By the way, about the books.
Things weren’t as rosy as they might have seemed at first glance.
At first, my parents and I thought there wouldn’t be any problems with translation.
But that turned out not to be the case.
Far from it.
Thomas’s first attempt to read the book on mind protection ended in complete failure.
As soon as he opened it, he saw that it was blank.
Literally blank.
All the pages were empty.
Not a single paragraph or word.
Nothing but bare pages, with a distinct feeling of mockery from Regulus Black.
Sara and Thomas tried for a long time to make the text appear.
They tried heating the pages.
They tried looking at the book in different light spectrums.
There are many ways to hide written text in the world, like writing with milk or lemon juice.
All attempts failed.
There were other attempts, but…
In the end, my parents gave up.
They even wanted to throw the books away, just to calm their nerves.
That’s when an idea came to me.
If the books were about magic, maybe only a wizard could read them.
I decided to try.
I attempted to read one, and…
nothing.
It was still blank.
That was a punch to the gut.
Then I remembered a book from the third Harry Potter book.
It was about magical creatures.
To read it, you had to stroke its spine.
Maybe something similar was needed for these books?
My theory was confirmed.
To read the books, you had to channel mana into the page you were reading.
The text appeared clearly, with well-defined words and sentences.
I understood that this was a special protection against non-magical people.
From this, I deduced that Lord Black had fulfilled his Life Debt, but as a true aristocrat raised in that tradition, he had helped, gotten rid of the debt, and left the Muggles in the dark.
A question arises: what exactly did he do?
There is an appropriate answer.
What do you need to do to read the book?
First, knowledge of the language.
Second, mastery of mana.
Minimal, simple direction of mana.
But how many children can control mana before entering a school like Hogwarts?
The answer is obvious: not many.
Most wouldn’t bother training neophytes in even minimal control.
As I’ve said before, you can’t achieve much in this area until your Seventh shell has fully grown.
That’s why young wizards are taught etiquette, primitive rituals that only require the presence of mana, and the simplest potion-making.
And Regulus Black probably felt like a winner.
What else could he expect from a three-year-old child?
Mastery of mana?
Don’t make the Lord laugh.
A child, and a Muggle-born at that, could never read those books.
And his parents would think they’d been tricked and would probably lock the literature away somewhere safe.
Benefits all around: he got rid of the debt, and the knowledge didn’t leave his library.
Profit.
A subtle calculation.
He wasn’t being subtle when he insisted on the child’s third birthday.
Children are restless and don’t like to read, especially if the book is blank and you have to do something to read it, and you don’t know what.
Well, I applaud you, Lord Black.
But he didn’t expect that it would be me in the place of an ordinary child.
At three years old, I already had a fully grown Seventh shell and could consciously release and direct mana.
It wasn’t for nothing that I trained my mana control every day and never stopped.
In the end, there’s no limit to perfection.
So I could read the books.
And they weren’t wasted.
For six months, I copied the books and learned ancient languages.
And it paid off.
By the summer of ’83, I had a complete set of these truly priceless books in my hands.
And the knowledge I gleaned from them was incredible.
Take, for example, the knowledge about rituals for cleansing the magical shell.
Or rituals for increasing it.
Or rituals for receiving a blessing for the coming year.
Or a prosperity ritual.
Or a luck ritual.
Whatever you wish, as long as you have the desire.
Paradoxically, the dates of these holidays coincide with pagan dates.
For example:
Samhain, the Celtic harvest festival.
It takes place on the last day of October, on the night of November.
The meaning of the ritual is to bring gifts to ancestors to receive their blessing.
I understand that on this day, the boundary with the plane of the dead is so thin that the real world comes into contact with that plane.
That’s why the ritual involves offering gifts to the dead.
Yule, the midwinter festival.
It takes place on Christmas.
It’s associated with various planes, both the plane of the dead in the form of the Wild Hunt and the planes of gods like Odin, as well as elemental planes.
So on this day, gifts are offered to all planes to increase magical abilities.
I developed a theory that every wizard has a predisposition to a certain type of magic, fire, for example.
Fire has its own plane.
And during the Yule festival, during the ritual, symbols of different planes are present.
