Chapter 4: The Room of Requirement

I didn't dare to use the room for its intended purpose right away. Despite all the advantages, there was one drawback that significantly outweighed the benefits. Everything looked too good. A room that appeared at the moment of need, equipped to meet my modest requests, with an interior that differed little from the training hall in my former abode. One would have to be a complete idiot to rush headlong inside, as the first thing that came to my mind was that it could be a trap. But there's always a 'but'! What if the room wasn't a trap at all?

I decided not to enter, choosing instead to find more information first, so I headed to the library on the fourth floor. I remembered the way, but I swear, when I returned, the staircases were arranged completely differently. A couple of doors had disappeared, making the return journey almost twice as long. It was decided; the first thing I'd do in the library would be to look for a map of Hogwarts and copy it, along with all the notes about moving staircases, fake doors, and invisible doors.

In the library, as expected, an overwhelming silence reigned. In Ban Ard, where I had been invited to give lectures, I had wandered a couple of times through the dusty library filled with ancient folios and parchments preserved from the time of Ian Becker. None of the students liked visiting the library, as it made you look like a stupid dunce in the eyes of others, unable to remember and comprehend what the teacher said the first time. Against the backdrop of constant struggle and competition, few wanted to give potential enemies an extra reason or leverage. And so, despite the indistinct, frankly archaic language of ancient texts, interspersed with Hen Llinge, the elder speech, students had to rewrite the wisdom of the first sorcerers to avoid returning there unnecessarily.

In Hogwarts, everything was different. Entering the library, where apart from a couple of senior students there was no one yet, I was about to head straight to the nearest shelves, which were tightly adjacent to each other and filled all the free space, but I was stopped. Despite the abundance of books up to the very ceiling of the library, I had to listen to instructions from the librarian, Madam Pince. She made it clear what was allowed and what was categorically forbidden. I assured her that I wasn't going to damage the books, would treat them as carefully as my own life, and wouldn't spoil the originals with my scribbles. The sworn assurances worked, and in the next second, I was moving towards the kindly indicated section filled with materials on the castle's architecture.

First and foremost, I was interested in books that described the sights of the eighth floor and the castle's secret passages. I found half a dozen different folios, volumes, books ranging from pure fiction where the eighth floor and curious incidents that occurred there were barely mentioned, to very accurate and schematic maps with all the accompanying legends.

Finding accurate information, something more than simple mentions of a certain Room of Requirement, took four hours of painstaking search, in a book titled "Magical Architecture of Hogwarts, Hidden Spaces," dated 1865. There, the Room of Requirement was described in great detail, the author's guesses about the magic used in the construction of such a perfectly disguised room were laid out, and a couple of tips were given on how to find the room.

According to this, the Room of Requirement appeared to people when they were in dire need of help or passed by it three times without solving their problem, with the room looking exactly as the seeker needed most. The author writes that the Room of Requirement indeed helped him when he and a certain madam, five years his senior, decided to spend a private evening without prying eyes. Then the room took on the appearance of a luxuriously furnished room, created specifically for the pleasures that the children so strongly desired. But that's not all.

The author puts forward a theory of a limited number of rooms in the Room of Requirement. He claims that the room appeared to different students in the same form. Presumably, the Room of Requirement doesn't change its appearance if the needs of the seeker coincide with the goals of previous visitors.

Based on the evidence found, I'll have to more thoroughly check the Room of Requirement and finally make sure that it's not a trap. I see no reason to postpone the matter until tomorrow - there are still several hours until curfew, practically the whole day ahead, and the headmaster didn't forbid wandering around the castle, except for the third floor.

The successful search for information about the Room of Requirement also provided me with a scheme detailing the location of all the main rooms of Hogwarts. I also learned a couple of spells for affecting the randomly changing staircases. As a last resort, I'll use telekinesis.

This time, the ascent to the eighth floor went without a hitch. I jumped four floors without encountering any resistance. Difficulties arose at the stage of searching for the room. It wasn't in the same place.

I had to search for it again throughout the floor, walk three times from end to end of the corridor, but this time it didn't appear. The bas-reliefs on the walls remained simple architectural decor, unwilling to open access to the Room of Requirement, so I had to take matters into my own hands.

I stood exactly where the cursed room had appeared to me earlier. I swear, if it doesn't appear on its own, I'll demolish this wall, and then go inside and repair it with the "Reparo" spell. I'm patient, but every patience has its limits.

