The villa was quiet in the way old places get quiet. Not empty. Just peaceful.
Corvus followed the scent of herbs and hot metal down the stairs. The steps were worn smooth. Someone had used them for centuries and never bothered to soften the descent.
Light spilt from the open door at the bottom.
Nicholas Flamel's laboratory sat inside the cellar like it owned the place.
Benches ran along the walls in strict order. Copper pipes hugged the stone and fed heat into basins without a single wisp of wasted steam. A line of glass flasks stood on a rack, each labelled in crisp handwriting. There was no decoration, only strict functionality.
Nicholas worked without looking up. He held a glass rod and stirred a pale solution in a shallow dish. The flame beneath it stayed dull and steady, the sort of flame that never impressed anyone and never failed.
Corvus stopped at the threshold and watched his hands.
"Late," Nicholas noted.
Corvus stepped in. "I thought you would sleep."
Nicholas shifted a valve a quarter turn. The solution changed colour by a degree. "I slept."
Corvus placed his satchel on an empty chair and kept his posture respectful. Nicholas did not even glance at him again. That was worse in its own way.
He let his senses widen.
The wards were layered and practical. Containment. Sterility. Heat control. There were defensive lines as well, but they were not the focus. This room assumes accidents before enemies.
Corvus had told himself, before he arrived, that he would not use Memory Mapping on Perenelle or Nicholas again after the incident. He had kept it. Replication, on the other hand, was not something he had the luxury of not using.
He was waiting with the skill ready. The pull was constant, a cold itch behind the ribs.
Nicholas set the rod down and finally looked at him.
"Show me your notes from this morning."
Corvus reached into his satchel and laid a parchment on the work table. He kept it flat with two fingers. Diagrams, ratios and methods. His handwriting stayed neat. He had already memorised them.
Nicholas scanned it once. "You accepted my shortcut."
Corvus watched his face. "You were simplifying."
"I was testing whether you would ask why I simplified." Nicholas tapped a number with the rod. "You did not."
Corvus did not bristle. He leaned in and followed the ratios. "I did not because I can understand the chemistry behind it. Your shortcut breaks if the catalyst is not pure."
Nicholas nodded once. "True."
Corvus let the silence hold for a heartbeat.
Then he activated his Replication.
A pressure built behind Corvus's eyes. His magic tightened, then settled, like it had found a groove it liked.
His mind sorted what he touched into tiers without asking him.
Above gold came platinum.
Above platinum came diamond.
Nicholas Flamel was not simply skilled.
He was refined.
Alchemy - Diamond
Enchanting - Diamond
Transmutation - Diamond
Transformation - Diamond
Biological Manipulation - Diamond
Chemical Manipulation - Diamond
Potions - Diamond
Magical Theory - Diamond
Telekinesis - Platinum
Transfiguration - Platinum
Herbology - Platinum
Rituals - Platinum
Charms - Gold
Astrology - Gold
Dark Magic - Gold
Healing - Gold
Runes - Gold
Aura Reading - Gold
Corvus kept his face still. He did not even blink for a while. He did not focus on skills that were on Gold and below.
Nicholas's gaze stayed on him. Measuring, again. "You have a habit of going quiet when you comprehend new things."
Corvus lifted a brow.
Nicholas's mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. "Focus on the process, young man."
Corvus turned his attention back to the basin. "Show me the full method."
Nicholas resumed work as if nothing happened. That in itself was information.
They worked through the next hours in silence, broken only by instruction.
Nicholas explained without padding. A correction came with a reason. A reason came with a test. He did not praise. He did not soften failure. He simply moved on.
Corvus followed, hands steady, eyes sharper than they were in the morning. Not because he was faster now. Because he understood what Nicholas was doing.
In the middle of it, Perenelle came down the stairs.
Corvus sensed her before he heard her steps.
Her aura did not flare like a torch. It sat clean and bright, and it pulled attention without trying.
She carried a tray and set it on a side table with calm control. Cups. A small pot. Cookies stacked in a neat pile.
Nicholas's hand moved before his eyes did.
Perenelle clicked her tongue. "Six hundred years and you still reach first."
Nicholas pulled the plate closer to his notes like a miser. "They are mine."
Perenelle's gaze slid to Corvus. "Do not let him fool you. He pretends he has discipline."
