Tampering with Memory

"A hero, or..." Ollivander did not finish. Instead, he said, "The merit of power depends on the wizard who uses it, Mr. Murphy. Challenging authority is a very brave thing, but the destruction of order often brings suffering. I hope you will use your power with caution."

"Thank you for your advice, Mr. Ollivander," Murphy said, drawing another, shorter wand from his sleeve.

Ollivander's eyes widened. "This... this wand... so you really did..."

Murphy pointed the wand at the old man. "Sorry, Mr. Ollivander, but I'm afraid you'll have to remember a few things differently... Legilimency!"

Then, "Obliviate!"

"Legilimency!"

"Obliviate!"

Legilimency could force Ollivander to recall the scene from seven years ago, when Murphy's predecessor had bought his wand, locating that segment of memory so that Obliviate could blur it, while also adding false memories. After several repetitions, the mistaken recollections would reinforce those false memories until they became no different from real ones.

Memory was that ambiguous a thing. People had never truly read memory in any pure sense. Every act of recollection was, in fact, a revision and reinforcement of past memories.

And what Murphy was doing now was using that mechanism to confuse part of Ollivander's memory of Murphy buying a wand today with the scene from seven years ago, when Murphy's predecessor had bought his wand, replacing the material of the wand he had bought back then with its appearance today.

After three repetitions, Ollivander would only remember that Murphy had bought an aspen wand back then, and would completely lose all memory of the original cypress wand currently in Murphy's hand.

Ollivander passed out, and Murphy let him sleep for a while.

After the violent tampering his brain had just undergone, it needed rest to adjust the contradictory memories on its own.

When he woke, he would only feel that he had had a strange dream.

While Ollivander slept, Murphy summoned his account book. It recorded the details of every wand sold from here. Murphy found the entry from seven years ago, and with a light stroke of his wand, the original "twelve point four inches, cypress, unicorn hair" became "fourteen inches, aspen, phoenix feather."

With that, Murphy now possessed a wand with absolutely no registered records, one that could not be traced.

From now on, he could do whatever he liked with it without worrying about investigations such as Prior Incantato.

More importantly, this wand's history had also been buried, turning it into something that had never existed.

Murphy had gained quite a lot from his trip to Knockturn Alley, and he happily returned to Darkholm Manor by Apparition.

After chatting idly with Alex Wood for a bit, he learned that the ingredients used to brew the Beauty Potion had all been used up, and that the work of mixing the materials had already been completed. Murphy thought for a moment, then assigned Alex another task.

"Do you know of any spells that can make someone keep a secret?" Murphy asked.

He was preparing to build the Potion Research Institute, and in the future, he might even establish a spell research institute. Both would require large numbers of Muggle scientists and researchers to take part in the research.

Therefore, making them keep secrets had become a problem that had to be solved.

"The Unbreakable Vow?" Alex said.

"I naturally thought of that, but the Unbreakable Vow's effect is that a person dies after revealing a secret. What I want to achieve is for the subject to be completely unable to reveal a certain secret in the first place."

The Unbreakable Vow could serve as a deterrent, but its premise was that the person making the vow had to be sincere and had to know that the consequence of breaking the vow was death.

That alone made its range of application extremely narrow.

If the Muggle researchers knew that they would die if they accidentally leaked some secret, they would probably be very unlikely to accept such a vow from the bottom of their hearts.

"The Fidelius Charm?" Alex thought of another spell.

The Fidelius Charm was extremely powerful. It was almost one of the most powerful spells Murphy knew of. It could turn a physical object or a location into a secret.

When that secret was kept by the Secret-Keeper, the entity could not be found, seen, or touched by anyone other than those to whom the secret had been revealed.

It was powerful because the spell's range of effect was conceptual. Through a kind of reverse logic, it reversed what should originally have been an effect applying only to the Secret-Keeper and the concealed object, turning it into an effect that applied to everyone outside that scope.

At the same time, the effect it achieved was also conceptual. It rejected all contact from non-keepers of the secret toward the concealed object, whether physical or magical. Whether one tried to look, listen, use the Summoning Charm, the Point Me Spell, and so on, none of it would work.

It was as if it had erased the concealed object from the world of everyone not privy to the secret.

Murphy shook his head. "That spell doesn't apply."

The Secret-Keeper could actively reveal the secret. The Fidelius Charm could not achieve Murphy's goal.

"Is there any spell similar to the Unbreakable Vow, except its effect isn't that the subject dies after revealing a secret, but that once they try to leak the secret, they're hit with something like the Throat-Sealing Tongue-Locking Curse or the Petrification Spell, stopping them from revealing it?"

As an orphan, Murphy had learned his spells from school. Most of them were standard spells, and the minority, such as a simplified levitation spell, had also come from books in the library.

There was still a great deal of magic he did not know, and a child from a wizarding family like Alex might know more than he did.

"The Throat-Sealing Tongue-Locking Curse..." Alex thought for a long while. "I think I've seen something like that somewhere... but I can't remember..."

"It's fine. Take your time. This isn't urgent."

After all, it would still take some time to build the research institute, and before that, he still had to solve Umbrella Corporation's bankruptcy crisis.

Thinking of this, Murphy packed up the medicinal ingredients Alex had mixed and a bottle of Beauty Potion, then went to find Patrick.

After having Patrick find him a warehouse and storing the mixed medicinal ingredients inside, Murphy told Patrick the result of his meeting with Rita.

"She isn't willing to endorse us. And from the look of it, she isn't someone who can be moved by money."

Murphy still greatly admired scientists like this, who held fast to their own principles. He could not bring himself to use something like the Imperius Curse on her.

"That's already good enough. At the very least, you've attracted quite a few scholars' attention. Perhaps their research will bring us some good news. We can also use this point to do some positive publicity."

Murphy nodded. "What about your side? How did the talks with those companies go?"

Patrick shook his head. "Don't even mention it. A pack of jackals! Insatiable! They also know we're trying to stall for time, so they're pressing us hard. I brought in a few negotiation experts, but they turned around and advised me to go public."

"Go public?" Murphy did not quite understand.

"On the surface, they're saying that going public would let us accept public supervision, offset some of the negative public opinion, and also allow those pharmaceutical companies to take shares, turning enemies into friends."

"In reality, all they're thinking about is that after we go public, they can launch a mandatory tender offer and swallow us whole."