Cold air rolled in from the street each time the door of the Oslo office opened. Corvus stood by the frosted window and watched taxis nose through slush. He wore a bland face and an off the rack suit that made him forgettable. A clerk slid a folder across the table. He flipped it open. Ledgers, transfer orders, and a list of local trustees.
"Nordlys Family Fund," said the clerk, trying for a smile. "First tranche lands by noon."
Corvus tapped the cover once. "The grants are for locals, not for foreigners. Make sure to check they are locals for at least two generations. Birth bonuses, childcare vouchers, and rent support for young couples. Keep the language clean and civic. I do not want to see any slogans that can link these foundations to any political party."
The clerk swallowed and nodded. He left at a near trot.
Corvus stepped into a service corridor and vanished in a wash of flame. He reappeared on a dark stairwell in Stockholm that smelled of dust and old paper. A brass placard read Svea Heritage Trust. Inside, a woman in a wool dress guided him to a glass walled room. He set a thin case on the table and clicked it open. Simple contracts. Tight covenants.
"The scholarship arm pushes trades," he said. "Carpenters, nurses, teachers. The media arm buys quiet time on local radio. Community hours. No imported talking heads."
She adjusted her glasses. "Names for the family program?"
"Svea Familjefond. Keep it soft. Make the logo a cradle and birch leaves."
He took the stairs back down and stood in a covered arcade. Winter light flattened the stone. A street vendor hissed at a grill. He let the crowd flow and then moved into a shadowed nook. Flame took him again.
Vienna gave him rain and tram bells. The office in the fourth district had a deep oak counter and a wall of framed permits. A gray haired man met him with a polite bow. "Alpenheim Stiftung is ready," the man said. "We have a list of parishes and town councils."
"Good. Add Alpenkinderwerk for the birth grants," Corvus said. "Keep the intake local. Interviews in person. Work with midwives. It builds trust."
They crossed to a smaller room. A map of Austria and its districts hung there with pins and notes. Corvus pointed to three towns. "Start here. Farm belts first, then the small cities. Keep the paperwork simple."
He took a narrow lift to the street, turned his collar up, and walked. A kiosk radio crackled under the awning. Talk callers argued about border checks and subsidies. He paused and listened. The host kept a civil tone. That was the point.
By night, he moved to Manchester for a test buy. The studio was cramped and warm, all wires and stained carpet. A producer in a headset leaned in. "Thirty seconds at the top of the hour. Read before the weather."
A young voice cleared her throat and tried the copy. "Family Growth Council invites parents to apply for child credit support at the community hall this Saturday." She stumbled on the council, tried again, then landed it clean. Corvus stood behind the glass and raised two fingers. "Lose the word support," he told the producer. "Say, child, credit help. Plain words."
He watched the test spot air. No music. No sting. Just a time and a place and a small promise.
Back in Oslo, he met a printer in a shop that smelled of ink and hot metal. The press clanked as broadsheets slid out, stacked, and wrapped. The layout showed a young couple with a pram. Headline: For Every Newborn. No party logos, no political leaders. The copy listed dates and phone numbers. He nodded once and pressed a stack of cash into the foreman's palm.
Money moved while he moved. Shell firms bought ad space. Trustees opened community rooms. Lawyers filed with the city clerks. In six months, small radio stations, local newspapers and parish halls would do more than any rally. He did not need chants. He needed a habit. Baby stipends. School lunches. Free bus cards for families with three children. At each desk, he cut anything that sounded like a sermon. "Let the councils speak," he told them. "Let grandmothers speak."
He kept the two worlds apart. Pounds, kroner, and euros only. Bank wires and field receipts. Goblin ledgers stayed shut. The name Black did not touch the paperwork. The money rose from the new pipes under Moscow and St Petersburg and vanished into parish grants and grocery cards. No one needed to know the route.
He checked a street poster in Gothenburg. The words were dull on purpose. Apply at the town hall. Bring an ID and proof of address. The edge carried a small line about free prenatal checkups. He let his gaze slide to a newsstand. "Global economy" and "Cultural Enrichment" screamed from a headline. He smiled without humour. They would not scream forever. He had not forgotten his life as a simple police officer.
