Chapter 14. The Treasure Chest in the Forest
Looking at the description before him, Duncan moved the thought in his mind and cast the Treasure-Seeking Spell.
Everything in Duncan's sight changed.
The plank-laid floor before him, the heaps of clutter piled like a mountain, and that shabby modified car all vanished.
He seemed to be placed in an empty void, and the only things he could see were clusters of energy in various colours and sizes.
He turned on his heel and gave a rough sweep with his eyes.
There were three colours in total—blue, purple, and gold.
The small ones were as tiny as grains of rice, and the large ones were about the size of an adult's head.
"What are these?
Is this what a Niffler's vision looks like when it searches for treasure?"
Frowning in slight confusion, Duncan stepped towards the nearest energy cluster.
He simply failed to realise that, although the clutter piled in the storeroom had disappeared from his vision, it still existed in reality.
Duncan took two steps forward, and his toes made intimate contact with something hard.
A stabbing pain shot through his big toe.
He drew a sharp breath, the corner of his mouth twitching.
Face contorted, he squatted down and rubbed the injured foot with one hand.
"What's wrong with you?"
Fred and George noticed Duncan's odd behaviour and thought he might be under a curse.
They hurried over to him, bent down to check on him, and asked with concern.
"I'm fine," Duncan replied through gritted teeth.
He gradually withdrew from that mysterious field of vision; the things before him slowly became clear again.
But those energy clusters did not vanish completely and still bobbed up and down before his eyes.
"Shift the brooms over there and have a look."
Duncan crooked his forefinger towards a spot not far away, where there was a tiny blue energy cluster.
"Where?"
Fred followed the direction Duncan indicated and saw the brooms thrown haphazardly into a corner.
He blinked in puzzlement, but he still went over with George, obeyed Duncan's instruction, bent down, picked up the brooms on the floor, and tossed them onto the nearby clutter heap.
"Ha—there's a bronze Knut here!"
Fred cried out in delight, pinched the coin between two fingers, turned, and showed it to Duncan.
A smile appeared on Duncan's face.
He had not expected the magic he had obtained from the Niffler to be this useful; it truly lived up to its description.
Pressing on, he looked around again and pointed out another place for Fred and George to search.
Moments later, the two of them pried two silver Sickles from a cracked seam of a filthy cupboard.
The successive finds made Fred and George excited.
They felt as if they were standing in a treasury and urged Duncan to hurry up and stop delaying their grand fortune.
Time passed.
The Weasley twins turned the storeroom upside down.
Even in areas Duncan had not indicated, they searched with extreme care, and they even scratched at the ground with their fingers, afraid of letting the slightest bit of small change slip away.
About half an hour later, they stopped searching.
In the end, they had found twenty Sickles and fifty-three Knuts.
Unlike the other three's excitement, Pro—perched on Duncan's hand—had dejection and sorrow flash through its eyes.
It had sensed the coins hidden beneath the clutter in the storeroom earlier as well, but it had not told Duncan, planning to come back later and steal them secretly.
It simply had not expected Duncan to seemingly learn its magic in the blink of an eye and find all the coins in the storeroom one by one.
Listening to the clink of coins in Fred and George's hands, Pro felt a pang in its heart.
Those were its coins!
Unfortunately, no one heard—and no one cared about—its silent cry.
Fred walked up to Duncan in high spirits and slung an arm around his shoulder.
"How did you do that?
How did you know where money was hidden?"
"Secret," Duncan said with a grin, wagging his forefinger to show he could not tell.
"Tch, fine, don't tell us then."
George jingled the coins in his hand and asked Duncan, "Shall we split this fifty-fifty?"
"Put it all away yourselves," Duncan said, shaking his head.
"After all, it was found in your family's storeroom.
For all we know, some of it might be what you two lost."
"Thanks, then," Fred answered with a smile.
"Though it's not very likely any of it is what we lost."
"Apart from when we're at school, our pockets are cleaner than our faces," George added, shrugging.
"All right, all right, look at you two—like you've never seen the world," Duncan said with a dismissive wave.
He pulled open the storeroom door and squeezed out sideways.
"This little bit of money has you this happy?
Come on, I'll take you to make a big score!"
"Where to?"
Fred and George's eyes instantly burned with interest as they nimbly left the storeroom and hurried along on either side of Duncan.
"Don't rush.
Just follow me," Duncan replied, locking onto a huge golden energy cluster in the distance within his field of vision.
After the trial in the storeroom, he had gradually understood how the Treasure-Seeking Spell worked.
The size of a cluster indicated the amount of wealth, and the colour indicated the value—blue corresponded to Knuts, and purple to Sickles.
They had not yet found a golden cluster, but by inference, it ought to correspond to Galleons.
And judging by that sphere slightly smaller than a basketball, there must be quite a number of Galleons there, so Duncan quickened his pace.
Duncan, Fred, and George crossed an open grassland and entered a dense wood.
The blazing heat of the sun was blocked out.
They wiped the fine sweat on their foreheads and kept moving forward, stopping after a dozen minutes in front of a pine tree that one person could encircle with their arms.
Duncan searched the ground overgrown with weeds carefully with his eyes and finally locked onto a slightly sunken spot, where a golden energy cluster was pulsing.
"Fred, George—find a way to dig this open!"
Duncan swept his hand and gave the order.
"Mm?
There's money here too?"
Fred said in disbelief, and he and George dropped to their knees at once and rolled up their sleeves, ready to dig.
"Stop!"
Duncan shot the pair an exasperated look.
"You two are going to dig with your hands?
Are you wizards or not?
If the professors at Hogwarts found out, they'd be furious!"
"Oh, right!"
Realisation dawned on George.
He patted his forehead, drew his wand, pointed it at the ground, and turned two scattered twigs into shovels.
He picked one up and tossed the other to Fred.
"Let's start digging!"
Duncan lifted his head and stared wordlessly at the sky, wishing he could give the pair before him a good thump.
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