"The Lesser Orbit increases output by three hundred percent," Snape lectured, his voice carrying the flat boredom of a man who had just detonated a training mannequin. "If you cast a Shield Charm with that much force without adjusting your mental lattice, you will likely liquify your own brain."
He turned his obsidian eyes to the class, scanning them like a predator selecting prey.
"Mr. Flint. Step forward."
Marcus Flint stood, his usual swagger conspicuously absent. His trollish features were pale as he made his way to the front of the classroom, shoulders hunched defensively.
"Demonstrate," Snape commanded, gesturing to the remaining training dummy with a languid wave. "Show the class the technique."
Flint hesitated, his eyes darting from Snape to the expectant faces of his classmates. He swallowed hard, raised his wand, and began the breathing pattern they'd been drilling for weeks.
Alister watched from his seat near the back, his expression neutral. Through his Mana Perception, he could see the flow of magic inside Flint—jagged and wild, colored by fear. The mana surged through Flint's channels like water through a cracked dam, uncontrolled and desperate.
"Stupefy!" Flint shouted.
A massive bolt of red energy exploded from his wand. It missed the target by three feet, careened into the ceiling, ricocheted off a stone gargoyle, and singed Seamus Finnigan's eyebrows before dissipating in a shower of crimson sparks.
Nervous laughter rippled through the classroom.
"Pathetic." Snape's voice cut through the amusement like a blade. "Control, Flint. You are forcing the mana through your arm with no regard for the structural integrity of the spell matrix. Your technique is the magical equivalent of swinging a sledgehammer with your eyes closed."
He stepped closer, his robes billowing.
"Do it again. And this time, suppress the output to manageable levels. Unless you wish to explain to Madam Pomfrey why you've blown off your own hand."
Flint wiped sweat from his forehead, his hand shaking as he raised his wand again. He looked like a man trying to hold back a tidal wave with a wooden spoon.
Alister leaned back in his chair, observing the spectacle with detached interest. The power was there—raw, unrefined, but undeniably present. Flint had always had magical strength; what he lacked was discipline, control, the precision required to channel force without destroying himself in the process.
The struggle itself was the lesson.
Flint didn't succeed that day. When the bell rang, he was still wrestling with the technique, the training dummy charred and smoking—testament to power without purpose.
Alister gathered his materials and left the classroom without a word, offering neither help nor mockery. Some lessons could only be learned through failure.
Winter melted into spring, and the bleak grey skies of Scotland gave way to the lush, vibrant green of mid-May. The castle grounds transformed, bursting with wildflowers and new growth, the air heavy with the scent of warming earth.
Typically, this time of year was defined by the mounting panic of upcoming exams. Fifth years would barricade themselves in the library, having nervous breakdowns over O.W.L.s. Seventh years would be found weeping over N.E.W.T.s in quiet corners of the castle.
But this year, the anxiety was different. It wasn't academic; it was existential.
Over the past six weeks, the Wizarding World had undergone a silent, violent convulsion.
The Ministries of Magic—from London to Paris to Berlin—had attempted to put the genie back in the bottle. They had raided printing presses in Knockturn Alley and its European equivalents. They had declared the Manual "dangerous unsanctioned magic" and attempted to ban its distribution.
The Malfoys had tried to buy up every copy, citing copyright concerns. The Notts had declared the techniques "unsafe for public consumption" and lobbied for regulations.
They failed because you cannot ban a thought. You cannot confiscate a breathing rhythm. You cannot unlearn what has already been understood.
Once the masses realized that the Lesser Orbit actually worked—that a squib could light a candle for the first time in their life, that a hedge-witch could cure ailments that previously required expensive St. Mungo's Healers—the information spread like wildfire through dry kindling.
It was copied onto napkins in pubs. Whispered in tavern corners. Duplicated with Gemino curses in back alleys and distributed for a handful of Knuts. The knowledge flowed like water finding cracks in stone, impossible to contain.
By May, the monopoly was broken. The Architect's Gift belonged to everyone.
And the result was a terrifying, fragile equilibrium. A strange balance held together by mutual fear rather than mutual respect.
In the corridors of Hogwarts, the change was physical and immediate.
The Slytherins, who usually strutted through the dungeons with their chins held high and their bloodline superiority worn like armor, now walked in tight, defensive clusters. They were quieter. The casual slurs against Muggleborns had diminished to near silence.
Not because they had learned tolerance or compassion.
But because they had learned fear.
A Mudblood who dedicated themselves to the cultivation techniques could hit harder than a lazy Pureblood coasting on inherited talent. That fundamental truth had shattered centuries of assumed superiority.
The Ministry's authority was crumbling. Their decrees were ignored in the streets. Their threats rang hollow. People had realized the government couldn't protect them from the changes sweeping through their world—and more importantly, couldn't stop them from embracing those changes.
