Chapter 131: Scalding Vital Blood and the Scapegoat in the Abyss
The secondary heart was located deeper than expected.
Cassius ignored Harry's accusations, locking all his attention onto the pulsating subcutaneous tissue near the Basilisk's tail.
He pressed the fingers of his right hand together, and magic coalesced at his fingertips into an extremely thin, high-temperature cutting line.
The blade sliced through the eight-centimeter-thick muscle layer outside the third vertebra of the Basilisk's tail.
His fingers curled into a claw, and with a whistling sound, he pierced through the final layer of protective scales.
Blood splattered everywhere.
Cassius's right arm plunged into the Basilisk's foul-smelling abdominal cavity.
He didn't even frown, letting the magic clinging to his fingertips transform into sensory tendrils, which synchronized with the global perception network in his brain to precisely anchor the location of the internal organs.
Found it.
A dull, explosive sound erupted deep within the flesh.
Cassius closed his fingers, digging into the secondary heart—the size of an adult man's fist and covered with an amber-colored membrane.
High heat erupted from his palm, burning directly through the connective tissue membrane to forcibly refine it within the Basilisk's cavity.
Withdrawing his arm, he held a dark red liquid sphere in his palm that radiated intense heat and rich magical fluctuations.
As the millennium-old vital blood touched the oxygen, its surface immediately bubbled, and the overflowing heat dried the standing water at his feet with a sizzling sound.
"Thirty percent more than the estimated capacity. Not bad for stock that hasn't been used in a thousand years," Cassius judged with cold, numerical detachment.
Harry widened his bloodshot green eyes, his throat feeling dry and tight. He clutched his broken wand and backed away repeatedly, his left hand subconsciously grabbing at the frayed edge of his robe. "This is the thing you caused such a huge commotion for, sneaking into the Chamber of Secrets to steal! Just what kind of monster are you!"
"Watch your phrasing, Mr. Potter," Cassius corrected, tilting his head. "In a historical ruin with unclear property rights, taking unclaimed items that can be exchanged for power is called resource reorganization. Your sense of morality wouldn't fetch half a copper on the black market."
Not giving Harry a chance to continue, he tilted his head back, opened his mouth, and poured the scalding dark red vital blood down his throat, while his left hand pressed firmly against his own heart.
This was an act of a madman with no common sense. Ordinary Wizards wouldn't dare swallow even a single drop of high-level magical beast vital blood.
As the vital blood entered his stomach, the Dual-Soul Furnace spiraled out of control.
Cassius's skin turned a sickly bright red, and his veins bulged, looking as if dozens of live nematodes had burrowed under his skin.
The Basilisk's savage power attempted to tear this human shell apart, but the magic within his body transformed into a giant hand, forcibly pinning this force deep within his energy reservoir.
The pain tore through his periosteum. Every bone was crushed and then recast.
Cassius collapsed beside the corpse, eyes tightly shut.
Beads of sweat slid down his temples, and his bones emitted a teeth-grinding friction sound. He gritted his teeth so hard his jaw ached, refusing to let out even a single groan of pain.
The spider-silk inner armor emitted a piercing, strained hum due to the overloaded heat, its edges beginning to curl.
"You'll explode yourself!" Watching this miserable state where he looked ready to burst at any moment, Harryinstinctively rushed forward a step, his left hand even reaching out to pull him.
"Put away your useless sympathy and retreat behind the safety line," Cassius growled a warning, effectively pinning Harry's feet to the spot.
Relying on the willpower of having lived two lifetimes, he forcibly crushed and tamed the rampaging energy. The refinement lasted two minutes, with the millennium-old life force turning into scalding lava, washing over his muscle fibers.
Two minutes later, the crimson on his skin slowly receded, and a layer of dark golden luster flashed across his body.
He opened his hand and tossed the shriveled, slag-like tissue mass into the pool of blood.
Cassius opened his eyes, exhaled a puff of scorching, murky air, and flexed the fingers of his right hand, making his knuckles crack.
He glanced down at the worn thread on his cuff—a symbol of his extreme obsession with resisting loss of control—and it remained intact on his wrist.
"Material quality meets the standard. Physical burden capacity increased by twenty-three percent, meridian repair rate at eighty-two percent," he recited the figures like a precise instrument. "Worth it."
"You'd throw away your life just to pursue power," Harrysaid, gripping his broken wand tightly, his voice trembling.
"Only extreme investments on the edge of life and death yield high returns. This is called venture capital," Cassiusstraightened his body, his combat boots crushing a mass of entrails as he walked over unhurriedly. "What about you, Mr. Savior? Did you run into this sewer in the middle of the night to find amusement for that persecution-delusion diary of yours?"
Harry swallowed hard, his Adam's apple bobbing: "I thought you were going to blow up Hogwarts!"
"You thought," Cassius sneered, his face full of disdain. "Potter, has the logic circuit in your brain been soaking in water for years? If I wanted to destroy this dump of a school, would I need to draw blueprints and run to the basement to find an iron pickaxe?"
