After a rather unorthodox fight, Murphy acquired a check for two million pounds and a Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit.
He left several men with bruised faces and foaming mouths in the factory. When they woke up trying to recall what happened, they would find themselves unable to remember anything.
Doing good deeds without leaving a name, this was all thanks to the Obliviate spell.
Murphy drove to the bank, transformed into Jim Stick's appearance using a Polyjuice Potion that included Jim's hair, cashed the check, and deposited the money into an anonymous account.
Thus, he instantly became a millionaire.
Yesterday, he was earnestly trying to make money, and today, he was enormously wealthy.
Achieving financial freedom happened too quickly.
But selling magical potions was for making money, and now that the money was in hand, it didn't matter how it came!
First, build up from there! Murphy glanced at the Silver Spirit.
Not very familiar with cars from the '80s, and since British cars have the steering wheel on the right side, he caused quite a few accidents along the way.
Now, this luxury car's front bumper was detached, the rear bumper dented, and the body was covered in scrapes, looking as if it had just survived a fatal car crash.
So, Murphy took it to a car dealer, sold it at half price, and then switched to a sports car.
A silver Porsche 959.
One of the world's most outstanding supercars at the moment.
Although wizards could Apparate and fly on brooms, the allure of a sports car was more about the feeling of controlling a wild machine with one's mortal body, akin to an initial mechanical ascension.
Murphy quickly fell in love with this feeling. After driving the 959 around London twice, he picked up a fair-skinned and beautiful British girl.
The girl, Sylvia, was a sophomore at the Royal College of Music, aspiring to become a violinist.
Murphy lied, claiming he was a novelist preparing to write a magical story called "Harry Potter."
They enjoyed each other's company, visiting the British Museum, St. Paul's Cathedral, watching an opera, attending several concerts, and after dinner one day, naturally ended up in bed together.
At night, standing in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, with Sylvia sleeping soundly on the bed behind him, Murphy poured himself a glass of wine. Finding he couldn't get used to the taste, he eventually opted for a glass of water.
Overlooking the Thames and the brightly lit London in the distance, that peculiar thought returned to his mind.
Who the hell am I? Why the hell am I here? In just a few days, everything about the wizarding world had become blurry.
Is there really a magical world behind this bustling city?
Did I really go to Hogwarts? Am I really a wizard? Isn't this all just a dream? He took out his wand and pointed it at the bottle on the table, uttering the spell: "Wingardium Leviosa."
The whiskey floated up.
"Murphy?"
Just then, Sylvia's voice came from behind, "How did you do that?"
Murphy turned around, "You weren't asleep?"
"I just had a nightmare," the girl said, looking at him bewilderedly, "Is that a wand? Is this magic? The magic from your story? I'm not still dreaming, am I?"
Murphy smiled, "It's just a dream, go back to sleep."
"But..."
With a wave of his wand, Sylvia's sentence was cut short as a heavy drowsiness pulled her back into sleep.
Murphy stayed in the room a little longer.
He pondered, looking at the refined young man in the mirror and suddenly felt somewhat listless.
In just a few days, he seemed to have already grown tired of the game of wealth.
He wrote a check and left it along with the keys to the 959 on the girl's hand, then Disapparated from the room.
He returned to the Darkholme Manor.
Since the Sanders couple was imprisoned in Azkaban, this gloomy manor had been inhabited only by Murphy, who mostly stayed at school during the year and rarely came back, leaving the house without any signs of life.
He wandered through a few dust-covered rooms and eventually made his way to the basement.
Originally a wine cellar, it had long been devoid of stock and was transformed by Murphy into a magical laboratory during his fourth year.
The floor and walls of the cellar had been magically turned into solid rock, half of the space was equipped with a few dummies with targets for practicing spells.
The other half contained several experimental tables filled with various bottles and pots, serving as a potions laboratory.
After practicing several spells in the spell-practice area, destroying and restoring the dummies several times, then concocting some potions until all the stored materials were used up.
Looking at the potions table with the Draught of Living Death, Amortentia, and several bottles of Skele-Gro, Murphy took a deep breath, and his previously dampened spirits suddenly improved a lot.
"Damn it, indeed, this is more my thing."
As a transmigrant, orphan, and the son of a dark wizard, Murphy had few friends. During the summer holidays, he spent his time practicing spells and researching potions.
He loved magic, perhaps even more than the wizards themselves.
In fact, in his view, the wizards' attitude towards their most important trait—magic—was too casual.
They lacked curiosity and the desire to explore, taking such a magical thing for granted and treating it as a mere tool, as long as it was sufficient, seemingly never thinking to explore its principles.
In his eyes, the wizarding world's "magic tree" was strangely skewed.
For example, in a world where almost every adult wizard could Apparate or transport through Floo powder, Portkeys, and other means, they still used owls for communication.
Transporting material—even transporting living beings intact—was possible, so was transmitting information really that hard?
The original works mentioned mirrors that could communicate and magic for remote communication through flames, but strangely, these were not widely adopted, and people still had to endure the high latency of owl post.
Moreover, most wizards in this world could not fly.
Even though they could transform into birds, insects, and possessed spells like Levitation Charm and Mobilicorpus to control object movement, no one invented a flying spell to allow themselves to soar freely through the sky.
They preferred to fly on brooms.
And then, there was the Time-Turner, a defiance of the unbreakable Second Law of Thermodynamics as understood by Muggles.
There were also potions for immortality that could allow someone to live for over six hundred years.
Yet, few sought immortality, and aside from Voldemort, a freak, it seemed most wizards were content with aging.
Playing with time and achieving immortality was difficult, wasn't it? Even resurrection and rebirth, were they really that hard?
Yet, looking through wizarding history, only a few fools like Voldemort and Grindelwald had tried to achieve immortality.
Wizards seemed very open-minded, so much so that they appeared to have no desires.
But Murphy was different.
He was a transmigrant.
He was once a Muggle.
Having been trained in scientific thinking, his way of thinking was entirely different from that of ordinary wizards.
Seeing the many miracles in the wizarding world, he couldn't take them for granted like other wizards. He wanted to make more of those miracles happen, to turn more of what he had once thought impossible into possible through magic.
Even more so, he harbored an ambition greater than Voldemort's, Grindelwald's, or any dark lord in wizarding history:
He wanted to achieve immortality, to be omniscient and omnipotent!
All these were temporarily impossible with the technology of his previous life, and magic alone as known by wizards was also insufficient.
But if the two could be combined...
Maybe it wasn't impossible.
Murphy picked up a notebook from the potions table.
This notebook recorded his research findings on potions over the years, though in truth, there weren't many remarkable discoveries, mostly just records and summaries for practice.
But the last part was different from the rest.
Looking at the experiment records for "producing Essence of Dittany by non-magical means," his face gradually broke into a smile.
Now he understood why he had thought of selling magical potions in the Muggle world.
If it was just about making money, using magic to rob would be faster and safer.
What he really wanted to do was to use the power of Muggle technology to study magic, hoping to advance it to realms he couldn't reach on his own.
He wanted to see what was at the end of magic.
He knew what he had to do.