With that done I went about my day as normal. That is to say working tirelessly to practice the magic I learned from the books I read. Having the instinctual skill of Grindelwald made this process very fast but magic was no simple thing. While it was possible to use a spell without fully understanding it full mastery required that very understanding. It was why I had it so easy helping my peers with their work in fact. Thanks to all my advantages stacked onto each other my understanding of magic was quite high. Not quite at the level of a professor but not terribly far off either.-
Compared to that first year knowledge and problems were a piece of cake. There was a downside to following Grindelwalds skill imprint though, I began to mimic certain mannerisms. The way he walked, held his wand and his posture all seeped into my own and blended in such a way Dumbledore was practically glued to watching me these days. I could only imagine what was going through his head as he saw all these familiarities show up. He was probably having alarms go off in his head if I had to guess.-
Not that he acted on them though, at least not directly. There were minor tests of course, a classmate mentioning a belief like the old mans near me, someone mentioning how awesome some muggle technology or other was, that sort of thing. He was probably trying to figure out if I was either learning from Grindelwald or possessed by him. Technically that first option was true since I was indeed using Grindelwalds skill imprint to accelerate my progression but I wasn't directly under the man's tutorship. I did however start working on collecting the things Grindelwald wanted.-
It was a bit of a pain in the backside since I couldn't use the BD wreath in or around Hogwarts without the dense ambient magic frying it. Still sitting several hundred feet above Hogwarts on top of a cloud gave me plenty of separation from the castles magic. I'd made a habit of using the wreath to learn other languages after taking a look at the list of things the old man wanted. His list wasn't completely unreasonable honestly. It was mostly basic stuff really for starting a magical plant farm. -
Seeds, dragon dung, dragon hide gloves, tools, that sort of stuff. The only real exception was the ward stone he wanted. Ward stones were the foundations of long term wards and depending on the size HIGHLY regulated. The small ones that could cover a small house with simple but decent enough wards were easy to get, it was every size after that that were a pain to get. These stones could be artificially grown which is how there were even any left after thousands of years using them, but it was slow. I'm talking an inch of growth per month slow.-
Stones big enough to handle complex or wide area wards took years to grow. Hogwarts ward stone for example was said to be the size of an adult dragon. Stones of that size simply don't exist unclaimed anymore. All of them were currently in use or buried deep in ancient ruins. Thankfully Grindelwald didn't want a stone that big, merely one six inches across and tall. Stones of this size were classified as "manor" stones and were typically used to ward manors and their yards. It wasn't hard to guess that the old fellow was planning to carve out a territory of his own warded to be unnoticeable by muggles, which is to say literally everyone other than him in that world.-
The seeds that he wanted made it pretty obvious that he was going to basically set up a whole miniature production farm for wiggenweld. He'd have the plant ingredients for the potion and would only need a Flobberworm population to complete it. The worms themselves weren't difficult to care for or breed either while the plants grew quickly with the magical methods of herbology. Once he got the farm set up he could brew wiggenweld in large batches and sell them in that world for serious profit that he could then use to buy more things from me.-
It was a clever work around to his lack of funds for trading. One I could genuinely appreciate too as not only would it enrich that world even only a little but it would also make him a repeat customer as I was the only source of magical ingredients or items he had. To be honest though I was expecting him to eventually ask for a magic ability stone so he could attempt spreading magic to that world.-
It wouldn't be particularly difficult either though he'd be unhappy the entire time. All he'd have to do was impregnate a witch over and over again. Considering his preferences however this would not be something he'd likely enjoy. Technically he could just impregnate a bunch of muggle women too but that would be a coin flip on if the resulting children had magic. It also wouldn't be a terribly stable genetic population since all the children magical or otherwise would be half siblings. For a decent shot at setting up a population of magic users there he'd need at minimum five fertile men and woman producing children and then those children marrying and producing children themselves.-
Technically he could take an even bigger risk and impregnate thousands of women via sperm donations and magical manipulation. This would create just enough magical gene possessing individuals for a magical population to eventually form with him as a common ancestor. This route would take a LONG time to pull off though, longer than he'd likely live by far. It might not even work either as the emergence of these magical people without proper training would undoubtedly result in their hunting and possible extinction before they could ever have kids of their own.