**Chapter 74**
As the Christmas feast wound down, Albert had to admit that while the meals his mother had cooked in his previous life were delicious, the Hogwarts house-elves possessed a level of craftsmanship that surpassed any human cook. On an occasion like this, the feast rivaled—if not exceeded—what one might expect from a Michelin-starred restaurant.
After leaving the hall, Albert returned quickly to the dormitory, read for half an hour, and set his alarm for two in the morning. Fortunately, all his roommates had gone home for the holidays; waking in the middle of the night would disturb no one.
He climbed into bed, but his excitement kept sleep at bay. Eventually, he resorted to practicing the **Piercing Charm**—a habit he had developed to calm his mind before sleep—until fatigue finally pulled him under.
At exactly two o'clock, his alarm charm chimed softly. Albert rose from bed, checked that all his gear was in order, and dressed in his school robes before slipping quietly from the dormitory.
The castle was eerily silent. Christmas at Hogwarts, he realized, was far quieter than he'd imagined. Most students were gone, and those who remained had likely grown tired of the same corridors and games. The vast, torch-lit hallways were empty.
Albert made his way to Moaning Myrtle's bathroom, only to find it deserted. Perhaps Myrtle had floated off to attend some ghostly Christmas gathering. He remembered, from Nearly Headless Nick's Halloween party, that ghosts enjoyed holidays in their own peculiar way.
Approaching the sink, he confirmed the detail he had studied in the family's grimoires: a dry faucet adorned with the faint carving of a serpent.
In the original, the Chamber's entrance had been altered during Hogwarts' Victorian renovations, likely by a Gaunt ancestor. Using the sink as a disguise made sense; Salazar Slytherin himself, for all his darkness, probably wouldn't have chosen a girls' lavatory as the original entrance.
Albert took a slow breath and hissed in **Parseltongue**.
The faucet glowed white and began to spin. The basin sank into the floor, revealing a massive vertical pipe wide enough for an adult to slide through.
Casting a Cushioning Charm on himself—a spell he had long since mastered—Albert slipped into the pipe. He hurtled downward, the chute twisting and turning like a serpentine maze. Grimy water-stains streaked the walls, and the bends occasionally spun him around. He had the uncanny sense he was tunneling deeper and deeper into the earth.
Finally, the pipe leveled out. Albert landed lightly on the muddy floor of a massive stone tunnel, the Cushioning Charm absorbing the impact. The air was damp and heavy, and he felt, with a shiver, that he must be somewhere beneath the Black Lake.
The tunnel was silent. Only the faint crunch of bone under his shoes broke the stillness.
Albert raised his wand, murmured *"Lumos,"* and the beam of light revealed the floor strewn with small animal skeletons. He frowned. A creature the size of the basilisk wouldn't gain much energy from prey this small—these must have been incidental kills, perhaps left from the basilisk's first hunts decades ago.
Rounding a bend, Albert froze.
A glimmering green coil stretched across the floor—five, no, six meters long. As he crept closer, he realized it was a **shed snakeskin**, glistening faintly in his wandlight. The airless, damp tunnel had left a thin film of gray dust upon it.
Albert crouched, tracing a finger along the scale pattern. A perfect basilisk molt.
*This… is too valuable to leave behind.*
He drew out his spatial pouch and carefully stored the snakeskin within. Thankfully, the enchanted bag could hold objects many times its size.
Deeper he went, the tunnel twisting like a coiled serpent. Albert couldn't help but admire the mindset of the one who designed it: in darkness, a winding corridor like this would gnaw at the courage of any intruder, priming them for fear before the true danger arrived.
At last, the passage ended at a massive stone wall carved with two intertwined serpents, their eyes twin emeralds that glimmered like frozen fire.
Albert examined the wall closely. The gems were part of the enchantment itself; attempting to pry them free would be futile.
He hissed again in Parseltongue: *"Open."*
The serpents slithered apart. A crack widened into a yawning maw, stone grinding as the wall slid aside.
Albert straightened his robes, tucked the outer cloak into his spatial pouch to move freely, and stepped into the legendary **Chamber of Secrets**.
The chamber stretched long and high, supported by rows of stone columns entwined with carved serpents.
It wasn't as pitch-black as he'd imagined. A ghostly green light shimmered from above. Raising his wand, Albert noticed clusters of crystal embedded in the ceiling, channeling dim light from the lake above. Bioluminescent plants swayed in the Black Lake's depths, their glow refracted through the crystals.
The effect was otherworldly—and practical. The basilisk, he realized, didn't need light to hunt, relying on sound and scent. But the chamber's faint illumination meant Albert could fight without giving himself away completely.
He reached the far end of the chamber, where a titanic statue rose against the wall: the aged, solemn face of Salazar Slytherin, his beard cascading to the floor.
Looking up at the weathered features, Albert felt a strange, reluctant pity. Slytherin had quarreled endlessly with the other founders, ultimately leaving Hogwarts in bitterness. Even in stone, he seemed weary, his final years marked by isolation and obsession.
Yet pity had its limits. It was this man's creation—his "beloved pet"—that had stalked and killed a student fifty years ago, and now threatened Hogwarts again.
The basilisk was an **artificial monster**, born of a Dark wizard's will. And tonight, Albert Black had come to end it.
**To be continued…**