He pointed up at the massive hole he had bored through with his body: "Can a thirty-seven-meter-thick geological layer stop a gravity collapse array I've activated with full power? If I wanted to level Hogwarts, one stomp while standing on the lawn would be enough. Dumbledorewouldn't even have the qualifications to collect my corpse from the ruins."
Harry looked at the hole leading straight to the night sky, his scalp tingling. His lips trembled: "Then those diagrams you drew..."
"Calculating the location of this big bug's secondary heart," Cassius tilted his head toward the Basilisk's corpse. "The red cross coordinates were the calculated points of the pipeline's path. It has nothing to do with bombs."
The color drained completely from Harry's face, and he felt like a fool performing in a farce. "Then what about Luna? That red poison you fed her..."
"An energy crystal physically compressed from dragon blood mixed with Unicorn horn powder, market price thirty-seven Galleons each," Cassius read out the account. "Do you think I'm so bored that I'd spend thirty-seven Galleons to poison a first-year student?"
Harry lowered his head, staring at his mud-stained reflection in the puddle.
His desperate tracking and righteous accusations had become a clown's solo performance in the face of absolute rational profit calculation.
"You're treating the school's restricted area as your private slaughterhouse!" Harry gripped his last line of defense and looked up. "Professor Dumbledore and the Ministry of Magic won't let you get away with this!"
"Enough, Potter. Your detective game ends here." Cassiusbent down and reached into the bloody, mangled mouth of the Basilisk.
With a flick of his wrist, he tossed a half-meter-long, sharp fang dripping with corrosive venom at Harry's feet.
The fang hit the stone floor, splashing two drops of venom that caused the ground to smoke.
"This thing belongs to you. A Basilisk fang, specifically for breaking Dark Arts creations." Cassius bent his knees, focusing his newly enhanced physical strength into his toes. "Take it, grab that academic fraud of yours with a head full of mush, and crawl back to the surface along the pipes."
"Go find your old Principal and let him give you the Savior halo he's had custom-made for you," he commanded.
"You killed the monster! I will never lie to Dumbledore and steal glory that doesn't belong to me!" Harry shouted, neck stiff.
Cassius paused. He turned his head, locking onto Harrywith a cold, ruthless gaze as if assessing a pig ready for slaughter.
"Do you think that old man with the half-moon spectacles cares who killed this beast?" Cassius tore away the pretense in the most indifferent tone. "He needs a scapegoat to stabilize the school board and shut the Ministry of Magic up, who can also moonlight as a shining idol."
"And you, the boy with the lightning scar, are his most perfect and only political chip."
Cassius took one last glance at the ruins of the Chamber of Secrets, his gaze not lingering on anyone for even half a second.
"Carry this scapegoat, along with this blood-stained glory. This is the survival tax you must pay in this dirty world."
The air exploded.
Cassius's legs erupted with thrust, and the granite beneath his feet shattered into powder.
He transformed into a deep blue afterimage, rushing in reverse up the thirty-seven-meter-deep vertical hole and escaping into the night sky.
Harry sat dazed in the pile of snake blood and rubble. In front of him was the split-open millennium-old Basilisk, at his feet was the sizzling, smoking fang, and behind him was the demented Lockhart, drooling while holding a mouse bone and muttering, "No, that was the Armenian Wizard who did it."
Harry Potter tilted his face, covered in mud and blood, toward the large hole that revealed the cold moonlight, his eyes stinging.
"Damn it."
The twelve-year-old boy wiped the snake blood from his face, bent down, and grabbed the heavy fang.
Chapter 132: The Thousand-Year Beast Torn Apart by Bare Hands and the Professors' Horror
Water droplets hit the stone slabs, the tapping echoing deep within the pipe network beneath the second-floor lavatory.
Moonlight filtered down from a thirty-seven-meter-high vertical shaft, cutting a pale, bright patch into the stagnant water of the Chamber of Secrets.
The beam of light shone directly onto this slaughterhouse. Harry gripped the heavy Basilisk fang, standing for three minutes in a pool of blood that reached past his ankles.
The highly corrosive slime remaining on the surface of the fang trickled down along the bone's texture, etching the skin of his palm and burning out a large patch of itchy red spots.
He pulled over the wide cuff of his school robe, wrapped it twice around the root of the fang, and stood stiffly. The accumulated blood beneath his feet had long since lost its warmth and felt sticky to step on. The air was filled with the stench of rotting internal organs mixed with high-temperature charring.
Thirty meters away, the giant statue of Slytherin was no more.
Two broken stone legs stood atop a base that had been sliced flat across the middle.
In the center of the Chamber of Secrets, an eighteen-meter-long ancient beast had been torn in half from its lower jaw all the way down.
A flesh-and-blood canyon over two meters wide lay across the middle of the carcass, with jagged rib ends protruding from the cross-section, pointing straight toward the ceiling.