At night, Alister stood atop the Astronomy Tower, the wind whipping his robes around him like dark wings. It was well past curfew, but the Prefects had long since stopped patrolling the upper towers—they were too busy practicing the Circulation techniques in their common rooms to enforce petty rules about students out of bed.
He wasn't looking at the stars.
He was looking at the Ley Lines.
To a normal wizard, the world appeared unchanged. Grass was green, stone was grey, water was blue. The surface remained constant.
But to Alister, possessed of the World Core and augmented by the System, the world had been dying.
For decades—perhaps centuries—the background radiation of ambient mana had been fading. It had been a slow, entropic decay. Magical bloodlines thinning with each generation. Ancient rituals forgotten as knowledge holders died without passing on their secrets. Wizards hoarding their power like misers clutching gold, letting the river of magic stagnate into a swamp of accumulated rot.
But tonight, the decay had stopped.
Alister closed his eyes and drew a slow breath.
The air tasted different. Richer. More vibrant. The underlying current of magic that flowed through everything had gained substance, weight, presence.
For the first time in centuries, the ambient magic of the planet wasn't shrinking.
It was recovering.
The mechanism was elegantly simple: a feedback loop of cultivation and circulation. By forcing thousands of wizards—weak and strong, young and old, talented and struggling—to actively circulate and refine their internal mana, Alister had kickstarted the heart of the world itself.
Every time a squib pushed past their perceived limits, every time a student accidentally drilled a hole through a stone wall with an overcharged spell, they were agitating the aether. Pulling fresh energy from the cosmic void and feeding it back into the planetary environment.
The "peace" of the last century had been a slow suicide—comfortable, stable, and terminal.
The chaos Alister had introduced was the defibrillator that shocked the patient's heart back into rhythm.
Alister looked down at his own hands, pale in the moonlight. He clenched his fist slowly, feeling the flow of mana through his meridians.
For months, he had felt it—the ceiling. An invisible, immovable barrier pressing down on his advancement. The shackles the degraded World Core had placed on every wizard who reached the peak of Tier 3, preventing further ascension.
But now, that ceiling was creaking under pressure.
The bindings were corroding. The restrictions were weakening.
"The stronger they get," Alister whispered to the wind, a slow smile spreading across his face, "the more room they make for me."
He looked out over the Forbidden Forest. Even from this distance, he could sense it—the trees swaying with renewed vitality, growing faster and taller. The creatures in the darkness growing larger, fiercer, more dangerous as they fed on the rising tide of ambient magic.
The world was healing.
And all it had taken was a spark of knowledge, freely given.
He couldn't imagine what changes a true fire would bring when just this spark had completely transformed the entire magical world.
______________________________________________
The sun hung high over the Scottish Highlands, transforming the Black Lake into a shimmering mirror of diamonds and sapphire. It was a lazy Sunday afternoon in late May, the kind of perfect day where the air smelled of warm grass, pine needles, and distant wildflowers.
Alister lay sprawled on a conjured tartan blanket near the water's edge, his eyes closed, his breathing slow and rhythmic.
He was simply napping.
Or attempting to.
"I'm telling you, George, it's all about the wrist rotation combined with the Third Cycle breath," Fred Weasley's enthusiastic voice drifted across the grass. "If you spin the mana counter-clockwise on release, it creates a hydrophobic cushion under the stone."
"Absolute rubbish," George retorted with equal confidence. "It's about surface tension manipulation through localized density reduction. Watch and learn, brother mine."
Thwip-shhhhh.
Alister cracked one eye open, curiosity overcoming his desire for peace.
The Weasley twins were standing by the shoreline, skipping stones. But these weren't ordinary stones following ordinary physics.
George had just thrown a piece of grey slate. Instead of skipping three or four times before sinking, the stone glowed with a faint azure aura. It struck the water's surface with a sharp hiss, like metal on a hot griddle, then accelerated dramatically.
It skipped ten, twenty, thirty times, traversing the entire width of the Black Lake before smashing into the rocky cliff face on the opposite shore with an audible crack that echoed across the water.
"Thirty-two!" George crowed, throwing his hands up in triumph. "New record! The Architect himself would be proud of that technique!"
Alister snorted softly, closing his eye again. "The Architect would tell you that you're wasting mana efficiency on showing off with a rock, Weasley."
"Oh, lighten up, Alister," Cho Chang laughed, tossing a handful of grass at his face.
She sat cross-legged beside him on the blanket, a Charms textbook open on her lap, surrounded by crumpled parchment covered in careful notes and practice diagrams.
"You're just jealous because you can't skip a stone past ten," Cho teased, poking his arm with the feathered end of her quill. "And are you even studying for end-of-year examinations? First year is almost over."
