Waking Up from the Longest Dream

A/N 10/10/21

1) 9 chapters today, and daily chapter from tomorrow (Hopefully)

2) MC, who was at the peak of his career in boxing and going through being a cripple and dying is probably over 40yo. Plus there is more years to be added to his mental age from this chapter.

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Kenneth was flying across a field chasing a dragon through the air, that's right, a dragon. This was his 21,899th day or tomorrow would be his 60th year he spent in this world that he assumed to be inside his head. I knew that human thoughts ran at an incredible fast pace, so he knew the time in here might be different from outside. He just hoped that Voldemort did not die from old age, or by the hands of Harry Potter. Even now, the anger he felt towards the death eaters had died down but still alive. To him it was almost like he was living another life, however, his soul body never got old, just stronger as the days passed up. Majority of the time, Kenneth had a rough time surviving, he spent almost 50 years running from the stronger magical creatures and fighting only the weaker ones. Although they were all souls without any magical ability, they had different soul strengths. It was only after the 53rd year he was able to keep up with mythical creatures like dragons and phoenixes.

The dragon realised that he could not outrun the human and turned around and roared. Kenneth did not bother to stop and charged at the dragon, the dragon was a soul, it could not breath fire. The moment the dragon tried to bite him, Kenneth dodge to the right and went straight to his wings. He grabbed both wings that was flapping at the shoulder blades and pulled as hard as he could. After few moments the dragon screeched as there was a cracking noise at the shoulder blades and the wings was ripped off its back, turning into white motes of light. It was a soul, so the dragon could fly without the wings, however, it was unused to not having them and started to plummet onto the ground. Kenneth fell down with the dragon, once the dragon crashed with a loud bang, Kenneth did not stop his decent, he did a flip and landed on his feet, right on the head of the dragon which smashed in to pieces and tuned into motes of white light. Soon the entire dragon was absorbed by the ground.

The moment the last creature died, the red tainted sky, slowly started to turn normal and the dimmed colours of the rest of the world started to turn vibrant. Kenneth could see that the edge of this world was crumbling down and disappearing.

"Finally, its over?" thought Kenneth as everything around him turned white.

When he opened his eyes, he knew he had returned into the real world because he was still in the underground lab. Only that the surroundings left him speechless. The entire underground lab was spotlessly clean and lit brightly with everlasting candles, he was laying on a soft king size bed, there was a red fur carpet on the floor surrounding the bed. There were cosy sofas and wooden table, there was even a kitchen fitted into a corner of the lab. What was more surprising was his body, a full-grown body.

"Adult body? Did I sleep for a long time? Then how come I'm so healthy? I should be skin and bone," he thought for a bit and continued, "there is no way Voldemort did all this, if it was him, I would be will be on a dissecting table. What's wrong with the person who did all this, they fitted a fake kitchen into an underground lab and did think about dressing me up and left me naked?" thought Kenneth.

He got off the bed and wrapped the bed sheet around him and started heading out of the underground lab. When he stepped outside, he felt a warm breeze brush past him, he knew it was summer. He came to the edge of the entrance and found that the underground lab was actually a cave dug into the side of a mountain deep inside some forest.

"You are awake?!!" he heard a woman's voice.

Startled, he looked around just to find no one around him then he asked, "Who are you? come out!"

"Oh, you probably don't realise what's going on since you were not aware what happened when it happened, I'm talking to you telepathically, just search for a connection symbol in your mind scape and send your thoughts into it. Anyway, don't worry if you can't, I'm on my way to you, it won't be long," said the voice.

Kenneth thought for a while and came to conclusion that a person who furnished the lab like that and has a telepathic connection with should not be a threat. So, he went back inside and sat on his bed.

"Did she say mind scape? What's that? Occlumency?" Thought Kenneth then he closed his eyes and started to try and look into his mind. In an instant he felt the surrounding change, he opened his eyes to a vast white space, instantly he felt omnipotent and omnipresent in this space, he was in his soul body. However, he was not alone in the space. There were a multitude of magical, non-magical and mythical creatures, a lot more than he could count. Just with one look he could tell that there were 7 that was very different from the rest, because these seven had runes hovering on their body while a symbol of a morning start engraved on their foreheads.

One looked like a black dragon, bigger than any dragon he had fought in the soul world, it looked like bigger version of the Hungarian horntail, the only difference was that it was black with silver eyes and dark brown rune hovering in front of its chest, a silver morning start symbol engraved on its forehead and the horn that looked like a bull only pointing forward towards its snout.

The second looked like a black phoenix, similar size to the dragon only with long, beautiful tail feathers with the same morning star engraved on its head, it had two runes rotating in circle of each other and hovering over its chest, one was black and one was white.

The third looked like a black serpent, half the size of the previous two, but out-classing them both in terms of length, it had a single silver rune hovering over its chest, and a morning star on its head.

The fourth was the a black alicorn, a unicorn with wings, it had a purple rune hovering over its chest.

The fifth was a black raiju, its rune was there but it was illusionary.

The sixth was an elf, not the house elf type of elf, but the tall mythical humanoid known in legends. Its rune was smallest of them all but it was multi colour and was hovering directly above the morning start symbol engraved on its forehead.

The seventh and the final one was a dwarf, half the height of the elf, it had two white runes hovering over on the back of its hands.

He was not scared to see them, this was his mind scape and he could feel a connection with all these creatures, they were actually him, or part of him. there was also soap bubble floating around, when Kenneth looked closer at them, he realised they were actually his memories, all of them, including the once from his previous life, the time he spent in the soul world and the memories of the few months he spent with his family.

He then saw a small symbol of a morning star floating in the sky, he floated next to it and sent his thoughts to it to inspect it, he heard it say.

