Get comfortable, turn the page, and let’s see what this story has been hiding 🔥 ✦ Elias soon adjusted to life at Hogwarts.
When he had no classes, he spent his time in the library, greedily absorbing magical knowledge, researching Signs with Flitwick, or working with Snape every Monday to improve witcher potions.
His standing among the students rose day by day.
Elias arranged different teaching methods according to the students’ ages.
For first- through third-years, he chose relatively gentle training: games, boxing, swordsmanship, and crossbow practice.
The fourth-, fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-years were not nearly so lucky.
For them, Elias opened swordsmanship classes and comprehensive training.
When the upper-years arrived for class, they discovered that the Quidditch pitch had already been transformed by magic into a full training course.
It had hurdles, trenches, low walls, high platforms, monkey bars, balance beams, a high wall, and a low-crawl net stretched over muddy ground.
After Elias explained the training method, many young witches and wizards drew in a sharp breath.
None of them had ever received systematic physical training, and the comprehensive course quickly brought complaints.
To Elias’s disappointment, only a small number of students could complete it.
The rest either fell from the monkey bars and high wall, or snagged their robes on the wire netting and had to stop.
Among the students who did finish, Muggle-borns made up a large share.
The most outstanding was Ravenclaw prefect Penelope Clearwater.
Elias learned that her father was a retired soldier.
Penelope had received structured training from childhood, so she completed his comprehensive course without too much difficulty.
Elias happily awarded Ravenclaw twenty points.
The Ravenclaws, however, did not look especially pleased about those twenty points.
Most of them were in a sorry state.
Their once-neat robes were covered in dust or mud, and some had even been torn.
These young witches and wizards, who usually spent their time studying magic and were genuinely capable in the classroom, had never suffered the blow of failing together like this.
They did not even bother casting Scourgify.
They simply left the Quidditch pitch with their heads hanging.
The first- through third-years were startled when they saw the state of the older students.
After hearing about their miserable experience, they showed genuine sympathy.
The third-years in particular were already beginning to worry about the next school year.
The students made another discovery as well: Professor Snape’s condition had not been good lately.
The young witches and wizards were sharp-eyed.
Snape’s already sallow, gaunt face looked even more worn down than usual.
His eyes were threaded with red, and two dark shadows hung beneath them.
The cause was Elias’s notes.
While reading through them, Snape had been shocked to discover the Trial of the Grasses formula.
Based on the information Elias had provided, Snape immediately realized that this so-called formula was the key to witcher mutations.
Snape was surprised.
He had not expected Elias to be willing to share one of the witchers’ core secrets with him.
Of course, Elias had done it deliberately.
He had long understood that the decline of witchers in his former world was not only caused by the dwindling number of monsters and the shrinking space left for witchers to survive.
A greater reason was the witchers’ own isolation.
Most witchers dealt only with sorceresses and mages.
They had little contact with the outside world.
Their unusual appearance, the emotional dampening caused by mutation, and the practice of taking children from ordinary families through the Law of Surprise all fed misunderstanding and fear among common people.
In that less enlightened age, ordinary people usually had only two ways to deal with fear.
They either fled from it or destroyed the thing that frightened them.
Under deliberate provocation, the massacre at Kaer Morhen had happened just like that.
The extremely low survival rate of the Trial of the Grasses was another major reason witchers had become so few.
Only young apprentices who survived the Trial and the later stages of mutation could truly become witchers.
It was an agonizing process.
Even the Trial of the Grasses itself was said to have a survival rate of only three in ten.
The few apprentices who lived through it still had to endure further mutation, which was no easy thing either.
Too many witcher apprentices lost their lives during that stage.
Elias himself had nearly failed during his Trial of the Grasses.
If Geralt had not brought the sorceress Yennefer to stabilize Elias’s mutating body with magic, he would never have survived that dangerous process.
And from the moment the Trial of the Grasses formula was created, it became one of the witchers’ highest secrets, never shown to outsiders.
No one had ever tried to improve it.
Witchers were still using the original version from a thousand years ago.
In Elias’s view, if any witcher had ever tried to engage more with the outside world, or brought in a truly skilled potioneer to improve the Trial of the Grasses and reduce its terrifying death rate, the witchers would never have declined to such an extent.
That was why Elias had handed over the formula without holding anything back.
Now that he had settled in this world, he had begun thinking about restoring the witchers.
Even if he had to start from nothing, one small step at a time, a witcher’s long lifespan meant that he believed he would reach that goal eventually.
When they truly began, however, Elias discovered the terrifying amount of work involved in improving the Trial of the Grasses.
Analyzing the properties of the original ingredients and finding suitable substitutes in this world had already kept Elias and Snape working for a long time.
Because of his mutations, Elias did not need to sleep.
Snape, however, had already begun drinking Energy Potions one vial at a time.
Elias could tell that Snape badly wanted a rest, but the pride of a Potions Master would not allow him to ask for one.
So Elias chose the right moment and said that he wanted to take a break.
Snape immediately accepted the excuse.
By now, both of them agreed that improving the Trial of the Grasses would be a long-term undertaking requiring sustained effort.
Compared with that, Elias’s Sign research with Flitwick went much more smoothly.
Parsing spell models was not difficult for Professor Flitwick.
With Elias beside him to correct and guide him, Flitwick was soon ready to begin experimenting with casting Signs.
After two initial failures, Professor Flitwick successfully cast his first Aard Sign.
The telekinetic shock wave from the Sign knocked Elias’s desk over.
Elias did not mind in the slightest.
Instead, he and Professor Flitwick cheered in delight.
The two quickly decided to celebrate this major breakthrough.
Elias called Pippy and asked the house-elf to prepare a lavish meal for them.
He even opened a precious bottle of Est Est, the red wine he had brought from Toussaint.
Professor Flitwick gave the wine extraordinarily high praise.
With the wine loosening the mood, host and guest enjoyed themselves thoroughly.
And Elias now knew what he would give Flitwick for Christmas.
✦ ✦ ✦ Ready for more?
CREATORS’ THOUGHTS EmberHollow Thank you for reading.
I hope this chapter pulled you deeper into the story.
Stick around, because there’s still a lot waiting just ahead.