The Possibility of Wizards Ascending to Godhood

When Roger had read Harry Potter in his previous life, a question sometimes flashed through his mind.

To Roger, the magic in Harry Potter was almost as omnipotent as a wish-granting machine.

Manipulating matter, traveling through time, interfering with space, splitting souls, extending life, healing, altering life forms, influencing fortune, modifying memories...

Though its destructive power might not have seemed especially outrageous, the power of magic in this world was undeniably immense!

Then why had wizards not continued onward until they elevated themselves and became gods?

Instead, they had hidden on the dark side of human society under the International Statute of Secrecy.

Among the books Professor McGonagall had given him, Roger had roughly found the answer.

There were two main reasons wizards had not become gods.

First, the essence of magic exceeded wizards' understanding. Nearly everyone who studied magic itself had ended up empty-handed.

In the end, they could only create the current, vaguely defined system of wizarding power.

To put it another way, if magic was like Doraemon's If Phone Booth, then the wizarding magic system was a "Complete Guide to Using Wish-Granting Machines" compiled by generations of wizards.

It involved neither the truth of the world nor the essence of magic. It was simply a collection of techniques for using magic.

How should he put it? It had the same sort of beauty as the Four Humors Theory of traditional ancient medicine, alongside theories of yin and yang, the five elements, dampness, heat, and numbness.

It really could cure illnesses.

But the principles behind it? No one could explain them. They could only establish a system of summaries and classifications based on experience to account for it.

Such an empirical system could sometimes lead to a result where what people believed to be the active ingredient in a medicine was not entirely the same as its actual active ingredient.

This had greatly hindered wizarding civilization's analysis of the essence of magic.

The advancement of human civilization owed much to tools for observing the microscopic world, such as microscopes. Before wizards could observe the fundamental nature of the world at the scale of magic, wizarding civilization was unlikely to fully travel this path.

Second, magic was the result of the combined action of the mind and magic. Once the "quantity" of magic reached a certain limit, the factor restricting a spell's power became the strength of a wizard's mind.

It was like a computer. When operating conditions such as memory and temperature were perfect, what limited its performance was its hardware.

To increase the power of magic and become a god, wizards needed to strengthen their Mental Power.

Wizards had come up with many methods for this.

Some believed that just as bees could never possess human-level intelligence, if human Mental Power was insufficient, then they might as well stop being human!

They wanted to become higher life forms, and so they embarked upon the path of evolution.

Some layered the bloodlines of Magical Creatures onto their own and became various Half-blood Wizards.

This was indeed a path, but mixed bloodlines only raised the upper limit; they did not change the lower limit humans were born with. To gain stronger Mental Power, wizards still had to temper themselves.

And there were hardly any wizards capable of growing to that height.

It was like how humans were capable of killing large beasts single-handedly with cold weapons without being injured. It was something humans could possibly achieve, yet few people in modern times could train their strength to that level. Most were still subhealthy urban dwellers whose shoulders could barely bear a load.

Without the pressure of death, few wizards could temper themselves to that extent.

Furthermore, Half-blood Wizards merely had higher upper limits, not no upper limits. Their limits were only somewhat greater than those of ordinary wizards, still far from the level of gods.

Others had set their sights on Transfiguration, soul-related Dark Magic, and similar paths of self-modification.

But they had failed as well.

At its ultimate level, self-Transfiguration through Animagus could not transform a wizard into a Magical Creature, so the increase it brought to a wizard's upper limit was limited.

And Voldemort, who excelled at soul-related Dark Magic, was only so powerful.

Besides the Modification Path, represented by bloodlines, Transfiguration, and soul-related Dark Magic, the wizarding world had two other major schools that sought to break the limits of wizarding civilization.

One was the Ritual Path.

If one person's Mental Power was not enough, then use that of a hundred people, or ten thousand people!

Ritual Magic is More Than Just Blood Sacrifice described this school in detail.

"Ritual Magic is everywhere." Sitting at the dining table, Roger softly murmured the sentence on the book's title page.

Because the inheritance came with a considerable debt, Roger had not inherited his parents' estate.

He did not have an official place of residence in the United Kingdom.

During this time, he had been renting a room at The Leaky Cauldron, one of the entrances to Diagon Alley.

Roger had rented a very small room, so it was not particularly expensive, and he could afford it.

When he arrived at the tavern hall, Roger ordered some British cuisine as usual.

As he ate fried fish and chips, Roger kept flipping through the book in his hands without putting it down.

During this period, Roger had devoted nearly all his time to reading the dozens of books Professor McGonagall had mailed him.

Of them, the one that fascinated Roger most was this seemingly unremarkable Ritual Magic is More Than Just Blood Sacrifice.

The principles it expounded were extraordinarily profound and extensive.

Through all kinds of data, it argued that the sun, moon, and stars possessed mystical properties because people believed they held special power.

The mystical properties of all things were bestowed by intelligent creatures capable of disturbing magic with thought.

The existence of potions, Magical Creatures, and even spells were all byproducts of the natural, ever-present Ritual Magic! And what guided this vast magical ritual spanning the world was the subconscious sea of all intelligent creatures!

The book even explicitly provided a method for wizards to ascend to godhood.

Unfortunately, no wizard could accomplish it.

"Unify the world, control the thoughts of all Muggles, all wizards, and all Magical Creatures—a man-made god ritual..."

Anyone capable of doing that would already be as powerful as a god and would have no need for the ritual. Yet anyone who needed the ritual could not possibly control the thoughts of every intelligent life form on Earth. It reminded Roger of an image he had once seen online...

What had been a one-track path had become blocked at both ends!

Besides the Ritual Path, wizarding civilization also had a relatively niche school.

The External Object Path.

They were the people who worked with alchemy and potions, and their core idea was actually similar to that of the Ritual Path.

But their approach was to create a divine artifact or divine potion that everyone believed in—or, failing that, the various materials composing them.

They truly had created many extraordinary magical items.

Such as the Deathly Hallows, Death's Door, and so on...

Of course, there were also those who did not rely on the power of "legends," instead using their own knowledge to forcefully break through the limits of wizards. Dumbledore and the alchemist Nicolas Flamel belonged to this type.

The reason wizards had chosen to hide from the world was that the modern population was simply too large. Who knew what consequences might arise under the disturbance of magic if its existence were made public? No one dared to gamble on it.

Except for a certain prophet who led the Acolytes during the Second World War.

Bang! Roger snapped the book shut.

There were now three paths to heaven before Roger, yet every one of them had been severed halfway through.

Since ancient times, countless gifted and talented wizards had attempted to break through them, but all had failed.

So, if he wanted eternal life, which path should he choose?