Alister brushed the grass off his shirt without bothering to open his eyes. "I learn by osmosis, watching you stress enough for both of us."
"I am not stressing," Cho huffed, though she immediately contradicted herself by chewing her lower lip while staring at a complicated diagram of a Cheering Charm's wand movement. "It's just... my parents sent another letter. They're worried about the 'radicalization' of Hogwarts' curriculum. They think I should come home for summer holiday early, before the term officially ends."
Alister opened his eyes, studying his friend's profile. He could see the tension in her shoulders, the slight crease between her eyebrows.
"Tell them you're learning practical self-defense," Alister said calmly. "Tell them the world is changing whether they approve or not, and you're simply making sure you don't get left behind when it does."
Cho looked at him, her expression softening. "You always make everything sound so simple."
"Because it is simple," Alister shrugged, sitting up and stretching. His spine cracked—a sound that echoed slightly louder than it should have. "Adapt or fade into irrelevance. That's the only rule that matters."
"Oi! Philosophical slackers!" Lee Jordan shouted, jogging over from the castle with a bulging wicker basket clutched in his arms. "Less existential pondering, more eating! I managed to liberate some treacle tart, pumpkin pasties, and chocolate frogs from the kitchens. The house-elves practically threw food at me when I mentioned we were having a study picnic."
"Finally," Fred abandoned his stone-skipping immediately, sprinting back to the blanket. "I was about to start gnawing on my own wand from hunger."
"That would be counterproductive to your magical education," Alister observed dryly, accepting a still-warm pumpkin pasty as Lee dumped his treasure trove onto the blanket.
He took a bite, savoring the spiced pumpkin filling, and watched a fellow first-year Hufflepuff by the water's edge accidentally overcharge a Levitation Charm. The boy's toad, which had been sitting peacefully on a rock, suddenly rocketed into the sky like a green missile, quickly becoming a diminishing speck against the blue expanse.
"Oops," Fred winced, shielding his eyes to track the toad's trajectory. "Think he'll get that back?"
"Highly doubtful," Alister chuckled, wiping a crumb from his lip.
"Reckon it'll achieve orbit?" George asked, squinting skyward as he bit into a piece of treacle tart. "First Hufflepuff toad in space. Historic moment for wizard-kind, really. They'll write about this in the history books."
"It's not funny!" Cho scolded, though she had lowered her Charms textbook to watch the spectacle. "That poor boy looks devastated. And he didn't even pronounce the incantation properly—I could hear him from here."
"That's precisely the beauty of it, isn't it?" Lee Jordan grinned, leaning back on his elbows with the satisfied air of a philosopher. "Used to be, you messed up a Levitation Charm and the feather just sat there looking pathetically disappointed in you. Now? You mess up and you accidentally launch household pets into the stratosphere. Magic's got proper kick to it these days."
Alister leaned back, resting his weight on his hands as he observed the frantic first-year down by the shoreline, frantically trying to summon his ascending pet back to earth with a wand that was sparking dangerously with each increasingly desperate attempt.
Fred dropped onto the blanket beside Alister, grabbing a pumpkin pasty and speaking around his first bite. "George and I have been refining the Skiving Snackboxes—proper research, mind you. We discovered that if you pulse mana into the Fainting Fancies during the third stage of brewing..."
"...they don't just knock you unconscious temporarily," George finished, looking unreasonably proud. "They induce a mild, medically stable coma. Solid four hours minimum. Waking up feels like you've had the most restful ten-year nap of your life. Madam Pomfrey won't know what hit her when students start using these."
"You two are going to accidentally kill someone," Cho sighed heavily, shaking her head, though she accepted the liquorice wand George offered her moments later.
"Not kill," Fred corrected with an exaggerated wink. "Incapacitate with remarkable style and panache. There's an important distinction."
"The Ministry would disagree," Cho pointed out.
"The Ministry," George said cheerfully, "can sod off."
Alister listened to the friendly banter wash over him—Lee launching into an impassioned argument about the dubious ethics of coma-inducing candy, Cho valiantly trying to maintain some semblance of order and responsibility, the twins absolutely reveling in the creative anarchy they were unleashing on the world.
The sun was warm on his face and shoulders. The air hummed with latent energy, vibrating with the power of hundreds of students unknowingly terraforming their world with every breath they took, every spell they cast, every time they pushed their limits just a little bit further.
He took a slow sip of chilled pumpkin juice, letting the moment settle around him like a comfortable blanket.
Down by the water, the Hufflepuff's toad finally descended—aided by a passing seventh-year who took pity on the distraught boy.
"Peace is bad for the world," Alister muttered to himself, quiet enough that only the grass beneath him could hear. A small smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. "But it certainly isn't boring."
(END OF CHAPTER)
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