Chapter 20: The Scholar's Nest
The place smelled of dust, stagnant magic and the unmistakable solitude of a long-uninhabited space.
It was a small apartment on a side street in Diagon Alley, one of those places that exist on the margins of the bustling main thoroughfare.
Professor Flitwick had handed him the key at the end of the platform, a piece of rusty iron that buzzed with the energy of a Fidelio Charm.
"A small shelter that the Director maintains for... emergencies," he had explained. "He will be able to practice his magic in peace, away from the prying eyes of the Ministry."
Timothy went inside and left his trunk on the creaking wooden floor. The furniture was sparse and covered with white sheets.
It was a safe place. It was a quiet place. And I already hated it.
It wasn't the place itself. It was the limitation. He looked at his school trunk, a simple wooden crate with an expansion charm. It was a container. Not a home.
His mental archive was vast, yes. It could contain the knowledge of a thousand libraries. But he remembered the temptation he had felt in the chamber under Hogwarts. The Philosopher's Stone.
He had wanted to possess it, not just archive it.
He realized that his ambition was not limited to knowledge. Over time, he would want to collect artifacts. Legendary swords, physical grimoires, relics of forgotten worlds.
And for that, his student trunk was pathetically inadequate.
"I need a portable Room of Requirement," he muttered into the dusty air.
And then, he remembered the weight in his pocket. The heavy leather bag, filled with the Galleons he had "found" at Hogwarts.
It wasn't just money. It was capital. It was a tool.
A slow and determined smile was drawn on his face. He knew exactly what to do.
The store was called "The Astute Traveler: Luxury Trunks for All Dimensions." It was at the end of the Alley, a narrow, dark façade that most students ignored.
Inside, an old craftsman in watchmaker's glasses greeted him.
"I don't want a school trunk," Timothy said bluntly, setting his bag of Galleons on the counter with a heavy sound. "I want the best I have. The biggest. The most... versatile".
The craftsman looked at him, then at the bag, and a connoisseur's smile lit up his wrinkled face. "Ah. A customer with pleasure. I have something... experimental".
He guided him to the back of the store. There, on a pedestal, was a trunk that was unlike any other.
It was of a dark, polished wood, with runic silver trimmings. It was beautiful, but its true wonder lay inside.
The craftsman showed him the model. It was a limited edition of seven compartments. A prototype. Obscenely expensive.
One compartment, upon entering, was a small luxury apartment: bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and a window that could be tuned to any view its owner desired.
Another was a three-story library, currently empty, waiting to be filled.
A third was a fully equipped potions lab, which would make Snape's look like a toy kitchen.
And the other four were empty, blank canvases, waiting for their new owner to give them a purpose.
The price the craftsman quoted was almost the entirety of the fortune Timothy had accumulated.
He did not hesitate for a second. "I'll take it."
The transaction was completed in an almost reverential silence. Timothy, now almost without a Knut to his name, left the store with his new treasure.
That night, in his dusty apartment, he stood in front of his new acquisition. It was more than a trunk. It was their base of operations. Your lab. Your home.
With a touch of his wand and a whisper of a shrinking charm, the massive trunk shrank to the size of a matchbox.
He picked it up and put it in his pocket.
The whole world was now his oyster. And he had just bought the perfect shell.
…..
With his portable base of operations secured, Timothy's next step was logistical and mundane: he needed food for Leo.
It was the perfect excuse.
He stepped out of his dusty apartment and plunged back into the vibrant chaos of Diagon Alley. The summer sun made the windows shine and the street was crowded with families doing their last-minute shopping for Hogwarts.
His first destination was the Emporio de la Lechuza. The interior was dark and smelled of straw and bird. "A pack of owl treats, please," he told the shopkeeper.
While the man weighed the treats, Timothy strolled through the store. His fingers casually brushed the spines of the books on a small shelf. Care and Maintenance of Magical Birds. The Owl and its Nocturnal Habits.
With each touch, one word resonated in his mind: Archive.
He felt the information flow, not like a torrent, but like a gentle stream. When he paid and left, the small library of the store was already safely stored in his mind.
Over the next few days, he became Diagon Alley's most curious and least shoppering "customer."
He spent hours at Flourish and Blotts. Not in the textbook section, which I had already filed, but in the forgotten corners.
He "skimmed" the sections on modern magical theory, biographies of famous magicians, and popular novels. His hand slid across the shelves, his mind silently copying.
File. File. File.
The shop owner saw him as a young scholar, lost in the love of books. He had no idea that the boy was looting his inventory on a conceptual level.
Then, he visited Mr. Mulpepper's Apothecary. The air was thick with the smell of a thousand strange ingredients.
He feigned a childish fascination. "What is this?" he asked, pointing to a jar of beetle eyes.
As the apothecary explained its properties, Timothy's hand brushed against the nearby jars. He not only filed away the shop's potions books, but the very essence of the ingredients.
He felt the conceptual structure of armadillo bile, the energetic signature of the tree snakeskin.
He passed through the artifact shops, filing away the enchantments of the color-changing robes and the telescopes that folded themselves.
