Interesting.
Charlie allowed himself a small, private smile. Maybe it was because so much of the wizarding world still lived in the last century. A lot of these books didn't read like proper textbooks. They felt more like memoirs—full of the authors' wild tangents and long stretches of first-person storytelling.
It made them a hell of a lot more fun to read.
He turned back to the section on moon rituals.
[Different cultures all have full-moon rituals. For example, the Celts believed that on the night of the full moon the doors to the faerie realm opened, connecting the human world to the other side.
On those nights they would light bonfires in the wild and gather herbs, because herbs harvested under the full moon were said to hold the strongest magic.
In the North, the Vikings held their rituals during the winter moon. They carved runes onto wooden slips and left them in the moonlight so the wood could drink in the moon's power.
Warriors would also set out mead as an offering to the earth and the moon, asking for victory and courage.]
Charlie stared at the photograph of the rune-carved wooden slip and felt a sudden itch in his fingers.
If you carved runes like that onto wood, could it really absorb moonlight?
Thanks to his alchemy studies he already knew the basics of runes. The main symbol here was Abundance, with a ring of smaller arrays around it that he couldn't read yet.
If he looked at it through alchemy, maybe those outer arrays were the part that pulled in moonlight?
Thinking about it wouldn't get him anywhere. Charlie closed the book, stood up, checked that Anthony and Hector were still asleep, and slipped out of the dorm.
Golden dream sand drifted along the dormitory stairs and lay thicker across the common room. He was used to it by now.
A few students were still hunched over their work in the common room. The space was so empty and quiet that every footstep echoed. That kind of silence never happened in Ravenclaw during the day.
No one looked up when he passed through. No one noticed when he left.
He headed downstairs, staying alert and moving fast out of habit, until he reached the alchemy workshop inside the Room of Requirement.
Hagrid's chopped wood was still stacked in the corner. Charlie grabbed a piece, opened the book, and copied the rune as carefully as he could.
Half an hour later he set the carving knife down and turned the wooden slip in his hands, checking every line. Once he was satisfied, he left the room again.
Out in the corridor he glanced up at the sky. The weather wasn't bad, though the wind was still sharp. He thought for a second, went back inside, and grabbed two heavy objects. He used them to weigh the slip down on the windowsill so it would stay flat and catch as much moonlight as possible.
It wasn't a full moon tonight, but Charlie knew that as long as the moon was in the sky he could still collect Moon Dew. The concentration would just be lower.
Tonight the moon showed only about a third of its face. At his usual speed he figured he could pull maybe half a bottle in half an hour if he pushed hard.
He looked at the slip pinned in place. He didn't need much. If the rune actually worked, if it could hold even a tiny amount—just one drop would be enough.
The next morning.
Even though the match wasn't until afternoon, the Great Hall was already loud with Quidditch talk. It was one of the few real entertainments at Hogwarts, and most people showed up even if their own house wasn't playing.
"Charlie, you really not going?"
"Nothing worth seeing. I'm sure Harry'll win." He answered without looking up from his plate.
"Sounds like an excuse to me," Anthony said, shaking his head. "Fine. We won't drag you."
Eighth floor.
The wind was still blowing hard. The sky had gone lead-gray and the air smelled damp and cold. The snow season was over. Rain season had begun.
"Hope they finish before it starts pouring," Charlie thought, sending a silent wish toward Harry and the others.
Then he looked at the wooden slip he'd left on the windowsill the night before.
It looked ordinary. The only visible change was that it had picked up a little moisture overnight.
The Abundance rune— the book hadn't said what special effect it was supposed to have after a Viking full-moon ritual. Maybe it didn't do anything at all. Maybe it was just a prayer.
Instead of guessing, Charlie had a more direct way to test it.
He picked up the slip with his right hand and held his left hand above it, fingers curled like he was about to grab something. He focused his natural-harvesting sense on the wood.
After a moment a faint pull answered from inside the slip.
He slowly drew his left hand back, still in that grasping shape.
A thin wisp of silver mist rose from the wood and gathered toward his palm.
"Feels like I'm pulling out a soul," he muttered.
"Speaking of which—does natural harvesting count souls as part of nature?
If I get good enough at this, am I going to end up ripping people's souls out?"
He shook his head and felt a sudden chill. The skill that had always felt like something gentle and nature-spirit-like suddenly seemed a lot more like dark magic.
A moment later the extraction finished. Charlie stared at the single drop of Moon Dew floating above his left palm, expression complicated.
Good news: it worked. Bad news: the efficiency was terrible.
Still. Progress was progress.
Next step was breaking down the perception function inside the weather-prediction ball.
From an alchemy standpoint the ball's rune array had three jobs: sense the surrounding environment, calculate or predict the coming weather, and project that weather inside the crystal.
His main goal was to isolate the perception part.
[Perceive weather, drive rune to collect Moon Dew, transform and store.]
That was the plan.
He pocketed the wooden slip and headed down to the fourth floor, straight to Professor Chambers' office.
The wooden owl on the door looked like it was sleeping—eyes closed, wooden chest rising and falling in a slow rhythm.
Knock knock.
Charlie tapped lightly. The owl's eyes fluttered open.
"Do you actually need sleep?" Charlie asked, curious.
"What kind of question is that? Owls sleep during the day."
