The next day, Morris woke up very early.
After a quick wash, he came to the sitting room and found Harold already waiting for him.
The director was pacing restlessly—this seemed to be his habit.
He kept glancing at the clock on the wall, clearly full of anticipation for the upcoming trip to Diagon Alley.
"I've been waiting for you for ten minutes," Harold said, adjusting his tie. "Is there anything you need to bring?"
"No," Morris replied.
Still, he brought his wand along—even though it was currently useless, it would at least make him look more like a wizard.
He noticed that Harold had specially changed into a tidy suit today, and his hair was carefully combed.
He looked quite respectable, actually.
The two quickly headed for the door, where the car was parked.
Harold proudly patted the hood and said to him, "See this beauty? A 1980 Ford Granada—a genuine classic. Though it's older than you are by several years, it runs steadier and more reliably than many supposedly 'new' cars. They don't make them like this anymore."
Morris knew nothing about car models, but the vehicle looked quite expensive.
'Could running an orphanage really be that profitable?'
He pondered to himself as he got into the passenger seat.
Meanwhile, Harold inserted the key and started the engine.
"Well then, let's go," he said enthusiastically.
However, thirty seconds passed, and the car remained where it was.
"Are we waiting for something?" Morris couldn't help but ask. "Or is the car broken?"
"No, we're not waiting for anything, kid." He tapped his fingers lightly on the steering wheel and whistled. "In fact, we're mainly waiting for you—you see, my car can go anywhere, but only if it knows the destination. I don't know where in London there's a place called Diagon Alley."
Only then did Morris realize he'd never told Harold the exact location of Diagon Alley.
However...
"Mr. Green, I hope you won't be angry."
"What is it?" Harold's tone immediately became wary, sensing incoming bad news.
"I don't actually know where Diagon Alley is either..."
"!?"
Harold turned his head somewhat speechlessly, taking a deep breath as if trying to maintain his patience.
"Wait," he said, rubbing his temples with both hands as if warding off an oncoming headache, "Let me make myself certain I understand this correctly. You're telling me that you don't know where Diagon Alley is?"
"You seem to understand quite quickly," Morris said calmly.
"..."
Just before Harold was about to lose his temper, Morris quickly added, "But I do remember that next to it there's a large bookstore and a record shop. They're on either side of the Leaky Cauldron, which is the entrance to Diagon Alley. So we just need to find those landmarks."
Harold stared at Morris with an expression that clearly conveyed his belief that the boy in front of him was deliberately toying with him, playing some kind of prank. But he had absolutely no proof of malicious intent, and Morris's face remained perfectly innocent.
"A bookstore and a record shop," Harold repeated flatly. "That's hardly enough information to find a specific location in a city of several million people. Do you have any idea how many bookstores and record shops exist in London?"
"That's all the specific information I know," Morris said, spreading his hands in a gesture of helpless honesty.
"Professor McGonagall just apparated us there directly—I wasn't paying attention to street names or addresses. But maybe we could drive around the likely areas, and I'll recognize it when I see it? A large bookstore right next to a record shop—that specific combination shouldn't be too common, should it?"
Harold stared at Morris for a few seconds, as if judging whether he was joking. Finally, he sighed helplessly and gripped the steering wheel again.
"Fine, then we'll start looking from Charing Cross Road," he muttered as he shifted gears. "That's where the most bookstores in all of London are. Let's hope we don't have to turn the entire city upside down."
...
Fortunately, they didn't spend much time searching.
The Leaky Cauldron was in the middle section of Charing Cross Road.
Although Harold couldn't see what it looked like, with Morris's guidance, they still managed to enter the pub.
From Harold's perspective, he had simply walked two steps on empty ground, and the next second found himself in this completely unfamiliar place.
"Don't mind the strangers."
Morris said what Professor McGonagall had once told him.
Harold immediately followed the instruction nervously.
The two walked one after another to the back courtyard.
It was still the same as before—walls all around, and a trash can.
"Two bricks up, then two across..."
Harold held his breath, watching Morris draw his wand and tap three times lightly on that specific brick.
"Welcome to Diagon Alley," Morris said softly.
Diagon Alley.
Harold looked around, feeling somewhat excited.
He'd been to Charing Cross Road more than once, but never imagined such a place was hidden there.
This was the wizarding world!
He saw a snow-white owl fly over the sign of Flourish and Blotts, and not far away, a copper kettle at the entrance to the Cauldron Shop was humming a tuneless song to itself.
The air carried strange yet pleasant scents that lifted his spirits.
Morris reminded him, "Now we should go look around. By the way, how much money did you bring?"
Harold instinctively covered his pocket and asked warily, "What do you need money for?"
"Admission fee," Morris said without changing expression. "Bringing you to tour the wizarding world can't be free, can it?"
Harold's eyes widened as he looked at him in disbelief. "You never mentioned this. And... do wizards even use our regular people's money?"
"I remember you said yesterday you'd give me pocket money," Morris said, already striding toward the white building. "We're going to Gringotts. There you can exchange your pounds for Galleons and Sickles—that's wizard money. I also want to buy some odds and ends besides textbooks—follow me."
"Do they take credit cards?" Harold asked as he followed.
Passing through the bustling crowd, they arrived at the entrance to Gringotts.
At the door stood several goblins.
This was Morris's first time observing these creatures up close. They were even shorter than he'd imagined, with dark skin covered in wrinkles, long pointed ears extending backward, and eyes gleaming with shrewdness.
Honestly, somewhat ugly.
As they passed, these goblins bowed slightly to them.
"They seem very polite," Harold whispered to Morris. "Are they human? Some kind of human variant, or...?"
"They're goblins," Morris replied simply.
Entering the main hall, there was a long row of counters where goblins sat on high stools, incredibly busy.
Morris led Harold directly to an available counter handling currency exchange.
"Hello?"
Morris looked up and greeted them—with his height, that was all he could do.
The goblin raised its head from behind a tall ledger and said expressionlessly, "What business do you need to conduct?"
"I need to exchange some pounds for Galleons, sir," Morris said politely.
The goblin looked Morris up and down and nodded knowingly. "Hogwarts new student, from the Muggle world, yes?"
"What does that matter?" Morris frowned slightly.
"Of course it matters," the goblin tapped the counter with its fingers. "If you weren't a Hogwarts new student, we wouldn't exchange currency for you at all. Muggle money is useless to us—we only provide this service for Muggle-born wizards about to start school."
"Fine, I'm a Hogwarts new student," Morris nodded.
The goblin let out a light snort through its nose and produced an exquisite scale. "According to regulations, you can exchange a maximum of fifty Galleons."
Fifty Galleons? Morris was slightly disappointed.
Still, the restriction was reasonable enough when he thought about it logically.
Because for a wizard, earning muggle pounds would be trivially easy—a few enchantments, some transfigured gold that would last long enough to complete a transaction, confundus charms, any number of magical shortcuts. The magical world had to protect itself from being flooded with counterfeit muggle currency.
If they allowed unlimited exchange, the entire economic system could be destabilized by wizards simply magic-ing their way to wealth in the muggle world and then converting it.