The compartment door was knocked on without warning, the sound urgent and filled with impatient energy.
Before Alan could respond, the door was flung open with a crash.
Two identical red-haired boys poked their heads in, their faces wearing the same mischievous grins of a successful prank. Behind them followed a dark-skinned boy, clutching a glass box carefully in his arms. Inside, a large, furry spider was restlessly crawling about.
Fred Weasley.
George Weasley.
And their close friend, Lee Jordan.
Their sudden intrusion shattered the silence of the compartment, which until then had belonged entirely to Alan.
Their eyes did not immediately fall on him, but were instead locked on the raven perched calmly on his shoulder.
That was no ordinary bird.
Its feathers were a depthless black, absorbing all the light in the carriage without a trace of blemish. Its posture was steady, lacking the restless twitch of common fowl. Most striking of all were its eyes—those orbs were not a dull black, but glimmered with a cold, intelligent light, gazing at the three uninvited guests with a scrutinizing, emotionless stare.
"Whoa!" Fred's exclamation came from the heart, making him forget the opening line he had meant to say. "That's one cool bird!"
"Its name is Corvus."
Alan closed the hardcover book in his hand. The cover bore no title, only a complex alchemical sigil embossed in gold. His voice was calm, concise, as though he had already foreseen their arrival.
The Weasley twins and Lee Jordan exchanged a glance, then squeezed inside without hesitation, plopping down on the seats opposite Alan. They had a natural charm that allowed them to befriend anyone, as though the entire Hogwarts Express was their playground.
Alan showed no sign of being offended. He merely watched them quietly, allowing them to observe both him and the small compartment.
"First year?" George was the first to speak, his eyes sweeping over Alan's brand-new but unmarked robes.
Alan gave a small nod.
"We're Fred and George Weasley, and this is Lee Jordan," Fred introduced enthusiastically. "We're third-years, Gryffindor. What about you? You don't look like one of us—you're way too quiet."
Alan's lips curved in the faintest arc. Instead of answering directly, he steered the conversation in a completely different direction.
"I'll ask you a question."
His voice was not loud, yet it carried a weight that commanded attention. Instantly, all three focused entirely on him.
"A bottle contains a special kind of bacteria. They divide once every minute, doubling in number. In one hour—sixty minutes—the bottle is filled completely, no more, no less."
Alan paused, his calm gaze sweeping across their curious faces.
"Now, how long would it take for the bacteria to fill half the bottle?"
"Ha, that's easy!" Fred blurted out, "Half the amount, so half the time—thirty minutes!"
"That's right, thirty minutes!" Lee Jordan echoed, wearing a look that said this is child's play.
George, however, frowned. He felt it wasn't so simple, though he couldn't quite put his finger on why.
Alan didn't reveal the answer immediately. He simply watched them in silence, letting their confidence ferment, then slowly curdle into doubt.
Fred and Lee Jordan's smiles gradually faded. They began to rack their brains, picturing the bottle and the bacteria inside. Divide, double…
For a moment, the only sound in the carriage was the rhythmic clank-clank of the train running along the tracks.
"Fifty-nine minutes."
Alan finally spoke, giving a number that instantly crashed their mental circuits.
"What?" Fred nearly leapt to his feet.
"No way!" Lee Jordan's eyes went wide.
"Because," Alan said, his voice carrying the unique calm of stating an axiom, "at the fifty-ninth minute, the bottle is exactly half full. One minute later, the bacteria divide once more, doubling in number—so half a bottle becomes a full bottle."
The compartment fell into stunned silence.
The Weasley twins and Lee Jordan gawked at Alan as if he were a creature from another world. That logical riddle, like a finely crafted key, had suddenly unlocked a new door in their cognition. They had never considered that a problem could be viewed from such an angle.
This first-year, who seemed aloof and perhaps even solitary, appeared to carry within his mind a world completely different—one of wisdom and pure logic.
The feeling was novel, and fascinating.
"Hey, check this out!"
Lee Jordan was the first to snap out of his shock. Almost as if he wanted to break the strange atmosphere, he excitedly pulled a crumpled copy of the Daily Prophet out of his backpack, spread it out forcefully on the table, and pointed to an inconspicuous little column squeezed between advertisements and gossip news.
"'Gringotts Goblin Stock Index' Annual Prize Contest!"
His finger tapped the tiny line of text, his voice rising a full octave.
"Guess which sector will have the steepest decline by the end of the year, and the final winner can claim a massive prize of one hundred Galleons!"
