Green-Hat Hero

Locke looked terrible.

His already ugly face had been beaten into a pig's head, mottled blue and purple, and several of his mouthful of sharp teeth had been knocked out.

The guy had been tortured pretty badly.

No wonder he'd vanished after the attack. So Draco Malfoy had taken him.

"Locke!" Lucius looked at the half-blood goblin. "Did you privately open a vault for Murphy Darkholme?"

Locke lifted his swollen face and looked at Murphy through bruised, purple eyelids.

The two of them stared at each other for a while.

Murphy suddenly said, "Locke, just tell the truth. All of my assets were legally inherited. You didn't do anything wrong."

Locke's pointed ears twitched. Then he looked at Dumbledore. "Dumbledore, can you guarantee my safety?"

"While you are serving as a witness, you will not be harmed," Dumbledore said.

"No! I mean afterward. If I tell the truth, can you guarantee I won't be retaliated against?"

Dumbledore pondered for a while, and finally said, "If one must face retaliation simply for telling the truth, then wizarding law will lose all credibility. Rest assured, the Aurors will ensure your safety."

"Good!" Locke seemed to have made some kind of decision.

He glanced at Murphy, then at Lucius, and suddenly said, "I'm innocent! Murphy Darkholme is innocent too! I did not do anything that violated Gringotts regulations! I did not privately open a vault for him. Everything I did was proper and legal! Mr. Murphy Darkholme's source of funds is also perfectly clear. All of this was Lucius's conspiracy."

Lucius was stunned.

"You—you didn't say that before! You helped Murphy open a vault under the false name Stephen Cumberbatch! You laundered money for him! And that money all came from Muggles!"

Locke, however, was extremely calm. "That was the statement you taught me to say, Mr. Malfoy."

Lucius was dumbfounded.

He couldn't understand why this fellow had suddenly switched sides.

"Impossible! That's not how it is! Bogrod—bring Bogrod here! He can prove everything!"

Scrimgeour nodded and was just about to have an Auror fetch him when an Auror came up and whispered a few words in his ear. Scrimgeour paused, then said, "Bogrod has already been arrested on charges of attempting to embezzle wizarding property."

"Also, Gringotts just sent a notice saying they have confirmed that Mr. Murphy Darkholme's source of funds is entirely reliable and legal." Scrimgeour glanced at Lucius. "If your evidence was meant to accuse him on that point, you can give up now."

"What?!"

Lucius found it unbelievable. He looked at Murphy, shocked and bewildered.

How on earth had this guy done it?

What kind of magic did he have?

"All right, Lucius, let's end today's farce." As Scrimgeour spoke, he had the Aurors pull Lucius out of the iron cage, preparing to take him to Azkaban.

"No! I won't accept this! I still have evidence!" Lucius struggled desperately. "Potions! I have samples of the potions he sold to Muggles! I have samples! And raw materials! I got them from a Muggle factory!"

He tore himself free of the two Aurors and took several items out of his undetectable extension bag. "These! These right here! They're enough to prove he sold potions to Muggles!"

Murphy frowned. This guy really had come well prepared.

If Murphy hadn't suddenly struck first this time, things might really have gotten troublesome.

But now, after this whole chain of maneuvers, Lucius's position was already hopeless. No one would believe him anymore.

Even so, Murphy still walked up to the materials and samples.

They were indeed the potion materials he had mixed, as well as Cloud White Medicine bearing the Umbrella Corporation logo, and several bottles of semi-finished products.

"What is this?" Murphy asked.

"The potion you sold to Muggles! Didn't expect this, did you! You thought that after burning down my home and taking the things stored in the cellar, you'd completely destroyed them all. But you didn't expect that I'd kept some myself!"

Murphy curled his lip. "Let's say it is, then. What potion is this?"

"Essence of Dittany!"

"Look!" As he spoke, he opened a bottle of Cloud White Medicine and poured it over the wound on his arm left by the iron thorns. Before long, the wound healed.

"Look! This is Essence of Dittany!"

The wizards on the judges' bench also saw the effect and began discussing it among themselves.

Yet Murphy still looked unconcerned. "But I see that what's written on it is Cloud White Medicine."

"That's the name you gave it. Cloud White Medicine is Essence of Dittany!"

"Putting aside, for the moment, what connection these things have to me," Murphy said, "let me ask you one question. How do you prove that Cloud White Medicine is Essence of Dittany?"

"What?" Lucius was stumped by the question. "Their effects are exactly the same!"

"Heh." Murphy laughed. "I hear you've invested in several apothecaries under your name, Mr. Malfoy. But you don't seem to understand potions at all."

"If the effects are the same, does that mean they're the same thing? If Mr. Snape were here, he'd definitely call you an idiot! Phoenix tears and Essence of Dittany can both treat external wounds. Are they the same thing? Bezoars and mandrake juice can both counteract certain poisons. Are they the same thing?"

"You may not know this, but in the Muggle world, there can be dozens or even hundreds of medicines for a single illness. Are they all the same thing?"

"You may know how Essence of Dittany is made, but do you know how Muggles produce this Cloud White Medicine?"

"If you don't know, how are you going to prove they're the same thing?"

"This... As long as there's a master pharmacist who understands potions, they'll definitely be able to prove it..." Lucius still wanted to struggle a little.

Murphy looked at Dumbledore once again. "Professor, you discovered the twelve uses of dragon's blood and achieved remarkable results in alchemy. You are a potions master. So may I ask, can you prove that these two medicines are the same thing?"

Dumbledore met Murphy's gaze quietly from behind those half-moon spectacles with his blue eyes. After a long while, he avoided Murphy's eyes, picked up the bottle of Cloud White Medicine and looked it over, then finally sighed. "Regrettably, I do not understand such techniques."

Murphy smiled.

This was exactly what he had expected.

To prove that two things were the same substance, one at least had to possess a sufficiently complete understanding of their properties. Merely "looking alike" was not enough.

Even "smelling alike, working alike, and tasting alike" were not enough. Even if you could list a million similarities between the two, you still could not prove they were the same thing.

Because that was merely a process of enumeration. Just like Goldbach's Conjecture and many other conjectures concerning prime numbers, even if you could produce a hundred billion examples that fit the conjecture, before there was a complete, rigorous, and sufficient logical proof, they would forever remain conjectures and would never become truth.

There was only one way to prove that they were the same substance: find the unique and irreplaceable property of that substance, then prove that both things possessed that property.

Did wizards possess that sort of ability?

What a joke.

If wizards could understand their own potions to that degree, why would Murphy need Muggles at all? Why bother with science and technology? Why bother earning pounds? He might as well just devote himself honestly to magic!

It was precisely because wizards did not have such ability, because their understanding of their own magic could not reach such precision, that Murphy sought the power of Muggles.

Therefore, it could be said that the existence of Cloud White Medicine was itself proof that wizards did not possess this ability.

It was like a woman who cheated because her husband was impotent giving birth to a child, only for the husband to try to prove the kid was actually his.

Murphy glanced at Lucius.

You're not a Lestrange either, so why does your line of thinking resemble a cuckold's so much?