Ten more days passed without ceremony.
For Thaddeus, time no longer moved in clear lines of past and future. It flowed like the sea beneath the ship—endless, shifting, without fixed landmarks, unless he deliberately chose to mark them himself.
The system, however, did not allow him to drift entirely without structure. A new feature had quietly integrated itself into the right corner of his vision. At first, he thought it was an illusion born from fatigue—a faint glow, a subtle set of numbers flickering at the edge of perception. But when he focused, it stabilized.
[TIME: 06:41:12 DAY: 17]
The format felt incomplete in a way only something non-human could have designed. There were no months, no familiar calendar system—only a continuous count of days since his arrival, paired with a precise, ever-moving clock that never paused, never softened, never drifted from exactness.
It was simple.
Stripped down to its most basic function.
And yet, it changed everything.
For the first time since waking in this old era, he had something resembling orientation. Not geographic, not political—but temporal. A fixed point he could always return to.
At first, he found himself checking it often, almost instinctively, as if afraid it might vanish if ignored.
But it remained—steady, unblinking, reliable.
It became easier to measure progress now. Not just in spell mastery or system rewards, but in something far more fundamental—duration itself. How long he had survived. How long he had learned. How long he had remained alive in a world that was still only partially understood—an old era whose rules he had not yet fully grasped.
And within those ten days, the system sign-in rewards did not disappoint.
He had received another spell book that opened another branch of magic in the system.
Old, bound in worn leather, its edges slightly curled from age and exposure. The title embossed on the cover was simple:
A Beginner's Guide to Transfiguration
Thaddeus remembered the way he had gasped when he claimed it and it materialized in the air before him. He did not touch it immediately instead;he used a levitation charm to hold it suspended in front of him.
Then he studied it first, quiet awe settling in his eyes. He might not have been a diehard fan of Harry Potter like Marco, but he understood the value of what lay before him.
Finally, he picked it up.
The moment his fingers made contact, a faint warmth passed through him—nothing explosive, nothing violent like the surge he had come to associate with active spellcasting. It was quieter than that. Subtle. Almost like recognition.
He opened it.
And the world of Transfiguration unfolded.
Transfiguration was not simply transformation.
It was structure rewritten at its most fundamental level. Not illusion. Not manipulation of perception. But change imposed directly upon reality itself.
The book laid it out in careful, simple terms at first—how matter held a kind of memory, how form was bound to intent, how even the smallest object resisted alteration unless it was understood down to its core structure.
Then it deepened.
Wood into metal.
Stone into fabric.
Living tissue into temporary alternatives—each accompanied by sharp, deliberate warnings, as if the book itself was cautious about how easily such knowledge could be misused.
And beneath every example was the same unspoken truth:nothing yielded without being understood first.
Thaddeus read slowly, absorbing each concept with the patience of someone who understood that real power was never rushed into existence. But what struck him most was not the theory itself—it was what it implied. If even a chair could be reshaped into steel… then a blade could be turned into something entirely different. Or worse—something living.
The book did not exaggerate the danger. Across multiple chapters, in slightly different phrasing each time, it returned to the same idea:
Transfiguration was not creation. It was persuasion, and reality did not always agree.
Still, his mind moved beyond the caution. He thought of combat, of survival, of control—and of what a master of Charms might achieve if he fully expanded into this branch of magic.
Dumbledore came to mind again—an unavoidable comparison now that the system had given him reference points. A wizard not just of power, but of precision of controlled transformation.
If Thaddeus could reach even a fraction of that understanding…
The possibilities were not just useful.
They were decisive.
After claiming the Book of Transfiguration, Thaddeus immediately began practicing spells under this new branch of magic. Unlike Charms, where his mastery already held firm, Transfiguration challenged him at every step. It took him a full day before he managed to turn a wooden spoon into a silver one.
Three days passed before a wooden cup became a proper goblet.
A week before a plate briefly turned into a living bird.
There were repeated mistakes, moments of doubt—but he could feel the progress.
The third book arrived a week later as a sign-in reward. It was another interesting one: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
The author's name was written in flowing script: Newt Scamander.
The title struck something oddly familiar.
That was… the name of a movie he remembered watching before he came here.
For a moment, he just stared at the book, expression going completely blank.
"…You've got to be kidding me."
A pause.
Then, still staring at it like it might suddenly make more sense, he opened the book.
At first, he thought it would be irrelevant—a catalogue of creatures, academic curiosity at best, a distraction at worst. He even considered setting it aside until bedtime.
But as he began to read, that assumption slowly started to dissolve.
The wizarding world did not separate knowledge into "useful" and "useless" in the way he had initially believed. Everything had application. Even creatures. Even monsters.
The book detailed habitats, behaviors, magical traits, and—most importantly—methods of interaction. Not just how to survive encounters, but how to communicate, calm, or avoid conflict entirely.
He paused when he reached entries marked with warning symbols.
Basilisk. Acromantula. Dragons.
Each description was calm, almost clinical, yet the danger beneath the words was unmistakable. These were not mythical curiosities. They were living catastrophes existing in the same reality as him.
And yet… there were methods.
Not of domination.
But of understanding.
That distinction mattered.
He leaned back against the wooden wall of his quarters, the ship creaking softly beneath him as it moved through unseen waters. The ocean outside remained endless and gray, but inside his mind, something was beginning to map itself—not geography, not direction, but knowledge of what might exist beyond the horizon.
Then a month passed.
And with it came the first natural crisis—subtle in its arrival, but unavoidable in its consequence. Something he would have to face and overcome.
TBC
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