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It is difficult to wake up in constant light conditions and other external factors - you simply do not know how long you slept, what day it is, and what is going on. However, as soon as I got to my feet and dust myself off, I realized that I slept for a day. I pulled out my wand and conjured Tempus.
"Hmm, one o'clock in the morning. So the students are coming today."
I had a couple of household spells to tidy myself up, cleaned myself, washed my face with the same method, and freshened myself up - I don't like hiking hygiene, it dries me up, but the feeling of the same unwashed head is much worse.
I gathered my junk in the form of an unchangeable bag, put on a complex of concealing charms, and left the Room of Requirement and went to the Chamber of Secrets. Too many secret rooms in this castle, though. Should I make my own? Why not? I'll figure out exactly how to achieve something like that later.
My stomach rumbled on the way, forcing me to turn into the kitchen. The house-elves didn't seem to need much sleep at all, and they were happy to feed me. But after a hearty dinner, I absolutely lost the desire to go somewhere. Eventually, I reached the common room, which was empty and boring. I took a chair by the fireplace, transfigured the pouf, threw my legs on it, and took a notebook and a pen out of my bag. I threw yellow Lumos over my head with my wand, adjusting the color with a desire - and why does no one focus on such a possibility? And how did I know that? Voldemort? The Dark Lord is a fan of colored Lumos. How lovely.
I need to see if my calculating skills have improved because that was the main point of the whole thing. Okay. Let's run through the arithmancy.
As soon as my gaze fell on the equation and began to read it, my mind began to calculate it quite briskly. Not like I was used to, thinking in words or images - my brain simply began to operate on the knowledge of the material. Well, for example, I know the multiplication table and want to multiply six by seven. Usually, I unconsciously mentally say, "Six times seven. Or I add visualization to that as well. But now I just write the result at a glance, and I know for sure that the calculation has gone through, and I understand how, but... too quickly. That's about how it was with the arithmantic equations - running my eyes over it. My consciousness or subconsciousness was able to quickly calculate it, and I had no problem considering each step of the solution separately.
I decided to complicate the task and remembered higher mathematics. But I did not remember any specific equations, so I decided to invent them, combining systems, matrices, integrals, trigonometric functions. In general, to make a complete mess. But I gave up halfway through - I was solving equations as I was making them up, and I considered dozens of "development scenarios" depending on the next component. That's crazy.
I decided to check my spatial thinking. Even in my previous life, I noticed a rigid and very strong dependence of consciousness on subconsciousness. It is enough to imagine a two-dimensional man made of sticks, even thick sticks. Now, when you have imagined it from the side, mentally make the man do a backflip, but so that the man lands strictly vertically on his feet. The fall of the man in the imagination is absolutely irreversible - the subconscious mind automatically calculates the shift of the center of mass, inertia, gravity, and a bunch of other parameters, up to the average mass and density of the abstract man. Making the man land strictly vertically and not fall down is a simple task, but it requires concentration and control. But if you don't make him do such a trick and land normally, bending forward at a slight angle, then the subconscious will straighten him by itself in the end. I easily ignored my subconscious mind in my mental experiment and "stuck" the little man strictly upright.
The next mental experiment was the rotation of a three-dimensional figure. A ball, a pyramid with three or four sides, a cube - no problem at all. I can spin it any way I want. But if there are more than six sides, and, God forbid, they are not of the same configuration, the brain will instantly turn the rotation into a rather chaotic transformation - a simple lack of either experience or control over brain resources. What was my surprise when I was spinning in my mind a fullerene of sixty atoms as if it were a computer, not a brain in my head. Not a single moment of concentration, a clear representation of each atom in the form of a separate sphere and purely symbolic connections between them. Let's complicate the experiment. Let's take the structure of the spell from the Grimoire, and make it more complicated. The most complicated one is Desolation. It's like a Fiendfyre, but omnidirectional and visually similar to Patronus Pulse. Well, only dark purple and literally scatters not very dense organic matter into atoms. The connection break is extremely brief but sufficient to make everything but the bones crumble into incomprehensible mush. This scheme is very complicated, consisting of a huge number of figures, lines, and symbols. Interesting, by the way. Once again, I notice that the grimoire spells have a different creation and activation principle than the local ones, but I digress.
The scheme of Desolation clearly appeared in my mind, but that's not surprising - all of the Grimoire's spells are permanently imprinted in my mind. What was surprising was that the scheme didn't "fall apart" when I tried to change it a bit - it usually does. I spun it as I pleased, though I had no idea what I was doing - knowledge is needed here.
"Holy shit..." I exhaled without my input, amazed at the degree of optimization in my thinking. However, my head hurt a little and judging by the sensations in my neck and nape, my blood pressure spiked.
It turns out that although the optimization of thinking has been successful, it has become a capacity of the mind, which is stored in the soul. But the mind works through the body, and that's what's failing now. Now I understand why Rowena, though she became one of the most famous witches and perhaps the best in the field of charms and other manipulations that require clear calculation and spatial thinking, still was not a super-witch.