Hermione stood frozen, mouth open.
Yesterday in Transfiguration Ivan had barely been able to hold a transformation steady.
Today he had turned parchment into flawless stone in under two seconds.
Ivan did not wait for her to recover.
He left her standing in the corridor and headed straight back to Gryffindor Tower.
On the way he ran into Harry and Ron still deep in a game of Wizard’s Chess.
Both of them stared at the thick theory book in his hands as though he had grown a second head.
Ron’s eyes went wide.
The knight he was holding slipped from his fingers, crashed onto the table, and immediately staggered upright.
Its armor was dented from the fall.
It raised a toothpick-thin sword and chopped hard into Ron’s thumbnail.
“Ow—!” Ron jerked his hand, flicked the knight away, then grabbed a cup and smashed the offending piece into the board.
He dumped the wreckage into the box to repair itself and turned to Harry, still cradling his throbbing thumb.
“Harry… you don’t think Ivan’s going to turn into another Hermione, do you?” Harry looked uncertain.
“Probably not…?” The mental image of two Hermiones lecturing them at once made both boys shiver.
Ivan reached the dormitory without knowing he was the subject of discussion.
The other beds were empty.
He opened the system panel at once.
[Ivan Hals Occupation: Wizard Charms: Fear Curse – Level 1 (6/200) Levitation Charm – Level 1 (12/200) Transfiguration Charm – Level 1 (30/200) Disarming Charm – Level 1 (16/200) Light Charm – Level 1 (1/200) Theory: Magical Item Crafting – Level 0 (435/500) Basic Charm Principles – Level 0 (88/100) Magical Items: Wand (yew, unicorn hair, eleven and three-quarter inches) Magic Power: Medium Compatibility: 72.5% Academic Points: 20] One hour under the Top Student card had pushed nearly every spell he knew to Level 1.
With the dorm empty he began testing.
A few trunks, stools, and pillows served as targets.
“Wingardium Leviosa.” “Expelliarmus.” A pillow shot from the head of the bed to the foot.
A trunk and a stool drifted slowly downward through the air.
Simple, clean success filled him with sharp satisfaction.
This was the power of magic.
Few people could resist that kind of temptation.
In his previous life, dying slowly in a hospital bed, he had always preferred books filled with magic and the impossible.
For the first few days after arriving he had not managed even the most basic spells.
Now several of them answered him at once.
The excitement was immediate and pure.
Everything in the room suddenly looked like a potential target for Transfiguration or Levitation.
Ten minutes of continuous casting left his head swimming—the first clear sign of magical exhaustion.
The tests had also given him a rough sense of his current limits.
Levitation: an empty trunk could be held a metre off the floor for nearly forty seconds.
His own bed could be lifted, but only thirty centimetres and for no more than five seconds.
Transfiguration remained the most interesting.
In theory it could change both form and nature.
Practised far enough, it should be able to turn inanimate objects into living animals the way McGonagall did.
The real question was whether it worked on living wizards.
Could an enemy be turned into a tree, a brick, or a farm animal?
Could the ground beneath their feet become a beast or a trap?
Canon almost never showed that use.
Even McGonagall, a master of the art, had not cast Transfiguration directly on opposing wizards during the final battle.
Yet Hagrid had given Dudley a pig’s tail and Draco had spent time as a ferret.
The spell clearly affected living bodies.
Perhaps magical resistance scaled with power.
The stronger the wizard, the harder they were to reshape.
That raised a deeper question: what exactly was magical power, and why could wizards do any of these impossible things at all?
The only advanced transformation that reliably affected powerful wizards was the Animagus change—and even that was limited to one fixed animal form.
It felt less like free Transfiguration and more like a permanent, flawless switch between two states with no time limit and no openings.
“I’m overthinking this,” Ivan muttered, rubbing his forehead.
He was a first-year who could just barely cast.
Speculation at this level was pointless.
After testing Levitation, Transfiguration, the Light Charm, and the Disarming Charm, he judged himself roughly upper-average among first-years—solid, but nothing more.
Then he turned to the spell that had been sitting in the panel since the moment he arrived: the Fear Curse.
He had never used it.
“Fear Descent.” He followed the half-remembered sequence from the original body’s memories and touched the tip of the wand to Maka’s head.
A dull purple light flickered.
Maka tilted its head and stared at him with pure innocence.
“Nothing?” He tried again.
The purple glow wrapped around the owl.
Maka decided it was a game, seized the wand tip in its hooked beak, and started tugging.
Ivan pulled the wand free before the owl could chew the wood and stared at the system line in mild frustration.
A Level 1 spell ought to produce some effect.
Unless… The fragmentary memory that had surfaced under the Sorting Hat returned.
Fear.
He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and looked across the dorm.
On Ron’s desk a small grey-black rat was dozing, crumbs of Bertie Bott’s beans still stuck to its whiskers.
Its tiny paws twitched occasionally, four toes flexing as if it were chasing something in a dream.
Ivan left Maka alone and walked toward Scabbers, wand in hand.