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 23: The Architect's Routine
The Return of the "Relaxed Student"
The Platform
Nine and Three-Quarters was a familiar chaos of steam, shouting goodbyes, and the hooting of owls. Timothy moved through the crowd with a calm he hadn't possessed the previous year. His obsession had not diminished, but it had matured.
The summer, spent in the solitude of his trunk-universe and the libraries of London, had been incredibly productive, but the conversation with Dumbledore had resonated with him.
He remembered the old man's warning: "Nothing in excess is healthy". His decision to return to Hogwarts, instead of accepting the gap year, was based on that logic. His frustration and intellectual isolation were inefficient variables. He needed "anchors".
So, this year, instead of instinctively looking for an empty compartment to immerse himself in his work, he made a conscious effort to "relax and live a little". He actively sought out the trio.
He found them halfway down the train, in a compartment already flooded with candy wrappers.
"Tim!", exclaimed Hermione, her face lighting up, clearly relieved. The "Ghost of the Tower" who had barely spoken a word to them during the second half of the previous year was gone, replaced by the boy they had met at the beginning.
"What's up, Hunter?" said Ron, pushing aside a stack of comics. "I thought you'd already be at the castle, reading some dusty book."
"I decided to take the trip easy this year," Timothy replied, sitting down. He joined the conversation with an ease that surprised the others. He listened to Harry recount another horrible stay with the Dursleys, joked with Ron about Gryffindor's chances in Quidditch, and debated (just a little) with Hermione about third-year electives.
To them, he was completely present, relaxed.
The truth was much more complex.
While his conscious self laughed and ate a Chocolate Frog, his mind was working in the background, operating at a level they couldn't conceive. His Archive Project had evolved. Having finished archiving and analyzing the entirety of the Hogwarts library, his focus was now on the vast ocean of muggle knowledge he had begun to copy.
In that very instant, while nodding at Ron's complaint about Percy, a separate part of his consciousness was analyzing a treatise on quantum physics from the University of London that he had archived the previous week. He had mastered mental multitasking. His conscious self could "enjoy life" and maintain his "anchors", while his subconscious continued the real work.
For Timothy, this was relaxing. And the second year was just beginning.
Casual Mastery (The Practice)
Timothy's return to the classrooms was, ostensibly, that of a reformed student. He kept his promise to Dumbledore and his agreement with Flitwick. He attended all his classes, sat attentively, and participated. The teachers, who had spent the second half of the previous year worried about the "Ghost of the Tower", were relieved. Professor Flitwick was frankly beaming.
But Timothy's participation was fundamentally different from the others'.
Having already archived, analyzed, and understood the entire Hogwarts curriculum (and much more) during his first year and the summer, classes were no longer a place to learn. They were a testing ground. They were an opportunity for his practice.
The first Charms class of the term was a perfect example. Flitwick, perched on his usual pile of books, was presenting the Cushioning Charm, Spongify. The classroom was a chaos of waving wands and students stabbing their desks, achieving, at best, wood that felt slightly soft to the touch.
Timothy observed the process with analytical amusement. The spell was simple, a basic tactile enchantment. Boring. He raised his hand.
"Yes, Mr. Hunter!" squeaked Flitwick, delighted to see his star student participating.
"Professor," Timothy said, his quiet voice cutting through the murmurs. "Does the charm have to be tactile? Or is 'cushioning' a concept we can apply to other forces? Like sound?"
Flitwick blinked, his academic mind catching up. "Well, theoretically, Mr. Hunter, the spell matrix is for kinetic impact absorption, so..."
Timothy didn't wait for the full answer. He saw a heavy book a Ravenclaw classmate was about to drop. "Allow me."
He made a casual gesture with his hand, wandless. The book fell off the desk.
There was no sound.
The heavy tome hit the stone floor with the absolute silence of a feather falling on cotton. The classroom went silent. Timothy had applied the spell conceptually, not to the object, but to the sound it was about to produce.
"Fascinating," murmured Flitwick, his eyes shining. "Five... no, ten points to Ravenclaw."
