July 1993
Gringotts had gone about as well as could be expected, which is to say: a goblin named Ragnok had looked at me the way goblins apparently look at everyone, with the polite, bottomless contempt of a creature who has processed more gold than I would see in several lifetimes, confirmed the vault, confirmed the twenty thousand Galleons sitting in it, and sent me on my way with a key and no further pleasantries.
I’d taken it as a rousing success and gone home considerably lighter in spirit if not in coin.
Now I was sitting at the workbench in my new basement workshop, staring at a blank stretch of stone counter, trying to decide what, exactly, a wizard with no reputation and a shop full of empty shelves should sell first.
My mind, unhelpfully, went first to legends rather than practicality — the kind of thing that happens when you’ve spent a previous life reading about a world like this one instead of living in it.
Famous lost objects.
Enchantments people still whispered about centuries on.
Ravenclaw’s diadem, more than any of the others, kept surfacing — wit beyond measure, supposedly, worn to sharpen the mind of whoever wore it.
Nobody had ever verified that, as far as I knew, and I wasn’t about to go hunting lost Founders’ relics in my second week of being alive again.
But the idea underneath it was sound, and worth stealing honestly: something that made a person better at acquiring knowledge, rather than something that simply did the acquiring for them.
Reading was the obvious lever.
Everyone who wanted to learn anything in this world still had to sit down and read it, slowly, the old-fashioned way, and nobody seemed to have thought to ask why that process couldn’t simply be made faster for the people willing to pay for it.
Glasses were the natural delivery method — practical, already worn by half the population, and unremarkable enough that nobody would look twice at a stranger’s shop selling them.
And once I’d settled on glasses as the medium, there was no good reason to stop at a single trick.
If I was already building the scaffolding to carry an enchantment on a lens, I might as well use it properly — not just reading speed, and not just the obvious add of night vision, but a proper suite of sight-related fixes: full vision correction that needed no prescription, a gentle low-light adjustment for dim rooms, magnification for fine work or distant reading, and a glare-adjustment layer that would dim automatically rather than blind the wearer walking out of a dark room into daylight.
Half a dozen small mercies for anyone who’d ever struggled to see properly, all riding on the same humble pair of glasses.
I closed my eyes at the workbench and reached for the ledger.
I want to know how to enchant a pair of lenses to correct vision, speed up reading comprehension, grant gradual low-light vision, add adjustable magnification, and auto-adjust for glare — all in the same pair, without any of them interfering with each other.
The price arrived a moment later, and I felt my eyebrows go up properly this time — not painful, not even close to what I could afford, but substantial enough that the ledger was clearly treating this as a real request rather than idle curiosity.
Somewhere in the range of sixty Galleons, if I was converting the weight of the price correctly, which was a strange way to describe a feeling but the only way I had to describe it.
Five functions layered into one object, none of them common enough to have an existing off-the-shelf enchantment, and none of them fighting each other once properly scaffolded, was apparently worth a good deal more than I’d have guessed going in.
I paid it without much hesitation.
Sixty Galleons out of twenty thousand felt like tuition, not a purchase.
The knowledge arrived the way it always did — not as a lecture, but as understanding, whole and immediate, the way you suddenly know how a knot works once someone’s shown you properly.
I sat with it for a long moment, turning the design over in my head, and felt the first genuine flicker of excitement since I’d woken up that morning.
It was clever.
Five separate charms layered onto the same lens without a shared foundation would ordinarily fight each other — competing for the same magical “attention,” so to speak, degrading over time or simply failing outright.
The blueprint solved that with a base enchantment I didn’t recognize from my NEWT-level education, something that acted less like a spell and more like scaffolding, a neutral layer the other four could be woven onto independently.
Vision correction sat as the true base function, adjusting itself to the wearer rather than requiring a prescription at all, which felt, frankly, like the single most useful piece of the whole design.
Reading-speed enhancement keyed to the wearer’s own processing rather than some flat multiplier, so it wouldn’t make anyone dizzy or careless.
Low-light vision that shifted gradually rather than snapping on, so a wearer’s eyes wouldn’t be shocked walking from a dark room into daylight.
Magnification, adjustable with a small mental nudge, for fine work or reading something too far away to make out cleanly.
And a glare-adjustment layer riding quietly underneath all of it, dimming automatically rather than leaving a wearer blinking and blind walking out of a dark room into full sun.
Knowledge in hand, I realized fairly quickly that I owned none of the actual materials the blueprint called for.
