Chapter 271: Dementors, Twisted and Spliced Humans
The magical bloodline revealed by the Dementor was extremely unique. It possessed a kind of "overbearing nature" that Lockhart had never felt before. The magical bloodline itself was actually generating powerful magical energy.
This completely exceeded the theoretical framework he had built from his recent research into magical bloodlines. Magical bloodlines could generate powerful magical energy without relying on the actions of a physical body? Was this a joke?
Lockhart didn't understand.
He was extremely cautious and did not put the Dementor into his "Fairy Tale Book" magical item, worried that it might be damaged. Compared to the Fairy Tale Book, physical isolation seemed more suitable for blocking the Dementor's power. So the stone house the young wizards were building came in handy.
It didn't need to be fully completed; a fully enclosed room with a door created by Transfiguration, which was then restored to its original state after entry, provided a perfect experimental space for the Dementor.
The young wizards were ambitious; the interior of the house they were building was very spacious. The inside of the pointy-roofed stone house was a full five meters high and quite wide. Lockhart opened his suitcase and let the Dementor out, looking up and carefully observing the magical bloodline that was vaguely revealed as it flew.
In a short while, cold frost began to grow in every corner of the seemingly wide room. The chilling air disturbed the interior, and the sealed space made people feel suffocated and depressed.
Lockhart was not completely unaffected by this. He could also clearly feel this emotion slowly growing deep within him. He tilted his head and watched carefully for a while, and his companions appeared beside him to help.
The little goldie jumped out of his pocket, opened the Fairy Tale Book in his hand, and let Madam Mary, who was inside helping Bellatrix with an experiment, out. The Boggart-turned-Hanged God's corpse and the Puffskein Fish-turned-Obliviation Mist were outside the house, guarding against any potential accidents that might occur outside the experiment.
The burlap sack appeared dancing above Lockhart, and together with the golden retriever, they formed a secure defense inside the room. Finally, the Vengeful Fairy remained deep within Lockhart's mind, serving as his main reliance and trump card during his adventures.
Lockhart turned to look at Madam Mary. "At your service, as always," Madam Mary said respectfully.
He nodded, lightly waved his wand, and a long serpent's phantom appeared, quickly traveling along the veins of time like a train, carrying him back along the traces of time. In the chaotic vortex of the river of time, Madam Mary, holding a Time-Turner, had already become a fragmented shadow, following closely behind.
"Be careful!" The Vengeful Fairy, sensing the problem, cried out in his mind, urging Lockhart to be on high alert.
Boom!
Lockhart suddenly felt a strong tremor, as if he had collided with a huge cloud of cotton. Moving forward again became extremely difficult. The long serpent was still advancing, but its speed became slower and slower, as if every little bit of distance it extended cost a great deal of effort.
Lockhart slowly shook the wand in his hand, feeling the information transmitted from the outside world.
Finally, after an unknown amount of time, a murky yet transparent vortex appeared before his eyes. The murkiness was due to the terrible magical aura here, as if everything was withering away. The transparency was not a good feeling either; Lockhart felt as if his soul was separated from his body, and in this vortex of time, he was gazing ahead with the senses of his soul.
Ahead... he saw what looked like a tattered wizard's robe dancing, and from the broken center, a terrible cold wind howled, as if it wanted to blow his soul away.
"Expecto Patronum!"
It had been a long time since Lockhart had used an incantation to summon the power of a Patronus. Now, however, he cast the spell with extreme caution. A misty silver light appeared on his body. The Hippogriff, such a powerful Patronus, could not condense and could only exist in its most basic form. But thankfully, the power of the Patronus could truly restrain the Dementor's power, and he felt much more relaxed.
Soon, he was carried by the long serpent into the hole in the center of the huge, tattered wizard's robe. A deep passage appeared in the hole. Lockhart's feet finally touched the ground, but he didn't feel solid. The whole world felt chaotic and bizarre.
He slowly walked forward. The further he went, the more he saw the howling vortex of cold wind in the passage begin to condense into frost. The fragments twisted like oil slicks, with various strange and chaotic colorful images that were so jumbled they made him feel nauseous.
Lockhart felt as if he had walked into a land of the undead. Everything was filled with the pale color of life's decay, yet in that paleness, it still exuded the most extreme essence of life, even if it was fragmented. The path seemed endless. No matter how far he walked, he always felt like he was standing still.