Massive, unbroken nerve cords twitched mechanically, pulling torn organs and chunks of meat that slid down inch by inch, crashing into the pool of blood at the bottom with a series of nauseating "splat" sounds.
Lockhart sat cross-legged in the dirtiest mud pit in the corner.
He was covered in snake blood, his hands clutching a greyish-white large rat's leg bone, earnestly tapping the tip of his shoe with the bone, repeatedly muttering "The great masterpiece of the Armenian wizard."
The tapping grew faster and faster, betraying an unhideable terror.
Dull footsteps came from the end of the Chamber of Secrets.
The cast-iron door that required Parseltongue to open, along with its hinges, had been ripped from the wall; the twisted metal door panel slammed onto the floor tiles, creating a crater.
Three figures, illuminated by the Lumos of their wands, stepped over the debris and dust to cross the doorway.
Dumbledore walked at the front.
The light from the Elder Wand probed into the cold space.
His half-moon spectacles were covered in a layer of dust, and his silvery-white beard was disheveled by the night wind blowing in from the pipe network.
The old Principal habitually brushed his left hand over the hidden pocket on the right side of his robes, where he kept his lemon sherbet, but he didn't reach for the candy this time.
Snape followed closely behind, the hem of his black robes dipping into the crimson puddles as they touched the ground; he let out an impatient "tsk," his leather boot loathingly kicking away half a piece of snake skin.
Professor McGonagall trailed at the end; she raised a hand to straighten her tilted Wizard's hat, her gaze sweeping across the Chamber of Secrets following the wand's light, her vocal cords ceasing to function.
The three top Professors of Hogwarts saw the tragic scene around them and fell into a long, collective silence.
There were no signs of a struggle.
This was a one-sided slaughter that had scoured the place clean.
Professor McGonagall raised her left hand, covering her nose and mouth tightly.
The stench emanating from dozens of tons of rotting meat rushed straight to her head.
Her chest heaved violently, her other hand clutching the tartan brooch on her lapel.
Snape strode past the mud and shredded snake skin, walking toward the massive remains of the head.
The sole of his shoe crushed a segment of fallen snake bone with a crisp sound. He knelt down, his black robes completely soaked in blood, yet he didn't care at all.
His left hand pulled a small silver scalpel from an inner robe pocket, instinctively moving to scrape the marrow from the jagged bone fragments, but the tip of the blade stopped abruptly just as it touched the spoiled sludge.
He stood up, the tip of his wand lifting a thick, outward-folded fragment of the skull, his gaze locked onto that terrifying torn wound.
"All damage is from blunt force and brute-force tearing; there are no residual traces of Dark Arts corrosion," Snapestated, his voice carrying a dry rasp. "The ulcerated wounds in the eyes of the head are structural collapses caused by high-frequency, dense, heavy-fire strikes. Not a Blasting Curse, not a piercing spell. Every crater points to the same attack pattern—a physical projection of compressed magic."
He tossed aside the skull fragment and stared at the two completely separated, massive lower jawbones on the ground. The bone marrow at the cross-section had oxidized and changed color upon contact with the air.
"The jaw was snapped while it was still alive," Snape's tone was matter-of-fact, yet it made one's skin crawl. "The direction of force was from the inside out. Pure anti-joint pulling. This is a wound torn open by human hands." He put away the small silver knife, a look of extreme regret crossing his face as he saw top-tier Potion materials turned into a pile of sludge.
Professor McGonagall walked stumbling.
Her Scottish tartan robes got caught on a sticky segment of snake intestine. She waved her wand, casting a Severing Charm to cut the intestine, then gripped her wand and hurried to the area of the Basilisk's massive tail. She knelt down, probing the white light from her wand tip into a large blood hole that had been violently excavated.
The white light swept back and forth deep within the flesh for a few seconds.
"The secondary heart has been removed," McGonagall's voice was soft, her vocal cords tight. "The wound isn't extensively torn; the surrounding tissue damage is controlled within centimeters, and even the main blood vessels connected to the heart were deliberately kept intact. This is a surgical-level precision extraction!"
She looked up at Snape nearby: "Severus, was this thousand-year-old divine beast torn apart from the middle by someone using their bare hands? No matter how strong Cassius Malfoy's magic is, he's only a twelve-year-old student after all. How could his physical body move a monster weighing dozens of tons!"
"Aside from that monster who tramples common sense underfoot, you won't find a second madman in the entire British Isles capable of such a thing." Snape stood straight, flicking the blood from his wand tip into a nearby puddle. He turned his head, his gaze locking onto Harry, who was standing in the center of the ruins.
"Mr. Potter," Snape applied pressure, "could you explain to us elderly Professors exactly which brutal butcher arrived before us and completed an entire set of horrific meat-cutting operations in this underground Chamber of Secretsbelonging to Slytherin?"
Harry was forced back half a step by Snape's questioning.
He gripped the fang in his hand, the burning pain in his palm stimulating his nerves.
