Living with the Weasleys for nearly a month had been the happiest month of Harry’s past ten years.
If there was anything slightly less than perfect, it was probably Mr.
Arthur Weasley undoing Dudley’s pig tail Transfiguration when he came to collect him, and Tris dragging Harry out to exercise every single day.
Tris was truly terrifying.
Harry deeply regretted agreeing to work out with Tris in the first place, but as a boy, he still had a strong competitive streak.
Since he had promised, he was going to stick to it.
So for nearly a month, surrounded by the grinning, teasing Weasley children, Harry and Tris underwent over twenty days of high-intensity training.
Now, the start of term was finally here.
Harry felt a surge of pure joy.
Tris felt a bit differently than Harry; he was currently experiencing a blend of pain and bliss.
The bliss came from his system officially unlocking.
After twenty-eight consecutive days of training, the Grindset System had activated right on schedule, bestowing quite a few tangible benefits.
The pain, however, was that after activation, the workouts didn’t vanish—in fact, their intensity increased by ten percent.
Tris was panicking just a little.
A ten percent increase might not sound like much, but it hadn’t even been a month!
How would it scale in the future?
If it kept adding ten percent every month or less, things were going to get ugly!
With compound growth, it would double in a little over six months and reach ten times the original intensity in two years!
He could handle a one-kilometer jog now, but if that turned into ten kilometers in two years—haha, wouldn’t he spend the entire day running?
*Damn Grindset System, you can’t grind me to death like this.*
With a heart full of anxiety, September first arrived.
Starting on the twenty-eighth, Tris had insisted that everyone heading to Hogwarts that year draft a checklist detailing every single item they needed to bring.
They checked and rechecked it multiple times.
Then, on the morning of departure, he went through each person’s list to verify it was complete.
“Why is Tris being so strict?” Harry whispered to Ron.
Although Tris had left the best impression on Harry back in Diagon Alley, after arriving at The Burrow, it was Ron he got along with best.
The reason was simple: Ron wasn’t nearly as obsessed with the grind.
Harry was certainly a boy willing to learn, especially when it came to magic, which he found deeply fascinating.
But grinding to the extent Tris did felt entirely unnecessary to him.
Running every day was bad enough, but Tris also made them read books.
Harry wanted to learn about the wizarding world, but reading about it in books wasn’t his favorite method.
By comparison, he preferred hearing about it from Ron, Fred, and the others.
Ron in particular was a fantastic storyteller.
Gradually, Harry and Ron grew closer.
Hearing Harry’s question, Ron lowered his voice and said, “Tris is a bit strict, but it’s actually really necessary. You have no idea—in previous years when we went to the station, we had to turn back halfway several times. Last year, Tris told Fred and the others to make a checklist… and well, that was the first time I can remember us arriving at the station before ten-thirty.”
A giant question mark popped into Harry’s head.
“You don’t know the half of it,” Ron said with a shrug, seeing Harry’s expression.
“The time I remember best was two years ago, Fred and George’s first year at Hogwarts. We drove back and forth five times, and when we finally got to the station, the train was less than a minute away from leaving.”
“Five times?” Harry was stunned by the number.
“Yeah. Charlie, Percy, Fred, George, and Mum—all five of them forgot something once. Oh, Dad actually forgot his hat too, but Mum said he didn’t need it anyway…”
Harry’s mouth hung open.
He glanced over to the side.
Fred and George were grinning, as if Ron wasn’t talking about them at all.
Percy turned his head away, pretending he hadn’t heard a word.
Harry realized he might have misunderstood Percy.
At least before this, he had assumed Percy was the meticulous, serious type.
Forgetting things seemed like something that should never happen to him.
Now, it appeared that wasn’t quite the case.
“So, even though Tris can be a bit annoying, listening to him usually works out better,” Ron concluded with a shrug.
Ever since Tris suggested writing to Albus Dumbledore to help Charlie get into the dragon sanctuary in France, his advice had become increasingly valued and trusted in the house.
“I thought I heard my name,” Tris said, stepping in from outside.
He had just gone out with Arthur Weasley to inspect the Ford.
They would need to drive that car to London tomorrow, and he didn’t want any breakdowns along the way.
“No way, I was praising you!” Ron said with a straight face.
*Like I’d believe that.*
Tris rolled his eyes and walked inside.
…
Thanks to Tris’s advance preparations, the Weasleys and Harry made it to King’s Cross Station without a hitch, arriving on time and boarding the train early.
“Don’t ordinary people notice the platform entrance?” Harry asked excitedly once they settled into a compartment.
Although he had fully accepted being part of the wizarding world during his month at The Burrow, stepping through the barrier onto Platform Nine and Three-Quarters just moments ago still made him feel like he had stepped into another life.
“That pillar has a Muggle-Repelling Charm on it—a spell that makes Muggles overlook the area,” Tris explained as he helped Ron and Harry heave their trunks onto the luggage rack.
“It makes people without magic subconsciously ignore anything strange happening at the entrance.”
