Damian only knew the absolute basics of alchemy. Asking him to personally forge an alchemical automaton capable of repairing the Wizard Tower was a tall order.
Tower Spirit Zero explained, "Although I am not the spirit specifically designated for the Alchemy Workshop, as the core administrator of the Wizard Tower, I can activate the workshop's automated assembly mode. However, we currently lack the raw materials needed to construct an automaton."
Damian breathed a sigh of relief. He didn't have to build it himself; the workshop was largely automated. If he actually had to forge a golem from scratch, he had no idea how many years it would take just to learn the necessary alchemy.
Following Zero's guidance, Damian made his way to the second floor.
Stepping into the Alchemy Workshop, Damian felt a sudden sense of vertigo. It looked like the ruins of a long-abandoned, highly advanced assembly line.
The strange, complex devices piled across the room were heavily scarred by time. Damian eyed them skeptically. "Can any of this equipment actually still be used?"
Zero projected a translucent, 3D holographic model of the workshop in front of him. Most of the equipment in the projection glowed a warning red, with only a handful of components highlighted in blue.
"Currently, there is no intact automaton production line in the workshop," Zero stated. "However, a functional line can be disassembled and spliced together using surviving parts from different workstations."
"I have highlighted the necessary, functional components in blue. You simply need to detach these specific devices and reassemble them according to my schematics."
After some heavy lifting and precise maneuvering under Zero's step-by-step guidance, Damian successfully pieced together a functional production line.
He wiped sweat from his brow, remembering the construct's earlier warning. "Zero, give me the list of materials needed to actually build one of these automatons."
A dense list projected into the air, detailing names, pictures, and the magical properties of various materials to ensure Damian wouldn't make a mistake.
"Materials highlighted in gray are currently missing from our inventory," Zero explained. "However, several of these base materials can be salvaged by breaking down the ruined equipment in this room. Shall I initiate the recycling protocol for the damaged devices?"
"Wait," Damian paused, thinking it over. "Is there any chance of repairing those damaged machines later?"
He didn't want to blindly scrap everything. These ancient devices were incredibly precious; it was highly likely that no one in the modern Wizarding World knew how to build them anymore.
"Certain devices are structurally sound enough to be repaired," Zero replied. "I have already filtered them out of the recycling queue."
The 3D projection updated, highlighting specific machines in different colors to separate the scrap from the salvageable.
Damian nodded. "Alright. Recycle the ones that are beyond repair."
"Since there are no functional transport automatons, you must manually move the designated scrap to the recycling chamber," Zero instructed.
The tower spirit was a commander without an army, completely devoid of working drones. Even the tower itself was running on emergency low-power mode. After tens of thousands of years, the magical reserves in the tower's core were nearly dry.
Normally, the Wizard Tower could passively absorb magic from its surroundings. However, the corrupted environment of the Gap World made that impossible here.
Fortunately, Damian had his rune-based magic. Without it, hauling the heavy, ancient machinery by hand would have been backbreaking.
The recycling chamber sat right next to the main workshop. Damian levitated the ruined devices inside, watching as the room's automated systems smoothly broke the ancient metal down into raw, usable materials.
Once the salvage was complete, the required materials list updated. Damian scanned it closely. Several of the missing base metals were mundane and could easily be sourced from Earth.
However, two specific magical materials made him frown: Mithril and Magic-Sealing Stone.
Mithril was a naturally occurring, highly conductive magical ore in the Wizarding World, making it the absolute best material for inscribing runes and magical circuits. Because of this, it was exorbitantly expensive, and the Alchemy Workshop required a massive amount of it. With Damian's current vault balance, buying it outright was impossible.
But, Damian reasoned, once the Winter Forest exploration mission is officially over, I'll receive a massive payout. Selling a few high-grade potions on the side should cover the rest.
As for the Magic-Sealing Stone, Damian actually knew exactly where to find it. During one of his previous dream-excursions into the Gap World, he had encountered bizarre, petrified creatures that were entirely immune to magic. They had obsidian-black bodies threaded with dark red veins—the exact description of Magic-Sealing Stone. That specific dreamscape had been littered with floating pillars made of the stuff.
Because Magic-Sealing Stone violently rejected magic, it couldn't be stored inside an Undetectable Extension Charm, which had piqued his curiosity at the time. He had used a portkey to lock onto the spatial coordinates of that dreamscape, and now, that foresight was about to pay off.
With the workshop's immediate issues sorted, Damian turned his attention back to the metal disc in his mind, specifically the newly restored blue crystal.
He discovered that when he focused his mental energy on the blue gem, a private, 3D projection of the entire Wizard Tower appeared in his mind's eye.
The tower consisted of nine floors, including one massive subterranean level. The tower's primary magical core and Zero's central data matrix were housed on that underground floor.
Damian could theoretically control the entire tower through this mental projection. However, everything above the fourth floor was grayed out and unresponsive, marked as severely damaged or offline.
Damian's eyes lingered on the inaccessible eighth floor. That was where the Ancestor of Time, Aemon, had kept his personal chambers. If there were any clues about the ancient wizard's fate, they would be up there.
The seventh floor was designated as the grand library.
"Zero," Damian asked, "does the seventh-floor library contain ancient spells, alchemical formulas, and original meditation methods?"
"Yes," Zero confirmed. "All magical texts, formulas, and meditation methods are cataloged there. The library is managed by Tower Spirit Seven."
"However, Spirit Seven's data core is housed on the sixth floor, which is currently offline."
"In fact, aside from myself, the data cores for all twenty-three subordinate tower spirits are stored on the sixth floor."
Damian frowned. "Is there any way to repair or reboot their cores?"