The venom had burned through his skin, and blood was dripping down from the root of the tooth.
How could he explain? Say that a boy viewed granite strata as rotten wood and smashed down thirty-seven meters?
Say he saw with his own eyes that person riding on the head of a mythological beast weighing dozens of tons, dislocating the giant snake's jaw with his bare hands, and then tearing it all the way from the mouth to the stomach?
"Cassius Malfoy did it!"
Harry shouted loudly with a parched throat, his tone mixed with suppressed indignation. "It was all his doing! He didn't care at all about where this monster came from. He pried open the snake's mouth and tore it apart with his bare hands! He even dug out the secondary heart from its tail and drank all the thousand-year essence blood inside! He said it was just an alchemy material!"
Harry held out the bloody fang in front of him, trying to shove this sole piece of evidence toward the Professors.
The entire Chamber of Secrets fell into silence.
Only Lockhart sat in the mud, giggling as he bit on the rat bone.
Dumbledore said nothing. He took heavy steps, slowly rounding the smashed statue base and stopping before the massive ancient remains.
The old man's boots stepped into the stagnant water, making heavy splashing sounds.
The old Principal's eyes had lost their usual composure.
Every wrinkle on his face squeezed out bitterness.
His knuckles were thick as he felt the uneven broken bones.
Twelve years old.
Snapping a Troll's knee with one kick, burning through Devils Snare with a single fire, and now in these dark underground pipes, cleanly dismantling the thousand-year legacy that represents the supreme glory of Slytherin into a floor full of shredded meat.
The most critical point was that he didn't even want to spare a single extra drop of magic for the battle itself, engaging in pure physical consumption.
The greatest white wizard of this century looked at the mess on the ground and finally grasped the underlying and most absurd logic of this disaster.
Chapter 133: Refining Thousand-Year Essence Blood, The Savior's Accusation
"So we all guessed wrong about him. We've been wrong from the very beginning."
Dumbledore turned around, speaking to Snape and McGonagall behind him in a tone filled with a sense of powerlessness: "That young master of Malfoy Familydoesn't care at all about the bloodline inheritance of the Chamber of Secrets, nor does he care about the schemes left behind by Tom Riddle fifty years ago. He has zero interest in ruling the school."
The old man's finger pointed at the hollowed-out bloody hole at the tail.
"He went through all that trouble to drill through the ground and run down into these sewers simply because this divine beast, which has slept for a thousand years, can serve as a pot of nourishing meat soup to strengthen his bones and muscles. He smashed through this door just to have a midnight snack."
Snape's facial muscles twitched twice.
As a Potion Master, he knew better than anyone present that someone who could swallow thousand-year essence blood in their teens and even suppress and refine it possessed a physical body whose horror had long since transcended the scope of human Wizards.
That obsession with becoming stronger, so pure it was untainted by any desire for power, was far more terrifying than those Dark Wizards shouting about bloodlines.
He walked to the corner, yanked up Lockhart, who was still drawing on the ground, and delivered a verdict with a face full of loathing.
"Principal. There is no need for further exploration here," Snape said coldly and firmly. "Since someone found us too slow and did all the cleanup work for us, we had better quickly take the Savior and this idiot back to the surface. The smell here makes one nauseous after even a second."
Dumbledore nodded. He raised the Elder Wand and drew a red arc of light in mid-air.
A clear, bright cry broke through the subterranean chill.
Fawkes, body wreathed in magnificent flames, spiraled down through the vitrified opening above and landed steadily on Dumbledore's broad shoulder.
"Children." Dumbledore walked toward Harry, his calloused hand gripping the boy's thin shoulder to pull him out of the foul-smelling mud. "Grab Fawkes's tail feathers. It will take us to a clean place suitable for talking."
Harry bit his lower lip hard, until a trace of blood appeared.
His right hand still gripped that fang dripping with corrosive liquid, letting the flesh tear and curl without ever letting go.
He followed behind Dumbledore, reaching out to pinch one of the Phoenix's feathers.
Before the firelight flared up, he took one last look back at the mangled meat scattered across the floor, headless and tailless.
The fire of anger in his heart, a mix of fear, powerlessness, and extreme humiliation, burned until his chest ached.
Cassius had slaughtered the dragon, taken the most valuable gold coins, wiped his mouth and left, leaving a bloody scapegoat's pot to land squarely on Harry Potter's head.
A flash of red light, and the group left the underground water network that had been violently ravaged into ruins.
In the empty Chamber of Secrets, only the residual blood on the stone walls dripped down through the cracks in the rock, drop by drop.
Fawkes lowered its tail feathers.
The firebird's wings swirled into a ball of golden-red fire, enveloping Harry, the three Professors, and Lockhart, as they bored through the crack in the granite pipe and rose straight to the surface.
Harry kept his mouth tightly shut the whole time, biting the flesh of his cheek.
He walked behind the Professors, his school robes stained with dark brown, foul-smelling Basilisk blood that had hardened into a crust.