Touching the wall with my hands, I felt the magic hidden in it, a power that faded with each year, but precisely on this part of the wall, the charms were particularly well preserved. I reached out to the energy lurking inside, without unnecessary words, without spells. Feeling the newly created connection, thin, barely noticeable, I began to retransmit thoughts and images mixed with a request for help. Probably, this room wasn't initially hidden, at least not for students. Its malfunction, the lack of a normal materialization mechanism, comes from the general context. Hogwarts is old. It's aging, and the charms aren't being renewed. The charge laid during the enchantment is running out, natural energy is becoming less and less. I bet the castle is located on a powerful source, a place of incredible concentration of power, but this is not a panacea. Nothing is eternal under the moon, which means this problem will have to be solved independently, preferably by adjusting the condition for the door's appearance.

This time, in addition to the necessary training equipment, a luxurious laboratory materialized in the room. Among the missing components were only minor, easily replaceable tools, while the main ones, without which work is impossible, were present, although they differed from the ones I knew by being more technologically advanced. It's understandable - how can six hundred years of Neverland's magical development compare to millennia on Earth.

The first and most important thing to mention is the athanor - an alchemical furnace, without which it is impossible to create anything more serious than elixirs and decoctions. Then came crucibles, a distillation cube, enchanted tongs, ceramic reservoirs and vessels adapted for distillation. Some tools simply didn't appear because I own analogues, like the tin cauldron used in Professor Snape's lessons.

The presence of professional equipment right here, in Hogwarts, relieves me of a whole heap of problems, allowing me to start calculating and simulating genetic experiments much faster. To get the maximum effect, it's desirable to conduct experiments before the age of eighteen, so there's still time in reserve.

Say what you will, but Alzur was a genius, especially for his time. His genius allowed him to create witchers, and one could say his work contributed to the death of Vilgefortz, and his own death as well. However, it was still far from the creations of Viy, which ultimately destroyed him, when he was already making one discovery after another in biomagic, healing, and chimerology. At a certain point, the Chapter decided to sponsor the sorcerer's research, especially since there was a serious reason. Alzur, along with Malaspina's teacher and the student Idarran, conceived something grandiose - to make everyone a mage, any person, even the untalented.

You might say it's nonsense? The Chapter thought so too, but by that time Alzur and his company were considered geniuses of hybridization, mutations, and genetic modifications, so everyone wanted to be associated with future glory. The sorcerers understood: those who didn't support Alzur would soon be left on the sidelines of history. Looking ahead, nothing came of it in the end. The artificial gift couldn't compare to natural magical abilities, and the losses among the test subjects were in the hundreds. The project was deemed unprofitable and ceased to be funded. The reputation of the trio suffered significant damage, but they seemed not to care at all.

How it all ended is known to everyone. Alzur and his associates retreated to the mountains, continuing their experiments unofficially in abandoned fortresses, for which he was branded a renegade. Despite the failed initial plan, he didn't give up but set himself another task. Instead of burning the results of the experiments, why not apply them for a different purpose? For example, to create super-killer mutants? That's how the first witchers appeared. Created by a wizard as a by-product of a failed experiment.

Of course, the Chapter denied any involvement in the creation of witchers, but they appealed to the higher-ups, the monarchs. The mutants turned out to be surprisingly good monster slayers, putting an end to the main calamities of the continent in a couple of centuries, but that's another story.

Towards the end of his life, Alzur invented his Magnum Opus - Alzur's Double Cross, and with its help, Viy, which killed the great sorcerer, destroyed half of the glorious city of Maribor and fled into the forest. Data on this spell were erased from available sources, and those that remained were subjected to strict censorship. Vilgefortz had to search for the original in Alzur's numerous tower-laboratories, secret hideouts, and castles where the first witchers were created.

Neverland will never know how Vilgefortz, in search of the original, caught up with the monster in the forests and burned it with white flame. I'm not trying to look better in your eyes than I really am, but the fact remains. Fate itself led me that day. I got what I wanted, though destiny set a huge price for knowledge. A fight with the greatest opponent in my previous life. The most difficult fight.

And today, standing here in this room, I'm deciding whether to add local knowledge to the results of Alzur's work, or maybe limit myself to the success of the legendary sorcerer? The former promises even more power and possibilities but will stretch the preparation process for several years, hoping to finish in time. Plus, new experiments and test subjects will be needed. If we discard the possible profit from the ratio of Vilgefortz's knowledge and local magic, then I only need to take a couple of measurements, figure out how to conduct improvements on myself, and in two years, it's in the bag.

There's another problem that needs to be solved as quickly as possible, which I'm going to deal with right now - mastering the powers of the source. From the moment I realized myself as a person, I continued to cast spells by inertia, as in Neverland, without overstressing myself. First, I used witcher signs, then spell formulas. A couple of times I used spells with bare control - the weaker ones. After buying a magic wand, I continued to cast spells, but more in the local way. It's time to remember my new, true power!

