Julian extended his magical senses through the room to search for any remaining living things, but after finding none, he lifted his wand. "SCOURGIFY!" he said, and a stream of magical cleaning bubbles poured out, spreading through the vast chamber as they began scrubbing everything clean. While the spell did its work, pun entirely intended, he shifted his attention to the broken glass walls of the greenhouse that he could now see clearly. The damage was not nearly as bad as it could have been. There were only a few small holes and one larger break hidden away in a corner.
With another wave of his wand, he said, "REPARO!" and the shattered glass drew itself back together, restoring the greenhouse to proper condition. Ten minutes later, the cleaning spell finished its task and removed the excess dirt, dust, and stains left behind by fluids that had seeped from corpses. Unfortunately, it did not get rid of the bones, though it had cleaned them down to a yellowed color. Julian gathered the ones he might be able to use for ring making and banished the rest, then paused to marvel at just how enormous the greenhouse really was. It was easily the size of a football field in both width and length, and the ceiling rose nearly thirty feet overhead.
The sunlight filtering through the vines covering the outside of the greenhouse cast a strange twilight throughout the interior, making it feel almost like he was standing inside a forest. "Even though potioneering was never where my mother placed most of her focus, she had one of the finest collections of magical plants and animals of her era. It is sad to see all of that effort reduced to almost nothing. It does make me wonder what was so valuable about that tree we found in the vault," Helena said with a sorrowful look.
Julian had to stop himself from saying that the tree in the vault was worth a thousand gardens full of ordinary magical plants. That was not even an exaggeration. The "singular" trait in the tree's system appraisal had confused him, so he had checked the description more closely. It did not mean the tree was merely the last of its kind. It meant it was the only one of its kind that had ever existed on Earth. Unlike every other plant here, which could reproduce and be cultivated, that tree was entirely unique and could never be replaced.
That meant the golden apple tree was both priceless and irreplaceable, and Julian fully intended to hoard it accordingly. 'Before any of that, though, I need a proper look at the whole island so I can figure out how much has to be cleared away and how much can be left alone,' he thought before leaving the greenhouse and going back into the manor. "Dotty!" he called, and the house-elf appeared instantly out of nowhere. "The carriage has been cleaned as ordered. How may Dotty serve?" the elf asked eagerly.
"I need you to clear all the belongings out of the master bedroom without damaging anything and put them into one of the spare rooms," Julian instructed. Dotty gave him a salute and vanished again. Looking at the large bird still perched on his shoulder, Julian asked it to get off because he was beginning to ache. The ho-ho hopped down from him onto the stone floor without resistance, and Julian rolled his shoulder to ease the soreness before walking out through the front door of the manor.
Pulling his broom out of Greed, he mounted it and rose smoothly into the air. For a moment he was tempted to simply fly and enjoy the sky, but he needed to get this done quickly. Once he climbed high enough, Julian finally got a proper look at the entire island, and what he saw surprised him. Despite being a complete mess of overgrowth, it was actually rather large, stretching roughly ten miles in every direction from the manor at its center. His eyes narrowed, however, when he noticed the island's shape. It was suspiciously circular.
It almost looked as though someone had cut a perfect massive circle out of the seabed and raised it above the water. 'More likely, someone cut away everything else until only this circle remained,' he thought seriously. Putting that aside for the moment, he spotted several more species of magical creatures scattered across the island beyond the ones they had already encountered earlier. There were graphorns, dryads, faeries, and even a small flock of gryphcats, cat-sized griffin creatures lingering near the edge of the island. The smaller things hidden in the vegetation, however, were impossible to make out from above.
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