After explaining the limitations of the Room of Requirement, Victor pushed open the huge door, and the newly established guild headquarters was revealed to the three of them.
"Woah! What is this place?!"
The three of them stared blankly at the magnificent but still incomplete garden and marble fountain. The endless gray-white stone path sparkled under a simulated sun. Looking up, there were blue skies and white clouds floating on the ceiling. The three of them could even feel a gentle breeze blowing past them, and the scent of earth filled their noses.
"This is the headquarters of a guild I founded called Fairy Tail," Victor said proudly. "This is the largest room the Room of Requirement can provide. It used to be a place for storing junk, but I burned all of that stuff later on."
"Fairy Tail? And what's a guild?!" Hermione looked at Victor with a confused expression, and the other two looked the same.
"It's a student organization I started. I'll start recruiting next semester!" Victor replied. "As for what the guild actually does, don't ask for now. You'll find out when the time comes!"
"Then what are we here to do?" Harry asked.
"I'm currently setting up the buildings here. I've already built that three-story wooden house in the distance, and I've put all the furniture and facilities inside," Victor said, pointing to the house in the distance. "What you three need to do is arrange all the furniture and facilities in that wooden house. I'll guide you when you're there. Of course, if you think there's anything missing in the house, like decorations or anything, you can let me know, and I'll go buy them!"
"Is that all?" Ron asked weakly.
"What are you thinking, young man?" Victor turned and gave a sinister smile, then pointed to a few large sacks piled up not far away. "After you've taken care of the wooden house, you have to plant all the seeds from those sacks in the flower beds, and then water and fertilize them!"
"That many?!!" Ron's eyes widened in disbelief as he looked at the huge sacks of seeds.
"This is just the beginning. There's still a lot of work to do!" Victor said nonchalantly. "But if you think it's too much work, you can call Fred and George to help out. I can pay them one Galleon a day!"
"Do I get paid?" Ron's eyes immediately lit up.
"Dream on. You're here to serve your punishment for breaking a school rule, so you don't get paid!" Victor said with the look of a wicked capitalist. "And if you're short on money, you can always go to the pumpkin head on the first floor. I don't think anyone has been able to get the game reward I set up since Fred."
"I'll pass on that…" Ron immediately shook his head in horror. He had been inside the pumpkin head once, and that one experience gave him nightmares for about a week straight.
"But Dreyar, I have a question!" Harry said, raising his hand with some difficulty. "Hogwarts doesn't allow students to return to school during the holidays, and we're all going home, so…"
"You don't have to worry about those things!" Victor waved his hand and then took out his wand. "Dumbledore already tacitly approved you to be able to come and go from Hogwarts freely during the holidays. As for how you'll get to school, I'm going to cast a spell on you now. I'll teleport you here from your homes at a set time every day…"
With that, he waved his wand, and a silver magical array lit up on the backs of their hands, but it quickly disappeared.
"What time should we come every day?" Ron asked.
"I'll teleport you here at eight-thirty in the morning and teleport you home at six in the evening," Victor said with a smile. "Don't worry, I'll take care of lunch! But please remember not to be in the loo during that time, or I'll throw you into the Black Lake if you dirty the headquarters!"
"I'm sure the merpeople there would be more than happy to have a bath with you!"
He is a monster!
Mum, the person in front of me is a monster!
Ron looked horrified.
All the boys at Hogwarts were warned not to go near the Black Lake when they first started school, especially during the spring and summer, but the school never gave a specific reason.
But as a Weasley, Ron knew why. Before he started school, his father, Mr. Arthur, had told him that during the spring and summer, the merpeople in the Black Lake might randomly grab one or two people to take back to their tribe for mating. Although he didn't know what their purpose was, they didn't seem to care about age.
And so, Victor's first year at Hogwarts gradually came to an end.
In late June, the students' holiday had just begun. After saying hello to the families of the three kids (he had to threaten Harry's family), Victor sent them and the Weasley twins, who had heard they could earn Galleons, to Hogwarts. He then went to the largest Japantown in London. He came here because today was a special holiday.
Today was the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, the traditional Japanese holiday: the Children's Day (Tango no Sekku). Victor was here to find the taste that he hadn't eaten in a long time.