Corvus took one cookie and bit it. Butter, honey and something sweet under it, a spice he could not name on the first taste. "It tastes like bribery."
Perenelle's eyes warmed by a fraction. "Good. You can be taught."
Nicholas made a low sound that might have been a laugh if anyone else made it.
Perenelle moved back toward the stairs. "If he eats the lot, I will make more. I am not cruel."
Corvus watched her turn.
He wanted to see what Prenelle had, hence he did not hesitate.
Replication reached again.
Nicholas had built a wall with care. Perenelle was a storm built into a person.
His mind caught the shape of her skills, and his stomach tightened.
Black Magic - Diamond
Dark Magic - Diamond
Temporal Magic - Diamond
Soul Magic - Diamond
Spatial Magic - Diamond
Psychic Magic - Diamond
Life Magic - Diamond
Death Magic - Diamond
Aura Manipulation - Diamond
Charms - Diamond
Enchanting - Diamond
Magical Theory - Diamond
Healing - Platinum
Transmutation - Platinum
Transformation - Platinum
Biological Manipulation - Platinum
Transfiguration - Platinum
Alchemy - Gold
Corvus stood still and felt, for the first time in a long time, the honest urge to step back.
Replication, unlike memory mapping, was not noticed by the overpowered couple.
When the day ended, it did not end with an announcement. Nicholas set his quill down, covered a basin with a lid, and turned a wardstone a finger width.
"Read the books I've given you before you sleep," Nicholas stated.
Corvus picked up his satchel.
Nicholas watched him at the door. "Today was your first day, Corvus. Tomorrow we will focus on atomic changes."
Corvus inclined his head again and left. He replicated Alchemy from Nicholas. Upstairs, his room waited. Clean. Quiet. Too polite.
He layered privacy wards anyway.
Then he lay back on the bed and let the absorption begin.
Extreme speed and extreme agility were not only movement traits. They were mental tools. They made absorption faster. They also made it brutal.
Six centuries pressed into him.
He forced himself to sift.
He pulled out patterns and methods. He pulled out the one thing Nicholas returned to, again and again, in private thought and practice.
The Codex, also known as The Book of Abraham the Mage.
In Nicholas's memories, it was not a curiosity. It was the hinge that turned his entire life.
It described the council of Elders and their departure without romance. Names are recorded like ledger entries. Places noted as coordinates. Artefacts left behind as if the world were a table and they had decided which knives to forget.
Corvus watched the knowledge settle into him and felt his earlier assumptions crack.
Magicals were not simply blessed. They were not a different branch of evolution. Wizardkin was of another world.
Underlings, in Abraham's phrasing. Servants. Tools.
Elders had walked the world openly once. Muggles had called them gods because Muggles always did that when they could not understand what stood over them.
Witches and wizards came with them.
Not as equals.
As something brought.
Corvus lay still and stared at the ceiling as if stone might answer him.
If this were true, then his war was not simply against the Confederation. It was against a history he did not know existed.
His jaw tightened.
He forced himself to breathe and kept sorting memories until his eyes burned.
Elsewhere in the villa, Nicholas and Perenelle retreated to their chambers.
Nicholas sat at a desk and wrote notes in a narrow hand.
Perenelle stood at a private set and brewed with steady hands. The Elixir of Life did not forgive distraction. She had enough experience to brew it without a recipe.
Nicholas spoke without looking up. "He is ahead of where I expected."
Perenelle did not pause. "He is not ordinary."
Nicholas's quill scratched. "That is not a diagnosis."
Perenelle's eyes flicked toward him. "Do not turn clever when you are uneasy."
Nicholas exhaled once and continued writing. "I made mistakes. Small ones. I wanted to see arrogance."
"And?"
"He questioned the method first." Nicholas's tone stayed even. "He assumed I was testing him, then adjusted. His aura stayed steady."
Perenelle's mouth tightened. "I felt a residue."
Nicholas's quill stopped.
"Dementor," Perenelle stated.
Nicholas did not react like a man who thought she was joking. "He is of House Black Nell. It might be family tradition to kiss back the wraiths."
"I am not joking." Perenelle set a vial into a cradle of runes. "It was the same feeling when we worked on the Dementor. Reading your mind. I have seen a natural legilimens before. Queenie Goldstein. Gifted, but limited. Strong Occlumency stopped her. Corvus reads past barriers when it suits him."
Nicholas resumed writing, slower. "Did you test his Occlumency?"
