Chapter 40.
From the day Soren got his wand at Ollivander's, he realized that his wand amplified his ability to cast dark magic.
He still remembered learning his first jinx, the "Snot Curse," in his first year—this curse was supposed to create effects similar to a severe flu, making the victim sneeze continuously or causing tears and mucus to flow incessantly. However, Soren managed to use it to produce an effect that made the subject collapse directly, causing Dobby, the test subject, to faint from excessive mucus.
Fortunately, Soren had prepared a stimulant; otherwise, Dobby might have been bedridden for days.
Although naturally suited for learning dark magic, Soren had no intention of becoming a powerful dark wizard. He studied dark magic books to gain a more comprehensive understanding of magic, rather than just learning the biased knowledge that had been harmonized by the Ministry of Magic and Dumbledore.
Soren understood the harm that learning and casting dark magic could do to one's soul.
Casting dark magic requires malicious intent as a foundation, which gives dark magic characteristics similar to addictive substances in the Muggle world. Each time dark magic is cast, it releases the evil and sinister thoughts within a person's heart, digging up the darkest corners hidden within. Over time, one's personality and soul can become distorted, becoming increasingly brutal and uncontrollable.
This is not Soren pretending to be virtuous; the importance of the soul to a wizard is common knowledge among all wizards. Once the soul is corrupted or twisted, it will eventually lead to a day of backlash from dark magic.
This is also the greatest difference between Grindelwald and Voldemort, the two generations of dark lords.
Grindelwald used dark magic to reform the wizarding world, striving to achieve his ideals. In his heart, he believed it was just a side, although many innocents were inevitably harmed in the process.
Voldemort, on the other hand, used dark magic for his selfish desires; he did not want to be an anonymous person. He wanted the whole world to know his name, for which he specifically named himself "Lord Voldemort," placed a name curse on it so that people would not even dare to mention it, and engaged in actions like organizing the Death Eaters and creating the Dark Mark, all to create and spread terror for his own fame.
This led Voldemort to ultimately meet a tragic end in the original story—his soul was too twisted, so time and again he was restrained and defeated by "Pure Love." There are still many mysterious and unresolved aspects in the magical world, such as love and causality, and Soren does not want to one day inexplicably be restrained by these mysterious forces.
Back to the three books of dark magic.
Among them, "The Fallen Beings" surprisingly records the creation of Dementors and various secrets. Dementors are a type of "Non-Being" that exists in a state between life and death; they do not reproduce but grow like fungi in decaying places. Furthermore, Dementors cannot be destroyed by any magic and can only be repelled by the Patronus Charm.
You may wonder, since Dementors cannot die and cannot be destroyed by magic, why have the ever-growing number of Dementors not been able to dominate the wizarding world? This is because, although Dementors cannot be eliminated, they can be made to perish by creating a special environment for them. Dementors feed on despairing emotions, and draining people's happiness is merely a means to create despair. If they are in an environment where no despairing emotions can be found to replenish their energy, then Dementors will eventually perish.
The first to discover how to control Dementors was the dark wizard during the medieval period. The exact time when Raczidian lived is unknown, only that it was before the establishment of the Wizarding Council (the predecessor of the Ministry of Magic). At that time, the wizarding world adhered to the jungle law of the strong prevailing over the weak, allowing him to study and use dark magic openly.
He discovered the secret of Dementors by chance and researched a method to produce them in large quantities—he established a secret chamber in his dark fortress filled with shadows and decay, allowing Dementors to thrive in such an environment.
He also created a unique method to control them, enabling Dementors to raid the nearby wizarding village. After being blocked by a young man named Elias using the Patronus Charm, he attempted to imitate the other's use of the Patronus Charm, intending to restrain the other's Patronus.
Unfortunately, he did not know that one of the conditions for casting the Patronus Charm is to have a pure heart of protection, and as a result, he was met with backlash of his own spell—his wand summoned a swarm of biting flies that quickly devoured his entire body.
Soren's greatest gain was the method to control Dementors; if operated correctly, he would gain a significant boost.
In the book "Dark Potions," Soren also found a very useful potion recipe—the Amplifying Potion. The Amplifying Potion is banned in the international magical community because its required ingredients involve dark creature materials, and the process of taking it carries considerable risk. Any deviation during the brewing process could lead to the user dying from a magical surge.