Zero couldn't provide a definitive answer. "As the gray mist's corruption worsened over the millennia, I was forced to initiate a hard quarantine on the fourth floor. I currently have no telemetry or sensor data for anything above that level."
Damian looked at the fourth floor on his mental projection. It was labeled as the Bio-Workshop.
Recalling the horrifying, twisted monstrosities he had already fought in the Gap World, a bad feeling settled in Damian's gut.
"Zero... are there mutant creatures trapped in the Bio-Workshop? Things warped by the evil god's residual power? Does this mean I have to clear them out before I can access the higher floors?"
"Affirmative," Zero replied flatly. "The Bio-Workshop houses a massive, internally contained ecosystem. Millennia ago, numerous species lived and bred within its simulated environments."
"The gray mist is a volatile mixture of the evil god's lingering corruption and the temporal magic left behind by the Ancestor of Time. The entities within the Bio-Workshop were heavily exposed to it, resulting in severe, aggressive mutations."
"The internal containment fields of the ecological zone eventually failed, allowing them to roam the floor freely."
"To prevent them from infesting the rest of the tower, I permanently sealed the bulkheads on the fourth floor."
"If you wish to ascend, you must first eradicate the corrupted lifeforms within the Bio-Workshop."
Damian sighed, committing the task to memory. He went back to experimenting with the blue crystal's functions and quickly made a massive discovery.
The raw spatial energy stored within the red crystal could be funneled through the metal disc and directly injected into the blue crystal!
When he carefully pushed a fraction of that energy into the blue gem, the subterranean magical core on his 3D projection flared to life. He was actively recharging the Wizard Tower!
The metal disc was acting as a universal converter, taking the red energy he harvested from the Gap World and refining it into usable magic for the tower's systems.
This solved a massive headache. He had been stressing over how to power the Alchemy Workshop once he gathered the materials. Forging automatons required vast amounts of magical energy, and buying enough Magic Stones to fuel the process would have bankrupted him ten times over. Now, the Gap World itself would foot the energy bill.
Later that noon, London Port.
Several heavy transport trucks were parked outside a rented warehouse roughly a kilometer from the bustling docks. Muggle workers were busy unloading heavy crates.
Soon, the hundred-square-meter warehouse was packed to the ceiling with over a dozen different types of industrial-grade metals.
Damian had ordered it all. The Alchemy Workshop needed massive amounts of base iron, copper, and steel to forge the chassis for the automatons. And he didn't just need repair bots; the production line could build various types of auxiliary constructs. He was stocking up.
Once the Muggle workers were paid and out of sight, Damian drew his wand. With a series of practiced, rune-enhanced spells, he shrank the massive crates and funneled tons of raw metal directly into his magically expanded pouch.
"Meow~"
Nox, who had been comfortably dozing inside Damian's hood, crawled up to perch on his shoulder.
Damian tapped his own throat with his wand. "Cat-speak."
"Damian, my clone saw Professor Quirrell heading toward Hogsmeade Village, meow~" Nox's trilling meow seamlessly translated into clear words in Damian's mind.
Damian smiled slightly, reaching up to scratch Nox behind the ears. "Good work, Nox. Thank you."
Hogwarts' one-week Christmas holiday was drawing to a close.
With the raw materials secured, it was time to head back into the wizarding world.
Damian pulled a flask of muddy, bubbling Polyjuice Potion from his robes and took a measured swig.
Instantly, his features bubbled and shifted like hot wax. A moment later, he had transformed into a completely different man with curly chestnut hair and a slightly weathered face.
This was the identity of a shady, mid-level magical merchant who usually operated out of Knockturn Alley. The odds of the real merchant being in Hogsmeade today were near zero.
After transfiguring his clothes to match a traveling merchant's worn robes, Damian activated a portkey. Space violently twisted around him, and he vanished from the London warehouse, reappearing in a quiet, shadowed alleyway in Hogsmeade.
"He's still inside the Hog's Head Inn, meow~" Nox reported from the depths of the hood.
Damian carefully lifted the cat out. "Hide here in the shadows. Wait for me to come back."
The Hog's Head Inn looked as uninviting as ever. Its rotting wooden sign, painted with a severed boar's head, creaked on rusted hinges.
The interior was just as grim. A thick layer of grime coated the small windows, blocking out what little sunlight managed to pierce the Scottish winter sky.
Damian stepped into the dim, sour-smelling pub and immediately spotted Professor Quirrell huddled in a dark corner, drinking alone.
Adjusting his posture to look suitably sleazy and anxious, Damian slid into the chair opposite Quirrell.
"I've got some... unusual goods moving through town today," Damian muttered in a low, conspiratorial rasp. "You in the market for anything special?"
Quirrell barely glanced at him. "N-no need," he replied quickly, his voice surprisingly steady.
The Defense Against the Dark Arts professor was clearly a few drinks deep. His pale cheeks were flushed, and his usual, exaggerated stutter was entirely absent, replaced by a look of profound misery.
Damian leaned closer, pulling a heavy, scale-covered egg from his robes and setting it heavily on the sticky table. "I've got a Norwegian Ridgeback egg right here. Fresh. You don't see these on the open market, mate."
Quirrell's expression twisted in annoyance. "I s-said no! Leave me b-be!"
Then, Quirrell abruptly froze. His eyes glazed over, his head tilting slightly as if straining to hear a whisper no one else could.
Deep within Quirrell's mind, Lord Voldemort's cold, raspy voice hissed , "Fool. Have you forgotten that oaf, Rubeus Hagrid, has a blinding obsession with dangerous beasts? Buy the egg. Use it to pry the information we need from him!"
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