Hello everyone!
Sorry for the delay, I've been a bit busy.
Here are the 3 chapters, from 21 to 23.
Enjoy them.
Mike.
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Chapter 21: The Architect's Hunger
The apartment smelled of dust, stagnant magic, and the unmistakable solitude of a long-uninhabited space. It was a "refuge", courtesy of Professor Dumbledore, hidden in an alley in Diagon Alley. For any other student, it would have been a blessing, an escape from parental supervision or the monotony of the Muggle world.
For Timothy, it was a limitation. I already hated it.
He left his old school trunk on the creaky wooden floor, a reminder of his freshman year, a simple container. Then, from his pocket, he took out the object that had consumed almost all of his "found" fortune. With a touch of his will, the dark wood "matchbox" expanded into the seven-compartment trunk, a masterpiece of runic craftsmanship.
This was not a refuge. It was his home. Your lab. His true Scholar's Nest.
He entered the first compartment: the luxury apartment. The air was clean, the temperature perfect. A magic window showed a view of the Alps that he had not chosen, but which he appreciated for its tranquility. The contrast with the dusty apartment outside was absolute. He stepped out of that compartment and into the second: the three-story library.
It was empty. Three levels of polished mahogany bookshelves awaited in reverent silence. It was a blank canvas. And Timothy, for the first time, felt that the Hogwarts library had simply been a tutorial. The real work began now.
His obsession, which had defined his first year, had undergone a critical mutation. The epiphany he had had in the Muggle world, the connection between Hawking's physics and Flamel's magic, had been the spark. He had been searching for the "grammar of magic," but had forgotten about the "grammar" of the physical world that magic manipulated.
How could he be a true architect of reality if he only understood half of the instruction manual?
Magic was the art of bending the rules. But in order to bend them, to break them with the precision of a surgeon rather than the brute force of a thug, you first had to understand the rules you were breaking.
His project was no longer "Archive Hogwarts". His project was, simply, "Archive Everything".
Quantum physics. Molecular biology. Astrophysics. Engineering. Philosophy. Every Muggle textbook, every scientific treatise, every work of human thought was now as crucial to its goal as the darkest grimoire in the Restricted Section. I would see science in magic and magic in science. He would become the nexus, the only being in existence who understood the "complete source code" of the universe.
The euphoria of this new mission was so intense, so pure, that it almost made him tremble. It was the same ecstasy he felt when he solved the riddle of the Archive, magnified by a thousand.
As his mind devised his new summer curriculum—mornings at the British Library, afternoons at Diagon Alley—a small, annoying variable popped into his mind.
The Ministry. The Flea Market. The Restriction of Magic in Minors.
He stopped, his euphoria cooling momentarily. He was a fifteen-year-old student. The Ministry watched the minors outside Hogwarts like a hawk. Every spell I practiced in this apartment, every Lumos to read, would trigger a warning. It would be a constant interruption, an unacceptable limitation.
Timothy stood still in the middle of his empty library. He analyzed the problem.
What was the Flea Market, conceptually? It was an enchantment, a monitor attached to the wizard, designed to detect the expulsion of magic. The disturbance of reality caused by a spell.
And how did he practice magic?
He remembered his first day, his perfect Lumos . The perfect matchstick needle. The way he felt the magic. He remembered the blade of light he showed Flitwick, conjured from his fingertip. He recalled his first failed attempt to animate a golem in the Hall.
In all of those cases, the wand had been at best an afterthought, at worst, a distraction. Ollivander had sold him an "amplifier," but he was his own source of power.
His "Talent" was not a channel; it was the ocean itself.
And then, he thought of the Archive.
The act of copying. The act of analyzing. The construction of his mental library. The use of Occlumency and Legilimancy as engineering tools. Everything was internal. It was pure consciousness. It was conceptual magic executed entirely within the strength of his own mind.
A slow smile was drawn on his face.
The Ministry had no way of tracking a thought.
They could not detect a spell that had no verbal component, no wand movement, and no explosion of external light. They couldn't measure a magical fluctuation occurring within the magician's own soul. The Rastro was designed to catch careless teenagers levitating cakes over their aunt and uncle's guests. It wasn't designed for him.
While the Ministry watched his ash wand—a simple piece of wood—he would be in the British Library, committing the greatest intellectual theft in human history, and they would feel nothing.
It was an unspoken advantage. It was absolute freedom.
He could spend the whole summer in this trunk, practicing the most advanced conceptual magic, rewriting the fundamentals of alchemy, and the Ministry would only see a fifteen-year-old boy quietly reading in an apartment. He was exempt from their rules.
The euphoria returned, this time not as a surge, but as a cold, powerful tide. The game wasn't just open to him; it was fundamentally rigged in his favor.
