Just as the entire classroom remained shrouded in silence and shock, the dark-robed figure lurking behind the lectern—like a bat poised to strike—finally moved.
"Silence!"
Snape's voice was not loud, yet it carried a biting chill that instantly snapped the young witches and wizards out of their daze. They instinctively shrank back.
He had heard it—the collective gasps, the unnatural stillness.
His gaze, sharp as twin blades, sliced through the dim light and locked precisely onto the source of the disturbance—the corner where Lucian Thornwick stood.
The moment his eyes fell upon the contents of Lucian's cauldron—something utterly different from a Cure for Boils—Snape's face turned livid.
Boom!
A suppressed fury detonated in his chest.
"Did I not explicitly forbid anyone from altering the recipe?"
And yet someone had dared to defy him—right under his nose?
To treat his warning as though it were nothing?
Unforgivable.
His greasy black hair seemed to stir without wind as he rose abruptly from his stool, his billowing robes sweeping up a gust of cold air behind him.
He strode forward.
Each step felt as though it landed on the students' hearts. The temperature in the dungeon seemed to drop by several degrees.
The young witches and wizards quickly parted to make way, barely daring to breathe.
They could already foresee it—Lucian Thornwick, the audacious fool, was about to receive the harshest punishment in Hogwarts history.
Yet as Snape drew closer, his pace slowed—almost imperceptibly.
He smelled it.
That refreshing, soul-soothing fragrance permeating the air.
As a Potions Master, his sense of smell was a hundred times sharper than that of any student present.
He could clearly tell this scent did not belong to any known magical plant or creature. It was something else entirely—
A fragrance that could only be born from the perfect extraction and flawless fusion of countless ingredients at their absolute essence.
"What is that scent…?"
A flicker of confusion crossed his unfathomable black eyes.
His anger still burned—but a professional instinct, a seed of doubt and astonishment, had begun to sprout.
Finally, he reached Lucian's desk.
The instant his gaze passed over Lucian's shoulder and truly beheld the contents of the brass cauldron—
Crack.
It was as though something deep within him shattered.
Snape froze.
The cold, perpetually scornful mask he wore—the expression of a man to whom the world owed a fortune in Galleons—collapsed entirely in that moment.
Gone were the anger, the sarcasm, the displeasure.
In their place was something close to stupefaction—an extreme, overwhelming shock.
What was he looking at?
That was not a potion.
It was a star imprisoned in liquid form.
A manifestation of magic itself.
Every ingredient's property had been activated to one hundred and twenty percent of its potential, merging in a way that surpassed all known theoretical frameworks—without the slightest rejection, without the faintest trace of waste.
That faint magical halo—
It was the phenomenon described only in ancient texts… "Magical Overflow."
It signified that the potion's stability and purity had reached an inconceivable apex—a level that theory itself deemed impossible.
"No…"
Snape swallowed with difficulty.
In the next second, he did something that nearly caused every student's jaw to hit the floor.
He lunged forward in a single step, utterly abandoning his usual composed elegance, like a devout believer rushing toward a divine miracle.
He stared—stared unblinkingly—at the softly glowing blue potion, muttering hoarsely under his breath:
"Impossible… absolutely impossible…"
"Perfect fusion… zero magical loss… ingredient vitality extracted to its absolute limit… This… this surpasses even master-level craftsmanship!"
"This… this is a work that only a god could accomplish!"
He had lost control.
The youngest and most brilliant Potions Master in Hogwarts' history had completely lost control.
He seized a crystal vial from a nearby shelf. Those hands—steady as stone, hands that had handled countless rare and volatile potions with flawless precision—were trembling violently now.
With the utmost care, as if handling a fragile, priceless treasure, he drew a single drop of the sapphire-blue liquid from the cauldron.
That one drop alone caused the entire crystal vial to emit a soft radiance.
Snape held it aloft against the candlelight, his eyes burning with obsession and fervor.
The storm raging in his heart had already overturned his entire understanding of the art he had devoted his life to.
A lie.
The books were a lie.
The Potions knowledge he had spent half his life mastering—before this first-year's creation, it seemed no more than childish scribbles.