A loud bang! echoed as a thick, dragon-hide–bound book was slammed shut, shaking the ink bottle on the desk so hard it nearly toppled over. The scattered students in the library glanced over with annoyance, but the boy who had caused it no longer cared.
"Merlin's beard!" he muttered under his breath, his voice laced with raw frustration as he complained to the classmate beside him. "All I wanted was to gather every argument about the concept of 'soul' and compare them—but to do that, I have to dig through this entire library!"
His companion only shrugged helplessly, unable to offer any solution.
"If only… if only there were a spell for it!" His voice rose in a near-shout, but he forced it down, letting the fury burn in his throat instead. "One spell—just say the word 'soul,' and every passage in every book that mentions it would link itself together and appear right in front of me! Wouldn't that be perfect?"
He spoke without thinking.
But Alan was listening.
Linking.
That word struck through Alan's mental citadel like a command spell, piercing the deepest chamber. His top-priority Epic-Level Task—
[Create an Information Medium]
—suddenly flared. Inside its massive data-structure model, a core technical bottleneck, long marked with a flashing red "Unresolved" status, now blazed like fire.
[Core Technical Difficulty: How to establish "indexes" and "associations" between different pieces of information on a physical medium?]
This scene—this Ravenclaw upper-year's frustrated outburst—was nothing short of a perfect, real-world application scenario. More vivid and urgent than any simulation Alan had ever run.
Opportunity.
Alan's body moved faster than his sense of social restraint. He closed the book in his hands, stood, and strode over.
"Good afternoon, senior."
His tone was calm and courteous, like a stone dropped into a restless lake—immediately quieting its ripples.
The Ravenclaw upper-year lifted his head, bloodshot eyes flashing surprise and irritation at the interruption. When he saw it was only a first-year standing before him, his impatience softened into the distant politeness of an older student. He nodded faintly, signaling Alan to continue.
"You may speak."
"I overheard your frustration just now," Alan said steadily, his eyes meeting the older boy's without a trace of fear. "Perhaps I have an idea—immature, maybe—but it might give you some inspiration."
Alan's words were slow, deliberate. Each one had the weight of careful calculation, backed by unyielding logic.
"I believe," Alan continued, "that the direction of your thinking was to create a spell that works directly on the physical books."
He paused, giving the older student a moment to absorb it.
"But that approach is extremely difficult, because it requires the spell to both 'read' and 'understand' the contents of every book. That is essentially demanding that magic itself possess intelligence. That belongs to the realm of gods, not wizards."
The Ravenclaw froze. The irritation in his expression vanished, replaced by the shock of having his hidden struggle laid bare. He knew Alan was right.
"However," Alan pressed on, his eyes now shining with the light of a builder of new worlds, "what if the solution isn't a spell on objects… but a spell on information itself?"
"Information itself?" The upper-year echoed, frowning at the unfamiliar phrase.
Alan didn't answer immediately. Instead, he reached into the boy's pile of books and drew out two completely different volumes—Mental Imprints in Ancient Runes and An Analysis of the Depths of the Soul. He set them side by side on the table.
"We can try this: a modified, very simple marking spell. Each time you come across a passage about 'soul,' you tap your wand beside it—like this."
He mimed a small gesture, tapping the air next to a paragraph.
"This action would assign an invisible, unique information tag to that passage. The tag is essentially giving that text a name. For example, call it 'Soul.'"
His explanation was stripped of arcane jargon, leaving only the core logic.
"Then, in another book, when you find a relevant passage, you apply the same tag—'Soul.' And again, for every related passage, across every book you read."
He leaned forward slightly.
"When all tagging is complete, we design a simple indexing spell. Its job isn't to read the text—that's impossible. Its job is to retrieve all passages tagged 'Soul' and display them—perhaps glowing on the page, or causing the books to flip open automatically to those spots."
Alan's voice lowered, deliberate, like the turning of an ancient key in a lock.
"In this way, we bypass the impossible problem of 'making magic understand words.' Instead, we use a smarter method: Marking + Indexing. This gives us the function of Concept Linking."
Silence.
It was as if the background hum of the library had been sucked away.
Alan had just translated the most basic principles of Muggle computer science—hyperlinks and tag-based search—into the elegant, ancient framework of wizarding magic.
The Ravenclaw upper-year sat frozen, stunned. His lips parted, his gaze unfocused, his very soul shaken loose. The brain of a proud Ravenclaw—honed on arcane tomes and intricate spells—was now undergoing an earthquake unlike anything it had ever endured.
It was as if lightning had struck him straight through the crown of his head.
~~----------------------
Patreon Advance Chapters:
[email protected] / Dreamer20