“That’s amazing,” Harry said, beaming.
“Harry, Tris, I’m a bit nervous,” Ron said, squirming in his seat.
“Nervous? Why?” Tris asked, sitting down after stowing the luggage.
“The Sorting Ceremony,” Ron blurted out.
“Everyone in our family is in Gryffindor. If the two of us don’t get sorted there, I won’t even know how to explain it to Mum and Dad.”
“What’s there to explain?” Tris raised his hands in a shrug.
“You end up where you end up. But if you ask me, your worries are completely pointless. Every single Weasley for the past two hundred years has gone to Gryffindor. Do you really think you’re that special?”
“Um… probably… not?” Tris’s words made Ron feel a little more at ease.
“I read about the four houses in a book,” Harry hesitated, “but how do they sort us into houses?”
Tris had bought quite a few books back at Flourish and Blotts, including the famous *Hogwarts: An Unofficial History*.
Normally, people like Harry and Ron would never read a book like that.
In fact, before the Chamber of Secrets incident, nobody in the Hogwarts library except Ravenclaws ever touched it.
Oh, wait—Hermione read it too.
She could even recite it.
The realm of top-tier academic prodigies was beyond ordinary understanding, and nobody dared to ask.
However, the Weasleys now had Tris, a transmigrator, so things naturally defied normal conventions.
Rain or shine, Tris spent at least two hours every day reading—and deep reading meant actually digesting the material, not just idly flipping pages.
With such a role model around, Harry and Ron had ended up reading a bit as well.
Yet none of the books mentioned how the Sorting at Hogwarts actually worked.
“I don’t know either,” Ron said, shaking his head in frustration.
“It doesn’t seem to say in the books.”
“Yeah, it doesn’t,” Tris confirmed with a nod. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
He had wondered before why none of the young witches and wizards knew how the Hogwarts Sorting worked before term started—even Hermione, who had practically memorized *Hogwarts: An Unofficial History*, was clueless.
After personally flipping through numerous books, he realized that whether intentionally or unintentionally, the secret was kept strictly under wraps.
What was even stranger—whatever other families did—at least in the Weasley household, from the parents down to the older brothers, not a single one was willing to reveal what the Sorting Ceremony involved.
Refusing to tell was the better outcome.
Fred and George, those two unreliable jokers, deliberately gave vague, ominous answers, making the Sorting Ceremony sound extraordinarily dangerous.
Knowing the truth, Tris felt nothing, but Harry and Ron were terrified out of their minds.
*Because they suffered through it, they want to ruin everyone else’s peace of mind?*
*What a wicked sense of humor.*
Tris thought to himself, though he had no intention of revealing what he knew either.
Well, some traditions were worth keeping alive.
“Fred said we have to prove our bravery or something to get into Gryffindor,” Ron said, scratching his head.
“And George said it’s like fighting a troll. Tris, could you win a fight against a troll?”
According to the current customs of the British wizarding world, families rarely taught magic to children before they started school.
However, if a child was particularly eager to learn and wanted to practice on their own, parents generally wouldn’t stop them.
Neither Ron nor Harry was particularly fond of studying.
Aside from flipping through their new textbooks out of novelty for the first couple of days after buying them, neither had opened them since.
Harry had, however, thoroughly enjoyed reading a few secondhand Lockhart novels Molly had bought.
He was even beginning to admire Lockhart.
Tris found this quite amusing.
He couldn’t help but wonder what Harry’s reaction would be next year when he met the real Lockhart.
Neither Harry nor Ron had practiced spellcasting, but over the past month, they had watched Tris practice basic spells every single day.
To them, he seemed already remarkably proficient.
“Of course not,” Tris replied, shooting Ron a look as if he were an idiot.
“Unless an adult wizard has undergone combat training, even they wouldn’t dare claim they could defeat an adult troll head-on—let alone an underage wizard.”
“What’s a troll?” Harry asked curiously.
“You can check the second to last chapter of Defense Against the Dark Arts,” Tris reminded him.
“It’s described in detail there.”
“Oh, come on, Tris, just tell us! I don’t want to dig through textbooks,” Harry whined playfully.
For some reason, even though Tris was the same age as them, he always seemed far more reliable.
Harry wasn’t normally one to act cute or whine—he had never had the chance growing up.
Yet when facing Tris, he inexplicably felt as though he were speaking to an elder, someone he could act a little spoiled around.
Normally, even if he felt that way, acting like this would have made Harry feel embarrassed.
Unless…
“Yeah, Tris, just tell us!” Ron chimed in, looking at Tris with big, puppy-dog eyes, his tone even more pouting than Harry’s.
He gave no thought whatsoever to the fact that he was the sixth child and Tris was the seventh, making him the older brother.
Naturally, Harry had only copied the behavior after seeing Ron do it.
*Sigh…*
Looking at Harry and Ron both staring at him with pathetic, eager eyes, Tris was thoroughly speechless.
How should he put it?
Suddenly, he completely understood how Hermione felt carrying two deadweights.