In the main hall of Gringotts, Aaron disengaged his invisibility.
The moment he appeared, the three goblins behind the counter looked up simultaneously.
The eldest goblin in the middle dropped his quill, leaving a long dark ink streak across his ledger.
“Inner Hall 713,” Aaron said calmly as he walked up to the counter.
The three goblins exchanged looks.
The eldest cleared his throat, his voice carrying an unnatural deference.
“Please wait a moment. We will inform—”
“No need for notifications.”
A voice came from behind the stone door at the side of the hall.
Griphook squeezed through the crack in the door, wearing a black goblin suit that was noticeably more formal than the last time he was seen.
His collar was buttoned all the way to the top, but the dark circles under his eyes betrayed a severe lack of sleep.
“Mr. Klein, please follow me.” Griphook bowed, guiding Aaron toward an inconspicuous iron door at the deepest part of the hall.
This door looked entirely out of place amidst the grandeur of Gringotts.
Cast from crude pig iron without any ornamentation, it bore only a line of tiny goblin script carved near the handle.
Griphook pulled out a dark iron key, inserted it into the lock, and turned it seven full times.
With every turn, a heavy mechanical clunk echoed from within the door.
The iron door opened.
Behind it lay not a mine cart track, but a stone staircase leading downward.
The steps were narrow, wide enough for only one person at a time.
No torches or lamps illuminated the side walls; only the blue phosphorescence seeping from the cracks in the stone emitted a faint, pale light in the darkness.
“The ordinary mine cart tracks go down to the seventh underground level at most,” Griphook said as he walked, his voice echoing off the stone walls.
“The inner hall of Vault 713 is below the seventh level. We call it the Abyss Level.”
“How many vaults are there on the Abyss Level?”
“Currently, only yours.”
Aaron gave Griphook a glance.
Griphook kept his head down, not daring to meet his eyes.
“The Abyss Level wasn’t built by Gringotts. Three hundred years ago, when Gringotts was expanding its foundations, we dug into a naturally occurring underground space. That space… doesn’t belong to any known geological structure.”
“What do you mean?”
“It means that Gringotts’ vein analysts spent fifty years and still couldn’t identify the rock composition here.” Griphook stopped at a turn and looked back at Aaron.
“Your father requested back then that the item be stored in the deepest, safest place. Gringotts provided several options, but your father took one look at the Abyss Level and said, ‘Right here. It belongs here.'”
The stairs grew steeper and steeper.
The temperature dropped rapidly.
Aaron’s exhaled breath turned into white mist.
The phosphorescence on the stone walls faded as well until only the goblin lantern in Griphook’s hand remained lit.
“We’re here.”
Griphook came to a halt.
The lantern’s dim light illuminated a small area ahead.
A door.
Cast in bronze, it stood roughly three meters tall and less than two meters wide.
The door surface was densely engraved with dark red runes—not carved onto the surface, but embedded within the bronze itself, as if cast into the metal before it solidified.
The runes were moving.
It wasn’t an optical illusion caused by the light.
Those dark red lines were slowly squirming, like living blood vessels pulsing beneath the metal surface.
With every pulse, an almost imperceptible aura leaked through the crack of the door.
That aura brushed against Aaron’s skin, eliciting no reaction whatsoever.
But Griphook was trembling.
The goblin manager stood five paces away from the door, his knuckles turning white from clutching the lantern handle tightly.
His teeth chattered, and his face wore the expression of someone with a gun held to the back of his head.
“Mr. Klein,” Griphook stammered, pulling a leather pouch from his robes and offering it with trembling hands.
“These are protective potions I prepared… three kinds of antidotes and a bottle of concentrated Phoenix tears essence… Though I’m not sure if they’ll work against that thing, it’s better than nothing…”
Aaron took the leather pouch and handed it back.
“Not needed.”
“But…”
“Griphook.”
Aaron’s voice wasn’t loud, but every word felt carved into the air.
Griphook’s mouth remained agape, the rest of his words stuck in his throat.
“Step back.”
Griphook retreated immediately.
He scurried back behind the corner of the stairs in three bounds, peeking out with only half his head to watch.
Aaron turned back to face the bronze door.
Sensing his presence, the dark red runes on the door squirmed faster.
The lines began to gather and condense, forming a complex pattern in the center of the door—like an open eye.
The pupil of the eye lit up.
A dark red light shot out from the pupil, striking Aaron’s face.
This was a magical identity verification.
If it didn’t match, the runes would directly trigger a backlash—causing soul trauma at best, and instant death at worst.
Aaron could feel the dark red light scanning him.
It started with the magic fluctuations on the surface of his skin, then penetrated into his flesh and bone, and finally touched the crystal deep within his soul.
The Creator Godhead.
The instant the dark red light touched the Godhead, the entire bronze door shuddered.
The eye formed of runes spun rapidly three times in the middle of the door, and then—it stopped.
The dark red light went out.
It wasn’t shut off; it was devoured.
The light spreading from Aaron’s palm was almost colorless, but wherever it reached, the dark red runes that had squirmed on the door for who knows how many years receded layer by layer.
Not bursting, not shattering, but dissolving.
The process was unnervingly silent.
There was no roar, no explosion, nor any of the light and sound effects expected from a magical collision.
The moment the dark red runes came into contact with that layer of colorless brilliance, they lost all aggression.
Like crayon drawings meeting water, the lines faded, blurred, and finally vanished entirely.
Griphook pulled his head back behind the corner.
He had seen it.
Those runes—a seventeen-layer locking array that Gringotts’ top goblin runic grandmasters had taken two months to reinforce—had dissolved silently under the touch of a ten-year-old boy’s hand like butter meeting a red-hot iron plate.
Silent dissolution.
The entire process took less than thirty seconds.
The moment the last dark red line vanished from the door, the bronze doors emitted a deep, resonant hum.
And then, it opened.
Not pushed open, but opening by itself.
The two heavy bronze panels slowly swung outward, the hinges making a rusty creaking sound that hadn’t turned for centuries.
The space behind the door was unexpectedly large.
No, not large—empty.
A hemispherical stone chamber, roughly twenty meters in diameter with a ceiling about ten meters high.
The floor and walls were made of the black rock Griphook had described as having an “unidentifiable composition,” their surfaces smooth as mirrors, reflecting Aaron’s figure.
There were no Gold Galleons, no silverware, nor any of the treasures a vault should have.
In the entire stone chamber, there was only one thing.
Right in the center stood a waist-high black stone pedestal.
It was circular, its top slightly concave into a shallow dish.
Inside the dish, a disc hovered in midair.