He stepped out of his trunk, shrinking it back to the size of a matchbox and putting it in his pocket. The weight in his pocket was that of a portable universe. His universe.
He walked out of the dusty apartment, locked the door, and walked calmly down Diagon Alley. The morning sun made the shop windows shine. Wizards and witches would pass by him, buying ingredients for potions and new robes.
They were his past.
He passed the Leaky Cauldron, greeting Tom the tavern-keeper, and came out to the din of Muggle London.
The air smelled of diesel and street food. He looked at the double-decker bus passing by.
That was his future.
Its first stop: the British Library. The first phase of the real Project Archive had just begun.
…..
Timothy's summer became a symphony of obsessive logistics. The seven-compartment trunk was his base of operations, a portable universe that freed him from the bonds of physical space. His routine was relentless, torn between two worlds that, to him, were no longer separate, but simply two wings of the same infinite library.
During the day, he was a ghost in Muggle London.
He moved with the confidence of a magician who was not afraid of the rules of men. The Ministry of Magic, with its Trail and Misuse of Magic Patrol, was a concern for children who levitated cups of tea. To him, it was irrelevant. Its fundamental magic, the Archive, was internal, silent and conceptual. He didn't use a wand. He didn't cast spells that disturbed reality in a way that Ministry bureaucrats could detect. It was, for all intents and purposes, completely outside its jurisdiction.
It began at the British Library. The building was a monument to human knowledge, and Timothy entered it with the reverence of a pilgrim entering a cathedral. He would find a secluded corner in the vast reading room, become functionally invisible with a low-level Disillusioning Charm, and begin the looting.
Archive.
His hand slid through a row of quantum physics books. File. File. File.
He didn't read. Extracted. He felt the essence of books flow into his mental library, a cold river of pure logic, equations, and theories. He then moved to the University, infiltrating the libraries of medicine and biology, archiving the entirety of human understanding of life, from macrobiology to the genetic code.
At night, he would return to the safety of his trunk, now parked in the dusty apartment in Diagon Alley. While his mind processed the intricacies of string theory in the background, he went out to finish his magic collection. He became Flourish and Blotts' most frustrating "client." He spent hours "glancing," his hand casually brushing the spines of books in the dustiest corners. The proprietor saw him as an indecisive young scholar; I had no idea that, with every touch, Timothy was committing a large-scale conceptual theft, copying treatises on rare curses and enchantment theory that the Ministry didn't even know existed.
The real work began when he returned to his trunk. He sat on the floor of his three-story library, now filled with the ethereal echoes of the books he had copied. And then, the analysis began.
It was there that his obsession reached a new peak. The connection between the two worlds was so obvious, so clear, that he laughed only in silence. Muggle science was no different from magic; It was simply an incredibly detailed and mathematical description of the rules that magic was designed to break .
He understood that the Transfiguration was not "converting" one thing into another. It was to rewrite the biological and atomic code of an object. Quantum physics gave it the "why" it worked, and cell biology gave it the "how." Potions were not a simple mixture of ingredients; they were chemical catalysts that activated the latent conceptual properties within substances.
His mind, armed with both languages, began to build bridges.
He remembered his promise to Hermione. Using Leo, his silent owl, he sent him a letter. It wasn't just a summer update. It was an explosion of his newfound euphoria.
His work intensified. Copy. Analyze. And now, the third pillar: practice.
He knew how Sacrifice Magic worked. He knew how the Philosopher's Stone worked. He had all the theory. But the night the golem had shattered had taught him a vital lesson: knowing is not doing.
He stood in the center of his lab. He tried to apply his new unified knowledge. I wanted to create a simple orb of light, but not with Lumos. I wanted to do it from scratch. He wanted to manipulate the photons directly, using his will to force a reaction of pure energy.
He closed his eyes. Concentrated. And he failed.
A useless little spark sputtered at the tip of his finger and went out.
He realized that he had all the theory in the world, but the practice of a child. His obsession now had a new front: not only to archive knowledge, but to master its application.
As he prepared for another attempt, a strange sensation ran through him. He looked at his watch. It had been almost three days since he last slept. He had been copying and analyzing non-stop, and now he was practicing advanced conceptual magic.
And he wasn't tired.
His mind was alert, buzzing with energy. His magic core felt as full and infinite as ever.
He remembered the mental exhaustion he had felt at Hogwarts. Why had he disappeared?
A part of his mind, the logical part of Leo, told him that this was a dangerous anomaly. His "Talent" not only gave him access to knowledge; It seemed to be providing boundless energy to process it.
For a moment, he considered stopping. To investigate why he did not get tired.
He looked at the stack of books on nuclear physics that he hadn't filed yet. He looked at his hands, which still couldn't control the power he knew he possessed.
