It was the voice of the Horned Snake.
A hissing snake tongue, but to Aaron’s ears, it was as clear as someone whispering right beside him.
Parseltongue.
In all of magical history, wizards blessed with this talent could be counted on one hand.
Only the bloodline of Salazar Slytherin possessed Parseltongue.
Now, someone else had it too.
Aaron opened his eyes, the corners of his lips curving upward slightly.
This trip to Knockturn Alley had been well worth it.
He backtracked down the dark alleyway to Diagon Alley, passed through the brick entryway, and returned to The Leaky Cauldron.
Still invisible, he pushed open the bathroom door, walked up to the sink, and canceled his invisibility.
The mirror once again reflected the lean face of the young boy.
Aaron turned on the tap and washed his hands.
The door opened.
McGonagall stood in the doorway, her gaze behind her square spectacles resting on Aaron.
“You were in the bathroom for quite a long time.”
“My stomach felt a bit off,” Aaron said, shaking the water from his hands.
“Must have been something I ate at lunch.”
McGonagall said nothing, staring at him for a few seconds.
In those few seconds, a vision flashed through her mind without warning.
A serpent.
Dark green scales, slit-like golden pupils, and a gem-like horn atop its head.
Coiled amid the clouds, its massive body obscured half the sky as its cold eyes looked down upon every living creature on the earth.
The vision lasted less than a second before vanishing, so fleeting it felt like an illusion.
McGonagall blinked.
“Professor McGonagall?” Aaron stood before her, his expression placid and flawless.
“We can leave now.”
“…Let us go.”
McGonagall turned and walked out of the bathroom, her pace a couple of beats faster than when she had arrived.
She was the Head of Gryffindor, Albus Dumbledore’s most trusted deputy.
She had seen Dark Magic, lived through war, and hardly anything in the world could unnerve her.
Yet today, for the second time, she felt something indescribable from this boy.
It wasn’t Dark Magic.
Dark Magic was cold, corrupt, and sickening.
This was different.
This was…
she couldn’t find the right words for it.
It was like standing on the edge of a cliff looking down.
You knew it was an abyss below, but it was so unfathomably deep that you didn’t even have time to feel fear—only a pure, overwhelming sense of insignificance.
McGonagall gripped the wand in her pocket tightly.
When she got back, she would need to have a serious talk with Albus about this child.
On the way back to the orphanage, McGonagall was noticeably quieter.
She hailed a Muggle taxi and sat in the back with Aaron, her eyes fixed on the gloomy London streetscape outside the window.
Aaron didn’t initiate conversation either.
His attention was entirely focused on his Divine Kingdom.
The five-hundred-meter space had undergone noticeable changes.
The ground was no longer just monotonous dirt and wild weeds; several rocky patches of varying sizes had appeared.
The stream’s volume had grown, gathering into a shallow pond.
The Horned Snake was coiled on a rock beside the pond, resting with its eyes closed to recover from its injuries.
Over forty insects bustled about in their respective domains—ants hauled tiny grains of soil to build nests, while a garden spider spun a complete web between two stems of grass.
The Demiguise was napping on the grass across the pond, its silvery-white tail flicking lazily now and then.
A miniature ecosystem was taking shape.
“We’re here.”
The taxi pulled up outside the orphanage.
McGonagall stepped out first and looked back at Aaron.
“Aaron, if you encounter any problems before term starts, you can send a letter to Hogwarts by owl.”
“Alright.”
“And…” McGonagall hesitated.
“How have things been for you here?”
Aaron looked at her.
“Fine.”
“Is anyone picking on you?”
“No, everyone is very friendly.”
McGonagall stared at his face, unsure how much truth lay in those words, but ultimately didn’t press the matter.
“September first, King’s Cross Station, Platform Nine and Three-Quarters. Don’t be late.”
“I won’t be.”
McGonagall nodded, turned, and took a few steps before shifting smoothly into a tabby cat.
With a couple of quick bounds, she scrambled over the wall and vanished into the twilight.
Aaron stood watching the direction she had gone for a moment, then pushed open the door and stepped inside the orphanage.
The hallway was quiet; most of the children were already having dinner.
Aaron skipped the mess hall and went straight back to his room.
Closing the door, he sat cross-legged on his hard wooden bed and plunged his consciousness into his Divine Kingdom.
“What is your name?”
Hearing this, the Horned Snake raised its head.
Its slit-like pupils locked onto where Aaron’s conscious projection hovered, releasing a string of hisses.
Unlike before, however, Aaron understood every word this time.
“I… have no name… Lord. The smugglers only called me… cargo.”
There was a restrained anguish in the Horned Snake’s tone, the tip of its tail curling slightly as it spoke the word “cargo.”