London met him with wet stone and bus brakes. He shifted and took flight over the city. He landed on a roof where he could watch the spot where his first life ended. It was silent now. London was like the London he knew and loved. Not a place where the Union Jack was seen as an offending object for some minorities. He was going to make sure to keep it this way. Not only here in England but in other countries that shared the same tragedy as well. It took a year for him to have enough political and economic weight to be able to affect these subjects. But now he was ready.
His mind went back to the first reports from Norway. Birth grant requests already outpaced the forecast. Instead of wasting their money on foreign help and orientations, if the governments started to do this... He stopped his train of thought. His organisation will grow. His vision will come true. Separate in Muggle and Magical worlds, for now.
He watched streaks of rain wash the streets. Muggle numbers whispered in his head. Five and a half billion. Half a million wizardkin. One to eleven thousand. And the Muggles had toys that burned cities to ash from a continent away. Tanks. Rockets. Satellites. Machines that did not miss twice. Only a fool talked about ruling the planet with such numbers. He talked about shelter. He took flight and shifted back to a dark corner of a street. Flame travel took him back to his study at the Nest.
He closed the ledger and drew a clean sheet toward him. Time to change lanes. His next replication would not be a beast or a dementor. It would be a set of minds. Biology first. Medicine next. Then chemistry to stitch them together. He wrote the words University of Cambridge at the top and underlined them once.
Flame gathered in his palm. He let it die. There was no need to rush. The foundations would hum without him for a week. The press would settle. The parish officers would stamp forms and smile into cameras. He would be across town tomorrow, in a library that smelled of old varnish and new paper, hunting for the hinge that made a wizard different from a man with no magic.
He was not a scientist; in his former life, he only heard about concepts and dumbed down versions in tea breaks or while on patrols. Developments in Physics, Chemistry, Biology and of course, the most popular subjects people wouldn't stop talking about, Quantum Physics. Even the scientists did not understand How's and Why's of that subject, yet civilians, when they find something strange and interesting, as usual, were latching on to it.
His target this time was the University of Cambridge, his focus was Biology, Medicine, Chemistry and interdisciplinary research between these.
--
The afternoon air over Cambridgeshire was cool and clean. Corvus cut through it in his shadow raven form, wings steady, body a dark line against the sky. He kept high above until the river made its slow bend and a lace of old stone and courtyards showed beneath him. He dropped to a rooftop by a narrow lane, shifted, and pulled his cloak straight. The city smelled of wet stone, cut grass, and coffee. It was full of bikes that had carried in the rain.
He watched first. Students poured out of a hall with paper cups. A porter checked a gate and grumbled at a lad with no badge. Corvus crossed the lane and let Memory Mapping do its work. Lecture timetables snapped into place. Divisions of the university. The biomedical site sat to the south of the big hospital. Shuttle routes. Which doors needed a card swipe? Which doors were always half open because a harried postdoc could not be bothered to wait.
He moved. Flight again, brief and low, between roofs and trees. He set down outside the Cambridge Biomedical Campus and walked in with the slow purpose of a man who belonged. Security glanced past him. He had the stride right. The glass of the School of Clinical Medicine threw back a clean reflection. Inside, the atrium hummed with light, vending machines clicked, lifts chimed, and from a corridor came the thin cold breath of freezers.
Another mapping, a clinical lecturer with coffee and a sheaf of marked scripts. Genetics modules, supervision lists, lab locations, and Monday seminars. He stepped into a stairwell and chose his mark for replication. Professor John Gurdon, a Developmental biologist, pioneer in nuclear transfer and cloning. Publications, decades of wet lab and dry lab experience, and a mind wired to see patterns in noise.
Replication flared. The world pressed in, then widened. Principles fell into order. Cellular & Molecular Biology, DNA & Chromosomes, Gene Expression & Regulation, Medical & Clinical Genetics. Microbiology & Industrial Applications. A whole new world opened in his mind palace. The new knowledge and experiences are waiting to be absorbed. A set of rules that had weight and reason.
