Number 13, Privet Drive

London was always gloomy, even in summer. In the second week of the holidays, after Mrs. Dursley of Number 4, Privet Drive had finished cleaning her precious son Dudley's room, she went downstairs to inspect how well her nephew had done his chores.

The dishes were washed! The floor was swept and mopped! The dining table had been wiped down too...

He was decent labor material, at least. It wasn't as though all those years of food and clothes her family had provided him had gone to waste, Mrs. Dursley thought to herself.

If that brat hadn't broken Dudley's toy before, making Dudley forbid him from entering his room, I wouldn't have had to clean Dudley's room myself.

After a regretful sigh, Mrs. Dursley went out into the yard. Their yard was small, but she spent a great deal of effort tending the flowerbeds there every day.

More precisely, she used her neck, twice as long as an ordinary person's, to crane over the hedge and spy on the neighbors.

And what she gleaned from that spying often became seasoning for the Dursleys' dinner table conversation.

Today, she had set her sights on a household diagonally across from them at Number 13, Privet Drive. If she hadn't overheard the neighbors talking yesterday, she would have thought the house was still vacant.

Rumor had it that the owner of that house was extremely reclusive. Few people had ever seen him out on the street. Other than occasionally seeing him come out to water the flowers, no one saw him at all.

Sometimes, he even wore long robes with accessories that looked as though they were from the last century. Someone had supposedly seen him using some kind of steaming cauldron, pouring something from it to water the flowers, and muttering indistinct words at those flowers at night.

He was a very strange person.

Those rumors immediately reminded Mrs. Dursley of some unpleasant memories, so she planned to find out today what sort of person that fellow really was.

Yet fate was against her. Even after Mrs. Dursley had trimmed the bushes in front of the yard bald, she still hadn't seen the new neighbor.

Still, to be fair, even from across the hedge she could see those flowers. They were truly beautiful—silver-blue blossoms whose petals seemed to stack in thousands of layers. They were exquisite.

Even someone as uninterested in flowers as her could not help but look twice.

At the same time, she saw her precious son and nephew fooling around.

Seeing that the children were fine, she could only return home unhappily and begin preparing lunch.

Outside, the frail Harry was caught in an instant by the much larger Dudley, and despair filled his heart.

"Run! Go on, run again!" Dudley sneered, the fat on his face twisting into a terrifying knot.

Harry had a head of messy black hair and wore battered glasses that had been mended with tape countless times. At that moment, he glared fiercely at Dudley through those glasses with green eyes full of disgust.

Bang—

Dudley punched him in the nose. "Oh, you still want to look at me like that?"

Blood immediately streamed from his nose, but Dudley did not care. Grabbing Harry by the collar of his oversized old clothes, he pondered how to have some fun with him.

"Hey, Dudley!" A bucktoothed boy with plenty of freckles on his face walked over. It was Piers, Dudley's good friend. He gave Dudley a malicious look and gestured toward Number 13, Privet Drive.

"Oh~ right." Dudley suddenly grinned.

Number 13, Privet Drive was a place that had recently become the subject of widespread rumors among the children in the area. Everyone said an evil wizard lived inside, one who liked to eat children and watered his flowers with human blood.

Look at the flowers in that garden. So pretty—they were watered with human blood.

Clearly, Dudley knew more about the rumors surrounding Number 13, Privet Drive than his parents did. But Dudley knew his father disliked stories about wizards and other superstitious nonsense, so clever as he was, he never mentioned them at home.

"No! Dudley, you can't do this!" Harry waved his hands repeatedly, trying to break free from Dudley's grip, but it was useless. Having lived in a cupboard for years, he was far too frail, the complete opposite of Dudley.

"That's a garden someone has carefully tended," Harry hurriedly said.

"Isn't that exactly why destroying it would be fun?" Dudley grew even more excited upon hearing that.

As they spoke, they came to the hedge outside Number 13, Privet Drive. Dudley looked around first, and after confirming no one was there, he lifted Harry high and threw him over.

"No!"

Harry's cry was accompanied by Dudley and Piers's triumphant laughter, their fleeing footsteps, and the sound of the flowerbed being crushed.

