"Heroes or..." Ollivander didn't finish his sentence and said, "The goodness or badness of power depends on the wizard who wields it, Mr. Murphy. Challenging authority is a brave thing, but the disruption of order often brings suffering. I hope you use your power wisely."
"Thank you for your advice, Mr. Ollivander," Murphy said and pulled out another, shorter wand from his sleeve.
Ollivander widened his eyes, "This, this wand... You indeed..."
Murphy aimed the wand at the old man, "I'm sorry, Mr. Ollivander, but you may need to remember some things again... Obliviate!"
Then, "Geminio!"
"Obliviate!"
"Geminio!"
"Obliviate!"
"Geminio!"
Obliviate could force Ollivander to recall the circumstances of Murphy's predecessor purchasing the wand seven years ago, locate that memory, blur it with the use of Geminio, and introduce false memories. After repeating this process several times, the false memory would become indistinguishable from the real one.
Memory was such an ambiguous thing. People had never truly had a pure retrieval of memories; every recall was actually a modification and reinforcement of the past memory.
And now, Murphy was using this mechanism to confuse Ollivander's memory, merging a part of today's wand purchase memory into the situation of Murphy's predecessor buying the wand seven years ago, replacing the material of the purchased wand with its current appearance.
After three repetitions, Ollivander would only remember that Murphy had bought a yew wood wand fourteen inches long with a phoenix feather core. He would completely lose memory of Murphy's original beech wood wand.
Ollivander collapsed, and Murphy let him rest.
The brain, after the violent alteration, needed a rest to adjust conflicting memories.
When he woke up, he would only remember that he had a strange dream.
While Ollivander was sound asleep, Murphy summoned his ledger, which recorded the information of every wand sold from the shop. Murphy found the record from seven years ago, lightly crossed out the original "twelve and a half inches, beech wood, unicorn hair" and changed it to "fourteen inches, yew wood, phoenix feather."
With this, Murphy had a completely untraceable wand.
He could use it freely in the future without worrying about investigations like Priori Incantatem.
More importantly, the history of this wand was buried, as if it had never existed.
A trip to Knockturn Alley was quite fruitful, and Murphy, in his happy mood, Apparated back to Darkholm Manor.
After chatting with Alexander Wood for a while, he learned that they had run out of potion ingredients to brew the Beautification Potion, and the blending work had already been completed. Murphy thought for a moment and assigned Alexander another task.
"Do you know any spells that can make people keep secrets?" Murphy asked.
He was planning to establish a potion research institute, and in the future, he might create a spell research institute as well. Both would require the participation of Muggle scientists and researchers.
Therefore, ensuring their secrecy became a critical issue to solve.
"Unbreakable Vow?" Alexander suggested.
"I thought of that, but Unbreakable Vow has the effect of causing death if the person reveals the secret. What I want to achieve is preventing the person from disclosing the secret in the first place."
Unbreakable Vow could serve as a deterrent, but its premise was that the person who made the vow must be sincere and aware of the consequences of breaking it, which limited its applicability.
"When you want to reveal a secret, it will trigger a Silencio curse or a Petrificus Totalus curse, preventing you from disclosing the secret."
Murphy nodded, "This sounds promising."
The Unbreakable Vow was indeed a powerful spell, almost one of the most powerful spells he knew. It could treat an entity or a location as a secret. When the secret was kept by the keeper, the entity could not be found, seen, or touched by anyone outside the secret.
It was considered powerful because the spell's scope of application was conceptual, reversing the range of effect from the keeper and the kept secret to everyone else outside.
At the same time, the effect it achieved was also conceptual, rejecting all actions of non-keepers toward the kept secret, whether physical or magical, such as seeing, hearing, flying curses, guiding spells, and so on.
It was as if it erased the kept secret from the world of non-keepers.
Murphy shook his head, "This spell won't work."
The keeper could voluntarily reveal the secret, and the Unbreakable Vow couldn't achieve Murphy's goal.
"Do you know any spells similar to the Unbreakable Vow but with the effect that the person, once they try to reveal the secret, will be silenced or petrified, like the Silencio curse or Petrificus Totalus curse, preventing them from disclosing the secret?"
Murphy, being an orphan, had learned magic at school. Most of his knowledge was about standard spells, and only a few, like the Levicorpus spell, were learned from books in the library.
He didn't know a lot of magic, and children from wizarding families like Alexander might know even more.
"Silencio curse..." Alexander pondered for a while, "I think I've seen something similar somewhere, but I can't recall."
"It's alright, take your time to think. This matter is not urgent."
After all, the research institute would take some time to establish, and before that, he had to deal with the bankruptcy crisis of the Umbrella Corporation.
Thinking of that, Murphy had Alexander pack up the mixed potion ingredients and a bottle of Beautification Potion, then went to find Patrick.
After storing the mixed ingredients in a warehouse found by Patrick, Murphy told him about the outcome of his meeting with Rita.
"She's not willing to stand with us, and it seems she's not someone who can be bought with money."
Murphy had great respect for scientists who stuck to their principles, and he couldn't bring himself to do something like using the Imperius Curse on her.
"That's already good enough. At least you've attracted the attention of many scholars. Maybe their research will bring us some good news. We can also use this to do some positive publicity."
Murphy nodded, "How about your negotiations with those companies?"
Patrick shook his head, "Don't mention it. A bunch of vultures! Insatiable! They know we want to delay, so they're pushing hard. I brought in some negotiation experts, but they're advising me to go public."
"Public?" Murphy didn't quite understand.
"On the surface, they say going public allows public oversight, offsets some negative public opinion, and allows pharmaceutical companies to invest and turn enemies into friends."
"In reality, they just want to initiate a hostile takeover after going public and devour us."