Corvus watched the boys get swallowed by hands and laughter with a faint smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
Harry tried to endure it with the stiff pride of someone who wanted to look grown, but Alice's hands moved with a mother's stubborn certainty and kept nudging him anyway. Frank stood close enough to block trouble without making it obvious. Neville hovered like a loyal shadow, then remembered the leopard and hesitated before stepping in again. Sirius looked offended that Harry had become an animagus within hours without coming and asking his wise godfather. The offence did not last. It turned into noisy relief.
Draco had it worse.
Narcissa's fingers brushed his tail into place with a satisfied smile, then checked his posture as if the fox form had revealed a flaw in his spine. Draco endured the inspection with the expression of a boy who knew that suffering under his mother and aunt was a privilege.
Bellatrix circled him like a shark that had discovered a new toy. Her grin stayed too wide.
Corvus let the scene run for a while. The outcome was already locked. The oaths would hold. The boys would learn control through repetition.
His attention slipped away anyway.
Paris.
The incident had landed with the kind of timing that was too useful to be called luck. It gave the new order moral ground and a clean excuse to tighten the screws without needing to justify the use of force. It mattered more than the television hosts, more than the expert panels, more than the saint nonsense.
Arcturus spoke with him for nearly an hour about the developments.
Corvus listened, answered, and gave new orders depending on the current political weather. He watched the room for the moment it would tip toward foolish curiosity.
Bellatrix shifted her weight and opened her mouth. Corvus felt the question forming.
He decided he had endured enough family time and vanished.
Bellatrix's lips stayed parted for a second after he disappeared, then she huffed like a wronged queen.
--
Northwest China was heat, distance, and nothing that cared whether he existed.
Corvus appeared at the edge of an endless desert under a pale sky. Wind dragged sand along the ground in thin sheets. The horizon flattened into a line where caravans of the Silk Road moved back and forth for centuries.
He stood still long enough to orient himself.
The destination of the portkey residue clung to his senses, a figurine he found in Diablo's collection of trinkets. Its destination was what Corvus was looking for. The so-called Immortals and their findings.
Flamels and Diablo were what Corvus expected. Herpo was a total failure. He hoped this one would be a good catch.
Corvus lifted into flight and moved.
He layered invisibility and phase around himself without effort and cut across the desert. The Tien Shan Mountains rested to the north, distant and cold. The Kunlun Mountains lay to the south, darker on the horizon. The desert between them felt empty until his psychic senses snagged on an active mind. He followed it and found himself in a cave. Corvus did not feel the same emptiness he felt in Abydos. There was only a man who had found something old and convinced himself he was a legend.
Hou Yi, this was the name he got from Diablo's mind. Corvus had done the necessary amount of research to identify the myth and confirm that the name was being worn like stolen robes.
The legend was of a celestial archer who shot down nine suns out of ten to protect the earth from getting scorched. A heroic tale wrapped in absurdity and worship. Similar geographies had similar tales with different planets and celestial bodies.
He moved and searched without sound. After a while returned to the wider chamber, the man sat in lotus position on a flat slab of rock. He was alive. He looked calm, but his breathing was strange. It moved from one hectic rhythm to another. His upper body was moving as he was having an epileptic attack.
He did not notice anything. Corvus studied him for a beat, then reached out with replication.
The result was ...absurd.
Mana Absorbtion
Kung Fu - Gold
Tai Chi - Gold
Wing Chun - Silver
Baguazhang - Silver
Archery - Silver
Farming - Orange
Cleaning - Blue
Cooking - Green
Hunting - Green
Comical and ineffective martial training at a level that would impress some mundanes who liked costumes and titles, and would bore anyone who had watched a real fight. Archery at a competent level. The rest were domestic skills.
Farming, cleaning, cooking and hunting. Corvus was not sure what to think. These will not appear even with the first-year Hogwarts students. His left eye ticked.
He pushed into the man's mind with psychic mastery.
Memories opened.
First things he found were a strong belief in being a chosen one, a heavenly heir and having a dragon bloodline.
Beneath all that, the man sitting was a farmer.
Five centuries ago, Lie Wei had lived a simple life and wanted more than soil and hunger. He had crawled into caves looking for ancestor spirits because he had heard too many stories and believed the heavens owed him a miracle.
Most caves had given him bruises. One had given him a bow and some parchments.
An older cultivator, dead or vanished, had left an enchanted weapon and parchment describing a discipline that did not rely on a wand. Mana absorption. A method to draw ambient energy and store it.
Wei had found it and decided it was fate.
He had taken the name Hou Yi because he wanted a legend that sounded bigger than a farmer.
The rest was the same pattern Corvus had seen in a hundred stories. A man declared himself young master even as he aged. He demanded respect from empty air. He threatened clans that did not exist.
Corvus extended his psychic mastery through the stone itself and mapped the cave properly.