He crossed to the medical library and took a table by a window. Extreme speed allowed him to absorb what he got from the Professor. He stood after a while and stared at the shelves. Human Molecular Genetics. Medical Statistics. Genomics of Common Disease. A slim volume on epigenetic control.
A fast Muggle repellent ward was enough to let him study in peace. Speed and Agility allowed him to put more time into hours. Comprehension woke like a second sight. Paragraphs laid out their bones. Figures stopped being pictures and became steps. He read, page after page. When a line snagged, he shut the book and went hunting. The corridor carried voices and the scrape of shoes. A senior technician came out with a crate of tips. Corvus used memory mapping. Pipetting practice, cleaning routines, which postdocs cut corners, and which reagent lots ruined yields. He went back to the table and continued.
His purpose kept the pace. What separates wizardkind from Muggles? A single locus would have been nice. Life did not oblige. The books drew a picture of many small effects. Polygenic risk. Regulatory networks that rose and fell like tides. He memorised each page and added a second line of notes in his own mind. If magical ability is heritable, it is probably not simple dominance. Think thresholds. Think canalised development. Check family studies in old Black records against large sample logic from the Muggle side.
Night again. He took the stairs because the lifts carried cameras. A professor in a wool coat paused at the noticeboard to pin up a seminar. Corvus thanked him for holding the door and plucked what he wanted from his mind. Bioinformatics pipelines. False positives and family structure. How to catch a batch effect before it lied to the paper. He returned to the book on expression control. Something that moved charge and signal. Something that is tied to the brain, gut, and bone.
In the day, he kept to the reading rooms. The place had a rhythm. Keyboards. Quiet coughs. The rattle of a trolley. From time to time, an alarm yelped in the distance when a door was propped open. He built a stack of questions, burned it down, and built another. Metabolism sat next to immunity.
He made a clean plan in his head. Three cohorts. Full wizards, squibs, muggles. Age matched. Sex balanced. No close kin inside the same cohort. Whole blood for DNA. Fresh whole blood for RNA. Serum for proteins. Magic wrecked electronics if you did not ward the room. Wards needed to keep noise out, not trap it in. He sketched a ward grid for a lab and marked out the spots to set freezers and sequencers so their fields did not step on the runes.
When a chapter tied into a knot he could not cut, he went walking again. The Clinical School gave and gave. A consultant who still taught undergrads paused by the café for tea. Memory Mapping brought over years of exam questions and a quiet contempt for perfect answers that did not touch the case. Corvus memorised that down as well. Theory was nothing if it did not touch a life.
By midweek, he had spent enough time to be equal to the work of multiple months. Without sleep, without rest, he read and comprehended. He sharpened it and turned the page. Structural variation. Things that broke in chunks. He wrote a clean word under it. Squibs. If a threshold sat between silence and spark, structural breaks could push a line to one side. He listed tests. Read depth. Split reads. Long range, if he could keep the magic off the machine. He drew a second plan for a hedge version that used older methods and more patience, in case the modern tools refused to play inside wards.
He did not live at the library. He moved through the labs as a shadow when he needed a look at gear. He moved across the campus at night in raven form when he needed to breathe. He never went near a camera twice with the same face. It paid to respect the statute and his own plans.
On Friday, he walked the perimeter of the campus and watched the bikes flow out to the city. The week had done its work. He had one more piece to take. A senior researcher rolled a bicycle from a rack and checked a lock. Corvus used memory mapping. His new target for replication cleared in his memories. Professor Azim Surani is known for his work on genomic imprinting and developmental genetics.
He stopped by the river on the way back. The sky went from slate to black. He closed the last book and packed his notes. Supporting courses would set the floor. Biochemistry to tie the process to matter. Statistics to keep him honest. Bioinformatics to hold the flood once he turned the tap. He stood, stretched his shoulders, and moved off the path.
A wing beat took him up. The city fell away. The week went into its box. Tomorrow, he would use replication again and start to build the lab that could hold this work. Tonight, he kept the plans simple. More reading, then the first list of samples and the letters that would make the doors open without a shadow in the hall.