Consciousness came back to me abruptly. Hop - and I felt comfortable floating in a gel-like liquid. After waking up, I did not panic, and everything that happened did not seem so significant to me. I had a strange feeling at the moment: part of my mind and logic screamed that something unusual was going on, while the other part just didn't care. Well, if you find yourself in an unfamiliar place, you may feel your body strangely, but it seems that you are not in danger at the moment, so there is no point in worrying.

I do not know exactly how long I spent in my new environment, but everything went well with me. The only thing that worried me was the feeling of my essence being re-formatted and rebuilt. However, this did not bother me too much.It was warm and comfortable. I did not want to eat, but soon my pleasant pastime came to an end when I became cramped and began to feel hungry in my prison. The liquid that I was swimming in had disappeared long ago, and I realized that I needed to get out. This was an instinctual understanding. I didn't resist it and, with all my strength, I tried to break the walls of my container, but not from the first or even the second attempt. I began to get through at least a little.

As soon as I felt and heard the crack in my prison with all my body, things got better quickly. A few more attempts from my body to stretch broke the walls and I fell out. I wondered if all children have a black-and-white vision, and it must be strange being hatched because when I looked around I saw what had happened to me all this time - it was an egg that had split into several pieces. And who am I? Curious, he began looking at himself as best his new body allowed.Well, I congratulate myself on my birthday, Vasya! You're a reptile now. A person born to crawl cannot fly. In principle, even before that, I couldn't fly on my own without auxiliary equipment, so all I was thinking about was how and what to eat.

Then someone bent over me. I saw him in infrared vision and he was clearly some kind of humanoid. It was not a person, because there was game going on - I suddenly reborn as a snake and it wasn't a fact that people were in my new world, but this thought didn't stir any emotions for me, it was just accepted as given.

He said something gibberish, judging by the intonation he was seriously excited and happy, that's how I interpreted his emotions. It took me a year or more to realize where I was and who was talking to me. After all today I became a familiar of a mad but no less brilliant wizard named Salazar Slytherin.Ta-dam!!! I was reborn into the horror of Slytherin, the monster from the Chamber of Secrets. The saddest thing for me was that, before the canon, I had to live here for another nine centuries. And my new rebirth did not please me at all. Being stabbed with Godric's toothpick by a rickety child — m-hmm.

I had long been accustomed to eating food that was alive, which still beat and wriggled in my esophagus, but dying at the very beginning of my life—no, thank you!

Salazar didn't really talk to me much this time, but he did like to talk out loud. When he was busy doing magic research and experiments, he would talk through every step of the process. True, you had to peel away the praise odes he gave himself from his speeches, but that wasn't a big price to pay for invaluable knowledge. Thanks to this, I found out my future fate, which Salazar had chosen for me.It turned out that, as a magician, Salazar had slightly above average power in the current grading system, and he was three times weaker than Godric. If Godric had a sixth grade, then Salazar only had a fourth grade, so he won battles with powerful magicians only thanks to twisted logic and a vast arsenal of curses and black spells tied to prana rather than mana. And every time he cast such spells, he lost years of his life.

If Godric, who I saw when Salazar boasted about me, was in his early thirties despite being in his late seventies, the seventy-year-old Salazar looked his age due to the frequent use of forbidden magic and the use of his prana, which greatly damaged his physical health and caused his body to age rapidly compared to other wizards. The local Dark Lord, however, refused to die.

