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The hidden chamber inside Ravenclaw Tower.
The deep-blue starlight still flowed silently across the domed ceiling. Rowena Ravenclaw's star-map chessboard rotated slowly in mid-air, recording every violent surge of magic that had shaken this ancient castle—and the land beneath it—for a thousand years.
The dragon farce on the Astronomy Tower had already ended. Gryffindor's blind celebration and the Ministry's shadowy schemes were fermenting inside the castle walls.
And Lucian—the architect of it all—stood before the chessboard now.
"The dragon business was handled too cleanly," he murmured.
He reached out, fingers passing through a drifting cloud of stardust.
He was reviewing the game.
From the brainwashing golden threads that rained down during the Halloween troll incident, to the fire-dragon event that was resolved with nothing more than a few sheets of parchment and bureaucratic sleight-of-hand.
The World-Will's methods for suppressing variables had dropped dramatically in intensity.
Over the past few days, while everyone else watched the children's little power plays, Lucian hadn't been idle. Under cover of night and chaos, he had moved freely through the Restricted Section of the library.
Among those dusty, curse-laden tomes, he had quietly hunted for the hidden traces of fate in magical history.
And he had found the name.
A specimen who once tried, with his own two hands, to flip the entire chessboard of the world—only to be ruthlessly crushed by the rolling tide of the era.
When he returned to the chamber with those forbidden scrolls, the space suddenly changed.
The star-map chessboard's cool blue light was violently devoured by suppressed patches of dark red.
In the air, chaotic shadows twisted and recombined.
First to emerge from the darkness was the faint outline of a skull-shaped hookah.
Then the mist churned and tore apart. The view widened into a sky filled with howling artillery fire and the steel tide of Muggles.
It was an apocalyptic war that had once swept the entire world—the iron-and-blood afterglow of the first-generation Dark Lord.
Gellert Grindelwald.
Lucian's gaze followed the proud figure raising his wand in the flickering light.
History books recorded it this way:
In twentieth-century magical history, Gellert Grindelwald was widely regarded as the most fanatical and destructive Dark wizard of his time.
Scholars generally noted that Grindelwald was not only a supremely talented spellcaster but also a dangerously charismatic demagogue.
Expelled from Durmstrang in his youth for extreme Dark magic experiments, he later used the slogan "For the Greater Good" as political bait, attempting to completely overturn the International Statute of Secrecy and establish absolute wizard supremacy over Muggles.
His extremist ideology and atrocities plunged the European continent into years of bloody turmoil.
In 1945, Albus Dumbledore answered the call of the international magical community and defeated him in a legendary duel hailed as the duel of the century, finally ending the catastrophe.
After his defeat, Grindelwald was imprisoned in the Nurmengard tower he himself had designed.
In modern academic consensus, Grindelwald is typically characterized as a brilliant but delusional genius destroyed by his own arrogance and radical beliefs. His fall not only burnished Dumbledore's immortal reputation as a defender of justice but also serves as an eternal warning to the magical world: certain legal boundaries must never be crossed, and the current peaceful order must be firmly upheld.
"No," Lucian said, staring at the final image—the massive mushroom cloud rising from a Muggle nuclear detonation.
As the cloud billowed upward, he felt the chessboard tremble with an overwhelming, indescribable pressure.
"So that's it," Lucian realized. "You weren't trying to rule the Muggles. In that mushroom cloud, you saw the oracle of Muggle ascendancy."
It was a chilling discovery.
That nuclear mushroom cloud was the physical god born from the collective will of billions of Muggles.
Grindelwald had seen it earlier than anyone: the Statute of Secrecy was nothing more than a shroud draped over the magical world.
He had tried to shatter Muggle common sense through slaughter and terror, attempting to drag the world back to an age of miracles before the physical god fully took shape.
But he failed.
Lucian tapped his finger, reversing the timeline. The star map rewound to the very beginning.
[1899, Godric's Hollow]
Starlight sketched the shadows of three young men: a young Albus Dumbledore, Gellert Grindelwald, and Aberforth.
Two immense magical powers—strong enough to twist the rules of the world itself—collided and fused. It was the blood oath between two peerless geniuses.
Then the brawl began.
