In the shadow at the end of the corridor Albus Dumbledore's figure resolved into clarity. He carried no wand and made no sound, yet every step he took caused the motes of magical dust in the air to fall back, forming an invisible, absolute sphere around him.
Behind his half-moon spectacles, the blue of his eyes lacked their usual warmth and merriment. Now they held a deep, piercing scrutiny, as if able to look straight into the essence of a soul. He had sensed, moments before, an evil soul-signature here , one he knew well , utterly extinguished in a way he had never seen. Immediately after, a new mental force had been born: powerful, unusual, and tightly contained.
Fred and George instinctively shrank the instant they saw Dumbledore. In front of that legendary headmaster their mischief amounted to nothing at all. They glanced at Alan; Alan signaled for them to leave. The twins understood at once, bowed slightly like startled cats, pressed to the wall, and hurried away.
Only Alan and Dumbledore remained in the long corridor: old and young, ten paces apart, confronting one another in silence.
"Good evening, Alan." Dumbledore spoke first. His voice was calm but carried unquestionable authority. "It seems you have experienced a rather… eventful night."
"Good evening, Headmaster." Alan inclined his head. "My research has just made a small breakthrough."
"A breakthrough?" Dumbledore moved two steps closer and fixed his gaze on the outline in Alan's pocket , the diary. "I felt a fragment of a soul disappear just now. A piece belonging to Tom Riddle. It was not destroyed. It… vanished. I'm curious how your 'research' achieved that."
This inquiry was unavoidable. From the moment Dumbledore appeared, Alan's mind-palace had already begun running at full speed. He pulled up every public record and profile on Dumbledore, plus snippets of Dumbledore's youth that had been present in Riddle's memories. The conclusion was clear: he could not truthfully reveal everything.
Telling Dumbledore that he had treated a fragment of Voldemort as an "experience pack" and consumed it could result, at best, in perpetual surveillance as a potential dark-wizard risk; at worst, in Dumbledore performing some humanitarian, but irreversible, act in the name of love and justice. Alan needed a model that explained the phenomenon, preserved his persona, and discouraged deep investigation.
"I define it as a form of conceptual cancellation," Alan said. His tempo was measured; every word sounded as if it were the output of precise calculation. "Headmaster, as you know, magic is in essence the will's distortion of reality. An independent consciousness , like the one inside that diary , necessarily depends on a stable self-conception. 'I am Tom Riddle' is its core logic."
Dumbledore's eyes flickered. He made no interruption; he signaled Alan to continue.
"But that logic is incomplete," Alan continued. "The concept of 'I' is philosophically recursive. When you repeatedly ask 'Who am I?', any definition based on external references , a name, lineage, achievements , ultimately fails. It falls into an infinite loop you cannot prove or disprove. A logical black hole.
"My action was not to assault it with magic. I constructed an abstract model of recursive questioning and forced that model onto the soul fragment, compelling it to expend all of its computational power attempting to answer the unanswerable question: 'Who am I?' The result, as you observed, was collapse. The information that constituted its existence was worn away through infinite self-interrogation and decomposed into meaningless psychic energy. I call the process an increase in entropy: an ordered complex structure reverting to disorder."
Silence stretched through the corridor. Only the wind outside the window stirred.
Dumbledore was quiet for a long moment. He had lived more than a century and witnessed countless unfathomable magics and astonishing theories, yet he had never heard a description of manipulating soul-magic in such a mathematical and philosophical fashion.
"Conceptual cancellation… logical black hole… entropy increase." He understood each word's literal meaning, but the combination formed an unfamiliar, icy, and precise theoretical frame. This approach bypassed traditional magical dichotomies of good and evil, life and death, reducing the problem to information and logic.
"Then," Dumbledore finally asked, his voice hoarse, "what became of the energy that returned as 'psychic energy'?"
That was the key question.
"That was an unforeseen byproduct," Alan replied without change of expression. "Most of the energy released during the fragment's entropy increase dissipated. But a small portion, because I established a direct psychic link with it, was passively absorbed by my consciousness-carrier. It is attribute-less energy that enhanced my mental power, absent memories or emotional contamination. My 'firewall' ensured that."
