If Charms class had given Alan a clear direction for future research, then History of Magic was the stage where, for the first time, he revealed to the entire school his sharp, blade-like logic.
The professor for History of Magic was Hogwarts' only ghost teacher—Cuthbert Binns.
He had once fallen asleep in front of the staff room fireplace, and when he woke the next morning to go teach, he simply left his body behind. Perhaps because of this, his very existence carried a stale, decaying aura, like something time itself had nearly forgotten.
His teaching method was widely recognized across the wizarding world as a perfect lullaby.
It was a voice so monotonous, so flat, so devoid of emotion, that it resembled a broken phonograph stuck on the same melody, repeating endlessly. He never looked at his students; he simply droned through the textbook word for word, indifferent to whether the classroom below was full or empty.
During the second week of term, Professor Binns was plodding through the history of the Eighth Goblin Rebellion in that same uniquely sleep-inducing tone.
"…and so, led by Urg, the goblins, wielding their crude axes and spears forged of black iron, stormed into the wizard settlement…"
His voice floated through the dust-laden classroom, absorbed not by echoes but by the heavy, drowsy silence.
Sunlight streamed down from the tall windows, carving beams of brightness through the air, within which countless specks of dust drifted aimlessly.
Most of the students had already surrendered completely. Heads slumped onto desks, breathing steady, they had slipped into dreams. The few who still resisted only bobbed their heads weakly, eyelids waging their final battle.
Hermione Granger was one of the rare exceptions.
She sat upright, quill scratching furiously against parchment, the rustle of writing almost the only sign of life in the room.
Alan was not asleep.
He leaned back in his chair, eyes shut, breathing steady—outwardly the picture of someone dozing.
But in his mind, the scene was entirely different.
His Mind Palace was running at maximum capacity.
Professor Binns' droning voice was automatically converted by his brain into pure streams of information, flowing into the central processing chamber. On another side, a vast and intricate database—fully tagged and cross-referenced—was being accessed at high speed. The two streams clashed, compared, and verified in rapid succession.
Every name, every date, every described event was broken down into its most basic logical units and cross-checked with precision measured in milliseconds.
And then—
A sharp red alert flared inside his palace of thought: a logical paradox.
An inconsistency had been caught, one that the existing data could not reconcile.
Alan's eyes opened.
There was no trace of grogginess in his dark gaze—only cold, steady clarity.
He calmly raised his hand.
In this tomb-like classroom, the gesture was jarringly out of place—like a stone cast into stagnant water.
Professor Binns didn't notice at first. His gaze seemed to pass through the walls, lost in some distant historical epoch, while his mouth kept spilling its endless monotone.
Alan had no choice but to speak, interrupting him.
"Excuse me, Professor—I have a question."
His voice wasn't loud, but perfectly measured. Yet in the deathly silence of the room, it struck with startling clarity, like a string suddenly plucked in an utterly quiet concert hall.
Students stirred awake almost instantly, startled.
Heads shot up, bleary eyes blinking in shock and disbelief.
Who?
Who dared interrupt the lullaby that had persisted unbroken for decades?
For the first time, Binns' eternal monotone was cut short.
Floating at the lectern, his pearl-like translucent head turned with a painfully slow motion, as though rusted, toward the source of the voice.
He looked at Alan. In those hollow eyes, for the briefest moment, something flickered—an echo of awareness.
A student.
A student had asked him a question.
That, in itself, was beyond his usual frame of knowledge.
"…Speak."
His tone remained flat, as though the interruption had not been an affront but a meaningless shift in background noise.
"Professor," Alan began, rising to his feet, his posture straight and steady, unshaken by nerves, "just now you mentioned that during the Goblin Rebellion of the eighteenth century, the rebels fought with crude axes and spears of black iron."
His voice was level, calm, matter-of-fact.
"However, according to Chapter Seven of A History of Goblin Finance by the goblin historian Grimclaw, as early as the sixteenth century, the goblin guards of Gringotts had already been fully equipped with mithril-forged armor and weaponry, crafted by their finest artisans and enchanted with Piercing Hexes and Deflection Charms."
He paused briefly, letting the words settle.
"At the time, this technology was far more advanced than the average equipment of wizarding armies."
His gaze met Binns' hollow eyes directly as he asked his question with absolute clarity:
"So why, in the supposedly more advanced eighteenth century, would the goblin rebels fight with weapons that had regressed two centuries in craftsmanship—crude black iron arms? Is this not a logical flaw in our historical record? Or did our textbook author, Bathilda Bagshot, perhaps commit some critical error in her citation of sources?"
The classroom froze.
Earlier, the silence had been heavy with sleep. Now, it was sharp, cutting.
Every student stared at Alan in shock. Their minds were still struggling just to process the words he had used: A History of Goblin Finance? Grimclaw? Mithril weaponry? These terms were like an alien language to them.
The only thing they understood was that Alan Scott, a first-year, had just stood up in front of everyone and suggested that both the professor and the most authoritative textbook in the wizarding world might be wrong.
Hermione Granger's jaw dropped. Her quill had long since stopped moving. She stared at Alan, eyes shining with shock—no, with sudden intellectual excitement, as though a spark had ignited her mind.
Professor Binns, who had repeated the same lecture script for decades—perhaps even centuries—was utterly dumbstruck.
Floating there motionless, for the first time, his hollow eyes showed bewilderment… and the faint stirrings of thought.
Alan's question, and his citation of an obscure goblin historian's work that even most adult wizards had never heard of, was like a precision-guided explosion.
It ripped open a massive crack in Binns' outdated, ossified reservoir of knowledge.