After taking this potion, the body experiences temporary discomfort, such as warmth, weakness, blood vessel dilation, and increased heart rate, requiring a certain endurance for pain. This is because the potion catalyzes the magical potential contained in the blood, intensifying it into usable active magic. If one can endure the torment for those few dozen minutes, a significant increase in magical power can be achieved.
Soren had long encountered a bottleneck in his magical research due to insufficient magical power, and how to enhance his own magic had always been a top priority in his mind.
It should be noted that Soren, who is well-read, lacks no theoretical knowledge of magic, but due to the limitation of his magical power, he is unable to use the vast majority of spells. If he could overcome the issue of magical power, he would be able to cast many high-energy-consuming powerful spells, elevating his strength to another level.
The brewing of the Amplifying Potion is not particularly difficult; the biggest problem in making it is that all the required ingredients are extremely precious and rare. The rarest and hardest to obtain ingredient in the Amplifying Potion recipe is the venom of a basilisk.
This raw material is the biggest hurdle for others, but it is not a problem for Soren at all. Soren had already collected a large amount of various precious materials from the bodies of the basilisk during the Chamber of Secrets battle, and the stock of snake venom is enough for him to brew several bottles of amplifying potions.
Unfortunately, due to the toxicity contained in the enhancement potions, each wizard can only take one bottle in their lifetime. This limitation did not surprise Soren, after all, enhancement potions use the toxicity of snake venom to stimulate the magical potential in the bloodline. No matter how successful the brewing is, there will definitely be some toxicity remaining; however, under the limit of one potion's content, that toxicity is not enough to harm the human body.
Other materials are also not easy to obtain, among them a type of Illusionary Scent Grass is classified as a Class A prohibited trade item. Soren plans to try his luck in the black market of Knockturn Alley, and if that fails, he will have to consider raiding Snape's laboratory.
As for the remaining materials, he has asked Dobby to help him purchase and gather them from various apothecaries.
Soren made quite a bit of money selling spider venom and basilisk flesh at the end of last semester, yet even so, in order to purchase the materials needed for the enhancement potions, he spent most of his savings, leaving only 1,000 Galleons for emergencies.
"The Abattoir Volume One" is the book that surprised Soren the most among the three. The book almost encompasses all magical fields in the magical world, covering areas such as spell theory, magic mechanics, transfiguration, curse theory, barrier theory, curses, mental magic, and soul magic. Unfortunately, this book was divided into eight volumes due to a great war in the Middle Ages, scattering them far and wide.
The copy Soren holds can only be considered one of the fragments of the eight volumes, and most of its content revolves around mental magic. From this, it can be inferred that the third-generation ancestor of the Malfoy family, Armand II Malfoy, must have obtained this book by chance and gained inspiration from it to create the family's signature spells, as many of the mental spells Soren learned from the Malfoy family spells can be found in this book.
Although this book cannot teach Soren any spells or enhance his power in the short term, it allows him to gain a deeper and more solid understanding of the essence of mental magic theory. In the long run, this is more valuable than learning a new spell.
Furthermore, Soren also took out the Malfoy family's secret spells for further study. Indeed, after reading "The Abattoir Volume One," his understanding of the family spells increased a level, and he successfully discovered the true inheritance of the Malfoy family—mental magic.
Armand II Malfoy was a natural mind master and an expert in mental magic. His naturally powerful mental strength merged into his bloodline after his death, passing on to his descendants. This explains why Soren, who activated his bloodline power, can easily learn profound mental magic.
The Malfoy family spells include many ancient and unheard-of mental spells, many of which fall under the category of dark magic and are considered forbidden spells, powerful enough to be compared to one of the three Unforgivable Curses.
For example, the legilimency, the Confusion Spell, the obliviate spell, the Hypnosis Spell, the Memory Manipulation Spell, the Gaze of Fear... Just hearing the names of these spells makes one feel an overwhelming sense of evil and terror.
This inevitably makes Soren curious as to why such powerful spells have never appeared in the original story's Malfoy family, and how the Malfoy family, possessing such a strong inheritance, still needs to humbly submit to Voldemort. Soren can only speculate that perhaps the loss of bloodline power has led the descendants of the Malfoy family to increasingly rely on schemes and place importance on politics and business, thereby neglecting the inheritance of magic.
Such examples are not unique to the Malfoy family. As far as Soren knows, the great Slytherin truly mastered snake language spells that rely on the pronunciation of Parseltongue. Without the inherited talent for Parseltongue from Slytherin's bloodline, one cannot learn them. After the decline of Slytherin's bloodline, the magic of Parseltongue was also lost.
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