Chapter 426

There are 5 chapters left! The last chapter will be on December 31.

May the magic be with you! Enjoy! :3

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Having warmed up in the almost summer sun, I sat down on the edge of the Astronomy Tower and, dangling my legs, began to wave them like a child.

"There you are," Hermione's voice rang out behind me, but it was no surprise to me, for in magic, I could feel her coming. "Professor Flitwick asked me to find you. It's time to get down to the first practical creation of the magic accumulator."

Hermione stood beside me practically at the very edge of the tower and straightened a strand of hair that had escaped because of the wind.

"Great."

I stood up briskly from the edge and followed the girl who had immediately turned around. We reached the professor's laboratory in a few minutes, as secret as possible at Hogwarts. Flitwick was already there and preparing various materials, ranging from wood to crystals, actively and amusingly running from one table to another.

"Ah, Mr. Knight!" smiled the professor immediately, as soon as I got closer. "Great, just great! I've checked all your and Miss Granger's calculations, checked against mine, and made some small and quite unnecessary corrections. Here."

Flitwick waved his hand toward the table, from which a folder of papers immediately flew off and slid into my hands. It wasn't very thick, about thirty pages.

"Read it, please."

Having said that, Flitwick went back to his business of arranging the various materials in the places he alone knew. On the other hand, I sat down with Hermione at the table, and we quickly leafed through, memorized, and understood the gist of the minor changes, which were mostly about materials, and there were a couple of nuances about transfiguration.

A dozen minutes later, the three of us were already standing at a special large table with a lot of rune complexes engraved on it. At the wizard's will, these complexes could move around the table, changing in size and structure - pretty handy, and no need to engrave something new all the time.

"So," Flitwick rubbed his hands together with a smile as he stood on a special stool. "As you and I realized, heterogeneous materials don't really work for us because of the heterogeneity itself."

Flitwick pointed with his hand at various organic materials: bars of wood of various sorts, bones, some other incomprehensible stuff.

"We'll experiment with them, however, but afterwards. For now, we'll deal with crystals with different crystal lattices. Unfortunately, my current magical abilities don't allow me to work with the matter at the atomic level... Yes, yes, don't be surprised, I'm very well up on my knowledge in the usual scientific disciplines."

Hermione and I smiled at the professor.

"So," he continued, straightening up. "We can, of course, use transfiguration and transmutation to set the structure we want, but we can't selectively influence not only the atoms but even the cells of the crystal lattice. The smallest thing that a wizard can affect with the known to me data is not much less than a millimeter. Therefore, we can't completely go into miniaturization. But!"

Flitwick raised his index finger up.

"We can get crystal slices of the shape we want. The excess is cut off by Miss Granger's calculated transformation spell related to the transfiguration school. We end up with the materials we need."

"Calculated mostly by Max," Hermione said.

"Yes, even so," Flitwick shrugged. "Let's get on with it, then. Let's start with quartz, as the easiest one for us to work with."

Flitwick moved the transparent crystal on the table, placing it in front of us.

"The project is mostly yours, so you have the honor of making the first working sample as well. From start to finish."

"Okay, Professor," we nodded simultaneously.

"Then I," looking at Hermione, took another quartz crystal, "will make the mechanism on the phase-inversion."

"Okay, and I'll take care of the accumulation module directly."

After quickly figuring out how the table worked, we each made our own magic circles under the crystals. Taking out our wands, we began to smoothly and carefully conjure, dividing the crystals into pieces, changing their shape, making a kind of pancakes. The next step was to enchant objects directly. It took about an hour and a half - calculations are calculations, but something can always go wrong in the process. Thanks Old Man, everything went smoothly here.

After an hour and a half of work, we had about a dozen transparent pancake-crystals at our disposal. For peer-to-peer storage, which in our view is storage with one "pancake" of extended two-dimensional space, it was decided to use the following scheme: a sort of pie, the first layer of which was a block for magic absorption, then the storage body itself, and after that - a block for magic output. For a later, more elaborate product with several storage bodies, the inlet and outlet would be in the same "pancake." The bodies themselves would be delimited by bi-directional limiters linked to each other. With their help, the bodies will accumulate magic sequentially and discharge in reverse order.

After enchanting, we proceeded to assembly. To do this, we placed the appropriate "pancakes" one on top of the other, and formed a small ritual scheme on the table below them. As soon as we activated it, the runes and lines glowed with soft blue light, and with them, our small construction, the size of three coins on top of each other, also glowed faintly. A couple of seconds — and everything is ready.

"Let's hurry up and check it out!" Flitwick, beaming with enthusiasm, immediately picked up the resulting magic accumulator carefully and carried it on his outstretched arms, like a most precious relic, to another table. We followed him.

Climbing onto another stool, the professor carefully placed the magic accumulator in the center of the ritual diagram engraved on the table, looked at me, at Hermione, and sighed deeply.

"Well... Merlin help us."