As he stepped forward, the crust rubbed together, making a crisp "crackling" sound.
He gripped the Basilisk fang in his right pocket, its tip piercing the skin of his palm.
This stinging pain reminded him that Hermione was still lying in the hospital wing and Colin was still petrified; he had to seek justice for Gryffindor.
Lockhart grinned, letting out a wheezing, silly giggle.
Even with his brain ruined, his right hand was still instinctively smoothing his messy blonde hair, trying to maintain the dignity of a leading bestselling author.
Snape held his wand, using a rough Levitation Charm to drag him along in mid-air. The group traversed the stairs from the second to the eighth floor.
The past Principals in the portraits poked their heads out to watch.
Snape's eyelids drooped, his obsidian-like pupils showing impatience.
The flesh under his left sleeve grew hot due to the restless magic; that aura of pure violence reminded him of the old days when the Dark Lord ran rampant.
He turned his head and stared at the picture frames. The people in the paintings, clashing with this gloom, all shrank back into the depths of their canvases.
The Principal's office was brightly lit.
Fawkes folded its wings and landed, immediately fluttering up to the top of the gilded perch, burying its head in its red feathers and preening its quills with its sharp beak.
Dumbledore stepped over the silver detection instruments scattered across the floor, sat in the large high-backed chair, and rested his chin on his interlaced fingers.
McGonagall moved to stand at his right, her hand tightly gripping the hem of her robes; her inner sense of the collapse of rules and order was frantically ringing alarm bells.
Snape leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed, his body blocking the oak door.
Harry sat in the low log chair opposite Dumbledore.
Snape waved his wand, flinging Lockhart onto a cushioned chair in the corner and adding a Freezing Charm. Lockhartsqueezed his left thumb and continued his wheezing, silly laughter.
The gears of the silver instruments clicked rhythmically, emitting a "humming" sound. No one spoke to begin the inquiry.
From the spiral staircase outside the door came the sound of heavy "thump, thump" footsteps, accompanied by an extremely dry wave of high-temperature heat that flooded directly into the room.
The oak door swung open. Cassius Malfoy stepped inside.
He had detoured to the Slytherin dungeon to change into new clothes.
His pure black school robes were ironed flat, buttons fastened to the very top of the collar, and his short platinum hair was combed smooth and neat.
Stripped of the bloody tyranny from the underground pipes, he looked at this moment entirely like a pure-blood noble young master who had gotten up in the middle of the night for tea.
The air in the room quickly turned dry.
An aggressive sense of pressure followed his boots as he stepped into the office area.
Cassius was forcibly suppressing the thousand-year Basilisk essence blood, and the residual energy his body couldn't contain manifested as a physical heatwave radiating outward.
A specialized Dragon-hide inner armor was hidden beneath his clothing.
Several red marks from high-temperature burns that had scabbed over bulged on the back of his hand and the side of his neck, and dark purple magic ripples traveled along his veins.
The air within two meters of him distorted from the heat; the Green-Crowned Bubble Grass by the fireplace dehydrated on the spot, its leaves turning yellow and drooping to the floor.
Small metal items on the desk were disturbed by the vibrations, clinking against each other in a series of jarring noises.
Cassius didn't look at McGonagall, nor did he pay any mind to Snape. He strode to the fireplace and chose the velvet-covered cushioned armchair to sit in.
He crossed his legs naturally, reached out his left arm, and pinched a bright yellow lemon sherbet from the candy bowl.
As his fingertips rubbed and twisted the candy wrapper, his tone was completely flat, directly ending the silence in the room.
"Headmaster, summoning me here in the middle of the night—are you planning to go through the procedures to award me a Special Medal for Bravery?"
"Alright, Harry." Dumbledore didn't take Cassius's bait. The old man took off his half-moon spectacles, pulled out a silk handkerchief to wipe them twice, and placed them back on the bridge of his nose. "Tell us from the beginning, everything that happened tonight, without missing a single word."
Harry's Adam's apple bobbed as he swallowed dry saliva.
The middle finger of his right hand picked at the edge of the broken tooth pitted by corrosion.
He opened his mouth and began his account.
Starting from Dobby blocking the platform at King's Cross Station, to his own tracking of Cassius along the way, finding the blueprints for the sewer pipes, and finally pointing out his theory that Cassius intended to plant explosives to destroy Hogwarts Castle.
This was the Savior's duty; he could not allow the descendant of a Death Eater to do as he pleased.
"You've concluded that I'm blowing up the school," Cassiusasked from by the fireplace. His voice was smooth, his articulation clear and sharp, lacking the soft childishness a twelve-year-old should have.
Harry's narrative rhythm came to a stiff halt. "Yes," he replied, his scalp tingling.
"Go on," Cassius said, tossing back the lemon candy and sinking his back completely into the chair.
Harry continued to pour out the remaining details.