His ghostly brain seemed to strain, trying to process the irregular input. But his processor was too old, too corroded to compute something so complex.
And so, second by second, time dragged on…
The silence in the classroom, at first shocked, gradually stretched into a long, tense wait, laced with awkwardness and anticipation.
For the first time in decades, Professor Binns' lecture had been halted by a purely academic question, leaving him in a state of prolonged, unbroken quiet.
The incident spread through Hogwarts like an unstoppable whirlwind, reaching every corner of the school the moment the class bell rang.
Alan Scott, a first-year, had managed to bring the ghost professor to a "system crash" with a single logical question in History of Magic—a legendary feat that made him an instant sensation across the year.
Among the Ravenclaw students, who prized intellect and scholarship above all else, his name began to be spoken frequently, tinged with both awe and curiosity.
Ever since that debate over the goblin rebellion, Alan Scott's reputation was no longer confined to the Gryffindor dormitories.
It had become a symbol.
The most immediate changes came from Ravenclaw. Students proud of their wisdom began treating Alan like a living, interactive database of knowledge.
In the hallways, upperclassmen would stop him to seriously discuss the third grammatical variant of a rare root in Ancient Runes.
In the library, students would peek from behind piles of books, whispering questions about energy decay models in trans-species Transfiguration.
Even in the bustling Great Hall, a thick-lensed girl would plop down opposite him, fervently debating the logical contradictions within house-elf contracts—and theorizing whether those contradictions could allow self-liberation.
Alan welcomed these changes.
Every question became a stress test for the database in his Mind Palace; every debate, an opportunity to spark new algorithms and build new models. The collision of knowledge was, for him, the most efficient nourishment.
....
That afternoon, there were no scheduled classes.
Sunlight filtered through the branches of the ancient oak in the castle courtyard, casting dappled shadows on the ground.
Alan avoided the common room—the noise there would generate too much irrelevant information, clogging his mental processor. Instead, he sat beneath the tree, unrolling a thick sheet of parchment, and returned to his massive personal project: the "Magical Automation Spell Program."
He sank completely into his mental world.
Within his Mind Palace, countless faintly glowing blue chains of spell logic were being constructed, simulated, and executed at lightning speed. A chain collapsed instantly when it conflicted with a fundamental Transfiguration axiom, becoming useless data fragments. Another, structurally optimized chain immediately replaced it, filling the void.
His pupils lost focus. Light, color, and form in the real world could no longer register on his retinas. All that remained were abstract, icy-cold symbols of logic and magical models, brimming with untapped power.
His body was merely a vessel sustaining life signs.
"Alan! Look at this!"
Fred's voice rang out from the castle gate, brimming with uncontrollable excitement.
He and George had just completed a masterpiece: a brand-new trick candy, its effect guaranteed to be sensational. They were desperate for their calmest friend to be the first "clinical test subject."
Fred's shout echoed across the courtyard.
Alan didn't react. He sat upright, rigid, like a medieval statue, not a hair moving.
"Hey! Alan!"
George ran up to him, shaking the candy—bright, almost garish—vigorously in front of his face.
Alan's eyes didn't move; they were as fixed as glass prosthetics.
"Is he… petrified?"
Lee Jordan, following behind, reached out curiously, poking Alan's shoulder.
The touch was solid and warm—alive.
But Alan didn't respond.
The three of them exchanged glances, laughter fading, replaced by a mix of astonishment and confusion.
They realized a terrifying fact: Alan's concentration had formed an invisible barrier, completely isolating him from the real world. Sounds, light, even direct physical contact were automatically filtered, blocked by a mental field before reaching him.
His consciousness had submerged beneath reality into another dimension.
They tried several other approaches, even shouting a cold joke guaranteed to make Mrs. Weasley respond in anger.
Ultimately, they had to admit defeat—they could not breach the barrier.
Grudgingly, they left with the candy they had failed to "sacrifice."
The courtyard returned to silence.
Time passed, measured only by the shifting light and shadow.
As the last rays of sunset disappeared behind distant mountains, a phase of computation in Alan's Mind Palace finally concluded.
He exhaled, rising slowly from the world of data and logic, regaining control of his body.
He blinked his slightly dry eyes, and reality snapped back into focus.
Stretching, his joints cracking in a series of sharp pops, he surveyed the results of an afternoon's work. A satisfying day.
But the next moment, a red alert that had never appeared in his Mind Palace flickered silently.
[System Log: Detected 17.3 seconds of unknown physical contact.]
[Analysis: Subject's consciousness was in deep immersion; sensory system offline; defense capability: zero.]
[Threat Simulation]
Alan froze.
His brain, at an absolute non-human speed, replayed the previously unnoticed memory fragments captured by the system: Fred's waving hand, Lee Jordan's finger poking his shoulder.
The Mind Palace simulation automatically ran.
It replaced the three friends with masked wizards wielding blades, intent on harm.
[Simulation Result: Encountered ambush; survival probability… negligible.]
The cold data conclusion made the hairs on his neck stand on end.
It wasn't fear.
It was a pure physiological reaction to a deadly logical vulnerability.
The deep focus he had always prized—capable of extreme research efficiency—was, from another perspective, the most lethal unguarded system backdoor.
The price of concentration: absolute environmental control.
He stood, labeling the event with a line of icy logic in his mind.
"The spell program project must be suspended."
A new project was instantly created in his Mind Palace, assigned the highest priority.
He had to immediately begin developing—or inventing—a new type of magic:
A passive defensive system capable of operating while he entered the Mind Palace and detached his consciousness from reality,
One that could automatically identify potential threats and preemptively react before he even sensed danger.
~~----------------------
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