Transfiguration class with Professor McGonagall was even more revealing. The task was to transform a beetle into a button.
Hermione, after several focused attempts, achieved a perfect transformation. A flawless mother-of-pearl button lay on her desk. McGonagall congratulated her with a curt nod.
Then, the professor stopped in front of Timothy's desk.
He remembered his summer frustration with the lead, that mental block that prevented him from believing that something so complex could be easy. He recognized that same momentary doubt... the internal logic telling him that complex transmutation should be hard... and he deliberately ignored it.
On his desk, there wasn't a button.
There was a cameo. An intricate silver and opal cameo, with a delicate female face (which looked suspiciously like a young McGonagall) engraved in relief. It wasn't just a transformation; it was an artistic creation.
McGonagall stared at the object. It was beyond N.E.W.T. level. It was mastery.
"Mr. Hunter," she said, her voice dangerously quiet. "Is this your attempt to 'show off'?"
"I was just practicing my control, Professor," Timothy replied calmly. "The theory of beetles is quite similar to that of cameos on a conceptual level, if one ignores the complexity of the shell matrix."
McGonagall stared at him. She didn't know whether to reprimand him for his arrogance or give him fifty points. She settled for a curt nod.
His control of practical magic, now that his mental blocks had dissolved, was absolute. The true challenge, he realized as he walked out of Transfiguration, was no longer in the classrooms. It was in the Room of Requirement, inventing the magic that wasn't in the books yet.
Innovation (Creation of New Spells)
Returning to Hogwarts was, as Dumbledore had predicted, a necessary "anchor". The routine of classes, although intellectually dull, provided Timothy with the rhythm and structure his obsessive mind needed to not derail. His days were for appearances, for practicing his control and for maintaining his social interactions.
But the nights... the nights were for the real work.
As soon as Ravenclaw Tower fell silent, he headed to the seventh-floor corridor. The Room of Requirement welcomed him like an old friend. It was no longer a library; it was a laboratory of innovation and development. The blackboard covering one wall was filled with his "Unified Laws of Conceptual Magic", a chaotic but brilliant tapestry of runic equations, quantum physics, and alchemical theory.
He had completed the Hogwarts archive. He had made significant inroads into the London muggle knowledge. But his obsession had hit a logistical wall.
He stood in the middle of the room, looking at his hand. His "Archive" method was incredibly efficient, but it had a fundamental flaw: it required touch.
To copy the British Library, he had had to spend weeks pretending to "browse" books, discreetly brushing spines. It was inefficient. It was slow. And for artifacts or knowledge he couldn't physically touch—the architecture of a building, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, a book behind glass—it was useless.
"An architect shouldn't need to touch every brick," he murmured.
He turned to his blackboard. His mind, now fueled by muggle science, saw a solution.
Standard Legilimency was a probe, a mental invasion. His tactile Archive was a conceptual data extraction. But what if he combined the two?
Light, according to the muggle physics he had archived, was information. Waves and particles that bounced off objects and carried their "history" (color, texture) to a receiver (the eye).
What if he could treat light itself as a data vector? What if, instead of invading a mind, he could simply read the information an object emitted passively?
He spent the next few weeks in a state of feverish creation. It wasn't a combat spell; it was a tool. He combined the theory of Legilimency (information extraction) with optical physics (light as a data carrier). He designed the conceptual parameters, the "intent" he would need.
Finally, one night, he was ready for the test.
"Room," he commanded, "I need a book I have never read. On the other side of the room. On a pedestal."
The Room obeyed. A dusty tome on hippogriff breeding appeared on a stone lectern about twenty meters away.
Timothy raised his hand, wandless. He concentrated, not on the book, but on the light from the torch bouncing off the open page. He didn't try to "grab" the knowledge. He tried to "see" it with his mind.
"Archivo Aspectus."
It was a whisper, but the effect was immediate. A pale blue beam of light, almost invisible, shot from his fingertip. It wasn't a Lumos. It was a beam of pure intent. It hit the open page.