Opening the copper ring pipe in the lavatory with Parseltongue, Lockhart turning traitor to seize a wand, the Memory Charm blowing the stone wall apart, and that thousand-year-old Basilisk of terrifying length bursting through the water's surface to give chase.
At this point, Harry's vocal cords felt dry, and the frequency of his chest rising and falling accelerated sharply.
Chapter 134: Pale Accusations and Settlement at the Table
"Then Cassius smashed through the ceiling and fell." Harrylooked down at his mud-caked shoes, "He broke through thirty-seven meters of granite strata and crushed the giant serpent's skull."
McGonagall's shoulders twitched violently, her fingers gripping the hem of her robes so hard they left red marks.
In her decades of enforcing school rules, this was the first time she had heard of such violence that ground magical architecture into the dirt.
Harry recounted the rest of the entire process.
Shattering a half-meter-long venomous fang with a single punch, straddling the Basilisk's head to pry apart its jawbone, tearing through sixty tons of shed scales with bare hands, ripping out an auxiliary heart alive, and swallowing the essence blood of a high-level demon.
He initially controlled his pace to lay out the story calmly, but by the latter half, feelings of grievance and humiliation ran wild.
Staring at the demon before him who had dismantled a giant beast yet could sit comfortably on a cushion fiddling with a candy wrapper, the gunpowder Harry had suppressed in his chest all night finally exploded.
He suddenly bolted upright. The legs of his wooden chair scraped against the bluestone floor, letting out a sharp screech.
Harry raised his right arm, his index finger pointing straight at the bridge of Cassius's nose, and shouted his accusation.
"Don't pretend to be a good person! You don't care about the lives of the other students at all; you did it entirely to feed your twisted greed for power!" Harry twisted his neck toward Dumbledore, pouring out his final cards in a rapid-fire torrent, "Principal, he doesn't hold a wand, he doesn't chant spells! He's a complete butcher! He used his bare fists to dismember the Basilisk and drank the demon's blood! He even destroyed the foundations of Hogwarts' main Castle!"
These words, howled from the throat of a second-year boy, carried the absurd derangement of a severe psychiatric patient.
Hearing such counter-intuitive words as "dismember" and "drink raw," McGonagall's eyebrows knitted into a tight knot.
Adopting the stern face of the Dean of Gryffindor, she scrutinized the emotionally crumbling Harry.
"Mr. Potter, please regain your logical faculties." McGonagall raised her arm and pointed at Cassius, "Do you expect the Professors present to believe that a normal twelve-year-old Wizard, discarding his wand and Transfiguration, could rely solely on his physical body to contend with a venomous monster weighing sixty tons that has lived for a thousand years?"
"Professor, I saw it with my own eyes! Professor Lockhartexperienced the whole process; he can testify!" Harry's face turned a deep purple as he scrambled for evidence, turning to look at the man shrinking into the corner.
Hearing his name, Lockhart raised his chin and pulled a vacant smile, a string of saliva hanging from his jaw. He picked at a hole in his clothes and lowered his head to continue studying his fingers.
Snape stood by the doorframe and let out a short, cold snort from his nose.
He glanced sideways at the mud-covered, foul-smelling Harry. The more he looked at that face, the more it reminded him of James Potter's foolish arrogance.
"Our great The Savior, Mr. Potter, has likely cracked his skull in the sewers." Snape drawled in a greasy voice, picking barbed words to sting. "A scene of ruins caused by an explosion from Lockhart's broken wand, and you've concocted a script about a fellow student eating a magical creature alive. Potter, it's a waste of talent not to submit this fantasy to 'The Quibbler' for a column."
"Professor Snape! You're protecting Slytherin! You're in this together!" Harry roared, losing his mind.
"Potter." Snape's tone dropped below freezing. "Sit down."
Harry shut his mouth.
He stared at Snape, who had composed his expression, those two hollow, black eyes releasing a clear warning: stop revealing everything in front of this troublesome young aristocrat. Harry's teeth ground together, his knees buckled, and he sat back down on the wooden chair cushion.
Cassius leaned back against the cushion, appreciating Harry's defeated body language.
He raised his right hand and brushed the air from his cuff.
"Potter, besides opening your mouth to splash pale, moral sewage, can you produce even a shred of physical evidence that matches a materialistic view of magic?"
Cassius turned his left palm upward. A cluster of high-purity, blinding blue flame erupted from his fingertips. He stared at the flame.
"There is a fatal error in the reporting timeline you provided. You stated it took a long time from my landing to tearing open the serpent's belly, when in fact, the entire physical cleanup and dismantling from entry to end took only seventy-three seconds on a stopwatch." Cassiuscorrected the rigid data. He spoke mechanically, entirely adopting the template of an experimental data report.
Cassius raised his chin, meeting Dumbledore's deeply furrowed gaze head-on.
"I processed the unclaimed alchemical remains in the sewers to raise the upper limit of my physical endurance. Scouring the current Ministry of Magic's criminal records, not a single charge can be found to convict me." Cassiussteadied his voice, "Sitting at the table where interests are divided and shouting about morality only makes you look like an unweaned infant."