That's how he began his research into immortality. To do this, Slytherin delved into death magic, demonology, soul magic, and everything that had already been taboo for most wizards who considered themselves reasonable in recent years. He refused horcruxes due to one hundred percent insanity. From the phylactery like Koshchei, due to the loss of the colors of life, neither food, sex, or other joys of living were of interest to a lich. He also did not want to create the philosopher's stone or become a pranic addict. And then he decided not to look for an effective way but to invent and develop one himself. His ego was truly the greatest. After reaching this thought, he set about implementing his plan without hesitation.To begin with, he wondered about the new container. As he believed that he deserved the best, the new body had to be not only strong magically, but also physically to be as deadly as a Basilisk! And that was a sure thing!!! And why not? The Basilisk's body was great, but what about communicating with people? Magicians would not easily accept his new look, and how could they cast magic in it? So, what did that mean? Right, we needed to make sure the Basilisk could turn into a human. Of course, I was slightly confused by his scale of thought, but let's not be distracted.Taking the centuries-old ritual of creating a basilisk, Salazar began recalculating it with the possibility of instilling metamorphic abilities in the future King of Snakes. To do so, he ambushed a magician from an ancient family that had settled on the Tin Islands during the heyday of the Roman Empire. This family was called the Niger. I admit that it took me some time to realize that the Niger Clan is the future of Blackie. After all, "black" in Latin is "niger," and it remains to be seen how well the Nigers have managed to adapt to local realities and become known as Blacks. "Black" sounds more aesthetically pleasing than "Niger."Salazar managed to capture the young wizard, and for several years he kept him as a prisoner, while Slytherin studied his blood structure, power and conducted research accompanied by daily examinations and diagnostic rituals. As a result, he was able to break the magic code of his genes and isolate the exact area responsible for metamorphosis. Naturally, no one let go of Nigger after that, it was simply dissected into ingredients. Having received the necessary information, he started to play with it and tried to fit it into an existing ritual to create Basilisk. Although Salazar failed to influence the embryo directly during incubation, he gave this gift to a toad which was the mother hen. To be honest, toads are creepy!Slytherin strengthened and expanded the connection between the toad and the egg, and was able to introduce an additional feature into the ritual that should give me magical abilities like those of the toad. And he partly succeeded—I did have the ability to transform, but it was weak and its development would take a long time. Decades, if not centuries. But this didn't bother the old man much. He always has several plans for everything, so if one doesn't work he moves on to another.He already assumed that the gift of metamorphism might not work, and therefore used my soul to create his Basilisk. When creating the Basilisk, he created a circle around the ritual, preventing anything from entering or leaving it, including my soul, which was needed for the creation of new life. To create the Basilisk he used a summoning to bring the soul of a human who had not been purified from Samsara's wheel, and placed me in a trap before starting the ritual. As soon as the trap collapsed, my soul entered the egg and became the soul of the Basilisk embryo.

Why did Salazar need a soul that was aware of itself as a human being? To make animagus possible for the snake. Although this was just a theoretical assumption, if a person could find animal instincts within themselves and expose them to a specific beast to learn how to transform into it, then a human in the skin of a snake would strive to return to their natural state in their understanding. That is, human form. Magic is very flexible, and even children can unconsciously access it, using it to fulfil their desires. So, Salazar decided to use his new and unusual body to subconsciously exert pressure on himself with his own magic, so that his body would go through the animagus ritual without problems in the future. His flesh would be constantly under the influence of magic that would carry the desire for human form, making his body flexible and suitable for transformation.On my first day in this world, Salazar immediately performed the ritual of binding me to him, making me his familiar. At that moment, I was slightly surprised by the new introduction, and when a bloody finger was inserted into my mouth, I instinctively licked it with my forked tongue, overcome by hunger. Well, the magician didn't hesitate, immediately reading out the appropriate words, and the familiar-master ritual began.

For the past thirty years, I have been confined to the secret room, never leaving except for rare hunting trips in the forest. And let me tell you, there are more dangerous creatures here than me. For the first fifteen years, Salazar accompanied me on every hunt. Maybe in another nine hundred years, I will be thirty meters long, but now, at only seven meters, I don't feel safe in the forbidden forest.When I turned five and was already five meters long, I thought that I had become taller than the mountains. Yes, sure. As soon as Salazar and I left the secret passage in the Forbidden Forest and moved away from it a little, I almost became the late dinner for a manticore. That thing didn't care about my threatening gaze, and it surpassed me in strength and speed by an order of magnitude, and its claws were very sharp. It tore the skin from my back and if Salazar had not come along, I would have died.

It turns out that the basilisk's gaze only becomes deadly after fifty years, before that age, it can only knock out mentally weak animals or paralyze them for a short time. But the saddest thing is that Slytherin needed me only as a new body, as a container, and what to do about that, I had no thoughts.I stupidly physically cannot even dream of causing anything that could harm my master or disobeying his orders. The only hope I had was that, in the canon, the overgrown worm was a dumb snake and not a dark werewolf magician who, at the end of the twenty-first century, still scares young children with magic. But again, it's scary to rely on canon, because I wasn't there and how my actions will affect it. I'm not sure, but I hope it won't affect my soul...

