The Restricted Section was the only destination that mattered.
Advanced guides to Transfiguration, volumes on ancient runes, a thick tome titled Legilimency: Peering into the Mind—titles that made his fingers itch.
With enough Top Student cards he could have spent a fortnight here and walked out significantly stronger.
He did not have the points, and he had not forgotten why he had come.
Following the row and column markers he found the seventh row, twelfth shelf.
It looked ordinary: books packed tight from top to bottom with no visible gaps.
He searched for hidden mechanisms and found nothing.
In the process he accidentally knocked a dark-magic volume to the floor.
The book opened itself.
Pages flipped rapidly.
Black fog poured from the paper, forming the outline of a man’s head with its mouth stretched wide in a silent scream.
Ivan heard nothing, yet pressure built against his eardrums and a wave of dizziness followed, as though the scream were real.
He slammed the cover shut.
The fog and the head vanished.
“It’s just a book,” he muttered, rubbing his ears.
“Calm down.” When he finally picked it up again the cover felt wrong—soft, almost like skin.
Secrets of Advanced Dark Magic.
The possibility that the binding was actual human hide crossed his mind and left a cold trail down his spine.
The system task marker remained unchanged.
The book was an accident, not the reward.
He forced it back onto the shelf.
Only then did he notice the discrepancy.
Every other Restricted Section shelf held seven cabinets.
This one held six.
Yet the overall proportions still looked perfect, as though space itself had been folded to hide the missing section.
“Someone used a Confundus-type charm and hid a cabinet.” He had examined the shelf carefully earlier.
The only explanation was a long-standing concealment charm that the screaming book had disrupted.
Knowing where the anomaly sat did not tell him how to open it.
Detailed Principles of Basic Charms had described concealment magic in general terms, but none of the spells he currently knew were useful.
He cast about for anything from the original books that might help and remembered one of Snape’s.
“Aparecium.” He pressed the wand tip to the wood.
The shelf shivered.
A thin seam appeared down the middle of the twelfth column, then widened.
A seventh cabinet slid into existence as though it had always been there.
The hidden section looked identical to the others—row after row of thick, aged volumes.
Ivan ran his fingers along the spines.
When he touched the final book the system spoke.
[Ding.
Reward issued.] He stared at the volume, equal parts relieved and annoyed.
That was the delivery method?
If he had been slightly less observant or slightly less lucky he could have searched for hours.
The system’s idea of customer service left a great deal to be desired.
Still, he pulled the book free.
The cover was rough, the title stamped in faded letters: Bloodline Origins.
The pages were yellowed with age—remarkable for a magical text, which usually resisted ordinary decay.
He opened it at once.
A few pages were enough to show that this was no grimoire of powerful spells.
It was closer to a historical record of the era before the great wizarding wars.
In those days wizards had not yet dominated the magical world.
They were, if anything, the weaker party.
Magical creatures—house-elves among them—already possessed formidable innate power.
Human wizards survived largely through numbers.
Some responded by refining spells and theory.
Others looked for shortcuts: the direct appropriation of a magical creature’s power.
A minority succeeded.
The resulting bloodline strength could be passed to descendants, though it tended to dilute across generations.
The discovery still drove many more to attempt the process.
Most failed.
Failure usually meant death.
The lucky survivors were left twisted into permanent monsters—werewolves, vampires, and worse—cursed for every generation that followed.
A few of the more ambitious went further and deliberately bred new creatures designed for easier fusion.
Ivan’s mind went immediately to the basilisk sleeping in the Chamber of Secrets and the Acromantulas of the Forbidden Forest.
The most extreme cases involved wizards who formed “particularly close relationships” with the less repulsive magical beings in the hope that their children would inherit usable bloodlines.