Harry was completely choked into silence by this cold, hard rhetoric.
He gripped the venomous fang, a deep sense of sorrow and helplessness seeping through his pores.
Justice, protecting the weak—these dogmas he upheld in Gryffindor Tower had all become a layman's farcical performance in this office where only violence and the drawing of interest lines mattered.
"I have a question." McGonagall took a step back and spoke. She deliberately lowered her voice to control her rapid breathing. "The essence blood clot from the Basilisk's auxiliary heart. Its toxin and magical energy density are enough to kill a full-grown Hungarian Horntail within three seconds. You swallowed it."
"Is there a conflict?" Cassius threw back the question.
"You didn't die," McGonagall followed up.
"The conclusion is clear." Cassius raised his hand to dispel the flame.
McGonagall closed her lips.
She shifted her gaze to meet Snape's.
Snape's eyelids flickered slightly, and the two confirmed a shared, chilling suspicion—stripping away his identity, the flesh and bone structure inside this boy was entirely divorced from the sequence standards of an ordinary carbon-based Wizard.
Dumbledore leaned back in his chair, scrutinizing Cassius, his aged hand pressing the tip of his wand firmly into the desk.
He could not understand this freshman.
"You smashed open the bathroom and broke through the ley lines; the Hogwarts Board of Governors will surely investigate the damage to the Castle's foundations." Dumbledore presented the pressure point, his tone remaining solemn.
"Send the full bill for the repair slurry to the Malfoy Manorcounting house for withdrawal." Cassius brushed off the compensation issue; filling stone cracks with pure gold Galleons was not worth mentioning.
"The Ministry of Magic's Auror investigation team will certainly intervene to examine the beginning and end of the Chamber of Secrets incident." Dumbledore added a second layer of pressure.
Cassius leaned forward, the purple ripples in the veins on the back of his hand pulsing twice.
"So, you go and organize the paperwork, concocting a perfectly deceptive official closing statement for the outside world." Cassius looked directly into the blue eyes behind Dumbledore's lenses, "Don't present Harry's absurd drama that even a dog would shake its head at."
The Headmasters Office fell into a stagnant silence.
The silver gears continued to click and mesh.
Cassius laid out all his cards on the wooden desk.
The serpent was slain by him, the foul blood was consumed by him, and the broken bricks would be settled with his gold.
The remaining political mess was thrown entirely to the White Wizard leader across from him, who excelled at mediation.
"Is the door locked?" Cassius stood up and straightened his tie.
"It's not locked, Mr. Malfoy." Dumbledore toyed with the probing needle on the desk.
"I should head back to the dungeons to sleep. Goodnight, gentlemen." Cassius pushed open the oak door, his leather boots stepping onto the spiral staircase.
Chapter 135: The Glory of Falsehood, the Reshaping of the Furnace
The dull thud of the oak door closing sealed the Principal's office completely.
The metallic sound of silver gears interlocking seemed jarring in the empty room.
Dumbledore stared at the wooden door for half a minute before slowly turning his chair around.
The old man's shoulders slumped visibly; the composure that always seemed to keep everything under control was stripped away completely, leaving only the exhaustion of cleaning up the mess.
"Minerva, Severus," Dumbledore spoke, his voice dry. "Notify Professor Sprout to prepare a bucket of strong corrosive agent overnight. Take your best cutting spells and make a trip to the Chamber of Secrets."
Snape stood in the shadows at the base of the wall, his cheekbones tightening.
"Erase the violent fragmentation marks on the thirty-seven-meter granite cross-section and smooth out the edges," Dumbledore ordered clearly. "Take all the torn skeletal and muscular remains of the giant beast at the scene and recut them with sharp blades. Finally, leave the sword marks of the Gryffindor sword on the floor."
"We are cleaning up a crime scene for a twelve-year-old thug, Albus," Snape said, every syllable sounding like he was chewing on glass shards. "He swallowed the bloodline of a demon beast in the underground pipes, and we are here to lay out a shiny red carpet for him. If the Ministry of Magic knew that Hogwarts was harboring a monster that even the Dark Lord would avoid, Fudgewould be so scared he'd jump right out of the window."
"That is why they cannot know," Dumbledore said, his tone firm. "That child of Malfoy Family has no ambition; he only cares about the efficiency of power accumulation and his brother. As long as the spearhead is not pointed at him, he will never proactively touch those fools at the Ministry of Magic. Revealing the truth now would only force that monster to flip the table on the spot. No one can afford the price of him truly getting angry."
Dumbledore turned his head, his gaze locking onto the boy covered in blood and mud sitting on the chair.
"Harry, after dawn, the school will issue an official announcement. Gryffindor second-year student Harry Potter, relying on extraordinary courage, drew the sword from the Sorting Hat and slew the rampaging Basilisk. Professor Lockhart assisted from the side and unfortunately suffered the impact of a dark curse, damaging his brain."