What was Slytherin planning to do with my body? He conducted a ritual of brotherhood and soul bond between us, according to his plan he was going to commit suicide and then use the released mana and prana to push his soul into my body and throw out my soul.I turned fifty today, but it has been like six months since Slytherin stopped visiting my dungeon. Before leaving, from his slurred speech, I realized that he would finish his work. That is, after completing everything, he would immediately return and take over my body, and I would go on to a new journey.

However, Salazar did not reappear either a year or two later. On the third day, I felt my familiar bond break, and through our fraternal and spiritual connection, Salazar's battered soul flew into my body.Poor Slytherin made a bad miscalculation. I don't know what he was hoping, that I would be his familiar? But again, a familiar's bond only clings to the first three layers of the soul. And Salazar had lost his physical body and with it, the second layer of his soul responsible for prana, so our familiar-master bond could not hold on to his astral shell. Maybe he counted on the fact that he was a serpent slayer and all serpents should obey him. But that only applies to unintelligent serpents and those with less mental capacity than a wizard. In short, in my realm where I am the absolute master, my former master's soul appeared, severely weakened and struck by spells.

To clarify: mentally, I am an order of magnitude stronger than Salazar. It takes ordinary magicians years to work on their own consciousness and develop and structure their mental powers. The basilisk, however, is different. Their brain is an ideal tool for manipulating pure psi. In the language of programmers, it's like having the coolest hardware already installed with specialized software. With this, basilisks can mentally stun, freeze, or kill their prey instantly. Petrification was Rowling's invention, but basilisks don't need such nonsense and waste. Why would they spoil food by turning it to stone?So, I began to learn how these techniques could be implemented. Before that, no one had ever thought to put a soul into a basilisk with human personality. My limited knowledge and experience were enough to organize my thoughts, create an ideal memory for me, learn how to speed up my own consciousness by thirty times, build several powerful defenses, one of which is a solid adamantium sphere. And if someone had enough willpower and mental strength to persuade me that they could break through and get inside, there would be the flame of Amaterasu waiting for them. Well, if they could put it out/avoid/ignore it, well, the visitor would be waiting for years in an endless labyrinth inhabited by a countless number of monsters created by my sick imagination. There you would find xenomorphs, Teletubbies, various demons - from Balrogs to the legions of Warcraft, as well as the Queen of Blades and her entourage.I am the king and God in my container! And then suddenly, these guests arrived. Without going into too many details, I hit them with all the strength of my mind, and apparently overestimated Salazar's abilities. From my blow, their personality began to collapse! No, no, it's not working, where are they going?

Then, no longer thinking about the confrontation that I had previously dreaded, I was busy pulling out all his memories from the mental plane of Slytherin. It felt like it took me days. All that time, with the power of my magic, I kept his soul from rebirth, copying everything until I reached his early years of life.When I was able to copy everything that interested me, I relaxed a little. I will have to deal with this knowledge for a long time and carefully, because without it I will not be able to find a human form. The Slytherin soul is still restrained from leaving for rebirth by me, and looking at it, I decide to experiment. I have already received everything I want from him. By relaxing my attention to his mental body, I allow it to fall apart, but having separated from the main part of his soul, the mental flaps do not disappear anywhere but are still in my inner space.Hmm, that's interesting. And if so, then? And imagining myself as a surgeon, with a scalpel made of mana, psyche and will in my hands, I began to separate all other layers from Salazar's core. As soon as I cut all the connections, the core simply fell off and disappeared. Maybe it fell out of me right into the river of souls, or maybe it just left so quickly that I didn't notice it. All the shells of Salazar's soul stayed with me, but his core was gone.

What should I do now? Magic, after all, is first and foremost desire and faith in your own strength. Well, I accepted it and really wanted to absorb everything I got from my old master and fill myself with confidence. I can do this! I will definitely succeed!

Then the pain came...Consciousness returned to me in the same way it did on the day of my realization in the egg. It was quick and painless, and at that moment, I felt just fine.

I feel like I have become much stronger than before. If you measured my magic power according to human rankings, I previously had the power of a fourth-octane magician, but after absorbing Slytherin's magic, I became a fifth and a half octane. Ehh, if I could still use my magic power in a snake body, there would be no limit to such a powerful internal source of magic.

In this world, dragons, basilisks, manticores, and nundu have magical sources, not cores, like magicians. A magician's core grows rapidly and strengthens until they reach the age of 20 to 25. And in basilisk, the source continues to grow throughout their life, provided that the magical background is not saturated.

Well, now that I've found freedom, it's time for me to take care of myself.