The pain faded slowly. Ethan lay in the dark heart of the Chamber for a long time before he finally allowed himself to think clearly again.
He had failed. That much was simple.
The harder part was understanding why.
He approached the problem the same way he used to approach failed experiments back in the lab.
Strip away the assumptions, isolate the variables, and stop asking what went wrong and start asking what the failure actually tells me.
He hadn't lacked power. He hadn't lacked knowledge.
He hadn't lacked technique, either. He'd built the body correctly: muscle, bone, the rough architecture of a nervous system, a working analogue of a soul-anchor to hold it all together. Every individual piece had been sound.
And every time, at the exact moment the structure should have taken on independent existence, it had simply refused.
Not weakened. Not strained past capacity. Refused. As if something underneath the magic itself had looked at what he was building and decided it didn't belong.
That was the part that unsettled him more than the injuries had.
Magic, as far as he'd learned it and as far as Riddle had ever understood it, didn't have opinions. It was a medium, not a judge.
But Ethan kept coming back to the same conclusion.
His soul wasn't from this world.
Whatever laws governed the relationship between a soul and a body in this universe had been written with the assumption that the soul in question belonged to it.
He was an edge case.
A foreign object the system was quietly, patiently trying to expel.
If that was true, no amount of skill would fix it.
He could refine the process for the next decade, perfect every spell and improve every magical structure, and the outcome would remain the same, unless he could fundamentally change the very rule of existence.
Which left him with his second plan. Harry Potter.
Harry was one of the few options Ethan could realistically pursue, and fortunately, it wouldn't require nearly as much preparation.
He already had a rough plan he could follow to get the result he wanted. The trouble would come afterwards.
Stealing the identity of the Boy Who Lived came with unavoidable, lethal baggage. Taking Harry's body meant inheriting Harry's destiny, and at the end of that road stood Lord Voldemort.
If Ethan became Harry Potter, sooner or later he would have to deal with him. He couldn't rely on the ridiculous chain of coincidences that had saved Harry in the original story.
Too many things had happened in canon that depended on circumstances lining up perfectly, and Ethan had no guarantee that any of them would happen the same way this time.
He certainly wasn't going to underestimate Voldemort.
Whatever else Ethan thought about the man, Voldemort was powerful and extremely dangerous.
The Dark Lord was a murderous psychopath, but he was also one of the most terrifyingly gifted sorcerers in modern history.
The other option would be to become powerful enough to battle Voldemort by himself, which honestly wasn't that bad of an option.
Harry wouldn't have been able to do that no matter how much he tried, simply because he never had the time to properly develop his magical abilities to the level of Voldemort or Dumbledore.
Ethan didn't have that limitation.
He had time, Riddle's knowledge, and something Harry had never possessed: the possibility of absorbing Voldemort's other soul fragments.
If Ethan could find and absorb the remaining Horcruxes, he would gain access to more of Riddle's memories, skills, magical knowledge, and experience with every fragment he consumed.
With enough time, Ethan could potentially become powerful enough to defeat Voldemort himself.
He leaned back and considered the possibility.
'Maybe I don't need to run from Voldemort.'
A faint smile crossed his face
'Maybe I just need to become strong enough to kill him.'
The other, more immediate problem would be Dumbledore. Ethan would have to fool him for as long as possible, keeping his true intentions hidden until he was powerful enough to deal with him directly.
That wouldn't be easy.
Dumbledore was far too intelligent and experienced to underestimate, and Ethan had no idea what kind of person he actually was.
If Ethan eventually became Harry, he would have to make sure Dumbledore saw exactly what he expected to see.
Harry Potter - Not Ethan.
And he would have to maintain that deception until he was strong enough that it no longer mattered whether Dumbledore discovered the truth or died, whichever came first.
Ethan dissolved his projection in the Chamber, allowing the silver soul-mist to flow back into the pages of the diary resting in Ginny's pocket.
Once his consciousness settled back into the diary, he re-established his connection with Ginny and took control of her once again.
But before returning, Ethan glanced once more toward the enormous statue of Salazar Slytherin.
He roamed around the Chamber, looking for anything that might be worth taking or investigating, though Riddle had already searched the place thoroughly during his own time at Hogwarts. Ethan therefore didn't have much hope of finding anything useful.
Tom had discovered a few things left behind by Slytherin, hidden within the statue and elsewhere in the Chamber, but whatever had been there was long gone by now.
After a fruitless search, Ethan began making his way back toward the tunnels that would lead him to the castle.
He followed the same route until he eventually reached the passage beneath the sink. Ethan looked up at the enormous pipe above him.
'Well, I can't fly.'
He raised Ginny's wand and examined the pipe carefully before pointing it toward the stone.
With a flick of the wand, he transfigured part of the pipe, reshaping the metal and stone into a narrow set of steps leading upward toward the opening.
Ethan climbed them without much difficulty, reaching the sink at the top.
A moment later, he stepped through the girls' bathroom, where Moaning Myrtle was nowhere in sight, and finally back into the sleeping castle.
The walk back to Gryffindor Tower took longer than the walk out had.
Filch had shifted his patrol route sometime after two, and Ethan spent a tense four minutes pressed into an alcove behind a suit of armor, waiting for the sound of Mrs. Norris's claws on stone to fade back down the corridor.
The dormitory was just as he had left it, dead quiet, filled only with the soft, rhythmic breathing of the sleeping first-year girls.
By the time he finally eased Ginny back into her bed and withdrew, letting her mind settle undisturbed into ordinary sleep, the sky outside the tower windows had already begun to lighten at the edges.
Ethan vaguely remembered some things from the books about what happened, but not everything.
He remembered the major events, but not the exact timeline or all the smaller things that happened in between.
'Now, how should I go about doing these things?' Ethan thought to himself as he leaned back in his chair.
He needed to get Harry Potter alone, and the best way was to get him to enter the Chamber of Secrets.
Ethan would have to make a few more trips to the Chamber of Secrets to set everything in motion.
The next morning, Ethan monitored Ginny closely through the connection, watching for any sign that she suspected something was wrong.
She woke up on time, rubbed her eyes, and gathered her bookbag.
Aside from looking a little more tired than usual, she went down to the Great Hall for breakfast completely unaware that her body had walked the depths of Hogwarts while she slept.
That evening, the familiar routine resumed as if nothing had changed.
Ginny curled up on her four-poster bed behind closed curtains, the diary resting against her knees, and poured out every mundane detail of her day across the parchment.
She complained about the sheer mountain of star charts Professor Sinistra had assigned in Astronomy, giggled over Ron accidentally singing his eyebrows off in Potions, and shared her quiet relief that her Transfiguration practice was still improving.
Ethan listened patiently. He offered steady, gentle advice where she needed it, validated her frustrations, and let his responses sink smoothly into the pages.
Whenever Ethan was alone with his thoughts, he would go over what he remembered from the original books and plan his next moves accordingly.
The next time he went to the Chamber, Ethan would awaken the Basilisk and set the events of the Chamber of Secrets into motion.
'Poor Harry. You really can't catch a break, can you? If my first plan had worked, you would have finally had a normal year at Hogwarts. But alas, destiny seems determined to be cruel to you no matter what.' Ethan thought with some amusement.
****************************