The round wooden chair under Harry's bottom felt like it had grown thorns.
His palm gripped the fang tightly, the tip digging into his palm and drawing beads of blood.
He did not want this damn honor.
In that sewer, he had been curled up in a dead end like a rat, waiting to die, and even his wand had been taken away.
That guy named Malfoy had crashed down like a meteorite, crushing all obstacles into powder, and after eating his fill and wiping away the blood, he had slapped the plaque of the Savior onto his face with a backhand.
Words of refusal were stuck in his throat, but before he could spit them out, Dumbledore's aged and raspy voice blocked them off completely.
"You must accept it, Harry. This is for the fragile order of the Wizarding world, and also to protect Hogwarts from the impact of panic."
A heavy hat of righteousness pressed down on him.
Harry's teeth ground together, and his jaw muscles bulged.
He stared at the drool dripping from Lockhart into the crevices of the floor tiles and lowered his head bit by bit.
This was the first time in Harry Potter's life that he felt being a hero was even more disgusting than swallowing a whole basin of slugs.
At the same moment, in the Slytherin dungeon.
The stone door slid open silently.
Cassius stepped into the dormitory, his footsteps extremely light.
Draco was lying sprawled out inside the curtains, his snoring rhythmic, completely unaware that the outside world had been turned upside down and scoured tonight.
Cassius walked towards the inner washroom. He locked the door, hooked his fingertips into the buckles of his custom-made dragon-hide inner armor, and pulled down. The fabric of the inner armor, soaked with sweat, fell onto the stone tiles with a dull thud.
The moment he shed the constraints, dense, web-like dark red cracks rapidly spread across the surface of his bulging upper body muscles.
The essence blood contained within the secondary heart of the thousand-year-old Basilisk was a primordial power that had lived for who knows how many centuries.
That energy core, like highly concentrated sulfuric acid, was currently crashing unobstructed down his esophagus into his stomach, frantically launching a violent counterattack against the surrounding meridian network.
If it were any other adult Wizard, they would have had their blood vessels burst by this eerie vitality a minute ago, turning into a puddle of blood.
Cassius tore off his tie and locked the glass door of the shower room.
He didn't mobilize even a single shred of external magic to suppress the toxins. Instead, he actively and completely opened all the floodgates of his blood vessels.
[Dual-Soul Furnace] operating at full power!
This was not magic; this was a purely physical forging and reshaping.
High heat exploded deep within his blood vessels.
Cassius's bare back pressed against the cold bluestone wall tiles.
The high heat instantly steamed the moisture in the stone tiles into white mist. His heart rate soared from seventy beats per minute to a terrifying two hundred.
The massive, pump-like roar of blood production even resonated through his chest cavity, causing the glass door to emit a fine, trembling sound.
The first wave of impact slammed into his bones.
Thigh bones, ribs, arm bones—the entire framework supporting the human body emitted a scalp-tingling "crack-crack" sound at this moment.
The old bone calluses snapped under this torrent, and denser, thicker new bone tissue filled and interlocked within the cracks at a speed visible to the naked eye.
Cassius bit down hard on his back molars, and a strong, metallic, rust-like taste surged into his mouth.
Even though the pain caused black spots to appear at the edge of his vision, he didn't let out even a single groan.
This extreme pain of treating his body like scrap metal being melted down and reforged was, in his view, merely the necessary cost to exchange for unlimited firing rights.
The lethal toxins carried within the essence blood attempted to invade his cerebral cortex.
The high heat of the furnace forced them into a desperate situation. Every pore on his skin opened up, and a layer of dark, viscous impurities was forcibly expelled from his body.
Before those impurities could even drip to the ground, they were vaporized by the temperature on his skin, which exceeded one hundred degrees, turning into black dust that scattered.
This brutal internal tearing lasted for a full four hours.
Near dawn, the drum-like heartbeat within his chest cavity slowly subsided.
Cassius opened his eyes. The deep blue luster in his pupils was restrained to the extreme, like two opaque pieces of deep-sea ice.
He turned on the shower. The cold jet of water washed away the residue on his skin.
After drying his body, he reached out to twist the brass handle of the shower room.
Without attaching any magic, merely by pressing his palm against it and having his neurons transmit the contraction command.
"Creak."
The solid cast brass handle couldn't even offer a second of resistance; it was like a piece of moist plasticine, directly squeezed and deformed into a lump of scrap metal.
Five finger imprints were deeply embedded into the interior of the copper column.
Cassius lowered his head to examine his palm.
Pale, symmetrical, with not a single deformed bulge, and the surface of his skin carried a kind of tough, enamel-like luster.
He released his hand, letting the lump of copper scrap metal hit the floor drain.
His physical load-bearing capacity had broken through the racial threshold.
This meant that from today on, that Magic Gatling system capable of firing over a dozen blasting curses per second had completely removed its safety lock against overheating.
He could empty the magazine anytime, anywhere, without any hesitation.