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I found the clues I was looking for. A light in the dark. I see now that Hogwarts teaches a limited view of magic. What are spells but rituals simplified into words and gestures and expressed through a wood and magical core combination attuned to the caster? What are potions other than symbolic recombinations of ingredients to achieve different effects?
Just because there's no ritual circle present doesn't make the magic non-ritualistic; dark magic is also cast with a wand.
I'm starting to suspect that the information is hidden on purpose. Spell creation… It's not easy, but wand magic is also limited in scope as it always depends on the power and will of the caster. A ritual can have other sources of power, sources not from within oneself. That technically makes them more scalable than spells.
If someone were to understand how they function and had the patience to experiment with different formulas, they could potentially achieve just about anything.
I haven't been very interested in magic recently, but this has reinvigorated my curiosity. I feel like I could achieve so much with just the simple knowledge I've managed to glean from the books borrowed from my friends.
But there's only one thing I want. And I only have two more months to achieve it.
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Harry closed the diary and put it away. He was starting to reach the end now. There were a scant few pages left. Maybe ten, or twenty. His mother hadn't really kept a consistent journaling schedule. The entries sometimes appeared several times in one day, and other times not at all for weeks on end, at which point she would come back with a completely different attitude, something having obviously changed.
Here, she'd been discussing rituals and how she wanted to create one.
He knew what she'd been trying to accomplish, and going by some information, such as himself in a mirror and other clues, he knew that she'd succeeded.
A shake of the head. He didn't want to be thinking about this right now.
His conversation with McGonagall had helped him refocus. His energy had been spread too thinly. The Mists of Moria, the wasp enchantment, the cabinets. The last two could be easily dropped. He'd already noticed a strong increase in productivity when it came to the projects he'd kept since he now had more time to spend on them. In the end, his goal was to increase his fighting ability. The cabinets hadn't been contributing much considering Dobby's taxi service, and the transfiguration professor had been right that he should first master animating the wasps as quickly as possible when they came out, and also to first learn how to make even more of them, before focusing on something as complex as casting a conjuration, an animation and an enchantment in less than a second.
He'd also been struggling a bit with other decisions over the past few weeks. While he'd continued going to the sessions with Quirrell, since they were immensely useful, he was now waiting in the usual room for his friends and Neville's golden trio to come and practice duelling.
He invested a lot of time in teaching others. He taught Tonks occlumency, and in the next weeks, they'd meet to work on the Aqua Eruptio spell. But, well, Tonks was currently his best friend, and while he'd been helping Cedric and Penny along, they had, like the children they were, started losing motivation, saying that they might prefer preparing for the end-of-year exams instead.
All valid, but how was he supposed to tell them that it was potentially their lives at stake if conflict erupted? Would conflict even erupt? Dumbledore seemed like he had a pretty good grasp of the situation.
In essence, Harry was wasting a lot of time, several hours a week, teaching the chosen one and his compadres because apparently literally the entire rest of the Wizarding World couldn't be arsed. Sure, Neville and Harley had come back with a few extra tricks after Christmas vacation, but considering the precariousness of their identity, one would have thought that their parents would have cared enough to start earlier.
Was Harry simply too paranoid because he knew exactly what might happen in the next few years? Was he unempathetic, manipulating Neville to increase his combat potential alongside his two friends, essentially helping turn him into a child soldier.
Harry dragged a hand down his face as the door to the large abandoned classroom opened, and this universe's version of the golden trio strode in.
They looked stressed, just like every week since they'd come back from the Christmas vacation.
It wasn't too difficult to guess why. Harry glanced to the side, out of the window and towards Hagrid's hut, where, for the 23rd day in a row, smoke had been belching out of the chimney like crazy.
In addition to one of their friends insisting that he could and would illegally raise the dragon, there was also, of course…
"The stone's in danger, Hagrid told someone how to get past the" Neville started in a frustrated tone of voice before realising that Harry didn't technically know about the Cerberus.
"I remained unconvinced," Harry replied flatly. "And even if the real stone is here, Dumbledore is more likely to succeed in protecting it without outside interference."
"But he trusts Quirrell, he's made a mistake of trusting the wrong people before," Neville insisted, Harley nodding alongside behind him, while Hermione bit her lip.
"You haven't even told your parents about your suspicions, which proves to me that you don't really think it's that urgent," Harry replied. In the original books, Harry had no one to talk to, and Ron's mom was a housewife, his dad worked in an office, and Hermione's parents were Muggles.
In this world, Neville's dad was running for Minister, and Harley's dad was a high-ranking Auror.
