The sunlight had just slipped into the night, and Vera woke up suddenly from a dull pain.
Cold sweat soaked the silk pillowcase.
As she struggled to open her eyes, until she saw the old and elaborate decorations overhead, she realized where she was now.
Although she had transmigrated to this world for three days, she would still occasionally forget her new identity — Vera, reportedly… the posthumous daughter of Regulus Black.
Barely propping herself up from the bed, she coughed a few times softly, a morbid flush rising between her delicate brows.
Vera tried hard to prop herself on the edge of the bed.
The familiar dull pain from her spine felt like countless fine needles crawling along her bone marrow, and her seemingly non-existent lower limbs made her feel a wave of illusory stinging pain.
This was the sequela of the car crash, a torture that had never stopped since she transmigrated into this body.
She bit her lower lip, desperately groping to reach the wheelchair by the bed, her slender fingers trembling on the genuine leather armrests of the wheelchair.
Vera took a deep breath, using all her strength to move herself into the wheelchair, finally gaining a moment of respite.
She adjusted her breathing, pushed the wheelchair to the window, reached out to pull open a corner of the curtain, and the deep night poured in instantly, illuminating her pale face.
Outside the window was the desolate garden of the Black family.
By the overgrown fountain, a nightingale was pecking at berries.
“Miss, did you have a nightmare again?” The voice of Kreacher the House-elf sounded outside the door, his hoarse and low voice carrying cautious respect, “At this time, it is just right for you to take your medicine.”
Without Kreacher’s reminder, the bitter scent of the Potion had already slipped through the crack of the door, making her stomach twitch reflexively.
Vera’s fingers paused, the dark green velvet fabric slipping from her fingertips, covering most of the outside information again, leaving only a thin silver edge of moonlight to outline the contour of her thin profile.
“Come in, Kreacher.” The still-sticky voice upon waking made her voice hoarser than usual.
The wooden door made a slight creaking sound, and the aged House-elf walked in with a hunched back, holding a silver tray in his hands.
In the crystal bottle placed on it, the emerald-green Potion liquid was bubbling bizarrely.
“There was a letter this afternoon, and I haven’t had time to hand it to Miss.”
Kreacher placed the Potion bottle on the bedside table, his voice sounding slightly higher than usual.
He lit the candle on the table, pulled out a letter sealed with wax, and respectfully handed it over.
That was a yellowish letter, and the text on the envelope was written in emerald-green ink: Number 12, Grimmauld Place, second-floor room on the left, received by Miss Vera.
Vera narrowed her eyes, her gaze shifting from the envelope to Kreacher’s muddy eyes twinkling with tears.
Silently exhaling a breath, she leaned forward slightly to take the envelope, but as her cuff slipped down, it also exposed the dense Potion burn marks on her wrist — a memento left by previous treatment failures.
Gently rubbing the texture of the Hogwarts school emblem with her fingertips, Vera opened it and glanced through it at a glance, exactly identical to the Hogwarts acceptance letter she saw in her previous life.
She put down the letter, noticing Kreacher’s ears twitching, and those tennis-ball-sized eyes flashing with some complex emotion she couldn’t read.
“It was also a summer like this,” Kreacher’s hoarse voice choked slightly, his knobby fingers twisting the old tea towel on his body, “When Young Master Regulus received the letter back then, it was also this season…”
He chattered on, suddenly realizing something: “Kreacher has spoken out of turn…”
“It’s fine.” Vera softly interrupted him, placed the unfolded letter on the table, picked up the Potion bottle, looked at the strange green liquid inside, and drank it up with her head tilted back.
The moment the Potion slipped into her throat, Vera’s spine suddenly stiffened, as if thousands of fire ants were crawling along her esophagus to the whole body, nesting in the gaps of her bones.
Her fingernails pinched deeply into the armrests, making the leather of the wheelchair emit a subtle sound of unbearable burden.
“Miss!” Kreacher cried out in alarm, watching her delicate and pale face gradually distort, subconsciously wanting to step forward.
“Get out!” Vera squeezed the command out from between her teeth, cold sweat sliding down her temples and soaking the stray hairs beside her temples.
No one could help her, she could only tightly grip the wheelchair armrests, relying purely on willpower to resist that burning pain.
The House-elf hesitated for a second, and then disappeared with a pop.
The burning sensation brought by the Potion gradually transformed into a strange numbness, and Vera felt her consciousness begin to float, as if being extracted from her body.
She saw her own distorted and ruined face in the mirror.
She saw the rainy night that had always lingered in her dreams, the dazzling headlights, the Muggle foster mother screaming as she pushed her out of the car, and then… a bloody mess…
That was the memory left to her by the original Vera, and also the nightmare she experienced every night after transmigrating.
Vera bit her lower lip hard, refusing to let go even after tasting the flavor of rust.
She must completely master this body and live well in this world…
She couldn’t faint, absolutely not.
Just at the moment when her consciousness was about to be swallowed by the severe pain, the burning sensation of the Potion suddenly disappeared.
Vera opened her eyes abruptly, finding herself suspended in a pitch-Black void.
The wheelchair, the room, and even the pain had disappeared, and beneath her feet was a huge magic array woven by silver rays of light.
At the core of the magic array, a diamond-shaped crystal slowly rose, and a line of text emerged upon it:
[In the name of Ancient Magic, oh heir of the bloodline, you have passed the trial and obtained the qualification for inheritance.]
Ancient Magic?
Vera frowned, and before she could react, those words instantly turned into streams of light and drilled into her body.
In an instant, she seemed to see ancient Wizards casting magic under the starry sky, seeing giant stones symbolizing contracts buried into the foundations of Hogwarts, and seeing countless magic powers scattering like stardust, falling everywhere beneath her feet…
Then, the severe pain struck again, but this time it was a different kind of pain —
As if someone poured boiling metal solution into her blood vessels, yet in the next second flushed her bone marrow with ice water.
In a trance, Vera seemed to see spiderweb-like golden patterns emerging under her skin, starting from the scars on her wrist and gradually covering her whole body.
Before she could see clearly, her consciousness plunged downwards, as if being forcibly dragged back to reality by an invisible force.
She leaned forward against the wheelchair armrest, breathing heavily, and the crystal Potion bottle rolled onto the carpet, making a dull sound.
Trembling as she raised her hand, Vera half-squinted, and by the candlelight, she saw that the Potion burn marks on her wrist were healing at a speed visible to the naked eye.
The originally ferocious burn marks disappeared without a trace, replaced by a layer of pale golden patterns — they slowly flowed under her blood vessels like living things, and then gradually faded away.
“…Ancient Magic?”
She muttered in a somewhat daze, unable to help falling into deep thought.