The train journey was already halfway through.
The air inside the compartment was a strange mix of the chocolate frog's sugary sweetness and the unpredictable flavors of Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans, yet the atmosphere only grew more heated.
Fred and George had by now completely accepted Alan as one of their own.
To them, Alan's mind—always capable of dissecting everything with the simplest logic—was like an untapped treasure chest, brimming with endless, ingenious possibilities.
Eager to prove that they too were "brilliant," Fred's eyes turned mischievous. From the depths of his trunk, he carefully produced a small wooden box.
The box was no larger than a palm, engraved with a few crooked and unstable-looking magical runes.
"Look at this."
He lowered his voice, leaning forward with the air of someone proudly unveiling a great secret.
"I call it the 'Portable Swamp'!"
Fred's eyes gleamed as he boasted about his creation:
"As soon as you open it, you can instantly create a patch of real swamp anywhere! Perfect for dealing with that old git Filch. It's practically a masterpiece!"
As he spoke, his fingers pinched the edge of the lid, ready to reveal his miracle.
But magical inventions—especially unfinished ones—were always full of variables.
Perhaps it was because the Hogwarts Express happened to lurch around a bend at that exact moment, or perhaps Fred's self-made runes already contained fatal logical flaws.
The instant he lifted the lid, a torrent of uncontrolled magical energy surged out from the cracks.
"Pffft!"
A muffled noise, like some massive weight plunging into a swamp.
A gush of dark green sludge burst violently from the tiny box, reeking of rotting plants and foul marsh stench.
This was no trickle—it was a geyser.
In less than a fraction of a second, the sticky muck had coated the entire floor of the compartment, and then, as though alive, began climbing the walls and corroding its way upward.
Dark green moss and foul-smelling aquatic plants of unknown origin spread at an unnatural rate. Slimy vines coiled around the luggage racks, and a few pallid fungi even sprouted from the cracks in the seats.
"Oh, Merlin's long stockings!"
Lee Jordan let out a shrill scream, springing off his seat like a catapult, scrambling to wedge himself into the tiniest space possible to avoid touching even a speck of filth.
Fred and George were utterly dumbstruck.
The pride that had lit their faces just a second ago froze into sheer horror.
"Scourgify!"
"Quick! Quick, clean it up!"
They fumbled to draw their wands, flailing them at the ever-expanding swamp. But their spells either sank without effect like stones into water, or worse—triggered a violent reaction, causing the muck to surge and froth more ferociously, the stench intensifying to the point of nausea.
In less than a minute, the once-comfortable compartment had transformed into a nauseating, foul-smelling swamp.
Despair began to creep across the three boys' faces.
They even started exchanging glances, silently asking whether they should smash open the window and jump out of the train to escape.
And at that moment, Alan calmly stood up.
Amid the chaos and panic, his movements were unbelievably composed.
There wasn't the slightest trace of disorder—not even a furrow of his brow. It was as though everything before him was nothing more than a dull, long-expected demonstration in a lab.
With elegance, Alan drew his wand.
He spoke no incantation.
He merely gave the faintest, casual flick.
One gesture. Nothing more.
From the wand's tip, a gentle halo of magic—nearly invisible—spread outward in silence, like ripples across a still lake disturbed by a pebble.
The halo carried no color, no heat, not even the faintest trace of magical fluctuation.
It simply existed—and swept across the space.
Wherever it passed, miracles occurred.
The sticky swamp muck on the floor, the slimy moss creeping up the walls, even the nauseating aquatic growths floating in the air—all of it, upon contact with the halo, was completely disassembled, erased. Not cleaned away, but as if an unseen hand had wiped them from existence in this very dimension, vanishing without the faintest residue.
In less than three seconds, the compartment was spotless again.
The floor gleamed like a mirror, reflecting the boys' stunned faces.
The walls were immaculate.
Even the stubborn stench that had clung to the air was gone, replaced with the fresh fragrance of grass after a rainfall.
It was as if the disaster moments ago had been nothing but a shared, absurd hallucination.
A perfect, wordless, impossibly effective Scouring Charm.
Fred.
George.
Lee Jordan.
The three of them were utterly petrified.
Mouths agape, frozen mid-motion—whether standing or crouched—they stared blankly at Alan. The look in their eyes was no longer that of classmates, but of people staring at an incomprehensible creature wearing human skin.
A first-year, casting silent spells—on the train, even before arriving at Hogwarts?
This was no longer in the realm of genius.
This was pure impossibility—an earth-shattering truth that threatened to overturn the very foundations of everything they had believed about magic for the past eleven years!
Under their gaze—shocked, awed, tinged with fear—Alan calmly slipped his white ash wand back into his robe pocket.
"There's no need to be surprised."
His voice was steady as ever, as if stating a law of physics.
"I spent my entire summer treating every chapter of the first-year textbooks as separate research projects. Take the Scouring Charm, for instance. Its essence is not 'cleaning,' but the forced disassembly and benign restructuring of material within a designated area."
He paused, then continued in the tone of someone explaining an experimental principle:
"As long as you fully understand its underlying logic, and simulate enough iterations to derive the optimal magical output model, then achieving it isn't difficult."
"This is simply the first practical result of connecting theory with application."
Every word landed clearly in the Weasley twins' ears.
To treat wondrous magic as something dismantlable—a "science."
To view the textbook not as future lessons, but as research problems to be solved in advance.
To regard spellcasting as the "practical outcome of theory applied."
This way of thinking was a chasm—vast and unfathomable—between Alan and the traditional wizard's mindset of "we'll learn when the professor teaches us" or "magic is just a feeling."