No one applauded.
No one whispered.
Because no one recognized the name.
“Klein” was on no one’s radar.
He did not belong to the Sacred Twenty-Eight, he did not hail from any famous half-blood family, and his name didn’t carry built-in fame like “Potter.”
Combined with the effect of his Divine Shielding, most of the students didn’t even notice someone stepping out of the waiting area.
Professor McGonagall read the name again.
“Aaron Klein.”
This time, her eyes looked directly toward the very back of the waiting area.
Aaron stepped out from beside the stone pillar.
He suppressed his Godhead, his aura, and everything else that shouldn’t be exposed in front of hundreds of people.
Right now, he was just an ordinary, perhaps slightly shy, half-blood first-year.
He wore slightly ill-fitting black robes, had a blank expression, and walked with a steady pace.
He walked down the central aisle toward the three-legged stool on the dais.
Hardly any of the students lining the aisle gave him a second glance.
Their eyes swept past, pausing on him for a mere fraction of a second before moving on.
*Unimportant background details, skip.*
But there were three exceptions.
The first was at the corner of the Slytherin table.
Malfoy was staring at him.
Not with defiance, but with sheer terror.
From the moment Aaron stepped out of the waiting area, Malfoy’s hands gripped the edge of the table.
His knuckles turned white from the strain, and fine beads of sweat broke out on his forehead.
His lips were pressed tightly together, and his face was as pale as parchment.
Crabbe whispered a question beside him.
Malfoy didn’t answer.
He knocked over his goblet.
Pumpkin juice spilled across the table, seeping into his cuffs, but he didn’t even notice.
His entire focus was pinned to the small figure walking toward the three-legged stool.
His memories of the train ride were like red-hot iron pincers squeezing his heart.
Those calm, grey-blue eyes.
That power that made his very soul want to kneel.
He still didn’t know what it was.
It wasn’t a spell, nor was it Dark Magic.
He had seen plenty of Dark Magic at Malfoy Manor, and none of it could produce that kind of effect.
It was something far deeper.
Far deeper than Dark Magic.
Malfoy’s instincts told him that the boy walking toward the stool was no ordinary eleven-year-old first-year.
He might not even be an ordinary wizard.
But his logic insisted otherwise.
*Impossible.
A half-blood with zero traceable family background?
How could that be?*
The second to notice Aaron was Dumbledore.
At the head table, Dumbledore maintained his standard genial smile, but his right index finger tapped twice against the tabletop again.
The third was Snape.
Severus Snape sat to the left at the staff table.
His greasy black hair hung around his face, his skin was sallow, and his lips beneath his hooked nose were drawn into a thin line.
His dark eyes were like two bottomless wells, devoid of any discernible emotion.
He hadn’t intended to pay much attention to this student named Klein.
But as Aaron walked past him, Snape’s eyelid twitched.
It was an incredibly subtle movement.
He didn’t know what that feeling was.
It was as if something had brushed past his mental barriers—lightning-fast, light as a feather, yet leaving behind an impossible-to-ignore trace of… Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
wrongness.
Snape’s gaze followed him, settling on the back of the boy’s head.
Dark hair.
Thin frame.
The collar of his robes slightly turned up.
An utterly ordinary first-year.
Yet Snape’s intuition told him: *Not ordinary.*
He pushed his intuition down for the moment.
Let’s watch the sorting first.
Aaron sat down on the three-legged stool.
The wooden seat was cold and hard.
Behind him were hundreds of watching faces, and above were floating candles and the enchanted canopy.
Professor McGonagall stepped forward, holding the Sorting Hat.
As she lowered the hat onto Aaron’s head, her fingers brushed against his hair.
In that split second, McGonagall’s fingers twitched back.
The feeling from two months ago rushed back.
It wasn’t pain, nor was it numbness, but an indescribable, suffocating pressure that shot from her fingertips straight down her spine.
But it was much weaker this time.
Because Aaron was deliberately suppressing it.
McGonagall adjusted the hat, making sure it was secure, before quickly stepping back.
The Sorting Hat slipped onto Aaron’s head.
The wide brim covered his eyes.
