The air in the basement was ten times colder than upstairs, and the fluorescent moss on the stone walls emitted a faint green glow, stretching Morin's shadow long and thin, like a restless snake.
He had just tumbled out of the fireplace, the hem of his black robes still dusted with Floo powder ashes, but he didn't bother to brush them off—the moment his feet touched the ground, he stumbled towards the row of metal cabinets against the wall.
"Obscurus... Obscurus..." he muttered, his fingers tracing the tarnished brass locks on the cabinet doors.
These cabinets held the Burke Family's most secret collections; some scrolls Borgin himself might not have even read.
Morin yanked open the third cabinet, and a scent of mold mixed with dried blood wafted out, revealing stacks of dossiers wrapped in black cloth.
He tore off the black cloth, exposing yellowed parchment.
The cover of the topmost scroll was inscribed with "Studies on Unconventional Magical Energy Forms" in dark red ink. Morin's heart rate suddenly accelerated, his fingers almost piercing the paper.
He unfurled the scroll, and in the green mossy light, the scrawled handwriting twisted like worms:
"...An Obscurial, neither a curse nor magic, but the rage of imprisoned magic.
When a young Wizard suffers extreme suppression, and his magic cannot be released, it transforms into a dark entity, residing within his body..."
"Yes, this is it."
Morin murmured, his eyes shining terrifyingly.
He rummaged deep within the cabinet and pulled out a leather-bound notebook with a cracked cover. On the front, a child shrouded in shadow was drawn, with "1892, Rio de Janeiro" noted beside it.
When he saw the records of Grindelwald utilizing Obscurials, he couldn't help but roll his eyes:
"Of course, important figures always find some strange 'assistants.' Dumbledore has a Phoenix, Riddle has a great snake, Grindelwald... well, he chose a crying black blob. His taste is truly getting stranger and stranger."
He continued to turn the yellowed pages, which contained observation logs recorded with a quill:
"Today I saw the son of a Squib, ten years old, who had never performed magic. His mother branded his palm with a hot iron, forbidding him to speak of magic. Then one day, the ceiling beam collapsed, and his mother was crushed beneath it. No one around touched it, only the child, surrounded by swirling black energy..."
He knelt on the ground, his fingertips tracing line after line of text, the green light dancing on his face, making him look like a Wizard performing some dark ritual.
"...Its power during an outburst is comparable to ten Blasting Curses, yet the host does not live past fourteen..."
"...Not Dark Arts, yet more sinister than any Dark Arts, it feeds on the host's life force..."
Morin abruptly stopped his searching, his fingertip hovering over a line of text.
It was an annotation written in ancient runes, roughly meaning:
"...It is the hanging rope of magic, the scream of a throttled throat.
Distortion is its essence."
His heart felt as if it had been clutched by an icy hand.
He finally pieced together the complete picture:
The Obscurus was indeed powerful, powerful enough to make Wizards of Grindelwald's caliber take notice, powerful enough to make the most ordinary child unleash house-destroying force.
But the price of this power was extreme pain and self-destruction.
It wasn't a force that could be controlled; it was more like a symbiosis with a demon—you feed it with flesh and blood, and it grants you destruction until both are annihilated.
"Powerful... but also disgusting," Morin cursed under his breath, yet he didn't push the documents away.
He continued to flip through, his gaze eagerly scanning every word, as if searching for contradictory evidence.
He needed a power he could use, not a transaction destined for mutual destruction.
Not until the sunset had completely dipped below the horizon, leaving only the green glow of the fluorescent moss in the basement, did Morin reach the last document.
It was a torn page from the "Supplementary Regulations to the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy," with a paragraph circled in red ink:
"...The formation of an Obscurus requires two conditions: first, magical awakening before the age of seven, and second, continuous subjection to extreme mental and physical suppression.
In adult Wizards, the magical core is already formed; even under torture, an Obscurus cannot be induced. This is a natural law, irreversible."
"Snap."
The parchment in Morin's hand dropped to the floor. He stared at the line of text as if seeing those letters for the first time.
Natural law, irreversible.
This meant that as a mentally mature, normal person, Morin, even if he hung himself from the rafters every day and let Finn and Lina whip him, could not induce an Obscurus.
Those powerful forces hidden in the shadows, those hopes that could help him break through his bottleneck, were never meant for him from the start.
He sat on the cold stone floor, surrounded by a dozen documents about the Obscurus, the green light casting his shadow on the wall, like a person whose bones had been removed.
After the frenzy of his search faded, only a bone-deep weariness remained.
A sense of powerlessness crept up his spine.
It turned out that the most desperate thing wasn't failing to find a method, but finding one, only to discover that the door had been closed to you from the very beginning.
Morin picked up the torn page from the floor, his fingertips unconsciously caressing the words "irreversible."
The basement was terrifyingly quiet, with only the occasional faint crackle from the fluorescent moss, as if mocking his futility.
He slowly stood up, putting the scattered documents back into the metal cabinet one by one, his movements as mechanical as a cursed puppet.
When the last brass lock clicked shut, he leaned against the cold cabinet door and closed his eyes.
In the darkness, that annotation about "distortion" echoed again.
Perhaps... it wasn't completely hopeless?
Morin had an idea, one that was crazy enough, yet seemed plausible.
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