After chasing away the reluctant Neville and Draco, the compartment instead fell quiet.
"What's wrong? Did my warning finally make you realize how impulsive you used to be?"
Tver sat down teasingly, ending up beside Ron, while Harry and Hermione sat across from them with their heads lowered.
Perhaps because he was not facing the professor directly, Ron was the first of the trio to speak.
"I know we were a bit impulsive before, and in the future..." He gave a sheepish laugh. "Er, we might still be impulsive, but you can't deny that we only wanted to protect Hogwarts!"
"Exactly," Hermione said, encouraged by him and finally mustering the courage to speak. "Because we're students, you adults are always keeping things from us that you should have told us!"
"And the information we found was useful to your actions too, wasn't it?" Harry asked in the end.
"Hmm..." Tver nodded without much objection. "A bit of sophistry, but understandable."
From an omniscient perspective, the trio's actions and thinking often seemed far too reckless.
But from Harry and the others' point of view, as children who had been under intense attention and had gone through so much, their abilities were already stronger than most people their age.
It was only the gap in information, along with the unavoidable immaturity that came with their age, that made their actions less appropriate.
As they grew older and learned more, those inappropriate moments had become fewer and fewer.
So Tver could no longer simply treat them as children who needed protection.
"Then tell me what you found. If it really is useful, I don't mind telling you a few things either."
The three of them immediately exchanged excited looks.
"It happened during the summer holidays. Mr. and Mrs. Weasley and Sirius took us to Diagon Alley to buy our textbooks for the new school year." Hermione thought back to the scene and began explaining everything in an orderly manner.
"Then, while I was buying some potion ingredients at Slug & Jiggers Apothecary, I ran into Professor Karkaroff..."
The next part involved him, and Harry could not help cutting in.
"He isn't the point. The point is, when Sirius left my side to talk to Professor Karkaroff, my scar suddenly started hurting, and then..."
He frowned and hesitated for a while, as if struggling to find the right way to describe that strange feeling.
"It was like there were three of me."
"?"
Clearly, Harry's struggle had not produced a very good description. The confusion on Tver's face was visible at once.
"What do you mean, three of you? Did you learn the Cloning Charm?"
"It wasn't cloning..."
Harry quickly waved his hands, but his expression was still complicated.
"It was more like, for those few seconds, there was me, my mind, and then, at the corner of Diagon Alley, there was suddenly another pair of my eyes. It was the kind of chaos where three fields of vision overlapped!"
Harry gestured wildly as he spoke, making even his explanation sound chaotic.
It was almost as if he was using that chaos to describe just how strange the scene had been.
Tver's mouth opened slightly in astonishment, and he did not speak right away.
He could understand what had happened to Harry. The three fields of vision represented Harry himself, the Voldemort Horcrux in his mind, and Voldemort himself.
In other words, at that time, Voldemort had very likely already returned to Britain and was quietly observing Harry.
But the question was, had Voldemort discovered the Horcrux inside Harry's mind?
Last year, Voldemort had deliberately used the connection between himself and Harry, but at the time, he had clearly not known that another fragment of his soul still existed inside Harry's mind.
Now, however, things were different. It seemed that Voldemort was actively communicating with the Horcrux inside Harry, rather than through his connection with Harry himself.
"Professor?"
Seeing Tver frown in thought, the three of them finally realized that Harry's situation was even more frightening than they had imagined.
In the past, no matter what problem came up, the professor had always seemed calm and composed. But now, this matter had left even the professor unable to give them an immediate answer.
Their hearts instantly tightened.
Pulled back from his thoughts by the call, Tver gave them a relaxed smile.
"You all know that Harry was able to connect to Voldemort's mind before. This time, my guess is that you encountered Voldemort himself in Diagon Alley, which is why that strange scene appeared."
Hearing that, they immediately relaxed.
Like hell they did.
"You-Know-Who was in Diagon Alley at the time?!"
Ron grabbed his face with both hands and let out a terrified, voiceless scream.
Harry and Hermione did not look much better. Back then, they had thought Mrs. Weasley was making too much of a fuss by calling Sirius over, but it turned out Voldemort really had been trying to hide behind a bookshelf and attack them?
"Then why didn't Voldemort attack directly at the time? I mean, with his power, destroying the whole street would be easy, wouldn't it?" Hermione asked, still shaken.
"Because that wouldn't help him, Hermione." Tver kept his relaxed smile, and only then did their panic begin to settle.
"No matter how many people he killed, it wouldn't cover up the reality that the Death Eaters are constantly being arrested by the Hunt Project."
"On the contrary, every move he makes exposes him to me and Dumbledore. If he accidentally gets himself killed, then no gain, no matter how great, would make up for it."
Even if Voldemort knew he still had a Horcrux left, his physical body was not indestructible.
If he accidentally returned to his former state as a remnant soul, then he really would be living a fate worse than death.
"So every time he shows himself, he has to be extremely careful. That is also why, before he has made sufficient preparations, we do not believe Voldemort will launch a large-scale attack."
After that explanation, Harry and the others finally laughed.
"With Headmaster Dumbledore at Hogwarts and you outside the school, Professor, Voldemort wouldn't dare act recklessly!" Ron said arrogantly. It was the first time he had ever said Voldemort's name so directly.
But Hermione had not completely relaxed. She remembered the professor's serious expression from earlier all too clearly.
"But that strange vision Harry had..."
"That's something we need to ask Harry about." Tver turned his gaze to the person involved. "You said it was like your mind suddenly had an extra pair of eyes. What did you see? It shouldn't have been what your own eyes were seeing, right?"
"That's right," Harry said, still somewhat puzzled himself. "At the time, the three images overlapped. I felt that those eyes weren't really seeing. It was more like a kind of perception."
"A bit like... I don't know whether you've heard of radar. It can scan out detected targets through things like sound waves."
"I know what radar is." Tver stared deeply into Harry's eyes, as if trying to see through them into the soul inside his mind.
"I understand what you mean. You weren't seeing it. You were scanning the surrounding scene through perception, which made you feel as if an extra pair of eyes had suddenly appeared in your head."
In that case, the Horcrux inside Harry's mind seemed to have...
Awakened?