"Swelling Potion."
Snape's oily, cold voice echoed through the dungeon, every word dripping with undisguised malice.
"A potion to test basic skill. The steps are complex, the reactions violent. Any small mistake could leave your foolish heads imprinted on the ceiling along with the ruined concoctions in the cauldron."
His gaze swept over pale, tense faces, lips twisting into a cruel arc.
"Two per group. Collect the ingredients from the storage room."
"One hour. I will come to inspect your results.
Anyone who makes a mess of my dungeon will receive a special reward—clean all the cauldrons with your tongue."
This blunt threat caused the temperature in the dungeon to drop even further.
The groupings were unsurprising. Alan's partner was Lee Jordan.
Lee Jordan's face went pale. His hands shook so violently that he could barely hold the dried nettle. He stared at the pufferfish eyes labeled in the textbook as "highly reactive," sweat already forming on his forehead.
"Don't worry, Lee."
Alan's voice rang out, calm to the point of seeming inappropriate.
"Treat this as a chemistry experiment, not some mysterious ritual. You don't need to understand it—just follow the instructions."
His composure carried a strange, infectious authority.
Alan didn't open the heavy Advanced Potion-Making book. He lined up all the ingredients—dried nettle, pufferfish eyes, bat spleen, porcupine quills—on the table in precise order. Then he focused his attention.
The noisy dungeon, along with Snape's oppressive gaze, vanished from his world.
Within his mind palace, data streams surged at unprecedented speed.
The theoretical framework of Advanced Potion-Making instantly activated, forming countless tightly logical formulas that began to violently deconstruct and reconstruct the traditional recipe for the Swelling Solution.
[Error.]
[The sequence in the textbook contains a fatal logical flaw.]
[Step 1: Add dried nettle. Step 2: Add pufferfish eyes. This causes the early reaction energy to overload, wasting over 30% of the active ingredients in chaotic boiling. It's a crude, primitive, and barbaric process.]
[Optimized procedure…]
[Priority 1: Neutralization. The bat spleen contains a special enzyme that, once ground, acts as a natural inhibitor, neutralizing over 70% of the nettle's irritants. Adding the spleen powder first, then mixing in the nettle, reduces early energy loss to below 5%.]
[Priority 2: Catalytic efficiency. The heating curve must be reset. Begin with low-temperature slow simmering to ensure thorough molecular fusion. In the final step, add the porcupine quills as the core catalyst and instantly raise the flame to its critical point. This maximizes the potion's potency, improving the final effect by an estimated 15%.]
In less than a minute, a completely optimized and nearly perfect brewing process was constructed in his mind.
Alan opened his eyes, a pure, rational light flickering in his pupils.
"All right, Lee. Let's begin."
He began issuing instructions, his voice steady and devoid of emotion.
"Step one: Bat spleen, grind clockwise in the mortar two thousand times, no more, no less."
"…Step…"
Lee Jordan's mind went blank. He had no idea what Alan was saying and could not see any connection between this procedure and the textbook. But he chose obedience.
Unconditional obedience.
Alan's mind handled the calculations and commands; Lee Jordan's hands executed the tasks. One controlled the ingredients, the other the heat and stirring. Their workbench was less like brewing a volatile magical potion and more like a highly precise industrial assembly line, each movement accurate to the millimeter, each flame controlled perfectly.
Other groups quickly descended into chaos.
Cauldrons occasionally spewed acrid green smoke, accompanied by bubbling sounds and panicked screams. Snape, scowling, waved his wand to extinguish a flame consuming the edge of a table, mercilessly shouting at the unlucky student.
Yet the silver cauldron before Alan remained elegantly calm.
Forty minutes later, while other groups struggled to salvage a gooey, oddly colored mess, Alan and Lee finished their potion.
Inside the cauldron lay a pure, flawless potion. Its color was a perfect emerald green, gleaming like a gem in the firelight.
They had completed the potion in a full third less time than the textbook's standard one hour.
Snape's footsteps echoed through the dungeon and stopped at their table.
For the first time, an uncontainable look of astonishment appeared on his perpetually sour face.
He leaned forward, scooping up a drop with a silver ladle. He brought it to his nose—the pure, potent magical aroma made his eyes twitch. Then he turned it toward the light, inspecting the color and viscosity.
Perfect.
Impeccable.
From potency to appearance, the potion far exceeded the level expected of a first-year student—indeed, it surpassed much of what he had seen from upper years.
But Snape's gaze quickly shifted away from the potion. He scanned the workbench and the discarded materials in the trash.
He found the problem.
The order of the ingredients and the state of the waste differed greatly from the traditional, sacred, inviolable recipe.
A new angle for attack.
"Alan," Snape's voice was icy, each word laced with venom.
"You… did not strictly follow the textbook procedure."
"Reporting, Professor." Alan met his gaze calmly.
"I simply optimized the brewing process while ensuring the final result."
"Efficiency optimization?" Snape curled his lips in a deeply sarcastic sneer.
"Potion-making is an art passed down for a thousand years! It requires absolute respect for tradition, reverence for the wisdom of our predecessors—not this… Muggle-style self-righteous 'efficiency' of yours!"
Unable to fault the result itself, he resorted to attacking Alan's procedure, attitude, and thinking at their root.
He picked up a quill and, next to the perfectly brewed potion, scrawled a grade.
An "A (Acceptable)"—barely.
"As for you," he turned to Alan, his waxy face finally showing the satisfaction of revenge, "because of your arrogant ignorance and your desecration of the art, I'm assigning you a three-foot-long essay:
'On the Sanctity and Irreplaceability of Traditional Potion Brewing Processes.'
Due Monday.
He glanced at Lee Jordan, who was trembling with fear.
"As for you, Mr. Jordan," he added, maliciously, "consider yourself lucky to have a 'capable' partner. You don't have to write it."
~~----------------------
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