Outside the iron cage, Lucien's eyes had transformed into bottomless black whirlpools as the Eye of Peering Magic operated at full power.
In his current field of vision, the magical circuits inside the giant serpent were laid completely bare.
Those magical pathways, which should have extended and branched in an orderly structure like the limbs of a great tree, were now utterly twisted.
It wasn't a simple misalignment or blockage, but a complete structural deformation, as though someone had forcibly twisted the branches of a tree into tangled vines.
Some sections even overlapped in places where they should never have intersected, making the entire magical structure look chaotic and unnatural.
As he observed Nagini's magical circuits, the knowledge of Dark Magic curses that Lucien had been cramming recently flashed rapidly through his mind.
Simply put, the erosion caused by a curse could be divided into three aspects: the physical body, the magical circuits, and the soul.
Physical curses were the most intuitive and relatively easy to deal with.
A curse like that of a Maledictus, one that flowed naturally through the bloodline, would inevitably involve physical erosion, though the severity and manifestations could vary greatly. Nagini transformed into a beast, while other cursed individuals might suffer from accelerated ageing or a frail, sickly constitution.
At least with this kind of curse, the damage could usually be observed directly through the body.
Magical curses were much more troublesome.
They often caused elusive magical complications, such as certain spells becoming stronger or weaker, irregular loss of magical control, or even an allergy to magic itself.
These types of curses mostly attached themselves to the magical circuits of the afflicted person, using the victim's own magic to sustain themselves.
This meant that the stronger a wizard's magic, the more stubborn the curse became.
Every spell cast and every surge of magic was effectively feeding the curse, allowing it to remain rooted in the victim's body.
And the most vicious were soul curses.
They eroded a person's very self, including memory, emotions, personality, and consciousness.
They were also the hardest to deal with because the soul was so fragile.
Use too much force, and the afflicted person could be reduced to an idiot or a lunatic. Use too little, and it would be impossible to dislodge the roots of a curse that had been entrenched for years.
Lucien's gaze swept meticulously across the twisted magical circuits inside Nagini's body.
Compared with those of a normal wizard, they were already something belonging to an entirely different species.
And compared with the magical circuits of the magical creatures he had recorded so far, they matched nothing he had ever seen.
They were neither those of a snake, nor a bird, nor any other creature.
They were malformed circuits forcibly twisted into shape by the curse.
In other words, what he was seeing now was not the natural magical structure of some transformed creature.
It was a structure that had been distorted little by little until it had become something entirely different.
The black whirlpools in his pupils slowly faded.
Lucien did not stop. He raised a hand and lightly brushed his fingers across his eyes.
A radiance of interwoven silver-white and emerald-green seeped into them, transforming into complex symbols that slowly expanded and contracted deep within his irises.
"Spirit-Seeing Sight."
This was a form of magic he had obtained from Slytherin's inheritance in the Chamber of Secrets, specifically used to observe souls.
His vision changed once again.
The outline of the giant snake inside the iron cage became semi-transparent, and a mass of greyish-black mist could be faintly seen occupying the area where its head should have been.
The mist was so dense that it refused to disperse, like years of accumulated grime or spreading mould, burying something deep within it.
Lucien examined it carefully.
The mist was not complete.
Deep within that greyish-black mass, a faint light would occasionally flicker.
It was like starlight hidden behind thick clouds, or a candle flame on the verge of going out, struggling weakly against being swallowed by total darkness.
The light was extremely faint, but it was still there.
Lucien let out a soft breath.
The soul had indeed been contaminated by the curse, and quite severely.
But fortunately, it had not been completely consumed.
This matched Nagini's earlier confusion while communicating with Lumen. She had not yet become a completely bloodthirsty beast.
Those chaotic reactions, sometimes pleading and sometimes roaring, were precisely the soul struggling beneath the erosion of the curse.
At times, her original consciousness seemed capable of briefly surfacing.
At other times, the curse clearly overwhelmed it again.
It had been decades.
For Nagini to endure for so long without her soul completely sinking beneath the curse's corruption, those decades must have been incredibly difficult.
Lucien rubbed the space between his brows.
Why were Dark Magic curses so difficult to break?
Because what one often faced was not a simple jinx left behind by a caster, but a kind of symbiote that had already fused with the cursed person.
The curse used the victim's own magic to sustain itself, creating a terrifying vicious cycle.
It could even actively counterattack. When faced with an external force attempting to dispel it, the curse might shrink, distort, or even detonate part of its own energy to harm the victim, resulting in mutual destruction.
In other words, carelessly trying to remove it could easily cause more damage than leaving it alone.
The longer a curse persisted, the deeper it became rooted.
At first, it clung only to the surface, like a poster stuck to a wall.
Gradually, it seeped deeper, becoming like a relief carved into the wall itself.
And finally, it became part of the wall, impossible to peel away without damaging the wall along with it.
Moreover, while the curse attacked the body, magical circuits, and soul simultaneously, those three aspects also became intertwined with one another, causing the difficulty of treatment to rise bit by bit.
Damage to one could affect the other two.
That was exactly what made the situation so troublesome.
It was like defusing a bomb.
The tangled, overlapping wires had to be disconnected in the correct sequence. Otherwise...
Boom.
The complex runes in Lucien's eyes slowly faded.
His vision returned to normal.
He had some ideas regarding the physical body and magical circuits.
Those two areas were difficult, but at least he could already see a possible direction.
But as for the soul...
That was another matter entirely.
Perhaps he needed to return to the Chamber of Secrets once again.
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