Lockhart thought about it for a while and used the small magical trick Dumbledore had taught him. "Mind Meld!"
He waved his wand and tapped it gently. In an instant, all the pale, iridescent light fragments before him shattered and turned into a rolling plume of smoke that poured into the passage. Vaguely, he saw a bizarre figure. Amidst the swirling cold wind, layers of shouting seemed to come from afar. "Ekstis! Ekstis! Ekstis!..."
This was a person's name. Lockhart had heard of this wizard. He was the master of the island castle that was the Azkaban prison before it was rebuilt, a powerful Dark wizard who often captured sailors who passed by the island and tortured and researched them on the island.
"No, no, please let me go. I can't die. I have a girl waiting for me back home!"
A miserable scream suddenly became clear. Lockhart walked forward and saw a Muggle bound to the wall in front of the bizarre figure. He wasn't sure if he was a sailor; he looked more like a beggar. He was now looking at the bizarre figure in front of him with terror.
It was bizarre because this Dark wizard was floating. His body was as dry as a corpse. A more fitting description would be that he looked like a Dementor. The Dark wizard smiled strangely, a shrill and harsh sound. He seemed to enjoy the Muggle's fear, and slowly raised his dry, bony finger, which looked a little like a wind-dried duck neck. The black nail at the end gently touched the Muggle's forehead.
"No! No~! NO!!!"
The Muggle screamed in terror and suddenly exploded. It wasn't the kind of explosion you would think of, but more like a castle made of building blocks collapsing. It turned into a pile of pieces.
The change was extremely fast. It flashed before Lockhart's eyes, and before he could react, the Muggle was pasted on the wall. Pasted wasn't the right word. It should be said that the Muggle turned into a large number of fragments, and the fragments randomly reassembled themselves on the wall into a bizarre combination.
Toes and eyeballs were squeezed together in a circle, and messy hair grew out of his navel and hung down. This was Conjugation, one of the four main fields of Transfiguration! This was the first time Lockhart had seen such a disgusting but clearly extremely advanced spell-casting technique.
"No~~~"
The mouth that was reassembled on the bottom left of the pattern on the wall was still opening and closing. But there were no teeth or tongue in it, and the sound became particularly distorted. Yes, the Muggle was still alive. And he was actually starting to emit a strong aura of magical power!
Lockhart watched this scene in astonishment. Magical energy from a Muggle, and it was a kind of aura that was already a bit like the Dementor's magical characteristics. What was even more crucial was that he could understand exactly what kind of magical experiment this Dark wizard was doing.
It was constancy at the brink of death. Voldemort had once made this discovery. Humans would emit a powerful magical force the moment they died. He used this force to create Horcruxes. And the Dark wizard in front of him seemed to be interested in this force as well. But unlike Voldemort, he cared more about the constant power. So the Muggle in front of him was in an emotional state just before death, but he never actually died. He was kept in a state just before death, allowing the powerful magical power emitted by his soul to become constant.
No! It wasn't just this kind of experiment. Lockhart was very sure that the focus of the magical research designed by the Dark wizard in front of him was a state where human emotions were at their peak, or even at their most extreme.
Emotions were the best nourishment for a magical outburst. And this Dark wizard was trying to twist the Muggle's body, deliberately creating a state of mental collapse that was beyond the Muggle's comprehension. This allowed the Muggle's mind to break into countless pieces as his body broke apart, and with the dislocation and chaos of the reassembly, and even a complete dislocation from his soul, it revealed a magical excitement that was impossible for a wizard to feel.
This was undoubtedly an extremely cruel study that could truly subvert the wizarding world's worldview. It turned out that Muggles could also generate magical energy.
But this wizard was clearly not satisfied with just this research result. He fondled and licked the wall where the Muggle's fragments were randomly pasted, feeling the magical energy that was not so obvious to his eyes.
"The rhythm..." The bizarre Dark wizard mumbled. "This is the feeling of rhythm. Emotions and the body change at the same time, and magical power comes from it."
In the surrounding mist, Lockhart's eyes lit up. With just this sentence, he seemed to have found the key point in Lupin's research on "Wolf-tongue." The change in emotion and the change in the body were synchronized. This was a good direction to try.
"Destruction..." The Dark wizard continued to mumble. "Devouring—slaughter—stagnation—"
"I'm missing one more! It must be one more!"