A NEWT-level education apparently didn’t come with a stocked supply cupboard, whatever else it included.
I made a list at the kitchen table — plain, unenchanted lens blanks, several grades of them in case my first attempts scratched or cracked; a length of fine silver wire, since the scaffolding layer wanted a conductive thread running through the frame rather than sitting purely in the glass; and a small, cheap training slate, the sort students used to test simple charms without risking anything valuable, which I intended to test my own vision correction against before ever trusting it near my actual eyes.
Diagon Alley in the first week of July turned out to be a reasonable place to buy all three, if a person didn’t mind asking a great many basic questions and getting looked at slightly oddly for it.
The optician’s supplier sold me a small box of lens blanks, various curvatures, without asking why a stranger wanted them in bulk.
A cluttered little hardware stall near the Apothecary had wire in more gauges than I knew what to do with, and I bought more than I needed on the theory that I’d rather have too much silver thread than have to make a second trip mid-project.
The training slate came from a shop that mostly sold to nervous first-years, and the witch behind the counter seemed faintly charmed that a grown man wanted one for himself.
I carried it all home in an ordinary sack, since the storage ring didn’t exist yet to make the job easier, and set everything out properly on the workbench before I let myself touch a single tool.
I stood up, found the pair of plain lens blanks I’d bought that morning along with the modest set of tools I already owned, and got to work.
It went badly.
Not dangerously badly — nothing exploded, nothing turned my eyebrows a different color — just badly in the specific, humbling way that “I understand the theory completely” and “I can execute the theory correctly with my hands” turn out to be two very different skills.
My first attempt at the scaffolding layer came out lopsided, more magic pooling in one corner of the lens than the other, and when I tested it against a training slate I’d bought for exactly this purpose, the vision correction worked on one eye and gave me a headache through the other.
“Right,” I muttered, setting the lenses down and rubbing my temples.
“Okay.
That’s fine.
That’s normal.”
I tried again.
The second attempt held the scaffolding evenly enough, but layering the reading-speed charm on top made the whole thing flicker, unstable, the two enchantments clearly still fighting despite the neutral base — which told me the problem wasn’t the scaffolding itself but the order I was weaving things in, something the blueprint had explained clearly enough that I felt faintly embarrassed for getting it wrong.
Third attempt, I slowed down.
Really slowed down, the way you’re supposed to the first several dozen times you do anything difficult and pretend you already know how.
Scaffolding first, held steady, checked with a diagnostic charm before moving on.
Vision correction next, tested properly this time rather than rushed.
Low-light layered in slow, gradual, exactly as designed.
By the fourth attempt, three hours and a sore back later, I held up a pair of glasses that worked.
Properly worked — I tested them in the dimming workshop as the afternoon wore on outside, watched the world sharpen into soft, workable clarity even as the light dropped, and felt a genuine, embarrassing swell of pride looking at a pair of glasses I’d made myself, badly, three times, before getting it right.
I set them aside — testing the reading-speed function, and the magnification besides, would need an actual book and a clear head, which I decided firmly belonged to tomorrow-me — and called it a night, pleasantly worn out in the specific way that came from doing real, careful work with my hands for the first time since I’d arrived in this life.
The next morning, tea in hand and the glasses sitting finished and proud on my kitchen table, I turned my attention properly to the second item on my mental list.
A storage ring felt like the natural companion piece, and if I was honest with myself, it was the one I’d been most looking forward to since before I’d even sat down at the workbench.
In my old life, I’d burned through more cultivation novels than I’d ever admit to anyone with a straight face, entire libraries of translated web fiction where the hero’s storage ring or spatial pouch was practically a rite of passage — and some quiet, embarrassing part of me had always wanted one of my own, purely for the satisfaction of it.
Now, apparently, I could just build one.
Back to the ledger.
How do I enchant a ring to hold internal space, weightless to the wearer, retrievable on command — built so the capacity can be set in tiers, roughly one cubic metre, ten cubic metres, or fifty, depending on what the wearer needs, with the outer design of the band itself customizable to the individual?
This price landed a good deal heavier than the glasses had — Extension Charms at this scale, stable and safe for daily wear on something as small as a ring, were clearly rarer knowledge than I’d assumed, more Ministry-restricted than novel, and the tiered, customizable design pushed the cost further still, since I was effectively asking for three products’ worth of scalable engineering rather than one fixed enchantment.
Somewhere past two hundred Galleons.