He ignored the anomaly. It was a feature, not a bug. If the universe was giving him unlimited energy, who was he to complain about?
She turned to her books, her obsession was rekindled, the hunger was too great to be stopped by something as trivial as sleep. The work was just beginning.
….
In the absolute silence of his library-apartment, inside the seven-compartment trunk, Timothy's only worldly obligation was to maintain his relationships. His friendship with Harry and Ron was maintained with brief notes on Quidditch or chess. But his connection to Hermione was different. It was the only one that was based on the intellect. And he remembered his promise.
After a week of silent looting of the British Library, he sat down at his oak desk. His mind buzzed with the newfound connections between particle physics and summoning enchantments. He decided to share a fraction of this euphoria with her.
He dipped his pen in the ink.
Hermione
I hope the Muggle world isn't too boring. I've been thinking about our conversation about Gamp's Law and food transfiguration. I had an idea.
The problem is that we're seeing magic as a separate entity from Muggle science, but what if it's not? Muggle physics has one fundamental rule: the Law of Conservation of Mass. You can't create matter out of nothing. Wizards believe that Gamp's Law says the same thing.
But that is incorrect. We don't create. We move.
What if a summoning spell ('Accio') is nothing more than a form of subatomic teleportation controlled by the will? If that's true, Muggle physics doesn't contradict magic; he explains it.
Tell me what you think. I could use your perspective.
Tim.
He sealed the letter and handed it to Leo, his owl, who ululated softly and disappeared into the night sky of Diagon Alley.
Timothy didn't wait for the answer. He couldn't afford it. The moment the owl disappeared, his mind returned to work. He returned to his routine of copying, analyzing, and practicing.
He spent eighteen hours a day awake. His "Talent" not only gave him a mind capable of processing information at superhuman speed; it also seemed to provide him with the energy to do so. He never got tired.
His magic core was an infinite well, and his brain, instead of being exhausted by the mental effort of processing quantum physics and arcane alchemy simultaneously, seemed to thrive on it.
A week later, Leo returned.
Hermione's response was exactly what he should have expected. They were four feet of parchment, written in his tight and precise handwriting.
I was fascinated, yes. But fundamentally, I disagreed.
Tim
Your theory is brilliant, but it ignores fundamental magical principles. You're mixing two completely different fields of study!
I reviewed 'Hogwarts: A Story' and 'Modern Wizarding Theory'. Bathilda Bagshot is very clear: magic exists precisely because it defies Muggle laws. He does not obey them. To say that the summon is 'subatomic teleportation' completely ignores the intentional component of magic...
Timothy read the entire rebuttal. She was meticulously researched, intelligent, and completely wrong. She was using the Hogwarts textbooks to refute Hawking's physics. I was trying to explain the ocean using the manual of a wading pool.
He smiled, but it was a sad smile. The gulf between them had become immense.
By the time Hermione had received his letter, researched his counterarguments, and written his response, he had already advanced light years.
It was no longer in the "hypothesis" of Gamp's Law.
He had already devoured theoretical physics and merged it with the knowledge he had archived from the Philosopher's Stone. He had stopped theorizing about the relationship between magic and science; now he was writing the equations that unified them.
In his workshop, on the blackboard that covered a wall, he had begun to sketch out his own theories: "The Laws of Unified Transmutation."
He was merging Flamel's alchemy with particle physics. The "Magic of Threshold" with string theory.
How could he respond to Hermione? How could I explain to him that I was trying to discuss basic arithmetic with someone who was inventing calculus?
He folded Hermione's scroll and put it in a drawer on his desk. I wouldn't answer. Not yet. The distance was too great to cross with an owl.
His obsession with magic, in all its forms, was total. But his frustration at his lack of practical skill remained his biggest obstacle.
He had the theory to take apart a building atom by atom, but he still struggled to control the animation of a simple golem.
He knew how it all worked, but his biological hardware and magical muscle control still couldn't run the divine "software" he was writing.
He ignored Hermione's letter. He ignored the anomaly of his infinite energy. He turned to his blackboard, chalk in hand. His obsession was not only with knowledge, but with mastery. And summer was just beginning.
…..
The seven-compartment trunk had become his personal universe. The dusty apartment in Diagon Alley was just a portal, a convenient physical address that anchored him to the world. Timothy's real life took place within the dimensional folds of his luggage.
It was in the third compartment: the potions lab. The room was a masterpiece of stainless steel and haunted stone, a place that would have made Snape consumed with envy. But Timothy wasn't brewing potions. He was standing in the center of the empty room, his eyes closed, in absolute concentration.