Those stems were so fragile. Their crisp snapping sounds represented lives winking out one by one. Yes, lives. He did not know why he felt that way about two flowers, as though they had truly cried out in agony beside his ears.

Harry hurriedly rolled over and got to his feet, only to see that he had crushed several silver-blue flowers like roses made of countless layers.

The flowers looked extremely valuable, and Harry also noticed the blood-colored soil.

His breath caught, and those rumors flooded into his mind.

Harry wanted to run, but he also felt guilty. The two feelings tangled together, leaving him unable to take a single step.

As if on cue, a creak sounded just then, and the front door of Number 13, Privet Drive slowly opened.

Harry turned his head. The first thing he saw was a pair of exquisite Oxford brogues, followed by well-fitted trousers, then a white shirt and a leather vest.

Then Harry saw an exceedingly stern face, like that of a runway model. Golden hair was combed back from his face, which looked utterly lifeless. He held a watering can, and two ancient silver rings, already somewhat oxidized, adorned his fingers.

Muen pushed open the door and immediately noticed the skinny child who had inexplicably appeared in his flowerbed, along with the precious magical potion ingredient he had painstakingly cultivated—the Moonpetal Flower, crucial to his curse—

?!

My flowers! My flowers, how could you just die?!

Then he noticed Harry, who still had petals and leaves stuck to him...

No, I set up a thorn shock ward on the fence and placed a no-entry formation at the front gate.

It was precisely to keep some fool from damaging the potion ingredient.

Did you fucking fly in??

"Hey, kid!" Muen looked at him, anger in his voice. "Do you know how precious Moonpetal Flowers are?"

Harry was so frightened that he did not know what to do.

"S-sorry..." He felt as though his mouth would not obey him, and his legs trembled.

"I... I'll restore them!"

"Restore them?!" Muen laughed in exasperation, helplessly amused.

But the next second, something happened that he could not understand.

Harry suddenly dropped to the ground and covered the damaged flowers with both hands.

Harry was a little dazed too. He did not know why he was doing this. He just... had a feeling?! Yes, he felt that he should do this, that he could do this.

Muen sighed and walked over to pull Harry up by the hand. He could tell the kid had crushed his flowerbed due to special circumstances, unless he had been trying to use Muen's hedge for a back-facing high jump.

"All right, you can go. Even if you ruined the Moonpetal Flowers, what could I possibly—"

Muen stopped abruptly midway through his sentence and stared in astonishment at the flowers blooming in the frail child's palms.

"This..." Muen's voice caught, and he saw that the other flowers on the bushes were also beginning to regain their vitality. Centered here, with the stems as their veins, a force of life began to spread outward.

Harry was equally astonished. He stared in disbelief at the Moon... Moonpetal Flowers in his hands, now blooming with life once more!

He hurriedly looked up at the man, fear still lingering in his eyes. On one hand, he was afraid that the man truly was an evil wizard, just as the rumors claimed. On the other, whenever he showed this sort of abnormal ability, he was always punished without exception.

Once, Aunt Petunia could no longer stand his perpetually messy hair and cut it all off with scissors. The next day, however, all his hair had grown back. As a result, he had been locked up for a week.

Another time at school, Dudley and his friends had tried to chase him down and bully him again. In the blink of an eye, he had somehow ended up on the kitchen chimney. That earned him a month of confinement. For that entire month, he was either at school or in the cupboard, and he was not even allowed out for meals.

Then, in Harry's emerald-green eyes, he saw a large hand reach toward him. It wore a silver ring, was covered in calluses, and seemed to have endured many things.

What was he going to do? Was he going to grab me and tell Aunt Petunia? How long would I be locked up for? The entire holiday?

Or maybe he really was the evil wizard from the rumors. Was he going to take me away? Eat me?

Harry was frozen with fear, unable to move at all. He even felt that it would be fine if the other man killed him. No one cared about him anyway, and there was nothing worth clinging to in a life like this...

The large hand settled over Harry's messy hair. Then, in Harry's disbelieving gaze, a faint smile appeared on that lifeless face.

"Not bad, kid."