Leaving Ollivanders behind, Shiro set off to purchase his required textbooks.
By the time he stepped out of the bookstore, ready to head back, Diagon Alley had become an absolute sea of people.
The sight instantly reminded him of the bustling food streets from his previous life–the density of the crowd was practically identical.
Relying on his formidable physical strength, coupled with Carrefour clearing a path ahead of him, Shiro finally managed to squeeze his way out of the throngs.
By the time he returned to the Leaky Cauldron, it was already noon.
“Once I get to Hogwarts, I must find a way to learn Apparition as soon as possible.
I can’t keep wasting time just commuting from place to place,” Shiro remarked, shaking his head as he looked at Carrefour, who was practically buried under an assortment of parcels.
Compared to Shunpo, which was tailored specifically for combat, Apparition leaned heavily toward utility and escape.
Provided one possessed sufficient magical reserves, it could take a wizard to the very ends of the earth.
However, it carried a significant degree of inherent danger.
If a wizard lacked proficiency or faced a sudden distraction mid-cast, they ran the risk of Splinching–leaving one half of their body behind while the other half teleported away.
Shiro scooped up Jerry, who had melted into a lazy, liquid puddle, and placed him down by the hearth before setting the owl’s cage neatly on the table.
He intended to start his magical journey by mastering a few “minor spells.”
For instance, Avada Kedavra.
Carrefour stood rigidly before Shiro, delivering a mechanical, word-for-word breakdown of the core fundamentals behind the Killing Curse.
Aside from consuming a substantial amount of magic, the absolute prerequisite for the spell was generating a flawlessly condensed, genuine intent to kill.
If the caster failed to summon sufficient malice, the resulting curse wouldn’t possess enough lethality to claim the life of a mere mouse.
Because casting any form of Dark Magic demanded a baseline of negative emotions, wizards who indulged in these arts for extended periods were exceptionally prone to degrading into dark wizards.
Currently, Carrefour had been processed into a puppet; he was essentially a heartless machine.
While this didn’t entirely strip him of the ability to cast Dark Magic, the raw destructive output of his spells had plummeted drastically.
Fortunately, Shiro didn’t require Carrefour for active combat; tapping into the wealth of magical theory stored within the puppet’s residual memories was more than enough.
With immense enthusiasm, Shiro dived headfirst into studying the Killing Curse.
Eight hours later.
The sun had completely dipped beneath the horizon.
Shiro rubbed his aching arm, which had grown thoroughly stiff from hours of continuous wand-waving.
Despite half a day of intense exertion, the tip of his wand hadn’t emitted so much as a single spark of green light.
*Forget it.
I shouldn’t aim too high right out of the gate; it’s better to start from the absolute basics.*
Shiro extracted the foundational textbook, The Theory of Magic, from his trunk, smoothed down the first page, and began reading with absolute seriousness.
For an entire month, Shiro practiced magic day and night without pause.
Inside the guest room, Shiro executed a crisp, calculated sweep of his wand through the air.
Not far away, Jerry, who had been lounging lazily across the table, abruptly bolted upright.
The feline’s anatomy contorted rapidly, shifting into a plump, brown mouse.
Operating with a frantic burst of speed that completely defied his round physique, Jerry scrambled toward the main door as if a lethal predator were snapping at his heels.
“Accio Jerry!”
A powerful surge of magic accompanied Shiro’s incantation, locking firmly onto Jerry’s fleeing form.
*Squeak, squeak, squeak!*
Jerry’s eyes gleamed with a thoroughly human intelligence, projecting a look of sheer, unadulterated terror.
No matter how frantically the fat mouse flailed his paws in mid-air, his body was inexorably drawn backward, floating steadily until he landed right in Shiro’s waiting palm.
“Whew…
success at last.
Here, your reward is a piece of dried fish.”
Shiro tapped a finger gently against Jerry’s head, watching the rodent let out a massive sigh of relief as he happily offered the treat.
This marked the fifth distinct spell he had successfully mastered over the course of the month.
In the wizarding world, an incantation had to be enunciated with absolute precision; otherwise, the resulting magical effect could deviate drastically from its intended purpose.
Earlier during his practice sessions with the Summoning Charm, Shiro had accidentally bitten his tongue, causing the pitch of the ‘A’ sound to spike a few octaves higher.
The blunder had triggered a violent, localized explosion.
It was precisely because of that traumatic memory that Jerry–upon hearing Shiro utter the incantation–had bolted like a madman, terrified that he was about to be processed into “Jerry Paste.”
As for the other four spells Shiro had managed to acquire, they consisted of the Mending Charm, the Wand-Lighting Charm, the Unlocking Charm, and the Knockback Jinx.
Accio, on the other hand, wasn’t explicitly drawn from his first-year curriculum; rather, he had extracted it directly from Carrefour’s repertoire, recognizing it as an immensely practical spell for daily life.
