Amidst everyone's eager anticipation, Halloween finally arrived.
Harry was regretting his decision. He felt he shouldn't have been so quick to agree to attend the Deathday Party.
The other students in the school were happily attending the Halloween feast. The Great Hall was decorated with live bats, as usual.
Hagrid's giant pumpkins had been carved into lanterns, so large that three men could sit inside them. Rumors were also circulating that Dumbledore had booked a troupe of dancing skeletons for the entertainment.
"Hermione, are you still going to the Deathday Party?" Harry couldn't help but ask.
"Mmm," Hermione nodded, but her attention was clearly elsewhere.
At seven o'clock, Harry, Ron, and Hermione walked straight through the doorway that led to the crowded Great Hall. It was brightly decorated with lanterns and shimmering candlelight, and the tables were laden with enticing golden plates. Harry looked at the lavish scene, sighed regretfully to himself, and they headed towards the dungeons.
The corridor leading to the Deathday Party was also lit with candles, but it didn't look cheerful at all.
They were all thin, black candles, burning with a ghostly blue light. Even on their three lively faces, it cast a rather gloomy shadow.
With every step, the temperature dropped. Harry shivered and pulled his robes tighter around himself.
Just then, he heard a sound, as if a thousand fingernails were scraping across a giant blackboard.
"You call that music?" Ron grumbled under his breath.
They turned a corner and saw Nearly Headless Nick standing at the entrance to a large room, draped in black velvet curtains.
"My dear friends," he said with a strange sadness. "Welcome, welcome... so glad you could come..."
Looking at the hundreds of milky-white, translucent ghosts in the room, and the terrible, trembling dance music produced by thirty musical saws, it was like a nightmare.
In any case, this was the worst Halloween the trio had ever had.
And most importantly, it was incredibly cold!
But even if the trio's Halloween was so miserable, at least they had plenty of "people" for company. In comparison, the dull solitude on Marcel's side was truly unbearable—although he himself didn't mind at all.
At this moment, he was in the Room of Requirement, alone, conducting some strange experiments.
"...The effect of the rule-runes is indeed powerful."
He was still writing rule-runes with a quill. Although he had made no progress in their application, the number of runes he had deciphered was already a very significant achievement.
What satisfied him even more were the crude applications of abilities he had experienced while in Al-Ani's body.
After some research and verification, Marcel found that those enhancement abilities couldn't even be called rules, but were merely a rudimentary form of magic. However, they had also benefited him greatly.
He finally understood why Godric Gryffindor was known as the most accomplished duelist of his time.
When a wizard mastered a large number of spells that enhanced their physical abilities, their combat effectiveness would be greatly amplified. For this reason, Gryffindor, whose magical achievements were definitely inferior to Ravenclaw's and even slightly less than Slytherin's, was the most powerful fighter among the four Hogwarts founders.
Of course, there were probably other reasons, but according to Marcel's research and attempts, this was definitely one of them. It was even possible that Gryffindor himself had come from a background as a knight.
After a series of jumping, leaping, and spell-casting attempts, Marcel, having finished his research, rested for a while in the Room of Requirement before leaving and slowly walking back to his dormitory.
The corridors were quiet, with only the sound of the rain pattering outside, which made one feel a little restless.
It was always like this on holidays. When everyone gathered together, it meant that other places became much emptier.
"Vylie?"
After rounding a corner, Marcel saw Vylie Blois standing by a corridor window.
"..." Vylie turned her head and looked at him silently.
"What's wrong? Why aren't you in the Great Hall?" Marcel tried hard to make his expression less stiff, but even so, it was just a wasted effort.
"You've changed," Vylie said in a low voice.
After Luna, another person had said the same thing.
Although Marcel himself was aware that the change in him was that obvious. Even though he had been low-key enough, people who had been in close contact with him in the past would always notice some clues.
And Luna Lovegood and Vylie Blois, these two girls, were the most sensitive of these people. Hmm, perhaps Hermione Granger could also be added to this list.
After a little self-reflection, he paused, no longer forcing himself to fake an expression, and then shook his head slightly.
"Perhaps. But I am still me," he said calmly.
Vylie turned around, faced him, and looked at him carefully. Her tone was equally calm, but the feeling it gave was completely different from Marcel's coldness.
"...The old you was better," she said seriously, looking into Marcel's eyes.
With that, Vylie turned and left, as decisive as she had been in the library that day.
"Even without emotional ties, I still can't read her thoughts," Marcel thought to himself, quietly watching Vylie's retreating back.
