"Huh? What is it?"
Both Moaning Myrtle and the Fat Friar froze for a moment. Seeing that Myrtle was standing there dumbly, the Fat Friar took the initiative and floated over to her side, then looked curiously at Avada, who had already closed his eyes and was gripping his wand tightly.
"Don't move. Just a moment, please…"
Avada's voice was actually trembling. He ignored the shocked looks from those around him, drew his wand outright, and pointed it unceremoniously at the two ghosts' intangible forms.
Up until now, his research into mental power had focused primarily on humans. He hadn't studied ghosts or other non-human beings in much depth. That was why, when he had dragged Harry to the abandoned bathroom before, he hadn't noticed anything amiss. It was only just now—seeing Myrtle standing alongside other ghosts—that Avada, through comparison, sensed the faintest hint of discord in her mental power…
And under the current circumstances, that tiny sense of wrongness could mean a huge problem.
"…Found it!"
His face went deathly pale. Compared with the Fat Friar, he had finally pinpointed the source of that unsettling feeling coming from Myrtle.
Her memory structure had been altered—just a tiny bit.
An unimaginably tiny fragment, no more than a few milliseconds of memory. Within the vast accumulation of decades of memories, it was so insignificant as to be utterly negligible—less than a drop in the ocean, more inconspicuous than the plus or minus sign that had once fooled sophons…
Just a few milliseconds of memory. What could that even show?
Or rather—who would deliberately alter a ghost's memory by only a few milliseconds?!
"Myrtle, could you come out with me for a moment?"
Avada suddenly opened his eyes again, his expression instantly relaxing. The tension and trembling from moments ago seemed never to have existed. "I think there are some things I need to discuss with you privately—about the cause of your death. It's not really suitable to talk about it in a public place like this…"
"My cause of death? Don't you already know?" Myrtle followed after Avada with a puzzled look as he started walking away. "And what's there to be embarrassed about? It was the only remarkable thing in my dull dozen years of life—dying for no reason at all in a bathroom! Who else could pull that off but me?"
"..."
By the time Myrtle finished her rambling, the two of them had already left the lively Great Hall and come to a stop in the corridor outside. The noise of the feast hummed faintly through doors and walls, as if from another world. Only then did Avada draw his wand again and point it at Myrtle, his voice slow and low.
"Don't move."
"W-what's wrong?" Myrtle jumped when she saw the wand, then relaxed slightly after remembering she was a ghost and that very few spells could affect her—but she still shrank back nervously.
"There's something wrong with your memory… yes, just like that. Don't move…"
Avada carefully extended his mental power, touching that abnormal fragment within Myrtle's mind. Slowly, he began to correct it. Though it was only a few milliseconds' worth of content, it still took him a long time to smooth everything out and restore her memories to their most natural state…
"Is it done?" Myrtle blinked in confusion. "You've been holding your wand up for ages, but I don't feel like my memory's changed at all?"
"That's because the altered portion was too small," Avada said as he slowly lowered his wand, his eyes locked onto her. "Now think again—how did you die?"
"Huh?" Myrtle frowned, thought for a while, then answered slowly. "I was hiding alone in the bathroom, crying… and then suddenly I died…"
"Wait, didn't I tell you last time that I also felt dizzy? Sorry—I think I remembered that wrong."
"Before you died… did you see anything unusual?"Avada's palm was slick with cold sweat, but he still tightened his grip on his wand.
"Uh… now that you mention it, there really was something rather special. It seemed like…"
"A pair of enormous eyes?"
"..."
Avada fell silent for a moment, then let out a long sigh.
"Damn it."
The next second—he bolted.
Straight toward the abandoned bathroom!!
"Who did this?!"
"The diary? Pure-blood families? Or something else entirely? But how could they know someone would investigate the Chamber on the very first day of term?!"
"Hiding the entrance to the Chamber, altering Myrtle's memory, fabricating absurd attacks to muddy the waters…"
"Who the hell is it?!"
Avada felt his mind nearly drowning in an indescribable sense of fear. He ran as hard as he could, as if a raging flood were right behind him. And when he roughly shoved the door open and stumbled back into the abandoned bathroom, he finally realized that he couldn't escape—
The small snake emblem, which had shown nothing unusual through magical perception before, now revealed an incomparably complex and intricate structure when viewed on the level of the soul. Beneath layer upon layer of those structures, something like a hidden space seemed to lie concealed…
But that wasn't the point.
The point was that within the structures directly connected to the snake emblem—the magic used to open the Chamber—there was clearly a trace of artificial modification!!
"I should have realized earlier…"
Avada sank weakly into a crouch, pressing a hand to his forehead. "If Salazar Slytherin truly inherited the research of the Peverell brothers, and possessed the ability to inscribe Parseltongue talent directly into the soul and pass it down through generations… then if he wanted to construct an absolutely secret space, how could he not use techniques like this?!"
"The conditions to open the Chamber's entrance were altered—that's why Harry's Parseltongue didn't trigger a response back then. But that was on the very first day of term!"
"What in the world is going on…"
He stood dazedly by the sink for a long while, then shook his head hard. "Forget it. What matters most right now is breaking the magic on the Chamber entrance as quickly as possible and eliminating all hidden dangers!"
"I don't know if this hidden-space magic has any similarities to the Fidelius Charm. I need to contact Dumbledore. Damn it—if only I'd discovered this before he left…"
"Should I tell Snape? Dumbledore said he would do everything he could to protect the students, but he also said Snape could only be trusted at critical moments… why?"
Rubbing his temples, Avada slowly walked out of the bathroom.
It was easy to foresee that, for quite some time to come, Brain-Boosting Potions and Invigoration Draughts would once again become his staple diet. He had to exhaustively reference the Resurrection Stone and the structure of the Chamber entrance, analyzing and studying soul-related magic. And that meant spending long hours in this girls' bathroom—which was obviously not something suited for daytime…
"After sealing Voldemort, how did things not get any easier…"
Cursing under his breath, he turned out of the bathroom, planning to return to the Great Hall for one last moment of relaxation.
And then—
He saw Argus Filch.
And beside him, Mrs. Norris.
They were standing motionless in the middle of the corridor, their bodies frozen mid-step like two statues. Their eyes were wide open, staring straight ahead…
(End of Chapter)