The curtain of light towered before Alan.
It was not a tangible wall, yet it appeared more magnificent than any fortress could ever be. It was made up of billions of runes, each one being born, dying, and recombining within mere milliseconds — evolving into endless logical puzzles. They were flowing waterfalls, burning nebulae, and the miniature reflection of the universe's birth and death — breathtaking, vast, and lethal.
This was Ravenclaw's Firewall.
Any attempt to unravel even a single puzzle by conventional logic was as futile as a fool's errand.
Because this thing was alive.
The moment Alan's mental energy so much as brushed against its edge, that portion of the structure instantly underwent a complete, fundamental reconstruction. It was as though an intelligent, sentient entity had sensed his thought pattern — and in response, generated an entirely new puzzle, exponentially more complex, precisely tailored to his cognition.
Brute-force cracking?
The thought itself was an act of surrender.
It would be like trying to drain the entire ocean using a glass cup.
But Alan Scott's soul had never been that of an ordinary wizard.
He gazed at the magnificent construct woven from pure "logic" and "information," and in the depths of his pupils, there was not the faintest trace of fear.
On the contrary — a scorching, electric thrill coursed through his spine, igniting every nerve cell in his body.
It wasn't reverence before a miracle of magic.
It was the exhilaration of meeting a worthy opponent.
This wasn't a magical barrier.
In his mental framework, he had already reconstructed it.
It was a system — a perfect "computer system," written by the most brilliant "programmer" imaginable, using the fundamental "laws" of the world as its language. A system capable of self-learning and dynamic defense.
And Alan Scott would be its first challenger.
Its first hacker.
He did not hesitate. Before that ever-shifting, radiant curtain of light, he sat cross-legged and closed his eyes.
The noise and light of the real world vanished.
His battlefield was within the realm of the mind.
His consciousness sank into a vast, dark void — his mental palace.
He didn't attack immediately, nor did he attempt to analyze even the simplest of the outer logic chains.
"To do good work, one must first sharpen their tools."
A command formed within his thoughts.
Hum—
In the darkness, a perfect sphere of mental energy flared to life, radiating a calm, pure silver glow. Across its surface flowed countless microscopic geometric axioms and formulas — the very building blocks of the world — nesting and revolving in flawless harmony, forming a self-sustaining, unbreakable cycle.
This was his Mind Palace — the mental sanctuary built upon his core philosophy: the pursuit of the original formula.
And now, it would serve as his most stable and reliable foundation — his operating system — for the coming battle of network and will.
System: Initiate.
Next, Alan summoned his Data Lotus.
That vast library of basic rune commands — which he had long since dismantled, studied, and memorized — unfolded before his mind like a colossal code interface.
But he didn't use these runes to construct spells.
That was the way of wizards.
What he intended was to give them new meaning.
He selected the first base rune with precision — "Penetrate."
Normally, it was used to enhance a spell's piercing effect.
But in Alan's "system," he stripped it of all magical properties, leaving only its core logical essence. He re-encapsulated it, cloaking it in a "data protocol," and then sent it forth.
Execute: Weak Point Detection Script.
A short and efficient piece of "code" was completed in an instant.
Then he selected the second rune — "Analyze."
Once again, he tore away its magical shell, rebuilding it as a pure logical instrument.
Execute: Logic Puzzle Data Capture Script.
The third rune — "Deceive."
Execute: Harmless Command Mask — used to probe the target's defensive response pattern.
Elsewhere in Hogwarts Castle, countless students were hunched over heavy textbooks, cramming for their end-of-term exams — muttering incantations and potion recipes under the dim light.
But Alan, alone in the most hidden depths of the castle, was taking a very different kind of exam.
A silent dialogue spanning a thousand years —
between him and the ancient, supreme intellect of Hogwarts itself.
A cyber battle across time and magic.
Each surge of his mental power became a precise line of injected code, silently piercing the vast ocean of logic before him.
Each thought he processed — amplified by the supercomputer of his Mind Palace — performed calculations of astronomical complexity, tracing every possible weakness in the firewall of Ravenclaw's mind.
This war had no wands raised, no spells shouted.
Yet its peril far surpassed any duel of life and death.
For what he faced—
Was the wisdom of Rowena Ravenclaw herself.
The ultimate defense woven into Hogwarts by that legendary witch, built not with power, but with logic and rules.
A single misstep, and his spirit, his consciousness—everything that made him who he was—
Would be mercilessly erased by that great firewall.
The final result?
His mind emptied, drooling senselessly, unable even to remember his own name.
And yet—
A faint smile tugged at the corners of Alan's lips.
He was enjoying it.
His detection scripts were identified, intercepted, and even traced in reverse by the firewall again and again.
His packet capture routines were repelled by higher-order encryption before they could even touch the data stream.
His deception commands sank without a ripple—the firewall's responses seamless, revealing no exploitable feedback whatsoever.
Perfect.
Too perfect.
This system was a masterpiece.
But any creation built by human—or even magical—hands could never be truly flawless.
As long as there were rules, there would always exist loopholes.
Time flowed on.
Alan's focus reached an almost painful intensity, his thoughts running at the edge of human limits.
And then—
In one seemingly meaningless coordinated assault, composed of over ten thousand micro-probes,
He caught it.
A flicker—
A delay so minute it could have been mistaken for nothing at all.
When his Pierce script and Deceive command struck the same logical node at the same instant—but offset by a precise fraction of a second—
That node's reconstruction speed lagged.
By 0.001 seconds.
"...There."
Alan's entire mind shuddered with focus.
Immediately, he poured all his mental computation into that single anomaly,
building a brand-new attack model around it.
He tore apart dozens of rune-logic fragments,
reassembled them in an unprecedented way—
into a volatile, paradox-ridden cluster of contradictions,
a self-collapsing instruction set designed solely for that node.
A logical bomb.
He took a deep breath,
and launched it—
precisely—
into that pinpoint weakness.
BOOM—
A silent explosion tore through his inner world like a tidal wave.
The targeted logic node wasn't destroyed,
but as it tried to process the paradoxical payload,
it fell into a momentary storm of self-contradiction.
And in that instant—
on the flawless structure of Ravenclaw's firewall—
a tiny, fleeting crack appeared.
A needlepoint-sized glitch in the system.
A bug.
He had done it.
Alan was ready to dive in,
to send his consciousness through that opening—
deeper, further—
When suddenly—
A voice resounded.
A voice that could not be described by any language—
immense, boundless—
it exploded within his silent mindscape like the birth of a universe.
It wasn't heard through the ears,
but felt,
erupting from the very core of his soul.
Even his impregnable Fortress of Thought trembled violently under its echo.
[Epic Quest Triggered: Breach the Firewall]
Quest Description: Wisdom… exists to be surpassed.
Objective: Become the first human in a thousand years to fully decipher Ravenclaw's Logical Core.
Reward:Ravenclaw's Gift
Failure Penalty:Mind Format Reset
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