"It's not complete! It can't be complete!!!"
He screamed in agony. He couldn't find the answer from the Muggle in front of him. He crazily pulled out his wand and extended a whip made of lightning, hysterically whipping the Muggle in front of him. "What is it? What is it?"
The Muggle couldn't give him an answer. The Dark wizard couldn't find the answer either. He yearned for the answer, and Lockhart in the mist was also thinking about the relationship between the four words he had been muttering.
Hmm... It seemed he couldn't analyze anything either. But it sounded like all four of them were in the realm of Dark Arts. Even though this Dark wizard, Ekstis, lived in a time before the 15th century, the Dark Arts he was dabbling in were obviously evil.
Lockhart frowned, carefully listening to the Dark wizard's gibberish.
"Slaughter brings stagnation."
"Devouring brings slaughter—."
"Destruction brings devouring—"
"Stagnation restrains destruction—"
"There must be some connection! Damn it, damn it, what is it!" The Dark wizard was frantically pulling at his head, looking like he was about to explode.
In fact, he really did explode. With a bang. He completely blew up, turning into a black smoke. Where the black smoke passed, the "disassembled and reassembled" Muggle on the wall instantly lost all signs of life. Although he still looked alive, he gave off a hollow feeling.
This was... "The Dementor's Kiss?" Lockhart couldn't help but gasp. He saw a wizard using some method to cast a spell similar to the "Dementor's Kiss" on a Muggle. Did he suck out his soul? How did he do it? This was completely beyond the scope of his knowledge.
You should know that even spells like the Imperius Curse only essentially targeted the "mind." The only thing he had come into contact with that truly dealt with the soul was the Horcrux. Even Horcruxes didn't truly change the state of the soul. When Voldemort died, his soul could still appear in a "ghostly" state. Horcruxes were more like nails made of fragments inserted into the river of time.
Lockhart quickly lost the mood to think about these things. As the Dark wizard blew up, the Muggle on the wall, who had been haphazardly pieced together, disintegrated again. Each fragment seemed to have lost its support and rolled off the wall. When they landed on the ground, they grew slender legs and feet, and a mouth full of jagged teeth opened up in the middle. They turned into a series of strange-looking "little people."
These little people chirped and squealed. After they all landed, they held hands in a circle and bounced, as if celebrating a new life. Then, they all turned their bodies around. Although they had no eyes, they all seemed to be looking at him coldly.
"Kill him!" A little person made of a foot shouted at Lockhart.
So they all charged at Lockhart, screaming.
"Repello Maxima!"
Lockhart cast the spell casually. He was confident that this part, which had lost its soul and only had its mind and body left, couldn't pose any threat. As expected, with the release of the spell, these little people were all blown away as if they had encountered a divine hurricane.
But an interesting thing happened. They hit the wall and all stuck to it again, as if they had grown there in the first place. But not long after, they jumped off the wall again. What was even more bizarre was that it was as if the wall had become a complete part of them. They started to emit magical power again. It looked like they had jumped down, but the original ones were still on the wall.
Replication. They were replicating infinitely.
Lockhart could no longer ignore their existence. These bizarre-looking little people quickly gathered into three groups, surging towards Lockhart.
"Yaya-yaya~..."
Their screams merged, and they even began to emit a magical power that was distorted and chaotic. Lockhart saw the power of Transfiguration in their bodies, saw a new scene of magical excitation, and most importantly, they all began to show a kind of "non-existence" magical power.
"This is..."
"Elves?" Lockhart quickly recalled the memories of the forest witch and looked at these little creatures in a daze.
Soon, in the distorted vortex of the river of time, in the strange hollow of the Dementor's belly, these little people, who might have been elves, began to twist into a chaotic mess. They turned into a powerful force that washed over Lockhart.
Ding!
A crisp sound echoed. The whirring of gears spun rapidly by his ears. Lockhart was suddenly in a daze, and his vision returned to the real world, where he was in a sealed room facing the floating Dementor in the distance.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Lockhart," Madam Mary said, gesturing to the Time-Turner in her hand. "I had to bring you back. The river of time almost collapsed just now."
Lockhart nodded, his brows furrowed as he thought about the scene he had just witnessed. He had a vague feeling that he had just grabbed onto something that was very, very important to him!