Neville and Harley both bit their lip to go along with Hermione, who was doing it for a different reason.
"They're busy, I don't want to disturb them," Neville explained petulantly.
"My dad also has his own worries," Harley said vaguely.
Harry gave them a dubious look. "If the philosopher's stone gets into the wrong hands, then we're all fucked. Is being a minister really that much more important?" he asked.
Hermione gasped at his language.
"But we know it's Quirrell," Neville insisted.
Harry, for the life of him, didn't understand how the trio had actually managed to nail down the real suspect, mostly because they weren't telling him.
"Something you still haven't provided concrete evidence for," he thus replied briefly.
Neville looked away shiftily; he was really a horrible liar. "You're just biased because you get lessons from him," he said accusingly.
"He's the best DADA professor we've had yet; I'm using him for what I can before he also inevitably succumbs to the curse. If the stone is really in Hogwarts, he'll probably get it by turning into a golden statue because it travelled through the pipes and fell on his head while he slept."
"Could it actually do that?" Hermione asked dubiously. "Turn someone into gold?"
Harry gave her a queer look. "How am I supposed to know? I know basically nothing about alchemy," he replied.
Neville, meanwhile, latched onto another topic. "My dad was the better teacher!" he insisted somewhat angrily.
"You weren't even there last year to compare the two!" Harry exclaimed while throwing out his arms. Then, realising that he was arguing with literal children, who for some reason believed the philosopher's stone was really in Hogwarts, and that an evil dark wizard in disguise was going to steal it, but still refused to tell their literal Auror parents.
He realised now that either for their own reasons, or because of his influence, Cedric and Penny had been much more mature at this age.
This teaching of the chosen one better generate some karmic debt, Harry mentally grumbled to himself. No one was supposed to deal with pre-pubescent kids as much as he did. Becoming a teacher was a career because careers were voluntary.
Talking about Cedric and Penny, they still hadn't shown up, and now it was late, so they probably weren't coming.
There was something fundamentally infuriating to be one of the few in the know about a potential conflict brewing in the background and not be able to prepare the people in one's life.
The only people he'd managed to help decide to leave the country were the Malfoys of all people, who, now that they took his Charon person more seriously, had trusted him when he'd said it was maybe time to go to France for a bit to recover and observe. They could even keep training Draco there and then stage a return of the prince once he matured. Sure, being away from the country's politics physically would harm the family's interests somewhat, but so would getting killed by a pissed off Voldemort looking for his Horcrux. Naricassa, a Slytherin, if nothing else, knew how to save her own hide and which people to avoid.
Also, well, it wasn't yet completely decided, but the Dursleys would likely be moving to Barcelona, which was all kinds of bonkers.
Harry, a transmigrator into the Harry Potter world, had thus far managed to avert a potentially bad fate for the Dursleys and the Malfoys, which was all kinds of ridiculous really when you thought about it.
"I guess Cedric and Penny aren't coming," he said with a disheartened sigh, turning the previously somewhat heated atmosphere into more of a pity party from the golden trio who were surgically attached at the hips and felt bad that he didn't have the same relationship with his own friends.
Harry buried his face in his hands as Neville, Harley, and Hermione all threw him pitying looks. He was a 40-something-year-old in the body of a 13-year-old being pitied by his 11/12-year-old students because he'd been ditched by his 13-year-old friends.
"What is my life?" he whispered to himself.
"I'd say they're about equal," Harley suddenly spoke up randomly.
By the confused looks everyone threw towards her, nobody really knew what she was talking about. The girl didn't seem bothered and shrugged, bouncing her wild curly black hair. "Uncle James and Quirrell, I'd say they're both equally good."
Neville looked betrayed, Hermione looked curious, and Harry just appreciated the respite the empathetic girl had granted him. It was nice to see that she could be nice when she wasn't being a pain in the ass.
Harry gave a last sigh, placed his hands on his knees, felt older than ever, and pushed himself up.
He'd eliminated some tasks, but considering the likelihood of Neville getting involved in some shithousery until Voldemort was truly dead and buried, it would be unethical not to teach him, considering no one else was seemingly interested in doing anything of the kind.
"Alright, it's fine, we have two pairs. Harley, Neville, you've gotten the knockback jinx down by now," he said with an approving nod. The two beamed, elbowing each other, while Hermione frowned. "That means you know how it is to master a spell to the point it's actually usable in combat. What you learned isn't only the knockback jinx, but also the meta-skill learning. We will now start applying that skill to a more complex spell, which will carry more utility than flipendo, at least until you develop the kinetic output of that spell with an advancement to the bombardment spell."