In that corner of the paper, a dozen strange and peculiar sector names were listed: Dragon Liver Trade, Wand Core Materials, Unicorn Hair Products, Goblin-Forged Armor, Cauldron and Potion Bottle Manufacturing… Each sector had a messy, tangled line graph beside it, enough to make anyone's eyes swim.
"Forget it, Lee." George leaned over for a look, then immediately lost interest and slumped back in his chair. "Who can make sense of this? Goblin minds are harder to predict than Merlin's beard."
"Exactly, it's pure guesswork." Fred waved dismissively in agreement. "A hundred Galleons? I'd rather spend time figuring out how to turn Filch's cat yellow."
But Alan's gaze was drawn to the headline.
His eyes swept rapidly over the sector names, and deep within his pupils it was as though countless invisible streams of data were flashing at high speed. His Palace of Thought activated in an instant, torrents of information colliding, cross-checking, and aligning furiously.
A key memory buried deep within his past life was triggered precisely by this contest.
Fairchild Semiconductor.
A former giant of the Muggle technology world.
By the end of this very year, due to a catastrophic technical miscalculation, the company would trigger a chain reaction across the entire industry. It would collapse into a vast financial black hole and declare bankruptcy.
It was an already occurred, irreversible, absolute historical fact.
Before Alan entered Hogwarts, in order to better understand the wizarding world, he had spent a great deal of time reading about Gringotts and goblin enterprises. In an ancient tome describing the goblin commercial empire, he had found a single, extremely obscure note—Gringotts goblins, through mysterious and secretive channels, had long since extended their investments into the non-magical world.
They were one of the hidden shareholders of Fairchild Semiconductor.
A bold, clear, and airtight line of reasoning took shape instantly in Alan's mind.
Fairchild's bankruptcy would cause goblins' massive investments in the company to be wiped out.
And goblins, as a race, were greedy yet pragmatic. To plug such an enormous financial hole, they would inevitably act. They would liquidate large amounts of assets they held—things nonessential to daily magical life, things that could quickly be turned into cash.
What wasn't essential?
Dragon liver? Fundamental potion ingredient—not possible.
Wand cores? The foundation of wizarding power—untouchable.
Goblin armor? The pride of their race and a strategic resource—absolutely not.
His eyes skimmed over the dozen or so options in the paper and finally locked onto one extremely obscure entry that almost everyone ignored.
"Gems and Rare Metals."
Apart from serving as luxury goods or materials for high-level alchemy, these weren't core to the wizarding world's functioning. Faced with immense financial pressure, these were the assets goblins would be most likely—and most willing—to dump.
Once they flooded the market to recover funds, the sector's prices would inevitably suffer a historic crash.
"I'll choose this one."
Alan's calm voice cut through the hushed whispering of the Weasley twins and Lee Jordan.
"What?"
The three of them turned at once, thinking they'd misheard.
Fred pointed at the nearly ignored sector to confirm:
"You mean… 'Gems and Rare Metals'? You're sure? This stuff's price hasn't shifted in decades."
Alan gave no explanation.
Any explanation right now would seem hollow—worse, it could expose the unnatural source of his knowledge.
Action was the best proof.
From the inner pocket of his robe, he withdrew a heavy pouch. It was made of dragon hide, enchanted with an Undetectable Extension Charm.
He loosened the drawstring and turned it upside down.
Clatter—
Golden Galleons poured out like a stream, piling into a glittering mound on the table. The dazzling gleam was so bright it made the twins and Lee Jordan squint and shield their eyes.
Alan slowly counted through the pile with a steady finger.
One coin, two… ten… twenty…
At last, he separated out thirty Galleons and pushed them aside.
He picked up a quill, marked a firm check next to "Gems and Rare Metals" on the contest slip, and signed his name neatly.
Then Alan handed the completed slip and the thirty Galleons to the raven perched on his shoulder.
"Go."
His voice was soft.
"Send it to the Daily Prophet."
The raven gave a sharp, piercing cry that cut through the chatter of the carriage. With precise talons it clutched the heavy bundle of coins and parchment slip, spread its wings in a sudden gust of wind, and darted like lightning through the half-open window, vanishing into the distant sky.
Inside the compartment, silence fell.
Fred, George, and Lee Jordan even seemed to stop breathing.
They stared at the now-empty table, then at the open window, and finally at Alan's face—so calm, so utterly free of doubt, like a being who had already foreseen the future.
Spending thirty Galleons.
On what to them looked like an impossible gamble, a matter of pure luck?
That extravagant, almost reckless gesture, combined with his godlike confidence—as though he held certainty of destiny itself—struck them with a suffocating force.
The Weasley twins and Lee Jordan were completely stunned.