A stash lay concealed beneath some dirt. Swords rested on carved racks, their edges reinforced with mana saturation rather than true spellcraft. A pair of heavy metal knuckles pulsed faintly, designed to channel absorbed energy into blunt force. Several talismans hung from pegs, each etched with copied symbols Wei had seen and never understood. The enchantments were not functional; they were decorative, as if a child had traced a master's diagram without grasping the principles beneath it.
Lie Wei was not a wizard in the formal sense. He had lived since before the Statute and survived only because he was lucky enough to find notes of an elder about mana absorption and never stopped feeding on it. Without education, without structure, without a wand or theory, he had become something adjacent to a wizard and far beneath one at the same time. He could feel mana. He could pull it into himself. He could not refine it properly, nor could he shape it with discipline.
His mind wrapped this crude survival in cultivation fantasy. He believed he was in the Qi Gathering stage, that deeper meditation would push him into Foundation Establishment, then Core Formation, then some imagined ascension beyond mortal flesh. He was trying 'breathing techniques' to find the most effective one.
In his delusion, witches and wizards were simply higher realm cultivators who had abandoned the Mortal Realm centuries ago. He considered himself the elder left behind to guide humanity, beginning with what he called Dragon Country. He never questioned why the higher realm cultivators had bothered to tell him that.
Corvus let the contempt settle. The man had mistaken isolation for revelation and ignorance for destiny.
Corvus dropped phase, invisibility, and flight. His boots hovered an inch above the stone, then touched down.
Wei's eyes snapped open.
The man stared at Corvus as if a ghost had stepped out of the wall.
Chinese left Wei's mouth fast, sharp, and full of theatre. "奉天龙之名,你是哪个人?"
Corvus blinked once and inhaled slowly, then shifted to fluent Guānhuà. It was the spoken language, or rather official speech, in the Ming Dynasty, the early fourteenth century.
Wei repeated the question with more anger. "In the name of Heavenly Dragons, who are you?"
Corvus held his gaze.
Wei's pride inflated on contact.
Wei's voice rose; the script of it was obvious to anyone who had ever watched a fraud perform. "How dare you ignore me. Do you not know who I am?"
Corvus let the silence stretch.
Wei stood.
He made a series of rigid hand movements, each one careful enough to look impressive to an audience that did not know better.
"Courting death. You dare ignore this master."
The words came out like someone reading from a scroll. 'Some cultures are really strange.' Corvus murmured to himself.
"Kneel before me, or I destroy your entire clan."
Corvus felt a small, dry amusement.
Cultivation stories loved this nonsense.
The real enemy in them was always other cultivators or clans, rivals fighting for scraps of power. Yet every deluded idiot who read too many scrolls tried to dress the world as Dragon Country is good like that, old and rich with culture, powerful with thousands of clan elders, secret clan elders and some more immortals who had zero morality to hurt each other, but the bad ones are always the Eagle Country, Sakura country and some others. In general, Japan and the West.
Corvus did not bother responding.
Wei's face reddened.
"Insolent dog. Even the heavens tremble when I speak."
Corvus started walking forward.
Wei was shorter than Elizaveta. The fact would have been funny if Wei had not been making it worse with every breath.
Wei started to pose in strange positions, then shouted, "Drunken Elder's Thunder Kick. "
The movement came out like a man copying a drunk monkey.
Corvus caught him by the throat and lifted him off the ground.
Wei's eyes bulged. His hands grabbed at Corvus's wrist. Corvus tightened his grip just enough to stop the struggle from becoming noise.
With a simple thought, Wei's limbs separated cleanly and cauterised by controlled heat before blood could become an inconvenience. The man's scream tried to form and failed. Corvus severed the vocal cords of the lucky moron with the same indifferent expression.
Wei dropped to the floor in pain, silent, shaking and ruined.
Corvus stepped over him and searched the chamber with psychic senses.
The cave held more than one room.
A secondary tunnel had been reinforced with crude effort and delusion. Wei had been preparing a second chamber, a place to wait like a spider. He believed he would one day pass his knowledge to a chosen disciple with a golden finger.
Corvus processed the rest of his memories. There was nothing else.
An intricate bow, with strange runes on it and parchments describing mana absorption and some of the runes.
Corvus used spatial mastery to reach the other chamber. He doubted he would fit in the tunnel. He stepped into the hidden room, took the bow and the parchments, and collapsed the chamber behind him so no one else would stumble into the same problem.
He returned to Wei.
The man's eyes followed him with a mixture of hatred, fear and incomprehension.
Corvus lifted him into the air with psychic force and held him level, silent and helpless.
"I agree with you on one thing," Corvus said in Guānhuà.
Wei's eyes flickered.
"You really did have a golden finger."
Corvus's mouth curved slightly.
"Now it will be severed, examined, understood and serve a higher purpose."
Both men vanished from the cave as the cave itself collapsed.