Sitting in a meditation pose, I immersed myself in my mind with a familiar effort, but I didn't draw energy from the surrounding world as before - I have plenty of it. The first step to mastering the powers will be increasing magic control. It would seem, where to go further, but the potential, even of the greatest mage, is incomparable to the potential of the source, so I have room to grow.

For training, I didn't need auxiliary equipment, just bare will and mind. I started with expanding extrasensory perception. In fact, this is a very complex spell that allows expanding the mage's perception, enhancing all five senses, not necessarily all at once, but at will, the sorcerer can see more clearly, further, hear even the slightest rustle, have a sense of smell like a dog. There are special spells for each organ, but the prospect of having the same capabilities at once as witchers, without the side effects of elixirs, didn't leave mages indifferent. The result was the spell "Higher Perception".

Here's what I did. At the end of the hall, I placed a lure, the simplest magical audio illusion, with extremely low noise volume. I don't know how many decibels there were, but from the other end of the Room of Requirement, I couldn't hear anything, even under the spell. I had hellish work ahead - to hear the sound, and after an hour and a half of meditation, attempts to increase the radius of sound perception, I made mediocre progress. I was only comforted by the fact that I had been training for just an hour and a half, everything is still ahead.

I came up with a trio of exercises for control using the senses, for example — the same bait, but now purely magical. It was still impossible to feel it from the other side of the hall.

The cherry on top was the good old telekinesis. A simple magical skill that didn't require much effort, but it was used precisely to achieve that special power and control over it.

In my time, I had lifted large objects, keeping them in the air for hours at a stretch. That practice had run its course, and it was time to make things more challenging. After taking my dinner out of the bag, I had a sandwich, drank some tea — but without sugar. The last ingredient could be used for much greater benefit.

Lifting an object with telekinesis is not difficult; you just need to use the right amount of magic in relation to the mass of the object. The real problems start when you try to perform this trick with two or more things. The magical expenditure increases, but not in a geometric progression — it's much worse. The flawed control of the gift also plays its part, and soon the magic starts leaking like water through a leaky bag. The more objects there are, the bigger the hole becomes. An effective way to increase control — one of the few that doesn't change over time. One might say it has stood the test of time. However, this approach only works for relatively large objects.

Things like sand or sugar are a different story. I poured some sugar from the pouch onto the table and tried to lift a single sugar grain. It was easier than I thought. Then two, three, six, ten — these were already a bit more difficult. Lifting the eleventh was impossible; I turned it into powder, just like the other ten grains. The problem lies in the extreme magical loss when attempting to exert force with the source. It used to be much better. I should have expected that the increased power wouldn't only elevate me, but also limit me. Well, I'll break through these limitations, but for today, training is over.

Leaving the Room of Requirement, I headed back to the Ravenclaw Tower. At this late hour, only the older students were wandering the corridors, gossiping, as soon as I walked past them.

According to the map drawn earlier in the library, it was easier to reach the tower by making a small detour, where a couple of staircases, easily controlled by spells, were located. They would help me reach the corridor leading directly to the tower, but first, I had to go down to the first floor.

As I walked down the corridor, I ran into a trio of kids I had already met on the Hogwarts Express. I remembered the pale-haired one, Draco Malfoy, solely because lately, I've developed a deep hatred for all blondes. The kid noticed me too.

"Harry Potter, I've been looking for you for a long time. Yesterday, on the train, you lied to me, that was the wrong thing to do on your part. If I were you, I'd be more careful, Potter," he said slowly. "If you don't start being more polite, you'll end up like your parents."

An amusing threat from a boy, but I know that behind the loud words of a child lies the foundation of behavioral norms — namely, learning and repeating after adults. Draco Malfoy was just mimicking his father, a former Death Eater, without even realizing how comical it sounded.

"You'll soon find out, Potter, that in our world, there are several wizarding dynasties that are far superior to the others. You shouldn't be friends with those who don't deserve it. I'll help you figure it all out."

I didn't respond to the boy, trying to hold back my laughter, showing with my whole demeanor that I was taking his words seriously and considering them. Most likely, he had no more prepared phrases, so he decided to leave, tossing a parting remark:

"Think about it."

By the time I reached the tower, I was in a good mood, and when I entered the common room, I saw a strange, nosed, big-eared creature that resembled a starved leprechaun.

"What's this?" I asked one of the older Ravenclaws.

"Oh, that's an elf."

At that point, I couldn't hold it in anymore: "Pahahahahahaha!"