You can read ahead up to 110 chapters on my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/darkshadow6395
Everyone's eyes turned to Ian.
At that moment, Ian had already pulled out a few alchemy items on the spot. Using a tube, he extracted a few drops from the potions in the reagent to analyze them. When he looked up, he was met with the intense stares of the old man and a group of werewolves.
"Huh?"
Before Ian could voice his opinions, Lupin pushed his body forward, shielding Ian as he simultaneously raised his wand.
"Can your real body get away?" Lupin lowered his voice and asked with a serious tone.
"This is my real body." Ian raised the item in his hand to prove that he was physically present. However, Lupin didn't quite believe him, after all, he had seen similar things before.
"If you can run, I seriously suggest you do it now. They might not hurt me, but they would definitely enjoy hurting you." Lupin's willingness to sacrifice himself moved Ian deeply.
Before Ian could respond with the highest form of loyalty, like "If you die, I promise I won't dig up your grave", Lupin had already shifted his gaze back to the group of werewolves, who were eyeing them like predators.
"He's just a child. You won't even spare a child?" Lupin's face was grim as he spoke, his eyes filled with a mixture of tension and vigilance.
"We haven't sunk to the level of random killing…" The old man said with some helplessness. But after a pause, he changed his tone to something far more serious. "However, he's not a werewolf. He cannot know this secret. Either he forgets everything he saw today, or he becomes one of us."
For these werewolves who wanted to keep the Lucid Awakening Potion a secret, this was perhaps the best way to handle the situation, especially with so many people involved.
However—
Lupin clearly wasn't going to let them cast a Memory Charm on Ian, nor allow Ian to be turned into a werewolf like them. Even if Ian hadn't been entrusted to him by Albus Dumbledore, Lupin still wouldn't stand idly by and watch a young wizard get harmed, not with his kind of personality.
"I must seriously remind you, Lucas, this child belongs to Dumbledore's house. Do you really want to provoke the strongest wizard in the world because of this?" Lupin knew he couldn't sway them by strength alone, so he chose to appeal to power. And in his eyes, he wasn't bluffing, he was almost 90% convinced of Ian's lineage.
"Someone from Dumbledore's house?" The old werewolf Lucas immediately furrowed his brows at Lupin's words. The werewolves around him looked a bit panicked, too, it was clear Lupin's tactic of name-dropping Albus Dumbledore had worked well.
"He's a descendant of Dumbledore's house?"
"No way! I've never heard anything about that!"
"That hypocrite must be lying! There are no descendants in Dumbledore's generation! My cousin once lived in Godric's Hollow!"
"Not necessarily… could be an illegitimate child. There were cases like that in the Dumbledore family before… I heard back then Grindelwald had a Dumbledore by his side."
"But that man is over a hundred years old, how could he have a kid this young?"
"You never heard the saying 'the older, the wilder'? … My mom gave birth to me at seventy."
"She still had a cycle at seventy??"
...
A group of werewolves, who had previously remained silent by the side of the elder Lucas, suddenly couldn't help but start whispering and gossiping furiously under Lupin's "threat."
"Silence!"
It took a loud shout from the elder werewolf Lucas to rein them in. The increasingly absurd and off-topic chatter of the werewolves finally died down, though a few in the back still whispered quietly with their heads down.
After all—
Werewolves are still people.
And where there are people, there's always a love for gossip.
"Just hearing what you said, how am I supposed to tell if you're not deceiving us?" Lucas was clearly somewhat convinced, but unlike the other werewolves, he wasn't so easily swayed, he had more shrewdness than that.
Even though doubts had begun to form in his heart, he still remained deeply committed to keeping the secret.
"Uh... werewolves don't lie to werewolves?" Lupin tried to win his trust by appealing to their shared kind. But despite how sincere his words sounded, they failed to have the desired effect.
"Heh."
The old werewolf, who had likely heard lines like that countless times in his life, simply let out a cold snort.
His expression remained incredibly stern as his eyes stared intently at the pair in front of him, his gaze switching back and forth between Lupin and Ian.
His eyes lingered the longest on Ian, deep and probing, as though trying to connect the boy's face with Albus Dumbledore in some way.
"I need proof," He said bluntly. "Don't blame me for being so cautious. You should understand what this potion means to us werewolves. We can't afford to let this information leak and lose our only hope."
The so-called hope wasn't spelled out explicitly by the old werewolf Lucas, but the weight of his words stirred all kinds of wild speculations.
"Hope? Meaning? You werewolves want to use your enhanced strength after transformation to found your own country somewhere?" As it happened, Ian was exactly the kind of person prone to wild speculation.
He put away what he was holding and suddenly asked this extremely out-of-the-blue question.
"Stop stirring things up, you troublemaking brat!" Lupin instantly broke into a cold sweat, heart leaping into his throat. He turned to look at Ian beside him, full of silent exasperation.
How dense did someone have to be not to realize the danger here? Was Hogwarts protecting its kids that well these days? There wasn't a trace of fear or anxiety on Ian's face!
"We're not playing some child's game here! You don't even know if you'll get out of this unharmed!" Lupin felt the need to remind the boy of the situation they were really in.
"Oh." Ian nodded.
Perhaps it was precisely this casual, nonchalant attitude that made the old werewolf Lucas feel like he was being looked down on, because he immediately glared at the boy in annoyance.
"Your guardian isn't wrong. If he can't give me a satisfactory answer, I'm afraid today won't be a good day for you; it could be the worst day of your life."
The tone of old werewolf Lucas was openly hostile.
"Should I understand that as a threat?" Ian looked up at the old werewolf, who was glaring at him fiercely.
"You think I'm afraid of Albus Dumbledore's retaliation? We're people with nothing left. Even if you are from Dumbledore's house, so what? What more could your family possibly take from us?"
It was obvious that Lucas was trying to put psychological pressure on Ian. But inwardly, his emotions were much more conflicted than he let on.
(To Be Continued…)