For example, a bonfire is fire, wine is water, a log is life, and so on.
During the ritual, the Seventh shell connects with these planes through these symbols, and what exactly happens there is unknown to me.
Perhaps the inhabitants of that plane bless the wizards.
Perhaps the Seventh shell absorbs the concentrated mana of those planes.
Who knows?
I’ll have to find out in the future.
So much I still need to learn.
One thing is clear: none of these rituals appeared out of nowhere.
They are all necessary.
Not only for wizards but also for ordinary people.
For them, it’s an opportunity for their descendants to receive the gift and to ease their own lives.
As you can see, this whole affair with the books brought nothing but benefits.
I even learned new languages.
Though I can’t speak them yet, if I encounter similar books in the future, it will come in handy.
***
Regarding sources, all wizards want to have a reserve of mana, to get something for nothing.
So why not subjugate existing, limitless sources of mana?
Countless attempts were made.
Some failed, others succeeded.
But at some point, someone, a genius whose name has not been preserved (perhaps deliberately forgotten), devised a ritual for subjugating a source.
Its description is not available to the public.
Only general facts are known.
First, to subjugate a source, you need to find it, and it must be free. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
Second, an altar is built on the site of the source using a magical substance.
This substance can be anything: stone, wood, bone, even water.
The altar must also have a “symbol.” This symbol can be anything from a precious stone to a book.
Third, the source is connected to one person, who then distributes the mana among others, that is, members of the Family.
Usually, this person is the Lord, the Head of the Family.
Sometimes the Head of the Family is not the Lord.
But the Lord is always the first among equals.
Fourth, subjugating a source requires an enormous amount of energy.
This energy is usually taken from sacrifices.
Preferably magically gifted creatures.
Even better if it’s something like dragons, thestrals, and so on.
After all, who wants to accumulate mana for decades?
That’s how magical families are formed.
The so-called manors of these families are located on the sites of the sources.
Within their manors, members of a magical family are practically omnipotent.
As they say, my home is my castle.
For wizards, this is not just a saying, but a real fact.
Let’s return to why I was talking about sources.
Namely, magical heredity.
Every family has a predisposition to certain types of magic.
Wizards call these Gifts.
These Gifts are encoded not only genetically, like pink muscles, but also in the mana itself.
Why?
It’s all about the source that the family subjugated.
Once they built their altar, from then on, all rituals are performed in the altar room, the family’s ritual room.
And since the Gifts are passed down, it means that all family members mostly receive gifts from the same planes, which in turn changes the source itself.
It also happens that the source itself is ideal for the family from the start.
That’s much better than gradually changing the source.
Besides, a source cannot be completely changed.
Therefore, Gifts are laid down both genetically and magically.
This fits well with Gifts like fire magic or necromancy.
But what about artifact-making?
That’s even simpler.
The family members themselves, over many generations, give their mana to the source.
The connection is two-way.
By doing so, they also change the source.
They program it, so to speak.
There are many examples in history of a Blessed wizard without any aptitude for the family’s Gifts being brought into a family.
The book gave the example of the Potter family.
Sometime in the fourteenth century, the family was reaching a point where, due to inbreeding (I don’t remember, in England everyone is related to everyone else) and accumulated curses, they were facing degeneration.
So all the family members got together and decided to bring a Blessed wizard into the family.
And they did.
The name isn’t given, but it was said that he didn’t possess the Potters’ family Gift of artifact-making.
But five years after being brought into the family and connected to the source, he began to show abilities in the craft.
Of course, this was due not only to the source but also to the family’s training.
Still, the very fact of acquiring the Gift is telling.
From all this, the idea of blood purity grows.
Wizards, scions of magical families with many generations of magical ancestors behind them, have greater magical abilities, plus they have Gifts.
That’s why they look down on Muggle-born wizards with contempt.
But in fact, it’s just ordinary selection.
Just as martial arts masters seek out other masters as partners, so wizards seek out a similar partner.
And we shouldn’t forget that these magical families were once just like Muggle-born wizards, without a pot to piss in.
Everything they have was obtained through enormous labor, blood, and sweat.
And any wizard can achieve the same, given the motivation and desire.
Isn’t that right?