The magic the two young men unleashed was brilliant and unrestrained. But in that moment, a single, extremely subtle golden glimmer flashed—though neither of them, still too young, noticed the destined meaning behind it.
The next second, an unexpected curse struck the distant figure of the girl Ariana.
The image froze on the moment the girl fell and the young Dumbledore's face collapsing in horror.
"Hah… hahaha."
Lucian's mocking laugh echoed sharply in the empty chamber.
"What a breathtakingly elegant method."
He saw it all clearly now.
When the World-Will realized that the alliance between Grindelwald and Dumbledore represented a massive variable capable of overturning everything, it engineered an utterly banal family tragedy.
With the corpse of one innocent girl, it instantly dismantled that power.
Ariana's death became a crushing shackle that ground the natural blade that was Dumbledore into a guilt-ridden, change-fearing appeaser who could only ever patch up the ruins.
Lucian watched the genius kneeling in despair and speculated:
Dumbledore had sensed the denying force behind the tragedy, but he never realized it was Heaven's Will erasing a variable. Instead, he fell into an abyss of self-blame, convinced it proved that magic and power inevitably brought disaster.
Thus, the greatest White wizard of the age walked the path of extreme compromise.
He began shackling magic with love, morality, and rules. At Hogwarts he desperately held open a cage called "protection." He thought he was atoning. He never knew the World-Will was using him to become the perfect undertaker for the magical world's quiet euthanasia.
The timeline on the chessboard raced forward and froze at [1945].
The duel of the century.
In the image, curses exploded across the sky. Lucian saw Grindelwald's eyes.
All he saw was sorrow and despair.
In 1945, the Muggle atomic bomb succeeded. Muggle common sense declared absolute dominion over the planet.
And in that same year, the World-Will dispatched its tightly leashed "agent"—Dumbledore—to act as executioner and eliminate the final struggle of the old era.
Flickering fragments showed the duel, but in the background the nuclear firelight of the Muggle world rose into the sky.
Lucian watched Grindelwald raise the Elder Wand.
In that moment, the hidden chamber faithfully recreated the scene. Grindelwald carried an overwhelming weight of reality on his shoulders.
"Such a shame," Lucian sighed—half admiration, half scorn—watching the proud figure gradually exhaust himself and finally lower his wand in defeat. "You were a prophetic genius, but you were still a native trapped inside the nutshell.
You possessed supreme magic, yet you lacked the one deep-blue upgrade that might have changed everything."
"But how could anyone blame you? Trapped inside the game, seeing the board at all was already the mark of a once-in-an-era talent. Who could demand that you also see the hand holding the pieces?"
Grindelwald's blind spot was exactly that.
He saw the survival war between wizards and Muggles, but he chose the wrong weapon: trying to use magic to slaughter ordinary people.
He never understood the World-Will. The World-Will could not be killed.
He tried to stab the heavens of this world with the sword of this world. It was a doomed dead end.
The moment Grindelwald lowered the Elder Wand was the moment he realized his closest confidant had willingly submitted to Heaven's Will and become the pathfinder for the new era.
Resistance against the greater trend had become an unsolvable deadlock.
The light faded. The star map returned to its calm, deep blue.
"A double-blind trap," Lucian said, waving away the shocking historical replay. "One man tried to use magic to fight the rising tide of materialism and was imprisoned. The other, terrified, personally castrated miracles and boiled the frog in warm water."
The bones of the pioneer are the best guide for those who come after.
The rules of the World-Will had been laid out in blood before him:
Under normal circumstances, the World-Will never clashes with you in raw power. It always exploits your attachments, human weaknesses, and the rules you proudly call "correct," dismantling you from within.
It will even weave a net of destiny using so-called luck and coincidence.
Of course, it seems my treatment as a transmigrator is somewhat different.
"That's why last night only brought parchment and Umbridge," Lucian said, the mockery in his voice sharper as he recalled the dragon incident.
Compared to the effort it once expended to suppress Grindelwald, the World-Will now treated Hogwarts like a child playing with toys in a basin.
Because the spine of magic had already been broken in 1945.
Now the World-Will only needed to go with the flow—using Lucius Malfoy's greed and the Ministry's hunger for power—to easily pry open Hogwarts' autonomy.