I was not in a hurry. He was no longer the frenzied student who ran against time. He was a collector. A taster of knowledge.
He took his time. I enjoyed the atmosphere. He bought an ice cream at Florean Fortescue's ice cream parlor, savoring the strawberry and peanut ice cream while his mind, in the background, finished archiving Quidditch through the Ages.
By the end of the week, his mission in Diagon Alley was over. He had copied, silently and without anyone noticing, all the available commercial knowledge.
His Archive had grown exponentially. But his hunger, far from being satisfied, had only grown greater.
…..
Diagon Alley had become too small.
After a week, Timothy found himself back in his apartment, a king in a conquered kingdom.
He had filed everything. Flourish and Blotts, the Apothecary, the artifact shops. Commercial knowledge of the British wizarding world was now in his head.
But the victory felt... Hollow.
He sat in the leather armchair of his trunk-apartment, looking out the magic window at a view of the mountains of Scotland. He felt the same emptiness he had experienced when he finished the Hogwarts library.
'Is that all?', he thought, a restlessness growing inside him. 'Is this the limit of your knowledge?'
His mind went over the files he had acquired. The magic was fascinating, yes. But she felt incomplete.
A recent memory surfaced. His conversation with Dumbledore in the office. The Philosopher's Stone. It wasn't pure magic; it was alchemy. A science.
And then, another conversation. Dumbledore in the library, talking about Stephen Hawking. Muggle theoretical physics.
And behind all that, the echoes of his own past life. The cold logic of programming code. The elegant beauty of a mathematical equation.
He had been searching for the "grammar" of magic.
But he had completely forgotten about the "grammar" of the physical world.
The epiphany struck him with the force of a spell. They were two sides of the same coin.
How could I aspire to be the Architect of Reality if I only understood half of the instruction manual?
Magic was the art of bending the rules. But in order to truly bend them, to break them gracefully, you first had to understand the rules you were breaking.
His obsession, which he thought was vast, expanded to infinity.
I needed to understand everything. The quantum physics that governed atoms. The biology that defined life. The astrophysics that dictated the dance of the stars.
To be the ultimate magician, he first had to become the ultimate scientist.
His project had just doubled in size. His hunger had become insatiable.
He stood, a new feverish energy streaming through him. He would no longer just be the greatest magician. He would be the most knowledgeable being, period.
And he knew exactly where to start.
He left his apartment, walked through the Leaky Cauldron, and back into the bustling streets of Muggle London.
His new goal wasn't hidden behind a magic barrier. It was in plain sight, a monument to the knowledge of an entire world.
The British Library.
…..
Crossing the barrier of the Leaky Cauldron was like going from a fever dream to the cold, gray reality. The vibrant chaos of Diagon Alley faded away, replaced by the rumble of London's double-decker buses and the smell of wet asphalt.
Timothy moved around the Muggle city with the ease of a ghost. He took the subway, an underground transportation system that he found both fascinating in its complexity and depressing in its monotony.
Their destination was an imposing building of red brick and limestone: the British Library.
He entered not as a magician, but as a student. He carried a backpack on his shoulder, his trunk shrunk securely in his pocket. No one gave him a second look.
He found a secluded corner in the vast, silent reading room of the science section, a place surrounded by gigantic bookshelves that rose toward the vaulted ceiling.
The air smelled of paper, history, and secular knowledge. It was different from magic, but just as intoxicating.
With a subtlety he had honed over months, he cast a low-level Disillusioning Charm upon himself. He didn't become invisible, but his figure became blurry, easy to ignore, like a spot out of the corner of his eye. A silencing spell made sure it didn't make a sound.
To any security camera or librarian who passed by, it would just be an intensely focused student, head bent over a book.
And then, the real feast began.
He opened his mind. Archival Magic, which until now had been fueled by grimoires and scrolls, tested a new type of information.
One book after another. File. File. File.
He started with quantum physics, absorbing the weird and wonderful rules of the subatomic world. He then moved on to advanced mathematics, devouring theories that were as abstract and beautiful as any enchantment.
Molecular biology, world history, philosophy from Plato to Sartre, mechanical engineering, electronics, nanotechnology... everything flowed into his mind.
And then, connections began to form.
His mind, now armed with the grammar of both worlds, began to see the symphony.
Reading about string theory, he laughed to himself. He saw that it was a clumsy, mathematical description of the dimensional planes he had already visited. Muggles were scratching the surface of reality with equations, while wizards were doing it with intention.
By filing a book on cell biology, he saw the basis of the Transfiguration. He understood that changing a rat into a cup wasn't "magic," it was simply rewriting the genetic code at an almost infinite speed.
He saw magic in science and science in magic. The universe was no longer two separate systems, one magical and one mundane. It was a single, magnificent operating system, and he was, for the first time, learning to read the entire source code.
The sun began to set, painting the reading room with orange hues. A librarian announced the closing time.
Timothy didn't move. He sat on the floor, surrounded by books on astrophysics and cosmology, with his eyes closed.
He was exhausted, his mind buzzing with the weight of thousands of new books. But he was elated.
The Hogwarts library had been the tutorial.
Now, the real game had begun.
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