I sat with that for a longer moment than I had with the glasses, doing quiet math about what I could still afford this month, before deciding it was worth it — a working storage ring wasn’t just a product, it was a statement, the kind of item that would get people talking about my shop before they’d even set foot in it, and a tiered, customizable line meant I wasn’t just selling one ring.
I was selling a whole category.
I paid it.
The knowledge landed differently than the glasses had — heavier, more careful, laced with warnings I hadn’t asked for but appreciated anyway.
Extension Charms of any real size were dangerous if done carelessly: get the anchoring wrong and the pocket space could collapse, taking whatever was inside it — or worse, whatever was nearby — along for the ride, and the danger only grew as the tier climbed higher.
The blueprint walked a careful line between “here is how you do this” and “here is exactly why people don’t usually attempt this in a ring rather than a much larger, more stable object like a trunk or a tent,” and it made a point of separating the three tiers cleanly: the one-cubic-metre band was, relatively speaking, forgiving — the kind of thing a competent first attempt could reasonably survive getting slightly wrong.
The ten and fifty-cubic-metre versions were not nearly so patient with mistakes, and the blueprint all but insisted I master the smallest tier thoroughly before I even considered attempting the larger anchoring work.
The outer design, at least, was the easy part — the customization sat entirely in a separate, cosmetic layer that never touched the anchoring itself, meaning I could engrave or shape the band however a customer liked without ever risking the spatial work underneath.
I made a note of something else too, sitting with the warnings the blueprint had carried alongside the knowledge itself.
Extension Charms at this scale weren’t simply dangerous to get wrong.
They were watched — the Ministry kept close track of undetectable expansion work specifically, for reasons that made a great deal of sense the moment I thought about it properly.
A ring that could swallow fifty cubic metres of space without adding an ounce of weight to the wearer was exactly the kind of thing a smuggler would want rather badly, and exactly the kind of thing the Ministry would want to know existed before it ever started changing hands across a shop counter.
I decided, turning the thought over a while longer, that I wasn’t going to build a business on hoping nobody official ever noticed what I was selling.
Every genuinely new enchantment, starting with this one, I would register properly — a patent filed with the Ministry’s own office for magical inventions, and a selling permission attached to it where the item warranted one, the whole business arranged through Gringotts rather than navigated alone.
I’d been assigned an account manager by then — a goblin named Grimnok, a considerably more permanent fixture than Ragnok, the teller who’d processed my very first visit — and his bank already handled considerably more delicate paperwork than mine, and plainly knew the proper channels for it far better than I ever would on my own.”
This time I knew to make the supply list before I let myself get excited about starting.
The blueprint wanted a band of reasonably pure silver, not gold — gold apparently held an Extension Charm’s anchor less reliably, something to do with its own faint magical resonance interfering with the spellwork, which I filed away as exactly the kind of detail no textbook would have bothered mentioning.
I needed a small, dense anchor stone to sit at the center of the anchoring array, hidden inside the band itself once finished, and the blueprint was particular about it needing to be something naturally magic-resistant rather than magic-conductive — obsidian would do, or a plain, unpolished piece of moonstone, cheaper and easier to source than I’d expected for something so important to the whole design.
I went out that same morning, sack over one shoulder, considerably more confident in my own shopping list than I’d been the day before.
A jeweler’s supplier sold me a small coil of silver banding, plain and unworked, along with a modest handful of obsidian chips for testing — cheap enough that I bought extra, on the theory that my first two or three attempts were unlikely to survive contact with reality.
I picked the polished band I actually intended to enchant properly from a small selection at the same stall, plain and unremarkable exactly as I wanted it, easy to dress up later once I trusted the anchoring underneath it.
An old crate of empty glass jars, bought from a secondhand stall mostly out of instinct that I’d want disposable test objects for the ring the same way I’d wanted a training slate for the glasses, rounded out the trip.
I decided, looking at the modest plain band I’d bought for the purpose, that I was going to start with the smallest tier and be extremely, tediously careful, exactly as the blueprint had all but ordered me to.
It took the rest of the evening and most of the following morning.
My first attempt anchored the pocket space unevenly, and when I nudged a testing object — an old sock, sacrificed to science — through the ring’s threshold, it vanished, and did not come back out no matter how firmly I asked it to.
I spent a genuinely uncomfortable twenty minutes wondering if I’d just created a small localized void in my workshop before the ledger, unprompted, offered me a cheap diagnostic question — a few Sickles, nothing — confirming that the sock was, in fact, still somewhere, just improperly tethered to the retrieval trigger I’d built.
