The End of Magic

After a rather undignified fight, Murphy came away with a check for two million pounds and a Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit.♬💢  💘♧

Left behind in the factory were several bruised, foam-mouthed men. When they woke and tried to remember what had happened, they would find they could not recall a thing.

Doing good deeds without leaving a name—this was all thanks to the Memory Charm.

Murphy drove to the bank, used Polyjuice Potion mixed with Jim Stick's hair to take on his appearance, cashed the check, and deposited the money into an anonymous account.

And just like that, he instantly became a millionaire.

Yesterday he had been solemnly swearing that he needed to make money; today, he was already rolling in it.

Financial freedom had arrived a little too quickly.

But wasn't selling potions all about making money? Now that the money was in hand, who cared where it had come from!

Build first, worry later!

Murphy glanced at the Silver Spirit.

Because he was not very familiar with eighties cars, and British cars were right-hand drive besides, he had gotten into quite a few accidents along the way.

By now, the luxury car's front bumper had fallen off, the rear bumper was dented, and its body was covered in scrapes, making it look as if it had barely escaped a fatal crash.

So Murphy drove it to a dealer, sold it for half price, and immediately traded up for a sports car.

A silver Porsche 959.

One of the finest supercars in the world at that moment.

Although wizards could teleport and fly on broomsticks, the charm of a sports car lay more in the feeling of controlling a raging machine with one's mortal body, like the first step toward mechanical ascension.

Murphy soon fell in love with that feeling. After driving the 959 twice around London, he had an English girl with fair skin and pretty looks in his car.

The girl was called Silvia, a sophomore at the Royal College of Music, a beautiful young woman determined to become a violinist.

Murphy lied and said he was a novelist preparing to write a magical story called Harry Potter.

The two got along splendidly. They made plans to tour the British Museum and St Paul's Cathedral together, watched an opera, attended several concerts, and after dinner one day, quite naturally ended up in bed.

At night, Murphy stood before the floor-to-ceiling window. On the large bed behind him, Silvia was fast asleep.

He poured himself a glass of liquor, took a sip, found he could not get used to the taste, and finally chose to hold a glass of water instead.

Overlooking the River Thames outside the window and the brightly lit London in the distance, that strange thought from a few days ago returned to his mind once more.

Who the hell am I?

Why the fuck am I here?

In just a few short days, everything about the wizarding world had somehow grown blurry.

Behind this bustling metropolis, was there really such a thing as a magical world?

Had I really studied at Hogwarts?

Was I really a wizard?

This wasn't some fucking dream, was it?

He drew his wand, pointed it at the bottle on the table, and spoke the incantation: "Wingardium Leviosa."

The whisky floated up.

"Murphy?"

But just then, Silvia's voice came from behind him. "How... how did you do that?"

Murphy turned back. "Why aren't you asleep?"

"I just had a nightmare." The girl looked at him in confusion. "Is that a wand? Is this magic? The magic from your story? Am I still dreaming?"

Murphy smiled. "That's right. It's just a dream. Go back to sleep."

"But..."

Murphy waved his wand. Before Silvia could finish speaking, she felt a heavy drowsiness tugging at her, dragging her back down into dreams.

Murphy lingered in the room a while longer.

He thought, looking at the finely dressed boy in the mirror, and suddenly found it all rather dull.

It had only been a few days, yet he seemed already to have grown tired of the game called wealth.

He wrote out a check, placed it together with the keys to the 959 in the girl's hand, then Disapparated and vanished from the room.

He returned to Darkholm Manor.

Ever since the Sanders couple had been thrown into Azkaban, this gloomy old manor had been occupied by Murphy alone. And since he had lived at school year-round, then rarely returned after graduation, the house had become utterly lifeless.

He walked through several dust-covered rooms and finally arrived at the basement.

This place had originally been a wine cellar, but there had long since been no stock left. When Murphy was in his fourth year, he had converted it into a magical laboratory.

The floor and walls of the wine cellar had been magically transformed into a single mass of stone. Half of the space held only a few dummies painted with targets; this was Murphy's spell-practice area.

