After finishing all the subjects offered at Hogwarts, Bellatrix once asked Lord Voldemort a question.
“Teacher, why do I feel like… these courses offered by the school seem to branch out into many magical paths… Is it just my imagination?”
Back then, Lord Voldemort didn’t look up, yet he seemed to say something completely unrelated.
“You must know that the person who originally established these courses was Lady Ravenclaw, known as the ‘Wise’ among the Four Founders.”
Bellatrix had indeed heard about this in her History of Magic class.
At the founding of Hogwarts, the Four Founders came together to establish Hogwarts jointly.
Slytherin contributed his family’s Castle and set up numerous defensive measures; the small boats and the octopus in the Black Lake were his handiwork;
Gryffindor wielded a wand and a sword, bringing young Wizards from various wizarding settlements while carving out a safe route;
Ravenclaw gazed at the starry sky from the high tower, formulating various systems and disciplines of Hogwarts while serving as the initial Professor;
Hufflepuff deeply cultivated this land, establishing greenhouses one by one, introducing a series of precious magical plants, and ensuring sufficient logistics.
With all their might, the Four Founders sheltered this school.
Hearing that these courses were founded by the ‘Wise’, Bellatrix confirmed her suspicions.
Each of these subjects represented a magical path, as long as you were willing to delve deeply into it.
Yet Bellatrix still chose the Dark Arts, where she had the highest talent.
Perhaps years of studying in Slytherin had some influence; under Lord Voldemort’s guidance, she had once discovered Mr. Slytherin’s laboratory.
It wasn’t the one located underground and guarded by the Basilisk.
Rather, it was a small laboratory accessible directly from the common room.
Inside, there were currently no books; she didn’t know whether they had been put away by Lord Voldemort or by the house-elves of Hogwarts.
But this was an excellent experimental location that would remain undetected by the Principal, which was enough to satisfy Bellatrix.
Although the Room of Requirement was good, the Principal knew all about it, which forced Bellatrix, who had always been wary of Dumbledore, to give up conducting any in-depth experiments in there.
However, this laboratory didn’t look like it was built in the Middle Ages at all; the remaining traces showed just how rigorous Slytherin had been back then.
Yes, she wanted to use a rigorous scientist to describe Slytherin.
After all, chaos was the mainstream of that era.
It was also in that laboratory that Bellatrix completely integrated all her knowledge acquired during her four years at Hogwarts.
Her exclusive magic was to take the mystery of the Dark Arts as its core.
At her most clueless moment, she thought of the witches in fairy tales.
Whether in Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Andersen’s Fairy Tales, witches usually existed as villains in the stories, and their magic was sufficiently bizarre, which gave Bellatrix inspiration.
Since they were both witches, whatever they could do, she certainly could too.
The first magic she researched sounded very simple, but was actually quite interesting.
In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the Queen made Snow White eat a Poison Apple, causing her to fall into an unconscious state of suspended animation, and in this state, she could surprisingly maintain her youth and beauty—how magical that was.
What Bellatrix had her eyes on was precisely this Poison Apple. magic to make someone die was far too simple; she knew plenty, and at the very least, Avada Kedavra could accomplish it, but suspended animation was not nearly that simple.
Although magic to maintain one’s youth was difficult, she knew a thing or two from the books in her family; however, every single one of these methods required complicated rituals and materials, while having an extremely low cost-performance ratio.
As for the Poison Apple in fairy tales, in Bellatrix’s view, it felt more like a means of deceiving time.
It froze her time at that very moment in a very clever way.
In some fairy tales, the prince woke her with a ‘True Love’s Kiss’, but Bellatrix preferred to believe a version where the prince jiggled the apple out while transporting her body, causing her to wake up.
That is to say, what truly played a role was still the effect of the apple.
Freezing time—what a seductive piece of magic.
In the world of Harry Potter, anything related to time was extremely mysterious…
Time-Turners, that mysterious Department of Mysteries in the underground of the Ministry of Magic, all proclaimed the greatness of time.
When researching, Bellatrix first thought of the description in fairy tales.
First, this apple could not have a strong aura of Dark Arts; second, it had to be half normal, half poisonous.
In the Potion knowledge she had learned, such a Potion split into two was quite rare, which instead reminded her of the Tai Chi she had encountered in her previous life. The source of this chapter is NovelPing.
The neutralization of yin and yang presented the Doctrine of the Mean.
Could it be half frozen time, half flowing time?
But after brief research, she found that anything related to time was not something she could study at present.
Therefore, she settled for second best and researched a suspended animation Potion for eternal youth.
The essence of youth was the high vitality of life, and she chose to continuously cast the vitality-boosting charm “Radiant” on the branch of an evergreen tree using Charms, thereby activating the essence of vitality contained within its branches.
Then, to prevent the high vitality from causing mutations in living organisms, she added an ingredient to the Potion that suppressed its rapid outburst.
Most crucially, through her own understanding of the Dark Arts, she designed a unique ritual.
On a full moon night, she placed the ingredients into the cauldron one by one, then added a large amount of soothing agents.
When the reflection of the moon clearly appeared in the cauldron, she continuously cast the Sleeping Spell at the cauldron while intensifying the fire until the moon’s reflection shattered.
After many experiments, under a chance encounter, she finally completed the concoction of this Potion.
The resulting Potion was divided into a clear liquid on top and a precipitate at the bottom.
She originally thought the precipitate was the true suspended animation Potion, but on the contrary, it was the clear liquid on top.
And its effect was also somewhat different from her initial conception.
The clear liquid on top could make a person fall into endless sleep, but at the same time, any wounds she caused would be repaired by the vitality inherent in the Potion.
Until the magic power was exhausted.
However, at this time, she would not wake up; instead, lacking vitality for maintenance, she would likely die directly.
Only at this time, by ingesting the antidote at the bottom, could she recover.
Similarly, if she ingested that antidote before the Potion’s magic power was exhausted, that vitality would suddenly burst forth within the body.
This was the fate that many mutated small animals told her.
Viewed this way, this researched Potion was simply useless.
Fortunately, in this process, she also had other gains.