"What spell is that?" Hermione asked curiously with her hand up. A gesture Harry was trying to help her unlearn, so he stared at her blankly until she put her hand down.
"The disarming charm, expelliarmus, we've already practiced a bit, but not to the extent that we should do to potentially use it wordlessly," he explained.
Hermione scrunched her eyebrows. "I've been wondering. What makes the disarming charm better than the stunning spell?" she asked.
"Yeah," Harley piped up. "If someone's unconscious, isn't that better if they're just disarmed?" she asked.
"That depends on the situation. For most formal duelling and in fact for street fights as well, it's better to disarm someone than to stun them," Harry explained. "The stunning spell has a counterspell, but the only counter to not having your wand is to get it back. Have you ever seen a witch or wizard do something useful without a wand?" he asked rhetorically.
Neville tilted his head curiously. "I read up on combat spells. Why was stupefy classified as more difficult than the disarming jinx?" he asked.
Harry nodded. "That's another important point. Don't let this scare you off, but the stunning charm veers more into the direction of dark magic. You have to feel like you have the right to render someone unconscious to use it, which requires more harmful intent than simply disarming someone."
"But then why will we be learning it in the fifth year?" Hermione asked, seemingly alarmed.
Harry shrugged. "All magic exists on a spectrum of intent. The darkest spells require the intent to kill, torture, or control. They're on one side of the spectrum. On the other side are spells like the Patronus Charm, which require happiness. Stupefy is somewhere in the middle, a normal spell, with a bit of intent. It's not harmful on its own, which is why it's not dark magic. Legally, there is no good use for a torture curse after all, while the stunning spell is justified as a self-defence tool since it doesn't inflict any lasting harm or pain." He then shook his head. "But enough about the theory, Neville, Harley, you already know the disarming jinx, go spar with only that to familiarise yourself further. In your free time, you can cast it concurrently to develop a feeling just like we did for the knockback jinx."
"Does that mean I should switch my focus?" Harley suddenly asked. "I've also been trying to learn the wordless version of the knockback jinx," she said a bit jealously, glancing at Neville, who sheepishly rubbed the back of his head.
"Yes, feel free to switch the focus to this. I'd say the disarming charm is more useful than the knockback jinx, because it essentially does the same thing, throwing someone backwards, just that the disarming charm, also, well, disarms them," Harry explained, and the pair went off to start throwing the red spell at each other.
Harry turned to Hermione, who wasn't so used to teaching yet as she'd only attended a session or two before the Christmas break. Enough to start trading spells, not enough to know one of them intimately. "The Defence Against the Dark Arts class teaches the disarming charm in either the second or third year," he started explaining to the frizzy-haired girl who seemed like she would prefer a bit of history with her training, unlike the other two dunderheads.
"It's a continuation of the knockback jinx, as I've already explained, as it adds the effect of disarmament to the kinetic force generated. It's not rare for first years to pick up the spell if they read ahead," he said with a shrug towards Neville, who was growing increasingly proficient at the spell and duelling in general, easily leading Harley around by her nose to the frustration of the older girl. "I also learned it in my first year and have used it in the duelling tournament. It's fundamental, basically."
Hermione scrunched her brows. "Do aurors also use it?" she asked curiously.
"It's doubtlessly part of their repertoire, how much they use it depends on personal preference, however," Harry answered, knowing it to be true. The disarming charm and the stunning spell were the core of non-dark subjugation methods and had been mentioned as such often enough.
Hermione nodded resolutely, looking a bit enviously at the way Neville and Harley were duking it out. She looked like she couldn't wait to get to that level.
Harry was curious to see her develop. Neville's talent was monstrous, Harley's was decent, but he'd yet to explore the depths of Hermione's. Cut that, that sounded wrong.
"Let's get started then," Harry said, beginning with a deeper explanation of the theory of the spell, the arithmancy, and the reasons behind the incantation and the wand movement.
Hermione was soaking it all in with wide eyes.
One always had to tailor the approach to the student.
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AN: Quick update to celebrate my new original story on RoyalRoad reaching a 289 followers. As promised I will post a chapter for every 100 followers to celebrate, so there will be another update tomorrow and probably the day after at least
Check it out as well btw, it's a comedic time loop in a fantasy world with an anti-hero protagonist, who, just like Harry Evans, is a wizard (albeit one of much less skill and intelligence).
Honestly, if you like my writing style you'll love it
Time Looping for Dummies by Bor902 on RoyalRoad