The other half held several workbenches covered with all sorts of bottles and jars. It was a potions laboratory.

Murphy practiced a few spells in the spell practice area, shattering and restoring the dummies seven or eight times, then brewed some potions until he had used up all his stored ingredients.

Looking at the Draught of Living Death, Amortentia, and several bottles of Skelegro on the potions bench, Murphy let out a long breath, and his earlier low mood suddenly improved a great deal.

"Damn it. Sure enough, this is the kind of thing that suits me."

As a transmigrator, an orphan, and the son of a dark wizard, Murphy had few friends. When he was bored over summer break, he would pass the time by practicing spells and researching potions.

He liked magic—far more than most wizards did, in fact.

In truth, as he saw it, wizards were far too careless in their attitude toward their most important trait—magic.

They lacked curiosity and had little desire to explore. They had grown used to something as wondrous as magic and treated it like an ordinary tool, caring only that it worked, seemingly never having any thought of investigating its principles.

In his eyes, the "magic tree" of the wizarding world had been specced in a very strange direction.

For example, in a world where almost every adult wizard could teleport, or achieve teleportation through Floo Powder, Portkeys, and all sorts of other methods, they still used owls to communicate.

They could transport matter—even living creatures, intact and unharmed—so was transmitting information really that hard?

In the original work, there seemed to be mirrors that allowed two-way communication, or magic that let people talk over long distances through flames, but strangely, none of it had become widespread. People still had to endure the absurdly high latency of owl post.

For another example, most wizards in this world could not fly.

Even though they could transform into birds or insects, and possessed spells like the Levitation Charm and Throwing Charm that could control an object's movement, somehow no one had invented a flying spell that would allow them to soar freely through the sky.

They would rather fly on broomsticks.

Then there was the Time-Turner, a divine artifact in this world that was utterly heaven-defying.

It outright smashed the second law of thermodynamics, which Muggles regarded as unbreakable, to pieces.

There was also the Elixir of Life, a potion that could allow a person to live for more than six hundred years.

Yet barely anyone actually yearned for longevity. Aside from that freak Voldemort, most wizards even seemed to accept aging with pleasure.

They could play with time in the palms of their hands—was immortality really so difficult?

For that matter, was resurrection and rebirth really so difficult?

And yet, looking across the history of wizardkind, only a handful of idiots like Voldemort and Herpo had actually worked hard to try to make themselves immortal.

Wizards all seemed extremely open-minded, to the point that they looked as if they had no desires or demands at all.

But Murphy was different.

He was a transmigrator.

He had once been a Muggle.

Having undergone training in scientific thinking, his way of thought was utterly different from that of ordinary wizards.

Seeing the many miracles that existed in the wizarding world, he could not grow accustomed to them the way other wizards did. He only wanted to make more of these miracles happen, to let more things he had once thought impossible become possible through magic.

Deep in his heart, he even buried an ambition greater than Voldemort's, greater than Grindelwald's, greater than that of any Dark Lord who had ever existed in the history of the wizarding world:

He wanted longevity. He wanted immortality. And beyond that, he even wanted omniscience and omnipotence!

All of this was still beyond the reach of the technology of his previous life, and it could not be achieved by relying solely on the magic wizards currently possessed.

But if the two were combined...

Then perhaps it was not impossible.

From the potions bench, Murphy picked up a notebook.

This notebook recorded some of his research findings on potions over the past several years, though in truth there were not many remarkable discoveries. Most of it was merely notes and summaries he had made while practicing potion-making.

But the final section was different from the parts before it.

Murphy looked at the experimental records titled "Producing Essence of Dittany Through Non-Magical Means," and as he flipped through them, a smile gradually appeared on his face.

Now he understood why he had thought of selling potions in the Muggle world.

If all he wanted was money, robbing people with magic would be faster, and safer too.

What he truly wanted to do was, in fact, to use the power of Muggle technology to study magic, in hopes of pushing it to a realm he could not reach on his own.

He wanted to see what lay at the end of magic.

He already knew what he should do.