His Mental File was on fire. I had just spent the last twelve hours awake, not copying, but analyzing. The last great file he had avoided, the densest of all, had finally been processed: "Philosopher's Stone - Flamel".
Was... all.
It was not a recipe; it was a complete field of study. He saw alchemy not as magic, but as the ultimate conceptual physics. He saw the formula for the Elixir of Life and, as Dumbledore had confirmed, he saw its flaws: an imperfect anchor that tied a decaying soul to a decaying body. He saw the conceptual transmutation from lead to gold, and again, he saw the trick: an atomic-level temporary illusion spell that degraded in hours.
But knowledge... the knowledge of how to rewrite the subject at that level... that was real.
Now, in his mind, fifteen-year-old Timothy Hunter knew exactly how to create a Philosopher's Stone.
He opened his eyes. He looked at his hands.
I couldn't create it.
This was the frustration that had been consuming him. It was the same wall he had hit the night he tried to animate the golem. "Knowing is not the same as doing."
He had the theoretical knowledge of a god, but the practical control of a child. His obsession with magic, in all its forms, ran up against this mundane barrier. His Archive software was infinite, but his biological hardware—his nervous system, his magical muscles, his ability to project intention—was woefully finite.
He remembered the failure of the golem. It was too complex. I had to start at the beginning.
He concentrated on a heavy pewter cauldron on the other side of the room. He would not use his wand; The wand was a crutch, a tool that limited the intention to pre-established formulas. He was the Architect, not a simple worker following plans.
He concentrated, pouring his will into the object. Wingardium Leviosa. He didn't even think about the words, just the intention: Float.
The cauldron vibrated violently. It slid half a meter to the left, scraping the stone, and then tipped over with a metallic clatter.
Failure.
His frustration was a cold flash. Why? His Archive contained the complete theory of levitation. He knew how the spell worked, how it "told a story" to gravity. Why didn't he obey?
It was like knowing exactly how a Formula 1 engine works, but not having the coordination to release the clutch without stalling the car.
He tried again. Something simpler. Lumos.
He raised his index finger, just as he had done in front of Flitwick. Back then, he had created a controlled sheet of light. Now, he tried the same thing.
An uncontrolled spark jumped from his finger and hit a shelf, singeing the wood. It was not a leaf; it was a defective firecracker.
He clenched his fist, cold anger running through it. He had the knowledge of millennia and the skill of a frightened child in his first flying lesson.
And then, another anomaly was present.
He stopped and took stock of his physical condition. He had been in London for weeks. He had spent whole days copying in the British Library, and whole nights analyzing in his trunk. He had been awake for nearly thirty hours, practicing advanced conceptual magic after he had processed the Philosopher's Stone.
It should be sold out. He should be on the verge of mental collapse.
He vividly remembered the migraines, the sharp pain behind his eyes, the nosebleed he had suffered at Hogwarts. That had been the "bottleneck" that had led him to look for the potion ingredients.
But now... There was nothing.
He checked his condition. His mind was perfectly clear, alert, buzzing with energy. His magic core, that infinite well of his magic, felt as full as ever. There was no magical exhaustion. There was no mental fatigue.
The epiphany hit him as hard as that of the British Library.
The headaches were not fatigue. They were adaptation.
The hardware of his biological brain had been adapting, painfully reconfiguring itself to handle the divine "software" of his Archive. The bottleneck was not permanent; it was the pain of the installation.
And now, the installation was complete.
His "Talent" wasn't just a big magic core or a quick mind. It was a perfect processing system. It was an engine that worked with one hundred percent efficiency, without generating waste heat, without energy loss. His mind could process the Hogwarts library and his magic core could fuel the practice, and he would never get tired .
For a moment, the logical part of Leo wanted to question why. Was it a facet of Timothy Hunter? A gift from the Cosmic Administrator?
But the Architect, the current Timothy, dismissed the question. It was irrelevant. It was not a system error; it was a fundamental characteristic. A characteristic that placed him above any other being. Dumbledore was getting older. Voldemort was weakening. He... he simply was.
The frustration over the overturned cauldron disappeared, replaced by an ice-cold determination.
The problem was not energy. The problem was not knowledge. The problem was control.
It had infinite power, but the motor skill of a child learning to write. He had the theory to compose a symphony, but his magic fingers couldn't play a single note correctly.
His obsession found a new and glorious purpose. Summer was no longer just for copying and analyzing.
It would be for practice.
He looked at the overturned cauldron. He concentrated again. He did not try to pick it up. He concentrated on a smaller goal.
Vibrates.
The cauldron trembled slightly. A controlled tremor.
Timothy smiled. The Archive was full. The energy was infinite. Now, the real training began.
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Thanks for reading!
If you want to read advanced chapters and support me, I'd really appreciate it.
Mike.
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