Structural problem, not a catastrophic one.
I decided that counted as a win, even if the sock itself was, as far as I ever discovered, permanently lost to whatever pocket of nowhere I’d carelessly built.
The second attempt anchored properly, but the retrieval trigger fired on any touch rather than intent, which meant the ring spat books and quills across my workshop floor every time I so much as brushed against it reaching for my tea.
I laughed out loud at that one, more delighted than frustrated by then — three days into this new life and I was already the kind of person who found magical malfunctions charming rather than terrifying, which felt like a good sign about how the rest of this was going to go.
Third attempt, I finally got it.
Retrieval keyed to a specific mental gesture rather than touch — the same kind of quiet, private intent Death’s parchment had responded to, I realized partway through, and wondered idly whether that particular technique had trickled down from somewhere older and stranger than either of us.
The one-cubic-metre tier held cleanly, weightless exactly as promised, and when I tested it properly — coat, several books, an entire crate of empty jars I’d bought for exactly this purpose — everything slid in and out clean and obedient, present the instant I asked for it and gone the instant I didn’t.
The ten and fifty-cubic-metre tiers, I decided, could wait for a steadier week.
Some ambitions were worth rationing.
I sat back at the workbench that evening, two working prototypes in front of me — a pair of glasses that would let someone read faster, see clearly regardless of prescription, magnify what they needed a closer look at, and navigate a dim room without a lit wand, and a plain-looking ring, smallest of three planned sizes, that could already swallow a decent portion of a room’s belongings and hand them back on request — and felt something settle in my chest that I hadn’t expected to feel so soon.
Not triumph, exactly.
Just quiet, solid proof of concept.
The ledger worked.
The mastery worked.
The theory turned into practice, eventually, if I was patient and careful and willing to ruin a sock or two along the way.
I thought, packing the prototypes carefully into a drawer for the night, that this was probably as good a foundation as any to build a shop on.
Two objects, unglamorous and useful, made by hand, made properly, made by someone willing to fail at them three times before getting it right.
There was one more thing worth doing before I let myself call either of them finished, and it was the kind of thing I suspected I’d regret skipping the very first time some clever stranger took one of my products home, pried it open, and walked away with a working copy of weeks of work.
A blueprint bought honestly, at real cost, was worth considerably less to me if anyone with a good mind and a curious streak could simply reverse-engineer it off my shelf for free.
I went to the ledger one more time that night, tired as I was, because this felt like exactly the sort of thing worth doing properly rather than cheaply.
I want the best available enchantment for protecting a finished magical item against having its underlying design copied, reverse-engineered, or magically analyzed by anyone other than its maker — something that actively resists being studied apart, not just a passive ward.
The price landed higher than either individual product blueprint had, steep enough that I sat back from the workbench for a moment and did the actual math on whether it was worth it before I paid.
I decided fairly quickly that it was — not for these two items alone, but as a standing practice, something I intended to layer into everything I ever built and sold from this shop onward.
A one-time cost against a lifetime of copycats felt, put that way, like the cheapest insurance I’d ever bought.
The enchantment itself, once I had it, was elegant in the way the best things Death’s ledger handed me always seemed to be — not a lock, exactly, more like a kind of magical camouflage layered beneath the working enchantment itself, scrambling the actual structure of the spellwork the instant anyone other than the maker tried to study it closely, whether by direct examination, diagnostic charm, or attempted disassembly.
To an ordinary owner, the item worked exactly as intended, seamless and untouched.
To anyone trying to learn how it worked without my say-so, the underlying design simply refused to hold still long enough to be copied, folding back into something meaningless the moment it was examined too closely.
It wouldn’t stop a truly determined, well-resourced attempt forever, the knowledge admitted honestly, but it would stop nearly everyone, and slow down even the best enchanters considerably.
I layered it into both the glasses and the ring before I let myself go to bed, tracing the final protective thread through each with hands gone clumsy from tiredness, and made a note in my book, short and firm, right beneath everything else from that long, strange, satisfying day.
Every product, from now on.
No exceptions will have this enchantment.
Tomorrow, I decided, I’d start thinking about presentation — how to make a ring and a pair of glasses look like the start of something, rather than the whole of it.
But tonight, I let myself simply sit with the small, stubborn pride of having built two things that worked, in a body two weeks old, in a life I was only just beginning to believe was actually mine.
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