On the surface, for Hogwarts students, the beginning of a new week seemed no different from the week that had just passed.
The House Tables in the Great Hall still had plenty of rich, steaming-hot food laid out whenever it was time to eat.
Owls still flapped their wings as they flew into the Great Hall through the doors or windows, dropping letter after letter and package after package.
Yet that was only the surface. Looking more closely, one would find that far more owls than usual had flown into the Great Hall.
Most of these extra owls had come to deliver various newspapers and magazines, such as the Daily prophet.
Faced with this, neither the students nor the professors found it surprising.
After all, even The Evening Prophet, which was only published when major events occurred, seemed to have become routine.
And for several consecutive days, the pages of The Evening Prophet had been completely occupied by war news.
Whether in the Magical World or Muggle countries, frictions and conflicts were breaking out everywhere, and they were only growing worse.
This trend had even affected the Daily prophet. Although it had condensed its reports on war-related news, the paper was still nearly twice as thick as usual.
The trivial news stories that normally filled the Daily prophet had become almost impossible to find.
In the blink of an eye, it was already Wednesday. At breakfast, countless owls swept over the Great Hall again, and the newspapers and magazines they dropped fell like raindrops.
"Ugh!" Anthony Goldstein merely glanced at the Daily prophet before snapping it shut and pushing it aside with distaste.
"Anthony, what's wrong with you?" Chris Moen picked up the Daily prophet and skimmed it. "It doesn't seem like... anything major happened, does it?"
"Nothing major happened?"