Edge of the Forbidden Forest, in front of the Cold Fusion Alchemical Furnace.
The alarm shrieked like a hundred screaming female ghosts.
"Core Meltdown Countdown: 30 Seconds! Current Temperature: 5000°C! Suggest evacuating crowd and writing wills!"
Ivan held a bottle of bubbling black potion—the "Powerful Hair Growth Potion · Enhanced Edition" just snatched from Snape's office.
"Professor! Don't be stingy! Lend me your hair!"
Ivan roared, ignoring Snape's murderous glare, and poured the entire bottle of hair growth potion into the massive crack in the reactor casing.
"NO!!" Snape let out a scream, a sound more painful than death. "That's the essence I brewed for forty-nine days using unicorn tail hair and dragon liver paste! You're using it to plug a leak? That's a nuclear reactor! Not your leaking drainpipe!"
A magical scene unfolded.
The viscous black liquid contacted the high heat and instantly underwent a chemical reaction.
Instead of evaporating, it rapidly solidified like superglue, turning into a metallic, glistening... black hairspray-like substance?
And it actually plugged the crack!
The leaking radiation gas was forcibly held back, emitting a hiss like a leaking balloon.
> [System Alert: Leak plugged. Plugging Material: Snape's Dignity (Physical).]
"It actually... plugged it?" Ron was dumbfounded. "Is Professor Snape's hair potion that hardcore?"
"Of course it's hardcore!" Snape gritted his teeth, his face twitching with heartache. "It has 'Permanent Sticking Charm' in it! It's meant for bonding broken bones! Now great, if I lose a single hair, I'll have to tear my scalp off to stick it back!"
Although the crack was plugged, the internal temperature of the reactor was still skyrocketing.
If the heat wasn't vented, this thing would still turn into a Tsar Bomba.
"Need heat dissipation!" Ivan shouted. "Who volunteers to be a heat sink? I can give him points! Lots of points!"
Gryffindor and Slytherin students stepped back three paces in unison.
Only one person remained in place.
Fudge.
He tried to sneak away just now but was grabbed back by Hagrid.
"Let... let me go!" Fudge trembled, looking at the glowing red furnace. "I am the Minister! I can't die here! I haven't finished my memoirs!"
"Cornelius," Dumbledore (Muscle Man version) walked over, patting Fudge's shoulder earnestly (almost planting him into the ground). "For the future of the wizarding world, for the stability of the British Empire, you need to make a small sacrifice. Just being a heat sink, it'll be quick."
"That's five thousand degrees!" Fudge shrieked. "I'll become a charcoal-grilled Minister!"
"You won't." Ivan interjected suddenly, holding a wet towel. "As long as you maintain contact and keep turning over, you can achieve the effect of crispy outside and tender inside... oh no, safe heat dissipation."
Before Fudge could resist, Hagrid and Snape lifted him up and stuck him next to the area just plugged by the hair potion (where the temperature was slightly lower, only three hundred degrees).
"AHHHH! HOT HOT HOT!"
Fudge let out a scream like a butchered pig. His suit curled and smoked instantly, shoe soles melted, and he stuck to the furnace like a gecko, responsible for using his body temperature (and cold sweat of fear) to cool the furnace.
> [System Alert: Fudge (Experiencing Life's Greatest Crisis): Heat Dissipation Efficiency +200%. Current Status: Crème Brûlée Reserve.]
"Hold on, Minister!" Ivan directed from the side. "Left side is burning, flip over! Yes, press your face there, the heat sink is loose!"
Fudge cried while pressing his face against the furnace, cursing every curse word he knew in his life.
Just then, the Metaverse entrance in the sky flickered violently.
Due to unstable real-world power, the virtual world began to collapse.
Grindelwald and Voldemort's figures appeared intermittently in mid-air.
"Albus! Think of something!" Grindelwald shouted in the void, his Armani suit half-burnt. "If the server blows, my assets go to zero! How will I acquire the Ministry?!"
"Gellert! Stop thinking about money!" Dumbledore roared, his muscular form flickering. "If we don't stabilize the spatial rift, the entire Forbidden Forest will be sucked into the 2D world!"
The two legendary dark wizards exchanged a glance and suddenly raised their wands simultaneously.
"If that's the case..."
