Inside the Room of Requirement, Cuthbert and Alex were still going at it with the training dummies.
Nearly a month in, and the results showed.
They could hold out for fifteen minutes now under a coordinated assault. A month ago, three minutes would have put them on their backs.
The cost was that every session ended the same way: flat on the floor, chests heaving, limbs refusing orders. Dead to the world in everything but breathing.
Young wizards bounced back fast, though. Two hours of training each night gave them time to collapse three or four times over.
Collapse, recover, get up, keep going.
Hermes trained on his own across the room. There was no point pairing him with those two. The gap in ability was too wide.
He'd taken Regulus's words from last time to heart. No more chasing the one-hit kill.
High-power dark magic paired with smaller spells. How to chain them. How to layer them. How to leave an opponent no room to breathe.
He wove through a cluster of dummies, opening with Bone and Blood Stripping to drive three back, then snapping off a Silencio to seal two more. Tarantallegra sent the rest dancing, and a Disarming Charm finished the sequence.
The combination flowed like water. The dummies couldn't keep up.
Regulus left them to it. They were old enough to manage themselves. He wasn't going to hover. If they wanted to train, good. If they didn't, he wouldn't push. But so far, they'd given him no cause to complain.
In the small chamber on the far side of the training floor, Regulus sat cross-legged on the ground.
The walls had closed around him, sealing out every sound. He shut his eyes and let his awareness sink inward.
His mental world unfolded before him. Six stars hung suspended in the void, turning in their slow orbits.
Betelgeuse burned at the farthest point.
Bellatrix stood sentinel at the center.
The three Belt stars formed their line in the middle distance.
Saiph sat in the lower right, same as before. Faint and dim. Doing nothing more than existing.
Regulus looked at it and felt nothing in particular.
Less than a week. No change was normal. The Chief business needed time to ferment, and its effects needed time to land.
He shifted his gaze away from Saiph and turned it toward the glowing figure.
Ever since it had become clearly visible, he couldn't stop thinking about it.
It stood there, luminous and perfectly still.
But something that had appeared couldn't be left to stand there forever. Something had to be done with it.
The question was what. And before doing anything, he needed to be clear about what he couldn't do.
That part was simple. Everything Voldemort had done was off the table. All of it.
Regulus shook the thought loose and turned back to the glowing figure.
Still there. Still standing. Still shining.
Its existence alone had value. Through it, he could see what a soul was supposed to look like.
It was a reference image lodged in his mind. No matter what happened from here, he could hold himself against it and check: had his soul warped, degraded, been contaminated?
Knowing the standard meant he could catch any deviation.
But beyond existing and serving as a mirror, the figure didn't seem to do anything else.
Regulus stared at it, and another thought surfaced.
What if it could grow?
Strengthened from the soul level. Its light brighter, its form denser, its inner force greater.
He didn't know what a stronger soul would bring, exactly, but there had to be benefits.
Greater spellcasting ability? Deeper magical insight? Better mental defenses? Sharper magical perception? More stable control over his power?
Books mentioned some of this, but always in broad strokes.
The strength of the soul determines a wizard's ceiling. A powerful soul can sustain more complex magic.
It sounded right. Examined closely, it was vague to the point of uselessness.
How strong was strong? What did "sustaining magic" mean in practice?
Those questions could wait until he'd actually grown it. The immediate problem was how.
Would it absorb magic if he fed it?
He drew a thread of magical energy and guided it toward the figure.
The magic drew near, but there was no response. It came closer still, and nothing changed.
It touched the figure's edge and passed straight through, like light through light. Nothing stayed behind.
He withdrew the thread. Not that path, then. What about his mind?
The refined essence produced by Star Guided Meditation, could that be given to it?
He separated a wisp of mental energy and directed it at the figure. Same result. It passed through.
As if the figure existed on a different plane entirely. Neither magic nor mind could reach it.
Regulus frowned.
Then what did it feed on?
Did it grow on its own?
The way each cycle of Star Guided Meditation incrementally strengthened his magic, his mind, his will, did the figure develop in parallel?
Possible. But there was no visible change.
His thoughts branched wider, and he remembered his ancestor, Arcturus Black.
The man who'd lived to a hundred and thirty-seven, only to descend into madness at the end. In his final notes, that warning: "The vessel grew too strong. What was inside couldn't get out. I trapped myself."
Regulus still believed his earlier interpretation was correct.
Arcturus had over-reinforced his body, hardening the vessel to such a degree that it imprisoned the soul within. The soul could no longer extend outward or interact with the world beyond it. The result was insanity.
He didn't know what methods Arcturus had used. Some magical experiment, perhaps. A specialized potion. A body-strengthening spell of his own invention.
He didn't know how strong the body had to become before it caged the soul. Where the threshold lay.
But following that thread further: aside from death, when the soul departed the body and traveled to that way station between life and death...
Could a living wizard's soul leave its body?
Not the way Voldemort had done it.
Tearing off fragments and cramming them into Horcruxes wasn't departure. It was mutilation.
What Regulus was thinking about was an intact soul, temporarily leaving a body that was still alive.
If that was possible, what could it do once free?
Move through space the way a Patronus did?
Pass through matter like a ghost?
And what happened to the body in the meantime?
Something like sleep, awareness briefly blank?
Or total vacancy, no response to the outside world at all?
Could the soul transcend the flesh?
Could it act upon the physical world in an external form?
Regulus had no answers.
These questions ran deep enough to touch the foundations of magic itself. Dumbledore and Voldemort might not have fully worked them out either.
But he couldn't stop thinking. His mind circled back to Voldemort. To the Horcruxes.
Voldemort treated the soul as a tool, ripping it apart and hiding the pieces in objects. All to flee from death.
But that path only led to diminishment. Every split left less behind.
A Horcrux was an object bearing a soul. What about the reverse?
Could a soul bear an object?
If so, could the soul withstand that weight?
Once an object entered the soul, would it alter the soul in turn?
Deeper still: could you nurture an artifact within the soul, let it grow alongside it? The soul strengthens, the artifact strengthens with it. A symbiosis.
He didn't know. But one thing was certain, even if it worked, the soul would need to be enormously powerful to sustain such a burden.
The ideas completed their orbit through his mind, and then he saw the pattern.
Whether it was feeding the soul to make it grow, or imagining the soul leaving the body, or exploring whether a soul could carry an object within it...
All of it pointed inward.
Exploring the self. Strengthening the self. Making the inner core harder, brighter, more powerful.
But it was too early for any of that. First, he needed to figure out how to grow the thing. As for the method, he was still thinking.