Stelle harbored that shiny, warm red stone—the Philosopher’s Stone, which to her was just a pretty pebble—and a new Elation Token in her pocket.
Drawing on her memory of the way there and a bit of luck, she avoided the night-patrolling Filch and Mrs.
Norris without a hitch, quietly slipping back into the Hufflepuff common room and crawling back into her warm bed.
She didn’t even bother to study her two new acquisitions closely.
She simply tossed them together with her other trinkets and, carrying the exhaustion and satisfaction of completing her Trailblaze mission, fell into a deep sleep.
Meanwhile, on the eighth floor of the castle, the silence of the Headmaster’s office did not last long.
Albus Dumbledore did not summon anyone, nor did he disturb Fawkes the phoenix.
He stood up, the hem of his dark blue robes, embroidered with silver Stelles, brushing lightly against the floor.
He needed to go see for himself.
…
He moved silently through the castle’s sleeping corridors, his footsteps as light as a ghost’s.
Most of the portraits were dozing; the few that were awake only cast respectful or curious glances at his late-night excursion but did not ask questions.
He went straight to the forbidden corridor on the fourth floor.
The wooden door was shut tight.
He pushed it open gently.
Inside, Fluffy’s three heads were drooping, snoring like thunder, sleeping far deeper than usual.
The faint, bizarre scent of cooled butter mixed with Kneazle fur still lingered in the air.
“An interesting sedative,” Dumbledore murmured.
Bypassing Fluffy’s massive body, he easily found the cleverly concealed trapdoor, pulled it open gently, and leapt down.
He landed gracefully atop the Devil’s Snare.
Sensing a powerful source of magic, the vines instinctively tried to coil around him, but Dumbledore simply gave his Elder Wand a gentle flick.
Without even chanting an incantation, the vines were smoothed out by an invisible force, retracting submissively into the corners to reveal the solid ground below.
He noticed obvious black scorch marks on several vines.
A faint smell of saltpeter and cheap fireworks hung in the air.
“Not Fiendfyre, nor a conventional fire spell…
It smells rather like Muggle things?” He frowned slightly; this differed from any method of bypass he had anticipated.
He walked through the stone corridor to the chamber of the flying keys.
Thousands of keys were still buzzing in the air, but his sharp senses noticed that the group of keys near one wall seemed to have slightly more chaotic flight paths than the rest, as if they had been briefly scattered by some high-speed moving object.
“No attempt to find the key, just a brute-force breakthrough?
Relying on pure speed?” Dumbledore’s brow furrowed deeper.
This required immense courage and a bit of recklessness.
When he pushed open the next door and saw the sight inside the giant chessboard chamber, even he, with all his vast experience, could not help but inhale softly.
The chessboard remained, but where the black knight should have been, there was only a pile of shattered stone.
It hadn’t been blasted to dust by magic, but rather, its base had been destroyed by an extremely precise and concentrated burst of high heat, causing the structure to collapse.
He stepped closer to inspect the charred break.
“Incendio, but so concentrated it’s almost like a beam.
Astounding control, yet the purpose was only to destroy a single chess piece’s support?” he muttered to himself.
His eyes swept across the rest of the board; the other pieces remained frozen in checkmate.
Winning the game by destroying the pieces?
This way of thinking was simple, crude, yet so absurdly effective that it left him speechless.
He pressed on.
In the potion logic puzzle room, the parchment still lay on the table, but the bottles had clearly been moved and opened.
Clearly, the intruder had made no attempt to solve the complex riddle.
“Relying on intuition?
Or sense of smell?” Dumbledore picked up the small bottle containing the blue liquid, noting that the bottom was visibly lighter.
He then looked at the nearly imperceptible gap at the edge of the black wall of fire, where a trace of weak magic lingered.
His eyes showed a mixture of confusion and intrigue.
“They discovered how the potion interacts with the fire itself and exploited it…
Keen observation, yet completely bypassing the established rules.” The signs in the troll’s chamber were even simpler—a floor tile lifted by a Levitation Charm, and a face-down troll that was still groaning, seemingly having taken a nasty fall.
The solution was so direct it was almost a joke.
Finally, he stood before the Mirror of Erised.
The mirror was as magnificent as ever, but in his eyes, the subtle magic protecting the Philosopher’s Stone had dissipated, and the glass had reverted to its most basic function.
He reached out, his fingertips brushing the cold glass, feeling the lingering trace of the Philosopher’s Stone’s powerful magic, alongside another, tranquil imprint.
It was here that the unknown intruder had met the most demanding—yet simplest—condition for obtaining the Philosopher’s Stone.
Dumbledore stood quietly in the empty room, looking around.
From the fireworks at the Devil’s Snare, to the brute-force breakthrough of the flying keys, to the violent destruction of the chessboard, to cheating in the potion room, to the simple trap in the troll’s chamber, and finally to the pure intent before the Mirror.
The trail of clues left behind didn’t paint a complete picture of a person, but it outlined a highly distinctive style.
A style that treated rules as non-existent, acting entirely on personal whim and split-second judgment.
Powerful?
Perhaps in some aspects.
But what stood out more was an absolute unpredictability.
His gaze finally landed on the floor, where something glinted faintly in the shadow cast by the Mirror’s pedestal.
He bent down and picked up an object he had never seen before.
It was a small, round token gleaming with the cheap luster of plastic, printed with a distorted smiley face that seemed to be laughing silently.
The material was neither gold nor silver, neither wood nor stone—a substance entirely foreign to him, devoid of any magical fluctuations.
“What is this?” Dumbledore held the strange plastic token to his eyes, examining it closely.
This laughing face, this bizarre material, appearing at the scene of the stolen Philosopher’s Stone was certainly no coincidence.
This little trinket, which did not belong to Hogwarts—and perhaps not even to this world—was the only tangible object the unknown intruder had left behind.
A vivid memory surfaced in his mind.
At the Start-of-Term Feast, that Hufflepuff named Stelle had accepted a letter from a bizarre mechanical bird in front of everyone, her face wearing an expression that seemed completely out of place in the magical world.
At the time, he had sensed a very faint energy fluctuation lingering around the girl, as if it came from the Stelles.
Now, the material of the token in his hand, along with the mischievous yet magic-devoid smiley face on it, perfectly matched the otherworldly aura he remembered on Stelle, as well as her often-baffling behavior.
Combine that with the bizarre ways the obstacles had been breached along the way.
Playing completely outside of conventional logic, ignoring established rules, solving problems with methods sometimes clumsy, sometimes precise, sometimes like a child’s prank, and sometimes with a sharp insight that cut straight to the core.
All the clues at this moment, like being threaded by an invisible string, ultimately pointed to that Hufflepuff first-year with the highly unconventional way of thinking.
The corner of Dumbledore’s mouth slowly curled into an understanding and profound arc—an enlightened curiosity.
“So it was you, Miss Stelle,” he murmured to himself, tossing the Elation Token in his palm, feeling its weightless, plastic texture that nonetheless seemed to carry countless mysteries.