"Then use that."
"Blood Pact · Modified · Shield Mode!"
A dazzling golden light shot from their wand tips, interweaving into a massive hemispherical shield in mid-air, covering all of Hogwarts.
However, because their ideologies clashed, the shield was extremely unstable.
Grindelwald wanted the shield black; Dumbledore insisted on gold.
Thus, the shield flashed frantically between black, gold, and pink (Ivan's added touch).
"Gellert! Put away your Dark Magic! Too ugly!" Dumbledore shouted.
"You're too old-fashioned! Albus! Young people today like Dark Style!" Grindelwald retorted.
The shield expanded and contracted like a loose lightbulb connection.
Lucius Malfoy stood below watching the show (thankful he wasn't grabbed as a heat sink).
Suddenly, the shield contracted violently, and a golden flame swept over his head.
"Oh, no..."
Lucius touched his head.
Empty.
The wig he just bought, imported from Italy to cover his baldness, was instantly vaporized by the shield's edge flame.
Not even ash remained.
"MY HAIR!!" Lucius let out a scream more miserable than Fudge, clutching his shiny forehead and squatting on the ground. "I am a Malfoy! I can't be without a wig! This doesn't fit pure-blood etiquette!"
Amidst this chaos.
The reactor plugged by hair potion suddenly let out a dull roar.
Hum—!!
A massive energy shockwave rebounded off the solidified layer of hair potion.
"Bad news!" Ivan's face changed. "Professor Snape's hair potion is too sticky! It reflected the energy back into the core! This will cause an 'Implosion'!"
"What will happen?" Ron asked tremblingly.
"Simply put," Ivan grabbed Ron and ran back, "the furnace will explode like a crushed soda can, flattening us all into a 2D photo!"
"Help!!"
At the critical moment.
Fudge, still sticking to the furnace as a heat sink, suddenly exploded with an amazing will to survive.
He felt the furnace behind him trying to suck him in, so he struggled desperately, kicking and flailing.
Coincidentally, his heel kicked the manual switch of the control valve.
Click.
The pressure relief valve opened.
But the high-pressure steam didn't vent into the sky, but... sprayed directly at Grindelwald and Dumbledore maintaining the shield.
PFFT—!!
The two old wizards were simultaneously blasted in the face by high-temperature steam smelling of hair potion.
"Cough cough cough! What is this ghost stuff?!" Grindelwald covered his eyes. "Why does it smell like ginger and old leather shoes?"
"It's Snape's hair potion..." Dumbledore wiped his face helplessly. "Looks like our shield needs an 'Anti-Hair Loss' attribute."
Blasted by the steam, their magic circuits instantly went chaotic.
The already unstable shield went completely out of control.
It didn't disappear, but... exploded.
But not a destructive explosion.
Instead, like fireworks, it exploded into a sky full of pink hearts and Golden Snitches.
> [System Alert: Hogwarts Metaverse Server has rebooted. Current Mode: Dating Sim · Magical Edition.]
Everyone was stunned.
Fudge slumped on the ground, entirely black except for his white teeth, smoking.
Lucius hugged his bald head and cried.
Snape looked at the scorched traces of hair potion on the ground, calculating the damages.
In mid-air, Grindelwald and Dumbledore were blasted into disheveled messes (truly messy this time), looking at each other.
"Albus," Grindelwald suddenly smiled, a surprisingly gentle smile, "the way you just sprayed steam reminded me of the summer of 1899."
Dumbledore blushed (hard to see under the beard, but his ears turned red). "Gellert, shut up. And take your hand off my waist."
"No." Grindelwald acted rogue. "Unless you agree to vacation at Nurmengard with me. I installed a new fully automatic mahjong table."
Ivan watched this and silently put away the detonator in his hand.
"It seems," Ivan said to the dumbstruck Harry and Ron, "the crisis is averted. However... we might need to prepare for a grand wedding—or a funeral, if they start fighting."
Just then, a charred black hand reached out from the cracked reactor gap.
Voldemort's weak voice drifted out:
"Um... excuse me, can the Metaverse still be used now? I thought I saw my NFT price go up..."
Ivan rolled his eyes, walked over, and kicked him back in.
"Shut up, Tom. Go take a bath first; you smell like a burnt tire."