The rain continued to fall outside the window. Marcel stood there for a while, looking out, then walked towards the Hufflepuff common room in the basement.
When he reached a corner on the third floor, his steps stopped.
On the other side of the corner, a huge snake was slithering in the corridor, and near its head, a small figure was drawing something on the wall.
"Ginny Weasley," Marcel said, turning to the side, his eyes fixed on the small figure as he whispered to himself.
"THE CHAMBER OF SECRETS HAS BEEN OPENED. ENEMIES OF THE HEIR, BEWARE."
The words, a foot high, were still faintly visible in the dim torchlight.
Finally, Ginny hung a petrified cat on the torch hook next to the writing—it was the caretaker Filch's cat, Mrs. Norris. And not far away, a door was wide open. It seemed to be a girls' lavatory.
Marcel quietly watched all this, pondering something to himself.
Suddenly, the sound of hurried footsteps came from the other end of the corridor. The giant snake heard it and immediately darted into the lavatory. Ginny followed, closing the door behind her.
A sign that read "OUT OF ORDER" swayed slightly on the door, as if refusing entry.
"...Harry, what on earth is going on?" said Ron, wiping sweat from his face. "I didn't hear anything."
"But I did! That voice was saying..."
Hermione, who was running ahead, suddenly gasped and pointed down the corridor.
"Look!"
Clearly, she had seen the writing on the wall. With words that large, it would be abnormal not to see them.
"What's that... hanging there?" said Ron, his voice trembling slightly.
They cautiously approached. Harry almost slipped; there was a large puddle of water on the floor. Hermione grabbed his robes to keep him from falling.
The two of them slowly approached the message, their eyes fixed on the dark shape below. They both saw what it was at the same time and jumped back in fright, splashing water everywhere.
But Ron was staring straight at the corner not far from here, as if something there had caught his attention.
The three of them, each with their own thoughts, stood there motionless for several seconds.
"Should we... try... to save it?" Harry stammered.
"Huh? What—ah!" Ron suddenly turned his head and was startled by Mrs. Norris hanging on the hook.
"What's wrong with you! Didn't you just see it!" Hermione said loudly.
"No, that is, I just saw—" Ron opened his mouth, but swallowed his words.
Just as Hermione was puzzled, a low murmur, like distant thunder, told them that the Halloween feast had just ended.
From both ends of the corridor, they heard hundreds of feet climbing the stairs, and the cheerful, loud chatter of people who had eaten their fill. Then, students began to push and shove into the corridor from both ends.
They were surrounded.
When the people at the front saw the hanging cat, the lively chatter suddenly died down. Harry, Ron, and Hermione stood alone in the middle of the corridor. The students fell silent, crowding forward to see the terrible sight.
In an unsettling silence, someone spoke.
"Enemies of the heir, beware! You'll be next, Mudbloods!" It was Draco Malfoy, speaking loudly.
He had pushed his way to the front of the crowd, his cold eyes alive, his usually pale face now flushed. He was clearly very pleased with the current situation.
He looked at the stiff cat hanging there, a blatant sneer on his face.
"What's going on here? What's going on?"
Filch had clearly been attracted by Malfoy's loud shout. He pushed his way through the crowd with his shoulder. Then, he saw Mrs. Norris.
Filch stumbled backward, clutching his face in horror.
"My cat! My cat! What's happened to Mrs. Norris?" he shrieked, muttering to himself, and then stared viciously at Harry, as if he wanted to eat him alive.
"Filch!"
Dumbledore and the other professors had arrived. In a flash, he walked past Harry, Ron, and Hermione and took Mrs. Norris down from the torch hook.
"Come with me, Argus," he said to Filch. "You, too, Mr. Potter, Mr. Weasley, Miss Granger."
Lockhart hurried forward, inviting Dumbledore to his office.
"My office is the nearest, just upstairs..."
The students silently parted to let them pass.
In Lockhart's office, Dumbledore bent down to examine the cat carefully, poking here and there. Lockhart stood by, pretending to be an expert, constantly offering useless advice.
"She's not dead, Argus," Dumbledore said after finishing his examination. "She has been Petrified... but how, I cannot say."
"Ask him!" shrieked Filch, turning his blotchy, tear-stained face to Harry.
Snape watched from the shadows, a hint of schadenfreude in his expression. For him, Harry's misfortune could be directly converted into his own pleasure, with a conversion rate of over two hundred percent.
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