Charlie smiled at its wooden body. "Fair enough. So you really think you're an owl?"
"Now that's the strange question. What else would I be?"
The owl had gotten comfortable enough with him to drop the politeness. Charlie took that as a good sign.
"All right. Is Professor Chambers in?"
"You ever going to visit just to see me?" the owl grumbled, then nodded. "Yeah, he's here."
A moment later it opened its eyes again. "Go on in."
The door clicked and swung open on its own. Professor Chambers was sitting at the workbench along the side wall. He set down his carving knife, stood up, and brushed off his knees.
"Welcome, Charlie. Skipping the Quidditch match?"
"Got something more interesting waiting for me." Charlie smiled.
Chambers chuckled. "Flitwick says you have a gift for the art of language. I have to agree.
Come in, sit down. Don't stand in the doorway. Problem with your project?"
Charlie took the seat across from the desk. "Something like that. I've been studying the weather-prediction ball you gave me."
"One function in particular caught my interest."
"Oh, I'm glad to hear it." Chambers leaned back in his chair. "Wait—don't tell me. Let me guess!"
He held up a hand before Charlie could speak. "You want to know how it predicts the future, right?"
Charlie thought for a second, then shook his head.
"Half right?"
Chambers looked surprised. "Not the prophecy part? Most young wizards can't get enough of prophecy. Predicting their own future, love, grades…"
"Like the pumpkin head I made?" Charlie said with a small smile.
Chambers slapped the desk. "Exactly."
He laughed, then looked at Charlie again. "All right, your turn. I give up. Who could possibly read the mind of a first-year who's dead-set on studying alchemy and running a chocolate business inside the school?
Speaking of which, I saw your painting. Very well done. Where did you get the idea?"
The professor knew about Lely and the shop? Lely hadn't mentioned anything.
Maybe he'd only looked at the painting itself and never bought anything.
Charlie noticed Chambers seemed unusually cheerful today—his thoughts jumping from one thing to the next.
"I saw it in a book. Got the idea from Muggle vending machines.
You put coins in, and the machine drops out a drink or a snack."
Chambers listened quietly, nodding slowly as he thought it over.
"Clever. Though if you wanted to make something like that work in the wizarding world, the goblins would be the biggest obstacle.
They keep their coin anti-counterfeiting methods completely secret. No wizard knows how it works. All we know is they can tell a real Galleon from a fake with one glance. Anyway—enough of that. Back to business."
Charlie nodded.
"Professor, I want to know how the weather ball perceives the outside climate.
Lightning, sunlight, moonlight, rain and dew—it senses them in such detail it's like there's a pair of eyes watching the world from inside the ball.
It's incredible. I want to understand that part."
Professor Chambers nodded once, then stood and walked over to his bookshelf. He started pulling down books and scrolls.
"Let me see… that was an old assignment. I'm not sure if I still have the original design notes."
He searched the upper shelves, found nothing, then crouched and opened the lower cabinet. It was much messier—rolls of parchment piled together.
After a while he stood up holding a scroll.
He came to stand beside Charlie—Charlie stood up too; it felt wrong to stay seated while the professor was on his feet.
They cleared space on the desk. Chambers unrolled the parchment.
It was about twenty inches long and ten wide, laid horizontally. In the center were three-view drawings of the crystal ball and its base.
All around them, dense notes and rune diagrams filled the margins.
Chambers was clearly in an excellent mood today.
"Start here." His finger tapped a line of text in the upper-left corner.
"First, the base. This rune lets us collect and perceive the surrounding environment. Then this array here—"
He moved his finger down to the next cluster of runes.
"—projects what we've sensed onto the crystal ball. That's the Hogwarts castle you see inside.
Remember what I said in class?
Alchemy tools are divided into three functional zones."
Charlie nodded. He'd already been using the three-function theorem to break down the weather ball.
"Input, Transform, Output.
The Philosopher's Stone takes in raw materials, transforms them, and outputs the Elixir of Life.
The Sneakoscope absorbs malice and dark magic fluctuations, analyzes them, and outputs light and spinning to warn the wizard.
For the weather ball, my breakdown is: it perceives the environment and climate, analyzes and transforms the data, and finally projects the predicted weather inside the crystal ball."
Chambers looked pleased. "Exactly. If you're still taking my class in sixth year, remind me to give you extra points."
He picked up a quill and circled a section of runes.
"The climate-perception runes are this segment. I used a Karlshan lattice to connect it to the next section so it can keep feeding data continuously into the analysis array.
Of course, if I were designing it now I'd use something harder but more stable and efficient—the Feathered Serpent pattern. Now look at this part. Do you know why I designed it this way?"
This lesson was probably the hardest one Charlie had sat through in a long time. It felt like those old math classes back in the day. He didn't dare let his attention wander for even a second.
Only when Chambers stopped to flip through a book could Charlie catch his breath. Even then, the professor wasn't pausing because he'd forgotten something—he was doing it for Charlie's sake, because Charlie's foundation wasn't strong enough yet.
"See this section in Advanced Alchemy. It explains the advantage of this design clearly.
High-level alchemy items have a complete, circular rune circuit. Input, Transform, and Output form one continuous logic loop.
But on the actual rune layout, it isn't a straight line. It's a circle. Like a watch. Everything has to work together as one complete whole."