"No."
Nicholas did not hide his relief. It was small, but it was there.
Perenelle's gaze stayed hard. "He is young. That makes him worse. Gifted and young with a strong family means he survives mistakes long enough to make new ones."
Nicholas leaned back. "The residue might be family work. Blacks and Rosiers are known to be secretive houses. It might be a family trait."
Perenelle did not argue. Her senses had not lied to her in six centuries.
"He bothers me," she admitted.
Nicholas's eyes held hers. "Why?"
"My instincts are screaming around him, Nick."
Nicholas turned back to his notes. "A month," he murmured.
Perenelle covered the Elixir and extinguished the work flame. "A month is enough to understand what he is."
Nicholas nodded once. "I am not going to control him."
Perenelle's smile held no warmth. "No. Not that."
In his room, Corvus kept pulling the new knowledge apart, piece by piece.
He needed more time with this couple.
He also needed to decide which of them was the greater danger.
--
Nicholas kept the same hours every day.
Corvus learned the pattern by the third morning. Wake before the sun, wash, dress, and go down the narrow stairs to the cellar lab.
The villa had a stillness to it. No moving portraits. No gossip. No doors slamming because a suit of armour took offence. Just stone, old wards, and two immortals.
Nicholas waited by the long table, sleeves rolled to the forearm, hands already stained with soot from the burner. The man looked neat even when he was messy.
Corvus set his satchel down, pulled out his notes, and took his place.
Nicholas tapped the rim of a crucible with a glass rod. The sound was small, but it cut through the room.
"Again," Nicholas prompted.
Corvus didn't argue. He repeated the sequence. Grind. Measure. Add. Heat. Wait. Then the part most people ruined, the moment where impatience turned a near perfect solution into grey sludge.
Nicholas watched the surface without blinking. Corvus watched Nicholas instead.
The first replication had landed like a stone in his stomach.
Diamond level Alchemy. Diamond, dense, layered and sharp enough to cut.
The knowledge settled in him like a second spine. Rules that had felt vague before turned rigid. Ratios that looked like superstition became logic. It didn't make him kinder. It made him faster.
Nicholas held a palm out. Corvus stopped on the next motion, mid pour.
Nicholas leaned in, sniffed once, then nodded. Approval, quiet and almost annoying.
Corvus set the vial down and let out a slow breath.
Perenelle appeared at the door on a soft step. She carried a tray with cups and a plate of cookies, and she looked at the table the way an Auror looked at a crime scene.
She placed the tray down like she did every day. Then reached for a cookie and snapped it in half with casual fingers.
Corvus watched Perenelle's eyes, but now he was seeing the pattern in them. Her gaze did not rest on the cookies. It went to the air around Corvus, then the corners of the room, then Nicholas' hands, then Corvus again.
Replication was ready; his second choice was Temporal Magic of Prenelle. Another Diamond level skill.
It went in clean. That evening, when he finished absorbing it, the world felt wrong for a heartbeat, and time felt wrong. Not slow or fast. Simply wrong. Like the room had slipped one step to the side of itself.
Nicholas looked up from his notes.
The next morning, Corvus put his timeturner, not pushing it toward Nicholas, just making it visible. Honest. Controlled.
"I want to use it in your library," Corvus stated. "More hours. More reading. I won't take a single volume out. I won't copy anything with magic. I just need time."
Nicholas' brows climbed. He was surprised.
"You ask," Nicholas noted.
Corvus kept his hands still.
Nicholas leaned back, eyes narrowing. The old man measured things in risk, not courtesy.
"You can," Nicholas allowed at last. "One condition."
Corvus waited.
Nicholas tapped the table once with a knuckle.
"You do not leave the library while you are turned."
Corvus held Nicholas' gaze.
"Agreed."
Nicholas did not smile. He reached for a wand anyway.
He raised it, drew a slow circle in the air, and the villa's wards stirred. Corvus felt the thread catch on his skin, gentle and cold.
Nicholas set the hook with a final flick.
"If you cross the threshold," Nicholas added, "the time turner locks. You waste the loop. You also wake Perenelle."
That last line carried weight. Nicholas knew what threats mattered.
Corvus gave a small nod. "Understood."
The library sat behind a door that looked too plain for what it guarded.
