Back in his private sitting room, Alan activated the highest-grade isolation array. A faint ripple of magic ran through the air, and then the entire room felt as if it had been excised from the map of Hogwarts , becoming an independent space completely sealed off from the outside world.
This was his absolute domain.
He did not light a lamp; the room remained pitch black. That mattered little to him. After his upgrades, darkness was no longer merely the absence of light but another form of information. He could "see" the molecular structure of every piece of furniture and "hear" the energy flow through the runes embedded in the walls.
He sat cross-legged and let his consciousness sink into the mind-palace.
Above the ruins of the old palace a brand-new, far grander and far more intricate structure was rising. Its foundation remained those eternal logical paradoxes and mathematical conjectures, but its walls and beams were being built from countless new elements , faintly shimmering "data quanta." These were the legacies of Tom Riddle.
Alan's consciousness hovered at the center of this newborn palace. Before him a huge, translucent folder floated: the complete data backup of "Tom Riddle (age 16)."
He did not rush to examine the powerful black magics or pry into the secrets of the Slytherin chamber. From the start his goal had been crystal clear.
He reached out with his "hand" and opened the topmost file, labeled as a "core existential module."
File name: "Horcruxes: Immortal Backups and Redundancy Schemes."
The file unfolded into a surging flood of data. It was neither text nor image, but the raw, unadorned memory and perception of Riddle when he created his first Horcrux.
Murder.
A girl's scream, the smell of heather. The pure, primal terror of death struck the data stream like an icy needle.
Splitting.
The excruciating agony of the soul being forcibly torn. Alan's firewall immediately stripped away the pure negative emotion, leaving only the essential data changes. He "saw" that Riddle's soul had not been "cleaved" in the literal sense. More accurately, he had performed a lossy copy. A portion of core data was forcibly copied out; the copying process caused structural damage and data loss to the source file (the main soul), rendering it unstable.
Sealing.
That copied "soul data" was burned , via an extraordinarily complex curse that drew energy from death itself , into the physical medium of the diary. Alan found this process shockingly similar to "non-volatile storage" in modern information technology: the diary had become, effectively, a soul hard drive.
"I see…" Alan murmured.
He had long harbored logical doubts about the phrase "soul splitting." How could a whole be "split"? If parts are removed, are they still the original whole? It is the Ship of Theseus paradox. Now he understood: it wasn't splitting but backing up. Voldemort had not literally cut his soul into seven pieces; he had created multiple disaster-recovery centers. Each Horcrux was a backup. Destroying a Horcrux merely erased a backup. As long as the master server (the main soul) and other backups remained, he could restore himself by reading backups.
But the backup process came at an enormous cost. Each lossy copy inflicted structural damage on the main soul, making it increasingly unstable and less like its original self. This explained Voldemort's increasingly inhuman appearance and escalating madness. His source file had been holed with corruption.
More crucially, Alan discovered a detail likely missed even by experienced wizards , perhaps even Dumbledore and Voldemort himself.
"Quantum…"
At the instant Riddle's soul was "copied" and burned into the diary, a link beyond spatial dimensions formed between the main soul and that soul fragment. This link resembled quantum entanglement: no matter how far apart they were, operating on one produced an instantaneous change in the other. In the wizarding world that kind of change took on a fuzzy, less rigorously defined meaning: "sensation."
Alan's purification of the diary Horcrux would feel to Voldemort's main soul like an organ suddenly being removed. He would detect it. But because Alan used a previously unimaginable method , conceptual cancellation , Voldemort's sensation might not be the sharp pain of a destroyed Horcrux. Instead it could appear as something stranger: for example, a chunk of his memory might instantly show up as unreadable, a formatted blank.
This realization made Alan's entire plan snap into focus.
He did not need, as Dumbledore had, to hunt down and physically destroy each Horcrux one by one. He only needed to locate another Horcrux, then, via that Horcrux and the "soul entanglement" property, trace and locate all the other backup servers. He could even write a "virus": a conceptual virus aimed at the core logic of Voldemort's soul, using one Horcrux as an infection source to instantly contaminate all backups and cause him to self-destruct from within.