The Great Hall grew blurry in the shadow of the brim, and the noise seemed to fade into the distance.
And then, the hat moved.
Not physically.
A mental tendril extended from the hat’s inner lining, gently and tentatively brushing against the surface of Aaron’s mind.
This was the Sorting Hat’s standard procedure for over a thousand years.
Whenever a first-year sat on the stool, the hat would enter their mind in this exact manner, reading their personality, abilities, and values to make its judgment.
To the Sorting Hat, most first-years’ minds were like open books.
Some were simple, some complex, but all were readable.
The hat’s mental tendril entered the surface of Aaron’s mind.
For the first tenth of a second, everything was normal.
It read some surface information: Male, eleven years old, orphan, composed, calm.
Then, the mental tendril reached the next layer.
There was no next layer.
No, that wasn’t right.
There was a layer, but it wasn’t a human mind.
The Sorting Hat’s consciousness felt as though it had stepped off a normal, grassy field straight into a bottomless abyss.
What did it see?
It saw a vast sky.
Not the enchanted sky of the Great Hall ceiling, but a true sky.
A glass-like dome hung infinitely high above, with clouds drifting slowly.
Below the sky lay a vast landscape: meadows, river systems, rivers of lava, and ancient stone.
A complete miniature world.
At the center of this world stood a white altar, upon which burned a golden flame.
Before the hat’s consciousness could even comprehend this image, the flame flickered.
The golden flame turned toward it.
As if an eye were staring at it.
And then, the hat’s consciousness was sucked into that “eye.”
An infinite, boundless space exploded within the Sorting Hat’s perception.
No boundaries.
No end.
No up, down, left, or right.
Those nebulae were not magic—they were not any form of energy it had witnessed in its millennium of existence.
It was something far more fundamental than magic itself.
The very thing that magic was made from.
The fabric of the Sorting Hat on Aaron’s head began to tremble violently.
The students in the hall noticed the anomaly.
Usually, the hat would twitch slightly on a first-year’s head, as if deep in thought.
But now, it was shaking.
It was trembling all over.
Its brim, its tip, every single patch vibrated at an unnatural frequency.
One second.
Two seconds.
Five seconds.
The hat did not speak.
Whispers began to ripple through the audience.
“What’s going on? Why isn’t it saying anything?”
“Is it stuck?”
“I remember the last one to take this long was Potter…”
Ten seconds.
The hat continued to shake.
Inside Aaron’s mind, the Sorting Hat’s consciousness had completely lost its bearings.
It tried to pull back from the void.
But it couldn’t.
It wasn’t that it was trapped.
Rather, its mental structure was being “scorched” by a silent, continuous force within that void.
It wasn’t a physical burning; it was a scorching on an existential level—like a piece of paper placed directly against the surface of the sun.
The paper didn’t catch fire.
But it was being vaporized by the sheer intensity of the light.
The hat let out its first sound within Aaron’s mind.
It wasn’t words, but a pure mental shriek.
“What… what is this…”
Its voice trembled.
An ancient magical artifact of over a thousand years, carrying the collective wisdom of the four founders of Hogwarts, now sounded like a child cast into a raging storm.
“You… you aren’t human…”
Aaron watched it from his conscious space.
He didn’t attack it, nor did he expel it.
He simply existed.
But for the Sorting Hat, “simply existing” was fatal enough.
His mere existence was an absolute crushing force to a mental structure of the Sorting Hat’s level.
It was like an ant peering down into the mouth of a volcano.
The volcano hadn’t erupted at it, but the ambient heat alone was enough to vaporize it.
“Don’t make me look…” the Sorting Hat’s voice cracked, shattered.
“Don’t make me… look any further…”
Aaron’s consciousness shifted slightly.
He didn’t speak.
He merely drew back a layer of his presence.
It was as if a curtain had been drawn in front of the sun.
The light remained, but its intensity dimmed.
The Sorting Hat’s mental tendril finally found an escape route.
It recoiled frantically, like a snail with scorched antennae, desperately curling back into its shell.
Twenty seconds passed.
The Great Hall was now completely silent.
Everyone stared at the madly vibrating hat on the dais.