And the most ironic part of this entire chain was Harry Potter.
As the designated Savior, he had no idea of his true role. Driven by hot blood and following Dumbledore, he believed he and his friends had defeated malicious regulations. He believed kindness and blind courage were the greatest trump cards in the magical world.
The World-Will deliberately exploited the protagonist group's path dependence on Gryffindor-style bravery, making them repeatedly push against the rules. This forced Dumbledore, in order to protect them, to compromise again and again with the bureaucracy, personally carving cracks into the walls of this magical sanctuary.
By the time Potter and his generation grew up, magic would be fully collared by physics and law, reduced to vulgar parlor tricks performed by charlatans.
"Jumping out like Grindelwald and shouting pure-blood supremacy, trying to smash the sky with magic? That is the most outdated move possible in this era."
Lucian walked to the star-map chessboard and pressed his finger on the dim star that represented himself.
If he revealed himself now, he would only invite endless accidents and strangulation.
The World-Will would send countless Umbridges and endless bills, dragging him into familiar territory and defeating him with superior experience.
Lucian re-lit the current Hogwarts star map.
Light and shadow intertwined across the board, simulating the final outcome of the dragon incident.
"Looks earth-shattering on the surface, but in truth—everything still leads to the same destination."
Lucian looked at the simulated result and gave a self-mocking laugh.
He had pushed house rivalry to its limit, dragged Umbridge into the game through Malfoy, and forced Dumbledore to sign the bill. The change was hardly small.
But the result?
Harry and Ron escaped arrest, yet they, along with Draco, still lost massive house points from the earlier disturbances. And they were inevitably heading toward the next plot point: the Forbidden Forest night patrol.
No matter how they twisted and turned, Harry Potter would still walk into that dark forest to face the remnant Dark Lord feeding on unicorn blood.
"Although the main road looks unchanged, I've quietly switched the signs at the forks."
Lucian sighed softly. The World-Will's vast包容力 and bottom-line resilience were enough to make anyone shudder.
But his gaze stopped on a single cool, detached star drifting at the edge of the main line.
Hermione Granger.
In the original script, she should have fully absorbed Gryffindor's blind courage after this incident, becoming the Savior's indispensable external brain.
Instead, she had detached herself from Harry and Ron's red cloud without a single backward glance.
She had observed the Savior's actions with cold reason and walked firmly away from the World-Will's preset path.
But she wasn't the only change. Neville had begun to echo Harry and Ron from a distance, forming a new trio.
"That's enough."
"Without that coolest head in the room, Gryffindor's iron triangle is left with nothing but passion and recklessness.
Such a combination will only make even better pawns for the World-Will's script."
Lucian closed his fingers, extinguishing the star map once more.
He had settled on the next phase of his plan:
He would not flip the table like Grindelwald.
He would lurk in the abyss and parasitize the script.
His fingers slid across the board, pushing the blazing red piece that represented Harry Potter—radiant yet clearly a marionette—straight to the front of the board, into the heart of the coming storm. His own piece slipped quietly into the blind spot at the bottom.
Since this was the protagonist the World-Will had carefully prepared for the new era, and since Potter was born carrying the grand mission of defeating Voldemort, he was simply the world's most perfect windbreak.
"Let the spotlight burn brightly on the Gryffindor lions. Let them enjoy that vanity meant to draw Heaven's attention."
He had no need to correct Harry's recklessness. On the contrary, over the long years ahead he would ensure Harry walked the main storyline of defeating the Dark Lord with extreme smoothness.
The brighter Potter shone, the more bitterly Dumbledore clashed with the Ministry, the more the World-Will's computational power would focus on the boy with the scar.
And Lucian would remain in the overlooked shadows, continuing to absorb a thousand years of accumulated knowledge, studying the magic of miracles, and attempting to substitute one piece for another.
The cold wind outside the tower carried the freezing mist of the Forbidden Forest as it howled past.
The closing act of the first school year was about to begin. The blood of the unicorns was already flowing in the forest.
"Burn as brightly as you can, Harry."
At the top of the tower, Lucian took one last look at the slowly brightening horizon, then turned and stepped into the shadows of the resting chamber.
"The great Savior was born to stand in front of the wind."
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