A new, far more efficient and thorough "god-slaying" strategy took shape inside Alan's mind-palace.
He suppressed the grand scheme for the moment and turned his attention to another folder:
"Black Magic: Advanced Curses and Forbidden Knowledge."
He opened it, and millions of twisted, venomous curse structures surged out like snakes: soul-stealing curses, pain-drill curses, Avada Kedavra, and many ancient black magics the Ministry forbade. To Riddle, these were symbols of power. To Alan they were merely segments of "code."
He casually retrieved the structural model of the "pain-drill" curse. That curse inflicted extreme agony by forcefully overloading the target's nervous system so each neuron fired at unbearable frequencies.
"Crude, inefficient," Alan judged.
That brute-force method burned enormous energy and placed a tremendous load on the caster's psyche. His mind-palace began executing optimization. He compared the curse's structure against his knowledge of human neurology and bioelectrics.
Seconds later a new model was born.
It no longer overloaded the entire nervous system; it targeted precisely the brain regions responsible for processing pain , the anterior cingulate cortex and the insula , using a very low-energy, specific-frequency magical resonance. The effect would be ten times the original pain-drill's intensity while consuming less than one percent of its energy. The caster would not need furious emotion; they would merely flip a switch and execute it coolly.
Alan named this optimized curse "Neural Interrogation," and filed it away. He did not intend to use it, but the optimization deepened his grasp of magic.
Magic, he concluded once more, was not mysticism but another set of physical laws not yet fully deciphered.
As he continued through the black-magic files he encountered some of Riddle's adolescent experiments , trivial, mischievous studies. How to use Parseltongue to command a teacup to "auto-refill" with tea; how to enchant an opponent's shoelace to untie itself at socially critical moments; how to subtly corrupt the low-level contractual logic of a house-elf's binding so it executed orders with minor, embarrassingly awkward deviations for its master. Looking at these juvenile notes , Riddle's adolescent sense of cruel humor , something like speechlessness rippled through Alan's purely rational mind.
He shelved these "useless" data into a recycling folder titled "Adolescent Social Behavior Disorders and Inefficient Retribution Methods."
Just as he was about to close the folder, a memory fragment Riddle had marked as "useless" caught Alan's attention.
It dated to Riddle's fifth year. In his hunt for Horcrux research he had once spent long hours in the Room of Requirement. To avoid a professor patrol he had clumsily slipped into a vast storeroom piled with sundry discarded items.
The memory's viewpoint swept past mountains of junk and paused on a dusty, ancient crown-shaped headdress in a corner. It was a Ravenclaw diadem. Riddle at the time had not recognized it as the legendary Ravenclaw diadem; he merely thought it curious and soon forgot the incident , his interest vested in Slytherin relics.
Alan knew what it was. That crown was one of the Horcruxes Voldemort later created.
"Coordinate locked," Alan's mind recorded.
Hogwarts's three-dimensional blueprint exploded across his consciousness. Using the route and perspective embedded in Riddle's memory and the relative placement of surrounding objects, his mind-palace computed, in a hundredth of a second, the precise entrance to the "Room of Hidden Things" and the diadem's three-dimensional coordinates within that vast space.
The location of a second Horcrux was confirmed.
At that exact moment a faint, almost imperceptible hiss came from Alan's sleeve.
He looked down. It was not a real sound but a magical-layer "communication request." The sender was the small metal serpent that had been transfigured into a bracelet on his arm: the emergency contact device he'd left with Hermione.
His consciousness snapped out of the mind-palace and returned to the present.
He extended his hand. The little metallic snake came alive, coiling in his palm. Its head rose and opened and closed its mouth, producing Hermione's voice in Parseltongue's distinctive sibilant frequency.
"Al, Alan… help… emergency…"
The words came in fits, terrified and urgent.
Alan's expression hardened instantly.
He stood. The door opened without sound.
The next second he was gone, leaving behind a faint ring of spatial ripple that slowly faded.
~~----------------------
The Author has stopped uploading chapters after chp #242. I'm going to stop uploading here
the entire book is available on my p@treon:
[email protected] / Dreamer20