Aaron was silent for two seconds.
“What about your companions? The smugglers said there was a batch of Horned Snakes.”
“…All dead.”
The Horned Snake rested its head on the rock, its golden slit pupils dimming.
“There were seven when we were captured, but only three survived the transport here. The smugglers wanted to harvest our gallbladders to sell; the other two bled to death during the extraction. I was the smallest, and my gallbladder was too small, so they thought I wasn’t worth the trouble and threw me aside.”
Aaron’s expression remained unchanged.
He felt no anger over this.
Anger was a human emotion, and someone possessing a Godhead viewed such matters from a different perspective.
The smugglers harmed magical creatures out of profit, just as spiders preyed on insects and eagles hunted rabbits.
Within the food chain, every action possessed its own logic.
Yet Aaron would remember this.
Not out of anger, but because the Horned Snake was now his believer.
Harm to his believer was equivalent to trespassing and causing trouble on the territory of his Divine Kingdom.
This debt would be settled sooner or later.
“From now on, you shall be called Naga.”
The Horned Snake froze for a moment, then coiled its body tighter, pointing the horn atop its head toward Aaron.
“Thank you… for the name… Lord. Naga… will serve you forever.”
Another wave of faith force surged in.
The act of bestowing a name was inherently loaded with immense ritual significance.
For a magical creature, receiving a name from a deity was equivalent to solidifying its status within the Divine Kingdom.
Aaron withdrew from the Divine Kingdom and opened his eyes.
Night had fallen completely, and the streetlights outside cast a dim yellow glow.
He looked down at his hand.
The bite marks left by the Horned Snake on his fingertips had long since healed, but faint, scale-like patterns flickered dimly where the tiny puncture marks had been.
The talent of Parseltongue was fusing into his body.
Aaron walked over to the window and watched a gecko crawling across the sill.
He opened his mouth and spoke a sentence.
The sound was not English, nor was it any human tongue.
Hissing, drawn-out syllables imbued with a rhythmic cadence spilled from between his teeth, sounding in the night breeze like snake scales scraping against stone slabs.
The gecko froze on the sill, turning its head toward Aaron as if listening.
Although a gecko was not a snake, as a fellow reptile, it could sense the fragments of information carried within Parseltongue.
“Interesting.”
Aaron shut the window and laid back down on his bed.
Starting tomorrow, he needed to accomplish something before term began.
The faith provided by his current forty-plus insect believers was too scattered.
The faith generated by a single ant was roughly one-thousandth of a Demiguise’s; even combining over forty of them didn’t equal a single magical creature.
Yet insects possessed an advantage magical creatures lacked: numbers.
If he could boost his believer count from forty to several hundred—or even thousands—in a short period, those faint threads of faith gathering together would trigger a qualitative change.
More importantly, once the believer count breached specific thresholds, the Divine Kingdom might unlock new functions.
Aaron closed his eyes, mapping out tomorrow’s plan in his mind.
The night breeze slipped through the gap in the window, causing the curtains to sway gently.
Snores echoed from the adjacent room—Tommy’s snoring, thunderous and continuous.
Aaron rolled over and pulled the blanket over his head.
There were still less than two months before term started.
Not much time, but enough.
The next morning.
Aaron woke up earlier than anyone else.
At five o’clock, he threw on his gray cloth shirt, tiptoed out of the room, headed downstairs, and slipped out through the back door into the orphanage’s backyard.
The backyard was a vast, overgrown plot choked with weeds as tall as a person.
A few rotting wooden crates were stacked in a corner, and beyond the perimeter wall lay an equally derelict parking lot.
The morning air was damp, dew clinging to blades of grass while spiderwebs gleamed like silver threads in the dawn light.
Aaron stood in the exact center of the backyard, closed his eyes, and activated the garden spider’s innate talent: Sensory Network.
An invisible web expanded outward from his consciousness, spreading in every direction.
Every quiver of a grass stem, every vibration of an insect’s wings, every track of an earthworm squirming through the dirt mapped out with crystal clarity in his mind.
Dense clusters of light specks ignited.
Across the surface and shallow soil of the backyard, there were at least three hundred insects of various kinds—ants, beetles, centipedes, earthworms, moths, crickets…
Aaron opened his eyes, bent slightly, and held his right hand palm down, hovering two inches above the ground.
Divine Majesty Radiation.
Unlike capturing them one by one through physical touch like before, he was attempting a far more efficient method this time.
An invisible glow lit up his palm—the most fundamental form of divine power: Affinity.
There was no threat, no oppression; only pure goodwill radiating from a higher entity.
For these tiny lives, that was more than enough.