"Firewall?" Dumbledore picked up the new term with quick interest.
"The automatic defense system of my mind-palace," Alan admitted frankly. "It filters and purifies external information flows, preserving the absolute stability of my core."
The highest art of deception is nine truths wrapped around a single lie. Almost everything Alan had said was true; he had merely concealed the firewall's active scanning-and-absorb functions, describing it as a passive purifier.
Dumbledore's gaze lingered on Alan's face for a long time. He searched those deep eyes for signs of panic, evasion, or infection by darkness , but found none. Alan's stare was as still as an icebound lake. His psychic field was powerful and concentrated, yet extraordinarily pure. Not a shadow of corruption. That very purity unsettled Dumbledore.
A teenage boy had confronted and neutralized a fragment of Voldemort's soul, and rather than become tainted, had grown stronger. That was incompatible with Dumbledore's experience: in his understanding, those who battle with darkness invariably bear its stain. Unless… Alan himself was darker than the fragment. Or he existed on a different plane where good and evil were meaningless.
"Alan," Dumbledore said heavily, "you are treading an extremely dangerous realm. A soul is not a formula or a piece of code. It carries love and hatred both. To dissect it in such… a cold manner is perilous. I worry that the more you gaze into the abyss, the more the abyss will alter you."
"Headmaster, you confuse observation with identification," Alan answered calmly. "I do not gaze into the abyss; I measure its depth, width, and density. Everything I do is to collect data to build more complete models. The abyss itself does not attract me."
His words were cruelly clinical.
Dumbledore looked at him with a long, searching stare. He realized further discussion would be fruitless: Alan had already committed to his chosen path. The "mind fortress" he had built was so strong that even Dumbledore's kindly warning would be archived by Alan's system as an external data packet, analyzed, and then disregarded.
"Then the diary," Dumbledore said, changing topic, "since it is harmless, let me keep it."
"I'm afraid not, Headmaster." Alan shook his head. "As the only sample from this experiment, it has enormous research value. I must analyze its physical structure and investigate the material-layer mechanisms of soul-magic. It is vital to my work."
Refusing Dumbledore was a decision dictated by Alan's game-theory calculus. Surrendering the diary now would be an admission of weakness, inviting Dumbledore's oversight and constraints on all his future moves. Retaining it reinforced his persona as a dedicated researcher.
Dumbledore's eyebrows twitched imperceptibly , he had not expected such a brisk refusal.
"Alan, I am not requesting."
"Nor am I asking you, Headmaster." Alan's tone remained composed, but his will shone like iron. "This is my spoil of war. Under the commonly accepted laws of our magical world, I claim the right to dispose of it."
The air seemed to congeal. An invisible pressure radiated from Dumbledore, sweeping the corridor. It was the legendary authority of a senior wizard, powerful enough to break lesser wills. Yet Alan stood motionless. The instant the pressure hit, his mind-palace parsed it as "a psychic attack using intense magical fields to influence neural systems." His firewall rose automatically and fully blocked the effect. His body did not flinch.
A genuine flash of caution passed through Dumbledore's eyes. He withdrew the pressure.
"Very well," he said slowly, a trace of fatigue in his voice. "You insist. But I must warn you, Alan: you have obtained an ability you should not possess. I can sense it within you , the ability to speak with serpents."
"Knowledge itself is neither good nor evil," Alan answered.
"But those who possess it may be," Dumbledore replied gravely, fixing him with a final look. "I hope you remember what you said today. Remember your goal, and do not let the abyss change you."
With that, Dumbledore turned and his tall figure melted back into the corridor's shadow and disappeared without sound.
Only after the strong magical signature receded did Alan release a quiet breath. He had won the game: he kept his secret and, more importantly, his research sample. But he also understood that from this night onward Dumbledore had listed him as a top-tier "potential instability." Every step he took hereafter would require more caution.
Alan reached into his pocket and lightly touched the blank diary.
Now it was time to inventory the true spoils he had won.
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