In his mind, he felt a stream of data, different from the tactile torrent. It was slower, more deliberate. He saw the words forming in his mental Archive. Page one.
The page of the book, across the room, turned by itself with a snap!
The beam scanned the second page. Page two.
Snap!
Page three.
Timothy watched, his heart beating with a cold, triumphant euphoria. It had worked. He had just invented his first truly original spell.
It was slower than the tactile Archive, which could copy an entire book in ten seconds. This new method took almost a second per page. But the tactical advantage was immense.
He could stand in the center of Dumbledore's library and, with enough time, copy every book on his shelves without taking a single step. He could "read" the runes on a wall a hundred meters away.
He had just turned his eyes into the most powerful knowledge acquisition weapon on the planet.
The Inevitable Gap
True to his promise to Dumbledore, Timothy strove to "live a little" and maintain his "anchors". This, in practice, meant spending time in the main Hogwarts library, not just his Room of Requirement. It was the only place where he could simulate a normal study routine and, more importantly, interact with Hermione Granger.
He found her one October afternoon in her usual corner, but the table wasn't covered with the usual Transfiguration or Arithmancy texts. Instead, she was surrounded by a pile of peacock-blue books, all with the same smiling face and wavy blond hair on the cover.
"Light research, Hermione?" Timothy said, sliding a chair out and sitting down.
Hermione looked up, her eyes shining with an emotion he hadn't seen before. It wasn't the fervor of academic discovery; it was pure adoration.
"Oh, Tim, he's amazing!" she sighed, stroking the cover of Year with the Yeti. "Gilderoy Lockhart is simply... well, he's brilliant! Did you know he received the Order of Merlin, Third Class, and won Witch Weekly's Most-Charming-Smile Award five times in a row? He's the bravest wizard there is!"
Timothy leaned back in his chair, a genuine smile of pure amusement drawn on his face. This was the part of "living life" he found genuinely hilarious.
He didn't need to read Lockhart's books. The previous week, while he was at Flourish and Blotts buying new ink, he had spent a minute "browsing". He had used his new Archivo Aspectus to scan and copy the man's entire biography from across the shop. His mental Archive had processed the complete collection in less than twenty minutes and tagged it under "Fiction - Inconsistent".
"He's definitely... something," Timothy said, his voice thick with amusement. "Personally, my favorite part was in Wandering with Werewolves."
"I know!" said Hermione, her cheeks flushing. "So brave, facing that creature with only his wits!"
"No, no," Timothy said, his smile widening. "The timeline thing. He claims to have been in Tibet in 1985, negotiating with the Wagga Wagga werewolf. But in Gadding with Ghouls, he says he spent all of 1985 in Scotland, banishing the Bandon Banshee. The man is a miracle, Hermione. He is the only wizard in history to have mastered wandless bilocation for 365 days straight. It's fascinating. I should write a paper on it."
He expected her to laugh, or at least see the logical flaw.
Instead, Hermione blinked, considered his words seriously, and then nodded enthusiastically.
"Wow! I didn't even notice! It's probably a side effect of the Yeti magic! Or maybe a time loop caused by the Banshee. Tim, you're brilliant for noticing! That just shows how incredibly advanced his magic is!"
Timothy's smile faded. His humor evaporated, replaced by that familiar feeling of cold isolation.
His joke... his simple and obvious logical deduction... hadn't even registered. She wasn't just ignoring the facts; she was actively inventing an impossible logic ("Yeti magic") to defend her crush.
The gap between them turned into a canyon.
He realized, with depressing clarity, that Dumbledore's advice was much harder than it seemed. How could he "relax and live life" when everyone around him, including the smartest person he knew, operated on a fundamentally broken logic, driven by things as messy and inefficient as emotions?
His isolation was inevitable, not because he chose to be alone, but because he no longer spoke the same language as everyone else.
Timothy forced a smile. "Yes, Hermione. You're right. It must be the Yeti magic. It's brilliant."
He leaned back in his chair, sighing internally, as his subconscious mind continued its real work: analyzing the latest particle physics treatise he had archived from the London library.
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Mike.
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