Inside, it was dense. Shelves stacked to the ceiling. Ladders with iron runners. Old leather. Dust that smelled like ink and pressed flowers. The air held its own temperature.
Corvus stepped in and felt his pulse settle.
He turned the time turner once.
Corvus started seeing what the difference was between a normal wizard and a wizard who was skilled in Temporal magic. The moment he used the Timeturner, he saw the flows of Time.
The world snapped.
The sound of the villa faded, then returned, slightly out of place, like hearing a song from the next room. He stayed inside the library, exactly where Nicholas demanded.
He read.
He did not skim like a child showing off. He read like a thief with no time to waste. His speed and comprehension worked together.
Volumes on Transmutation, stacked beside notes.
With each new Replication, more fragments of the Codex were coming together.
A diagram of circles within circles. A list of names that matched older myths. A line about underlings that made his stomach twist, because it wasn't written as an insult. It was written as fact.
By the time the loop closed, dawn had not reached the windows.
His third Replication was Nicholas' Transmutation of Diamond level.
Transmutation did not sit politely. It rewired the way his mind sorted the world. Metal was no longer metal. It was structured. Bonds waiting to be broken and remade.
Nicholas watched him for a long moment.
"You look pale," Nicholas observed.
Corvus took a breath through his nose. "You teach hard."
Nicholas gave a quiet huff that might have been laughter.
Perenelle tested him without touching him.
She changed the questions she asked at the dinner table. Simple things, on the surface.
"What did you read today?"
Corvus kept his answer blunt. "History of transmutation circles. Three different schools. One was wrong."
"Which one?"
"The one identifies the elements as fire, earth, air and water."
Perenelle's smile sharpened. "Good."
His fourth Replication was Prenelle's Soul Magic.
That one hurt.
Not physically. It felt like standing too close to a grave and realising you could name every bone.
The Codex fragments in his head clicked into place again. He needed more time. So he offered something.
After one of Nicholas' lessons, Corvus took his wand out and performed the sequence that had earned him mastery in transfiguration. Clean work. The kind that showed method.
Nicholas watched without interrupting. Perenelle watched like a predator that had found a new scent. When Corvus finished, he set his wand down on the table.
"I can write the method," Corvus offered.
Nicholas' eyes narrowed.
Perenelle took a slow sip of tea.
Corvus kept his voice even. "I want more time here. I want more library time."
Nicholas glanced at Perenelle.
She did not answer at once. She let the silence stretch until it started to itch.
"On one condition," Perenelle finally replied.
Corvus waited.
"You do not share what you learn here," she continued, "with anyone who is not your blood or your bound."
Corvus did not flinch. "Agreed."
He added, quiet and firm, "And you do not share the method with anyone else."
Nicholas nodded once. "Did you know half of this method is based on Soul Magic?"
That question kept him staying for another three weeks.
He spent replication on what mattered.
Transformation.
Biological Manipulation.
Chemical Manipulation.
Each one widened the understanding of the Magic and Matter in his mind.
If Magicals were not of this world, then science was not a tool. It was a weapon. And a shield. And a key.
When Corvus finally mentioned England, he did it over breakfast.
"I have to return," Corvus stated. "I need to meet my intended. I need to keep my house steady."
Nicholas raised a brow. "You sound like an old man."
Perenelle's mouth twitched. "He is a Black. They start old."
Corvus did not smile. He kept it practical.
"I will come back," he added.
Nicholas reached into a drawer and pulled out a ribbon, blue as a clear sky. Too simple to be safe.
"A portkey," Nicholas explained. "Between here and Britain. You do not speak of this place. You do not bring guests. You use it alone. You are the fastest pupil I have in over six hundred years. Consider it as a gift."
Corvus accepted it and tucked it into his pocket.
Perenelle watched him the whole time.
Corvus felt her gaze like a hand at the back of his neck.
Replication came free on the morning he left. He used it on Aura Manipulation.
Not for greed but for clarity.
The world changed.
Auras were not colour, not in the childish way. They were pressure. Motion, density and threads pulled tight or loose. He could see the residue of spells like smoke that refused to disperse.
He understood, all at once, why Perenelle had been watching him like that.
She had been reading him. Corvus thanked them properly. No promises he would not keep.
Nicholas gave him a nod. Perenelle's eyes stayed sharp. "Do not waste what you learned," she warned.
Corvus slipped the ribbon into his palm.
He did not look away.
"Alchemy."