“I finally finished it!”
Allen lay sprawled across the desk, his face pale.
On the desk sat the final page of the manuscript he had written:
[“They don’t know we’re not allowed to use magic at home.
I’m going to have a lot of fun with Dudley this summer…”]
That’s right.
It was none other than the famous first installment of Harry Potter—Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
Allen Wayne.
He’s a transmigrator yeah.
Ten days ago, he got isekai’d here in London, Great Britain, in the year 1991.
And he got the [HP Copywriting System] alongside it.
Although Allen himself couldn’t remember every single word of Harry Potter without missing a line, the system would send the full contents of one book into his mind each year.
After he finished writing it, the system would help him publish it.
Once the publication succeeded, the system would grant him rewards based on the response.
[Detected that Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone has been successfully “created.”]
[Publish it?]
“Yes!”
Allen answered without the slightest hesitation.
For the past ten days, he hadn’t dared to slack off for even a moment.
He had written more than twenty thousand words every single day—it had nearly killed him from exhaustion.
But once this book was released, the royalties were sure to make him a fortune.
Not to mention the mysterious reward from the system.
Just thinking about it made him a little excited.
The next moment, the manuscript on his desk turned into a beam of white light and vanished.
[Successfully published Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone Part One.]
“Huh?
Only half of it?”
Allen was confused.
[The second half will be published at the appropriate time.]
The system replied.
Allen nodded.
Too tired to think any further, he flopped straight onto his bed and fell into a deep sleep.
…
At the same time, inside Christopher Little’s office, a single lonely lamp was still lit.
The fifty-seven-year-old Christopher rubbed his aching brow.
The coffee in front of him had long since gone cold.
More than thirty submissions were piled on his desk.
He had spent the entire afternoon reading through them, yet not a single one had made him want to continue past the third page.
He sighed and prepared to pack up and go home.
Just then, he suddenly noticed an unfamiliar manuscript sitting at the corner of his desk.
Hm?
Have I read this submission before?
He slowly put on his reading glasses and looked carefully at the manuscript.
The top page was the cover.
Only one line was written on it:
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
The First Eight Chapters
Christopher frowned.
He was certain he had never seen this manuscript before.
“…Interesting.”
He muttered under his breath, then sat back down in his chair.
At first, he intended to toss the manuscript straight into the wastepaper basket along with the others.
But taking one quick look wouldn’t take much time anyway.
Out of his love for literature, and the professional ethics of a literary agent—he casually opened to the first page, intending to skim a few lines before putting it down.
[Mr.
and Mrs.
Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much…]
He raised an eyebrow.
The opening introduced the main characters, but it wasn’t especially striking.
[They had nothing to do with anything strange or mysterious, because they simply didn’t hold with such nonsense.]
Oh?
This kind of contrast seemed to imply that something strange was definitely going to happen to them.
The cover mentioned a “Philosopher’s Stone,” so this story was probably related to magic.
To successfully pique a reader’s interest from the very first paragraph—this author has some skill.
Christopher sat up a little straighter and continued reading.
The third sentence, the fourth sentence, the fifth sentence…
Before he knew it, Christopher had turned to the second page, then the third…
By the time he finally lifted his head from the manuscript, the rain outside the window had stopped at some point.
Beside his cold coffee, there was now another fresh cup of hot coffee.
His assistant must have come in and replaced it for him at some point, yet he hadn’t noticed at all.
“Merlin’s beard!”
Christopher muttered something even he himself didn’t realize he had said.
He had been so absorbed in the manuscript that he had subconsciously picked up one of the characters’ shocked exclamations from the book.
His fingers trembled slightly.
An unprecedented surge of excitement rushed into his mind.
The last time he had felt this way had been more than ten years ago.
A boy fostered by his aunt and uncle, receiving an acceptance letter delivered by owl on his eleventh birthday…
A hidden magical world tucked between platforms nine and ten at a London train station…
Moving portraits, a talking Sorting Hat, wizards using wands to cast spells…
All of it felt as though it had been pulled straight out of a child’s dream.
But what shocked Christopher the most was the way the book was narrated.
There was not the slightest trace of pretension.
The language was as clean as the air after rain, every word landing precisely where it ought to be.
This didn’t feel like something a novice author could possibly have written!
He turned to the final page of the manuscript, where the story stopped at an intensely suspenseful point—
[Harry felt that after spending the afternoon having tea with Hagrid, he had more things to think about than he’d had from all his lessons over the past few days:
Had Hagrid collected that little package in time?
Where was the package now?
Did Hagrid know something about Snape, but wasn’t willing to tell him?]
“That’s it?”
Christopher blurted out, his tone carrying a trace of genuine irritation.
He flipped past the final page to confirm it, only to find that there really was nothing after it.
On the back of the manuscript paper, he found only a small line of writing:
[Author: Allen Wayne.
Contact information: none for now.
Please remit royalties to—13 Baker Street.]
Christopher stared silently at the words “Contact information: none for now.”
No telephone?
Could this author be extremely poor?
But someone truly impoverished could never have written so many vivid scenes in the book.
Perhaps this Allen Wayne was an author from a once-respectable family that had fallen on hard times?
He had no way to contact Allen at all, except for an address he had never heard of—and that address didn’t even sound like a real place.
Baker Street?
He suspected there might not be such a place in all of Great Britain.
That meant he could only wait to be contacted.
He had no way to actively reach the author.
But this book—He had to sign this book.
Christopher stood up and began pacing back and forth around the office.
He had worked as a literary agent for twenty years.
He had handled over a hundred books.
Some had been nominated for the Booker Prize; some had climbed onto bestseller lists.
But it had been a very long time since he had felt this excited.
So long, in fact, that he had almost forgotten what the feeling was like.
It was like opening a good book for the very first time and being completely drawn inside, until everything around him ceased to exist.
This book had that strange kind of magic.
He sat back down at his desk, picked up a pen, and quickly wrote several lines on a sticky note.
Then he pressed the button for the internal phone.
A moment later, his assistant poked her head in, her face still thick with sleepiness.
“Cancel all my arrangements for tomorrow morning,” Christopher said without raising his head.
“Then contact Barry Cunningham at Bloomsbury Publishing for me.
Tell him I have a book he needs to see.
It’s urgent.”
The assistant blinked.
“Barry Cunningham?
But it’s the middle of the night—”
“Oh, right.
Never mind.
I’ll go see him personally tomorrow.”
Christopher cut her off, the corners of his mouth finally lifting into a faint smile.
“Also, help me look up an address.
13 Baker Street.”
“I know you may not have heard of it, but I need you to use every resource you have to check.
Even if it doesn’t exist on any map.”
The assistant wrote down the address with a puzzled expression.
She was just about to leave the office when he stopped her again.
“One more thing.”
“Yes, sir?”
Christopher’s fingers tapped lightly against the stack of manuscript pages on his desk, his expression thoughtful.
“If someone named Allen Wayne calls,” he said slowly, “no matter what I’m doing, put him through immediately.”
“Allen Wayne?”
“You’ll know that name soon enough.”
Christopher picked up the manuscript again and turned back to the first page.
His gaze seemed to fall upon the little boy in the story—the boy with round glasses and a lightning-shaped scar on his forehead.
Then he said softly,
“Soon, the whole world will know it.”
After his assistant left, Christopher sat alone in his office, gazing out at the thick darkness beyond the window.
“Allen Wayne,” he murmured to himself, his voice carrying a hint of curiosity and a faint, almost imperceptible trace of awe.
“What are you?”
~
Push the book forward by Adding to library and sending powerstones~!