The shadow of final exams crept silently across every stone of Hogwarts Castle.
Students' faces grew more exhausted by the day; the air smelled of old parchment and concentrated ink. But heavier than the approaching tests was the announcement Dumbledore made at dinner.
"Professor Quirrell, having suffered severe shock from the Forbidden Forest incident, has unfortunately relapsed into his old psychological trauma and must immediately resign and return to Albania to recuperate."
The clamor in the Great Hall vanished at once.
Dumbledore's voice echoed in the hush—clear, weighty.
"Professor Severus Snape will be taking over the remaining Defence Against the Dark Arts classes this term."
Silence fell like a stone; then a wave of stunned, half-suppressed groans rose up that rippled along the four house tables as if the very name "Snape" were a curse.
After the announcement, the students streamed out like tides—everyone but Alan, whom Dumbledore signaled to stay.
"Quirrell's departure was unavoidable."
Dumbledore's tone returned to its usual calm, but his blue eyes behind the half-moon spectacles showed complicated relief, as if a burden had been lifted.
"Your 'conceptual firewall' did irreversible damage to a mind already hollowed out by another soul. He had to leave; otherwise it would have been worse."
He looked at Alan with a rare, penetrating tenderness. "I'm very sorry, Alan, that at your age you had to face such deep darkness and danger."
"It wasn't your intent, Headmaster," Alan answered evenly—no complaint, no fear in his voice.
Dumbledore inclined his head, then reached into the sleeve of his star-spangled robe and produced a tightly rolled length of parchment. "As compensation, and… a small research commission," he said, handing it over, "I think this should be entrusted to you."
Alan took it with both hands. The parchment felt heavy and durable—far beyond ordinary magical parchment. When he unrolled it, a faint scent of old events and slow echoes washed over him.
The sheet bore rubbings—the same "garbled" symbols from Riddle's diary. But they were different. Whereas the images Alan had seen in the diary before were blurred and indistinct, the symbols on this rubbing were chillingly clear. They weren't mere black marks anymore; they seemed forcibly stripped from the deepest, blackest corner of a soul and pressed onto the paper by some unspeakable magic. Each twisted stroke seemed to writhe silently, exuding an icy malice.
"I believe that with your intellect, you may discover secrets here that even I have missed."
Dumbledore's words placed a heavy key into Alan's hands.
"I will, Professor." Alan rolled the parchment back up solemnly. He felt that this was more than research material—this was trust, and a test that reached into Hogwarts' darkest roots.
He did not head for the noisy common room or the packed library. With the new, most complete "key" in his possession, he walked resolutely through the bustling corridors and up the stairs to the seventh floor.
At the end of the corridor, before the ridiculous tapestry of the "Giant Squash-Stomping Barnabas," he stood beneath an unremarkable stone wall. This was Hogwarts' most mysterious place: the Room of Requirement.
Alan closed his eyes. He did not pace like an ordinary student; instead he sank all his attention into his mental world. The spiritual sphere at the center of his mind—formed around the pursuit of the initial formula and already highly concentrated—began to spin at unprecedented intensity.
A wish, both extremely precise and intricately encoded, formed in his consciousness and was then projected outward as a stream of concentrated will.
"I require a place," he thought, "a final analysis chamber capable of interpreting and breaking down the oldest 'conceptual chains' and magical 'firewalls' from the founders' era."
When Alan opened his eyes again, the scene before him had completely changed.
The once plain stone wall was silently transforming. The blocks of stone seemed to melt into streams of light, and from the wall, a great door of pure white rock — glowing softly with gentle radiance — began to "grow" outward. The door was covered in intricate geometric carvings so complex they made his vision swim. The lines and angles defied all conventional spatial understanding, as though they led into another dimension entirely.
Alan reached out and pushed the door open.
There was no sound beyond it — only a vast, solemn, and almost sacred stillness.
He stepped inside.
The sight that met him made his blood freeze and his breath stop.
He was not in a "room."
He stood in an endless void.
Above him stretched an infinite sky of deep-blue crystal, glittering like a sea of stars — yet each "star" was a glowing rune. Below his feet was a black floor smooth as a mirror, perfectly reflecting the shining firmament above, making him feel as if he were floating at the center of the universe.
Countless curtains of pale golden light hung from the faraway "heavens" like frozen waterfalls, suspended in midair. Upon these light curtains flowed a vast ocean of ancient runes and magical formulas Alan had never seen before — golden symbols drifting, colliding, and reassembling like living fish.
Then, a vast, cold voice rang directly within his mind.
[Ding!]
[Special Location Discovered: Ravenclaw's Logical Core.]
[Mission Hint: You have found Hogwarts' oldest secret library — the cognitive model core Rowena Ravenclaw used to deduce the truths of the world.]
Alan's heart pounded heavily in his chest.
Ravenclaw!
The witch famed throughout history for her wisdom — one of Hogwarts' greatest founders!
This place… was her legacy.
The very nucleus of her intellect — the legendary final library that she had used to decipher the laws of reality itself.
Suppressing his awe, Alan took a careful step forward and reached out toward the nearest curtain of golden light.
But just as his fingertips were about to touch it—
Buzz!
An invisible barrier suddenly formed before him.
It wasn't a magical shield, nor a curse barrier.
It was a wall made up of countless ever-shifting, blindingly bright logical puzzles. Paradoxes, sophistries, endlessly nested symbolic sequences, labyrinths of reasoning that would require infinite calculations to find a path through… They flickered and transformed at a speed far beyond human thought, merging into a vast and magnificent structure — a firewall forged not of matter, but of pure logic itself.
Alan's pupils contracted sharply.
In that instant, he understood.
To reach the true core that held the wisdom of Rowena Ravenclaw, he would first have to use his own intellect to breach this barrier — the supreme "firewall of knowledge" that the greatest witch of Hogwarts had personally constructed a thousand years ago to guard her sacred hall of understanding.
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