Walking down the streets of Japantown, he looked around and saw that although this was a place where Japanese people gathered, the architectural style was still British. The only things that maintained a connection with Japan were probably the people and the food here.
Victor looked around and came to a restaurant that had a sign on a blackboard that said, "Chimaki for sale."
He pushed the door open and walked in. Perhaps because it wasn't mealtime, there were no customers in the restaurant, and he couldn't even see the owner. So, Victor shouted in the Japanese he hadn't used in a long time, "Is anyone here?"
As soon as he spoke, a middle-aged man suddenly poked his head out from inside the restaurant and replied in a not-so-fluent Japanese, "Yes, there is! What would you like to eat, young man?"
"Huh?! Are you from Kansai, boss?" Victor asked curiously, this time in Kansai dialect. He could tell the boss had a very heavy accent in his Japanese, like he was from the Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe region, and the moment he spoke, the Kansai flavor was impossible to ignore.
"Yeah! I've been here for a few years!" the boss replied with a smile. He wasn't surprised that Victor could speak Kansai dialect, as there were a lot of people from his hometown in Japantown. "But you look unfamiliar. Is this your first time here? Are you a foreign student or an immigrant?"
"You guessed wrong, boss! I grew up in London!" Victor said, pulling over a chair and sitting down.
"You're that good?!" The boss was surprised when he heard that Victor had grown up in London. "You grew up in London and can still speak such fluent Japanese and dialect?! You're not kidding me, are you?"
"Of course not!" Victor replied with a smile. "Boss, let's not talk about that for now. I saw outside that you have chimaki for sale here?"
"Of course, we do!" the boss nodded. "What kind of flavor do you want?"
"Do you have savory chimaki and pork with salted egg yolk?"
"Wow! You know your stuff! How many do you want?"
"Well, that depends on how many you have…"
Before long, Victor walked out of the restaurant dragging over two hundred pounds of chimaki. He then cast a teleportation spell and instantly disappeared from where he stood. But right after, people from the Ministry of Magic suddenly appeared near where Victor had just vanished and started looking for something everywhere. They had just detected some unknown magical fluctuations in the area.
Dragging the chimaki he had bought, Victor first returned home. Aliya, who was sitting on the couch with her legs out, was surprised to see him suddenly come back with a few big bags. She immediately asked, "Victor, I thought you were going to Hermione's house to play? Why are you back so suddenly? And what are all these things you have?"
"These are chimaki, and they're for eating!" Victor dragged the chimaki into the kitchen and then found the largest iron pot in the house. "And who told you I was going to Hermione's house to play? I had something important to find her for."
"Is there a difference?" Aliya walked over and curiously picked up a chimaki from the iron pot. "You just said this is for eating, but isn't this just a bunch of leaves?"
"What do you mean, 'a bunch of leaves'!" Victor immediately said in an annoyed tone. "These are a great thing! They're made of glutinous rice wrapped in a very fragrant plant leaf, and all sorts of ingredients are added to the rice. They're delicious!"
"Ugh, I don't understand what you're saying!" Aliya put down the chimaki, and then her expression suddenly changed, and she hit Victor on the head. "And you better tell me what you were doing with Hermione all morning. Did you make her angry and come back so soon?"
"Who made her angry?" Victor pretended to look wronged. "She broke a school rule, and I was just taking her back to school to serve her punishment."
"Nonsense!" Aliya lightly tugged on Victor's ear. "Don't think I don't know that students aren't allowed to go back to Hogwarts during the summer!"
"Why would I lie to you? There are a few other people besides Hermione. These chimaki are lunch that I prepared for them. I'm going to take them over after they're heated up."
"Really?!"
"Really!" Victor nodded.
"Then take me with you!" Aliya said, letting go of Victor's ear with a smile. "It's been a while since I last saw Hermione, and I never really got to properly tour Hogwarts when I went to that Quidditch match last time. Take me with you this holiday!"
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NOTE: In raws, the protagonist is a chinese man, but since this is a translation, and no one wants to see ching chong china in this fic, i opted to change the protagonist nationality to japanese.
If you've noticed in previous chapters, certain sayings and idioms were originally from China, but I've replaced them with equivalent Western expressions to convey the same meaning.
If the protagonist visits China in later chapters, any details that would imply it is his "hometown" or something along that line will be adjusted accordingly.
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