"Oh great, you found it," said the same womanly voice from before.

"Urm.. Yea," said Kenneth.

"So, this is how you sound like, I never heard your voice before," said the voice.

"Who are you?" asked Kenneth.

"My name is Nagini, I use to be a witch cursed with the Maledictus cursed," said Nagini.

Kenneth's eye widened like footballs. Instantly, he recalled the sad history of the witch. Nagini, born sometime before 1927 in Indonesia, cursed by Maledictus curse, a curse that give host the ability to transform into an animal, when the curse fully develops it takes over the hosts body and turn them permanently into the animal. When that happens, the host loses the ability to think like a human and live like a beast, and just because they completely become beast, they are not destined to be evil.

Nagini was found by someone called Skender and was brought into a wizarding circus where she was abused by the people there. She was described as a shy, kind and quiet women. After her escape from the circus, there were few complications with her one and only friend, who went on to join the dark wizard Grindelwald. Failing to convince her friend, she joined hand with Dumbledore and few other wizards and witches to bring down Grindelwald and ending the wizarding war. After that her location was not known, only that after her permanent transformation, she bonded with Voldemort, probably due to Parseltongue, only to later help him return then turned into a Horcrux and get beheaded by Neville Longbottom.

"Nagini? Use to?" he asked, then he remember that Nagini was on the Voldemort's side and his anger started to boil inside him. However, he did not let anger blind him and asked, "Have you met with Voldemort?"

"Yea, used to. I was cured thanks to you. Voldemort? Didn't the dark lord die 6 years ago?" said Nagini.

"6 years ago?!! When did you find me?!! That doesn't make sense, how come my body isn't all shrivelled up?" asked Kenneth.

"Yes, I found you 6 years ago just before the fall of the dark lord. I was worried for your body too, but there was a lot of magic being absorbed by your body, I assume that why you are so healthy. I'm outside, coming in now, let's talk face to face," said Nagini.

When Kenneth saw Nagini, his heart skipped a beat, the beautiful Asian women would definitely turn a few heads. Weirdly, she was dressed like those British women in the 50s, a white dress shirt with lace going down the middle with a loose ribbon bow hanging from her neck, over the shirt, she wore a navy-blue v-cut dress that ran down three quarters down to her ankles and wearing semi-high heels. Her long black hair was curled and half of it was tied to the back with a same navy-blue ribbon. He knew that wizards and witches lived three times as long as normal humans but he was still surprised to see a 60-ish-year-old woman looking so young. Nagini on the other hand, had her eyes glued to Kenneth's silver eyes, this was her first time seeing them

"It's finally good to talk to you, you have really beautiful silver eyes," said Nagini.

Kenneth blushed at the compliment before he picked up on a small detail, "Silver eyes? How do I look like? Do you have a mirror?"

"You don't know how you look like? Well, it has been 6 years after all," she then conjured a mirror made out of water in front of Kenneth.

When he looked at how he looked like he instantly felt sad, there was no resemblance to his parents at all, although he speculated there would be changes due to the experiment while he was in the soul world, he did not think he would be like a completely new creation.

"Did I look like this when you found me?" he asked.

"Well, I don't understand what you mean, but your hair grew a bit longer, everything else is the same," she answered.

Kenneth thought, "so it seems that the experiment created a complete new body for me, am I still human? And 6 years, the time inside the soul was 10 times faster than the outside," then he asked Nagini, "how did you find me? I don't remember curing you of the Maledictus Curse."

"It's better to show you," then she started to show him her memories through their connection.

Images flooded into Kenneth head, Nagini coming to the lab, her being on fire, the deconstruction, the reconstruction and the transformation. He was surprised to see that the serpent that Nagini transformed to was very similar to the one in his mind space, only smaller and different shade of colour.

"Since your body was pretty much reconstructed, we can assume the curse was destroyed, but how did you end up in a stronger form of a serpent? Have you ever seen a magical creature like that?" asked Kenneth, trying to make sense of the avatars of the creatures in his mind scape.

"I was hoping you could tell me, there are no known magical creatures like that, the closest is the Basilisk, but they don't look like that at all. The rune on my chest gives me an innate talent in manipulating space magic, that's now I got here so fast," Nagini replied, "and what's with the symbol engraved on my forehead? Some sort of blessing? A ritual? I can sense that it connects me to you and compels me to follow you, but whenever I activate it, my magical strength quadruples."

"Perhaps you transformed into that with the help of the Maledictus curse? By the way, where are we? Kenneth asked, ignoring her questions, he couldn't answer a question even he did not have the answer to. If he had to guess, it was a one of Voldemort's ideas he added to the ritual to control everyone under him with absolute authority

"We are in Albania. I got here from Britain. So very far from here, normal wizards would need to travel that distance either through floo network or a port key. It's almost impossible to apparate here, but with your symbol and my spatial abilities I only needed to make two jumps," she answered.

Kenneth went quiet, he was contemplating on what to do next. When he was in the soul world, he had come up with different scenarios he would have to deal with after he left the world. For example, he knew that since the experiment was taking a long time, it was likely that Voldemort would fall at the hand of Harry Potter before Kenneth left the soul world, so the scenario was either he had to find a way to sustain himself through magic until he was able to move as a baby, or if too much time had passed, and he was already a well-developed child, he would find a way to go back to Britain and admit himself to a muggle orphanage under a new name and wait for the letter from Hogwarts to come so he can learn magic. However, he did not think he would end up as a full-grown adult body in such a short time, but in all scenarios, there was one thing in common, that is, until he was strong enough Voldemort cannot know that his experimental ritual succeeded. Kenneth absolutely could not go back to his aunt and cousin.