Among his current arsenal, his absolute most proficient spell was, ironically, the Mending Charm.
Shiro was entirely confident that given another month of focused practice, his mastery over Reparo would comfortably rival Ollivander’s.
The underlying reason for this hyper-proficiency was painfully simple: for some bizarre, inexplicable reason, whenever he committed a minor slip or mispronounced a syllable while casting, the spell would inevitably culminate in an explosion.
Even if the blast radius remained small, Shiro was forced to deploy a Mending Charm immediately to restore the room.
The furniture inside the Leaky Cauldron carried a hefty price tag; if he didn’t master *Reparo* to a flawless degree, his current financial savings would be entirely wiped out by property damages.
In comparison, his mastery over the remaining spells wasn’t quite as polished, though he still performed them at a level that comfortably outstripped the average second-year Hogwarts student.
*Do I possess some sort of hidden, volatile attribute?
Why does every single casting error manifest as an explosion?
The textbooks explicitly state that backfires should result in a variety of different, quirky side effects,* Shiro mused.
Setting Jerry gently back down onto the floor boards, Shiro eased his eyes shut.
With a swift tug of his consciousness, his mind departed his physical body and crossed over into the Grey Fog Space.
Within the expansive, mist-shrouded domain, the gathering had grown.
Aside from the Shiro of the Demon Slayer universe whom he had met previously, there was now a completely unfamiliar figure: the Soul Reaper Shiro.
The Soul Reaper Shiro currently had an arm slung around Demon Slayer Shiro’s shoulders, venting a torrent of bitter complaints.
“That bastard Aizen has officially started making his moves.
A massive number of souls have vanished from the Rukongai lately, and the casualty rate among active Soul Reapers is climbing.
Every single one of them keeps getting dumped into the Fourth Division for medical treatment.
I’ve been working grueling, non-stop overtime shifts just to keep these people knit together!”
Demon Slayer Shiro pushed the complaining Soul Reaper off his shoulder with a look of deep disdain.
“Who told you to go flaunting your enhanced Kaidō proficiency right in front of Captain Unohana?
If you hadn’t shown off, do you really think she would have piled that mountain of labor onto your plate?”
The Soul Reaper Shiro stiffened, his entire silhouette seemingly draining of color as he slumped onto the floor.
Only within the neutral confines of the Grey Fog Space could he secure a brief, unbothered moment of genuine respite.
The Wizard Shiro stepped forward, observing that the Soul Reaper iteration looked slightly different from the residual memories he had previously absorbed from Demon Slayer Shiro.
Attached firmly to the Soul Reaper’s shoulder was a fresh, brass-colored insignia engraved with the kanji for “Eighth Seat.”
“Ah, you must be the newcomer from the Harry Potter universe.
Have you successfully enrolled at Hogwarts yet?”
Upon spotting Shiro Howard clad in his distinct wizarding robes, the Soul Reaper Shiro bounded off the floor like a coiled spring.
He clamped his hands onto the wizard’s shoulders, a pair of dark eyes erupting with an unprecedented, brilliant light.
If he could somehow integrate the miraculous, reality-bending magic of the Harry Potter universe into his arsenal, he might finally discover a reliable mechanism to pierce through the absolute illusions of Aizen’s Kyōka Suigetsu, allowing him to dismantle the lieutenant’s overarching conspiracies at the absolute root.
“I hate to burst your bubble, but your grand strategy is going to hit a wall.
At the moment, the absolute vast majority of my foundational martial strength is derived directly from your own reserves.
The actual magic I’ve managed to master is limited to a handful of basic utility spells; I’m completely incapable of offering you any meaningful assistance right now,” the wizard explained with a casual shrug.
Then, delivering a follow-up blow to the Soul Reaper–who was currently re-evaluating the meaning of life after completing the standard memory exchange–he added, “Furthermore, I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of wandless magic.
Even if I did possess a specialized spell capable of countering illusions, I wouldn’t be able to channel it without my instrument.”
“However, our counterpart from the Demon Slayer universe might actually be able to offer a solution,” the Wizard Shiro noted, shifting his gaze toward the spectating Demon Slayer Shiro, hoping to alleviate his other self’s lingering distress.
“If he manages to fully unlock the Transparent World, it might provide the sensory acuity necessary to see right through the falsehoods of Kyōka Suigetsu.”
“Are you truly confident that the Transparent World can bridge the massive disparity in power scaling between our universes?” Demon Slayer Shiro interjected skeptically.
“For all we know, a random Menos Grande firing a single Cero could probably vaporize an Upper Moon demon instantly.”
An amusing, thoroughly absurd mental image involuntarily flashed across Demon Slayer Shiro’s mind: Muzan Kibutsuji, right on the precipice of evolving into the ultimate, flawless living organism, getting absolutely pulverized into dust by a stray Gillian.