Lupin's Situation

"He's a despicable little man!" The Old Wizard hovered in midair, looking down at Goblin Pedro. "He took advantage of his female apprentice going mad and faked his own death, leaving me to face an enemy he couldn't even handle himself."

Pedro's face flushed red. He quietly took a step back, then suddenly puffed out his chest and strode forward. "All your apprentices want me dead. Why shouldn't I use you as a shield?"

"Ha." The Old Wizard let out a sharp laugh. "So you finally admit it."

"Why don't you think about why none of your apprentices treat you like a teacher?"

Pedro finally calmed down. His cold, mocking gaze swept over the Old Wizard. "You're dead. You've become a Ghost. I don't have to fear you anymore."

"Right." The Old Wizard chuckled, dripping with mockery.

"And your apprentices want to kill you, too!"

"Right, right, right." The Old Wizard had learned well from Anton. His "Yeah, right, right" attitude made Pedro's face flush red all over again.

Anton looked at the Old Wizard curiously. "Last time I followed you to the gathering place for wandering wizards, Pedro was there too. You two seemed to be getting along just fine."

The Old Wizard sneered. "Because he can't kill me."

Pedro sneered at the same time. "Because he can't kill me."

How interesting. Anton clicked his tongue in amazement. "So you've kept up this delicate balance?"

Then the two of them spoke in unison. "People have to learn to compromise."

What the hell did they mean, people had to learn to compromise? Neither of them was human.

One was a centuries-old Goblin; the other was a Ghost who could barely hold on to his own will.

"Can you tell me about Lupin first?" Anton pointed at the Lupin model on the sand. "Oh, the uncle I told you about."

He didn't care how much these two argued. No matter what their relationship with him was, neither seemed remotely reliable.

The Old Wizard said Anton liked to lie, but Anton didn't think everything the Old Wizard said was necessarily true, either.

Lupin seemed more dependable.

He'd be relying on Lupin to protect him, a kid, from now on. Of course he wanted to know more.

Whatever their personalities or morals, the two shared one thing: a researcher's dedication.

The Old Wizard sounded stubbornly insistent. "Don't compare Blood-Cursed Werewolves to Werewolves. They're not the same! You can't see the truth of magic. I saw with my own eyes that Werewolves and Animagi have identical Magical Power patterns."

"I have no idea what you're talking about." Pedro sounded impatient. "An Animagus is an advanced Transfiguration Spell. A Werewolf is a toxin that targets Magical Power, while a Blood-Cursed Werewolf is afflicted by a Curse that targets the bloodline."

"It's like the difference between Goblins, House-elves, and humans. They might look different in appearance and height, but they're entirely different species in essence."

"Oh, poor Pedro. He thinks living for a few hundred years means he knows everything, when all he can do is a few little tricks that everyone knows." The Old Wizard spoke in a singsong voice, sneering from midair.

"You don't know shit!" Pedro exploded. He jumped up and tried to hit him, but he was too short. No matter how much he flailed, he couldn't reach the Old Wizard.

"Can't reach me, can't reach me! Hehehe." The Old Wizard drifted back and forth.

Anton could already imagine what would happen next, because he'd been through it before.

The poor Goblin would have an incessantly noisy, invincible-bug Ghost at his side, even when he ate, slept, or went to the bathroom.

No wonder the Old Wizard was a Cruciatus Curse Master. Even after death, he could still torment people until they went mad.

Brilliant.

Anton could start looking forward to a wonderful life of sleeping and waking up in peace.

At last, when the two had finally had enough, Anton cleverly raised another question at the moment when the tension was about to peak.

Goblin Pedro finally had a way to back down. Without even glancing at the Old Wizard, he continued pointing at the sand on the table.

"Watch closely, Young Wizard."

The Werewolf's features disappeared from the sand, leaving only a dark, vaguely Werewolf-shaped figure.

The dark body began to split apart, like a mass of jellyfish covered in countless tentacles.

The tentacles twisted around one another, contracted, and twitched.

Then they suddenly drew tight and reshaped themselves into a human form.

"This is what a Transfiguration Spell looks like under Magical Power perception while it's changing something."

The model kept changing from human to Werewolf, then back again. Just then, Pedro snapped his fingers.

The sand formed a Wand, which sent out a fan-shaped wave made of sand.

The white grains of sand lodged tightly in a not-quite-fitting gap, just as the Werewolf had changed back into human form.

"That's more or less the effect." Pedro took another puff of his cigar. "You can think of it this way: after the transformation, the change isn't visible from the outside, but there's still a slow, unstable process of adjustment. Powerful soul-based Charms will have a difficult-to-repair effect on that state."

"Put simply, the Magical Power of Fiennes's Cruciatus Curse became fixed in the process of his transformation. Unless that Charms magic is removed, he'll suffer the long-term negative effects of a weakened Cruciatus Curse."

So the Cruciatus Curse had turned into a weakness aura?

Anton blinked in amazement. "So Werewolves are at their weakest for a while before and after transforming, and soul-based Charms are especially effective?"

"Gahaha." Pedro let out a strange laugh and pointed at Anton as he looked at the Old Wizard. "Your apprentice is just like you. The first thing he thinks about is killing."

The Old Wizard sneered. "You're no different."

What the hell did they mean, killing? Shouldn't a person's first concern when it came to Charms be how much damage they did?

Anton rolled his eyes. He was just a kid who knew a tiny bit about Charms. If he didn't prioritize things that could keep him alive, what was he supposed to think about?

At any rate, he finally understood Lupin's situation.

"Can he be cured?" Anton asked.

Pedro sighed. "It's difficult. It's like threads attached to every bone in the body. They'd have to be peeled away one by one. It would take a remarkably delicate operation, and I could only remove a little at a time during the brief moment of each full moon."

"It would take at least six sessions—that is, half a year."

"What a foolish approach." The Old Wizard mocked him again. "You only remember how to cast every kind of Dark Magic, but you don't understand their mysteries at all."

Goblin Pedro's anger flared again, and he began firing back with the vast vocabulary of insults he'd built up over the past few centuries.

Anton's eyes lit up. "How do you cure him?"

The Old Wizard smiled smugly. "Simple. Use the Displacement Soul Curse to expose all Magical Power that doesn't belong to the body on the outside. Then the reshaping power of a Werewolf's transformation will naturally push that Magical Power away."

"As for how to twist the soul into that shape, you'll need the Wizard's Eye Potion to help."

Anton saw that Pedro didn't refute him and grew excited. "I can brew the Wizard's Eye Potion. Mr. Pedro, could you try this method?"

"Hahaha!" The Old Wizard roared with laughter. "He can try all he wants, but a Goblin can't cast human Charms, and he wouldn't dare drink the Wizard's Eye Potion."

"Right, my dear teacher? Back then, you had that Centaur witch steal my experimental materials. I bet you had someone test the Potion, didn't you? Did they all die? You don't dare drink it, do you?"

Pedro only sneered. "I reject the proposal."

He turned to Anton. "Young Wizard, I can't let you treat the Werewolf. Fiennes is hoping that once you cure him, the Unbreakable Vow will kill me!"

"Gahaha." The Old Wizard drifted back and forth. "You'll come begging Anton for help, you foolish, self-important Goblin. You tried to kill me and trapped yourself in an Unbreakable Vow. Peeling it away bit by bit—what a laughable method."