longbottom house-elves to ask questions, mostly about house-elf magic.
Unlike wizards, house-elf magic was primarily passed down through bloodline inheritance.
House-elves were particularly skilled with spatial magic. Not just their own Apparition for teleportation, but they could also easily master precisely transporting food directly onto plates.
This was highly similar to Lynn's teleportation ability. Lynn could also teleport people and objects besides himself. Moving objects was relatively easy, but moving people—if they resisted strongly—required much more time and mental energy.
All three of his superpowers required mental energy to activate. For teleportation, when performing maximum-distance instant movement, he could only use it eleven times consecutively before suffering splitting headaches. Without resting for several hours and sleeping, he couldn't recover at all. However, telekinesis had low consumption—even moving ten-ton objects, Lynn could do it continuously for half an hour.
The house-elves' little casting tricks actually helped Lynn's superpowers. When he learned to wrap objects with magic like house-elves did before transporting them, he could clearly feel the mental energy consumption decreasing.
However, he needed to use telekinesis wrapping, not magical wrapping.
As long as he wrapped the object to be moved with telekinesis, the energy savings reached fifty percent.
This unexpected gain made Lynn quite happy.
The Longbottom library also contained records of new ancient rune combinations. Ancient runes were the foundation of spells—you couldn't just memorize the letters. Ancient runes formed spell combinations as words, and two words with similar power and meaning could have completely different compositions.
Like Ice meaning ice—Bing, Glace, Led, Is, Eis all meant ice. Their meanings were similar, but their power structure and application methods had subtle differences.
You could use "ice-cold" to form the concept of freezing cold, but you couldn't use "bing-cold" to mean freezing cold. And the hyphen "-" sometimes needed to be replaced with other "connecting symbols" like "..." or "'". If you misspelled one thing or matched inappropriate word combinations, the magic wouldn't work.
Designing magic through ancient runes was honestly quite difficult. The reason new spells appeared more and more slowly in modern European magical society had much to do with this.
High threshold, few learners, even fewer masters—so don't expect new spells every day. Developing new magic wasn't as good as expanding existing magic. Like Lumos—if you wanted to expand the Wand-Lighting Charm, just add newly defined suffixes at the end. This was much easier than creating magic from scratch.
Finding ancient rune word combinations he hadn't learned before in Neville's house gave Lynn tremendous gains.
In the blink of an eye, two weeks passed. Lynn, who had plowed through twenty-five books at the Longbottom house, was somewhat mentally overloaded.
He had near-photographic memory, but even that couldn't withstand such intense reading.
Remembering wasn't enough—Lynn also needed to digest this content and make it his own. That's why during previous holidays he only tackled one tome per day. If he just flipped pages, he could go through dozens of books in a day.
"No need to see me off, Neville."
Lynn said goodbye to Neville at the door. Neville had wanted to send Lynn in his family carriage, but Lynn's first stop wasn't the Weasleys' Burrow.
Since this was about relaxing... he'd return to Oxford first to spend time with the older girls, then go find Harley.
Returning to familiar ground felt fantastic. That security guard who'd kicked him out had probably been fired. Lynn navigated the campus with practiced ease, and his appearance unsurprisingly drew the attention of older girls wearing cool, sexy summer clothing.
"What a handsome little guy!"
Before Lynn could wander for even ten minutes, he was grabbed by multiple hands and pulled aside, beginning his battle of wits with these older sisters.
From morning to evening, exhausted but extremely satisfied, Lynn wiped the lipstick marks smudged on his face. In an alley with few pedestrians, he raised his wand. A few seconds later, a red double-decker bus appeared from the void, teleporting right in front of him.
"Welcome to the Knight Bus, emergency transport for the stranded witch or wizard. Just stick out your wand hand, and it will appear. My name is Stan Shunpike, and I'm your conductor this evening."
As the door opened, a thin young man with a face full of freckles spoke in an extremely rapid, perfunctory manner.
"Oh, brilliant, you've got no luggage to mention. You don't know, mate, half an hour ago I spent ten minutes hauling bags for a witch with loads of stuff. Why would anyone carry so much without using an Extension Charm trunk?!"
The talkative conductor Stan Shunpike rambled on, stepping aside to let Lynn board.
"Did you just crawl out of some cave full of Veela or something?"
He stretched his nose and sniffed hard at the air. "Can you tell me where? Is it expensive?"
"Not expensive. Doesn't cost a single penny."
"Where, where?" Hearing this, the conductor perked up immediately. "Please, you must tell me!"
"Right back there at Oxford University. You just need to be handsome enough. Beautiful older girls from all over the world are everywhere, and they're super enthusiastic too."
Stan Shunpike's face instantly darkened. He muttered sullenly, "Never heard of male Veela..." After looking Lynn up and down a few times, he finally remembered his conductor duties.
"Where to?"
"Number 4, Privet Drive, Little Whinging."
"Surrey?" Stan Shunpike paused. "Five Sickles fare. If you'd like—looks like you don't need hot chocolate or anything."
Seeing Lynn pull out a juice box and sip through the straw, he chose not to continue talking with this popular guy.
"Ernie, let's go." He turned and shouted to the driver. Before the words fully left his mouth, the driver floored it, instantly pushing the bus to maximum speed.
Stan, who'd been expecting to see Lynn's embarrassment with juice spilled all over, didn't get to see any such scene. Lynn sat motionless on one of the beds inside the bus, as if completely unaffected by inertia.
Deprived of the conductor's last bit of entertainment, Stan didn't say another word the whole journey, just muttering to himself and occasionally pulling out a small mirror to check his own face.
Only slightly slower than Lynn's teleportation, the Knight Bus—moving through spatial jumps and dimensional rifts—could leap over ten miles in a single teleport. Though the riding experience was terrible, the speed was top-notch. Muggle airplanes couldn't even begin to compare.
The sky hadn't even darkened when Lynn was dropped right at the door of Number 4, Privet Drive, Harley's aunt and uncle's villa. The Knight Bus disappeared quickly after he got off, leaving no trace for Muggles to see.
The first-floor living room lights were on. Lynn took out the gifts he'd bought earlier and carried them in hand, then knocked on the Dursleys' door.
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