Chapter 2
The class ended quickly. Gabin didn't linger to watch the emotional entanglements of the protagonist trio; he headed straight to the eighth floor of the castle.
The Room of Requirement.
His memories of the original story weren't extensive, but he still remembered this important location.
"I need a room to practice magic."
"I need a room to practice magic."
"I need a room to practice magic."
Silently repeating his request in his mind, he walked past the stretch of blank wall three times. A smooth door appeared in the stone. He pushed it open. Inside was a spacious room of at least three hundred square meters. There were straw dummies that could serve as fixed targets and machines capable of launching clay discs.
The walls were lined with an extremely magic-resistant metal, minimising any damage spells could do to the room.
None of it was particularly useful to Gabin right now. At least, not yet—he was still only a first-year student.
Gabin stood in the center of the room, recalling the two patterns he had memorised during the lesson. One was the magic circuit Hermione had used for the Levitation Charm: simple, clear. In his mind, it resembled the combination of a semicircle and a half-square.
The other was the circuit Professor Flitwick had used when casting silently. The wand-movement portion remained normal, but the incantation portion, Gabin remembered the pattern he had seen: the clean semicircle now carried a graceful, flowing curve, and at its center was a small swirling dot, making the whole shape resemble a pair of bird wings.
Silent casting meant controlling one's magic power to form exactly that kind of circuit during spellcasting and connecting it to the wand-movement circuit.
If normal casting was like digging trenches in the ground for the wand movement and incantation—once the channels were correct, you could simply pour magic power in without thinking—
Then silent casting skipped the trenches entirely. You had to directly shape the magic power in real time to form that precise circuit and link it to the wand movement.
The difficulty wasn't just a little higher.
But as Dumbledore had said, Gabin's talent was indeed extraordinary. Not only could he see the flow of magic power, but his ability to memorize magic circuits and control magic far surpassed most people.
Looking at the feather in front of him, he performed the wand motion with his right hand while concentrating fully. He split his magic power into two streams: one flowed out along the circuit formed by the wand movement, while the other, under his control, shaped itself into that winged pattern and attempted to connect with the wand circuit.
First attempt: failure. The feather didn't move at all, but he felt no discouragement and immediately began a second try.
Second attempt: failure, but this time the feather gave a faint twitch.
Gabin stared at the feather and reviewed his mistake. When trying to multitask, he had focused too much attention on forming the pattern circuit, causing his right hand's wand motion to falter. The circuits hadn't connected.
On the third try, Gabin slowed his movements deliberately. A faint silver glow seemed to shimmer in his eyes. In his perception, magic power became like a brush he could grasp, and he guided it stroke by stroke to paint the exact pattern he held in his mind.
No errors at all.
The feather trembled gently, then rose smoothly and floated in front of him.
Success!
Gabin cheered inwardly and broke into a satisfied smile, his talent really was formidable.
He cut off the magic flow. The feather drifted gently back down.
The Levitation Charm was indeed a very basic spell; the circuit variations for wandless casting weren't too complex. During Professor McGonagall's Transfiguration class, he had once seen her perform a wandless Transfiguration spell.
That dazzling, intricate pattern had nearly overloaded his brain—he'd almost fainted on the spot.
Compared to the Levitation Charm, it was the difference between 1+1=2 and calculus.
Even the Transfiguration circuits the professors used in normal class were far more complicated than the Levitation Charm—combinations of several basic shapes.
That was why his progress in Transfiguration remained slow for now.
Of course, the other students weren't much better. Only Hermione had already managed to turn a piece of firewood into a needle with a single sharp point.
After levitating the feather again to confirm, Gabin stopped practicing the Levitation Charm and moved on to other spells.
The Lumos Charm. The incantation: "Lumos."
It was an even more basic spell than Wingardium Leviosa. Its effect: produce a light source from the tip of the wand.
In Gabin's vision, this spell's magic circuit was extremely simple—just a straight horizontal line, and the longer the line was stretched, the more magic power it required, and the brighter the light became.
As Gabin channeled magic into his wand, a small point of light rose from the tip, sparkling like a star in his dark eyes.
But he didn't stop there. His expression grew serious—more focused than when he had practiced the Levitation Charm.
The magic circuit of Lumos was clearly visible to him: a straight line. His magic flowed into that line, sustaining the glowing point.
He then began to reduce the magic supply while attempting to shorten the circuit, the bright point in front of him dimmed and shrank noticeably but it didn't collapse.
Only when the lamp-like glow had been reduced to the size of a firefly did Gabin finally exhale in relief. At that moment, the magic circuit was no longer a straight line—it had become a tiny dot, and the length of that dot was less than one-twentieth of the original line.
Joy flickered in Gabin's eyes. After this period of practice, he could finally alter the Lumos Charm.
From the initial instant collapse, to collapsing at half strength, and now he could stably fix it as a small glowing point but this wasn't his limit.
He began to multitask: maintaining the first glowing point while using his wand to create a second one.
Thanks to the foundation of the previous circuit, the second one formed much more easily—more than twice as fast.
While continuing to supply magic to the completed glowing point, he kept creating new ones, finally, when his magic reserves had dropped to about half, a field of star-like lights floated before him.
At the same time, his mind had reached its limit. Fatigue appeared in his eyes, and his right hand began to tremble uncontrollably.
Controlling magic required mental focus. Maintaining the output for hundreds of glowing points had pushed his concentration to the breaking point.
But he didn't stop. He began to direct the glowing points to move.
Some lights flickered out, vanishing into the air like dying fireflies, but Gabin paid them no mind. He poured all his attention into controlling their positions; one by one, the points began to connect, turning into light trails. Depending on their placement, they formed different shapes.
Finally, Gabin slowly moved several of the shapes toward the center, arranging them into a simple short phrase, "Hello world."