By evening, the first-years finally arrived at the Great Hall.
Before long, under Professor McGonagall's guidance, the Sorting Ceremony began.
Murphy sat at the High Table, leisurely watching this time-honored spectacle and occasionally exchanging a few words with Professor Flitwick beside him.
Although he had tried to hint through the notebook that Tom should join Gryffindor to better take part in the Philosopher's Stone plan, it was fine for him to be in Slytherin too. As long as the main trio stayed together, things had not gone off track.
So he was completely relaxed, watching purely for entertainment.
Listening to the Sorting Hat ramble at the young witches and wizards before assigning them to their houses felt a little like opening mystery boxes. If Dumbledore had not already returned, and Murphy had not needed to maintain his dignified image as a School Governor, he would have wanted to start taking bets.
The Sorting Hat was also a fascinating object. Its ability to think was nothing particularly unusual; the wizarding world had plenty of thinking objects, such as the portraits found all over Hogwarts and the suits of armor that moved on their own.
What interested him was its ability to assess students during the sorting. Murphy very much wanted to know how it distinguished their traits.
One possibility was naturally that it could read minds, and had developed a deep-learning mechanism through countless sortings over the centuries, allowing it to determine the appropriate house directly from a student's thoughts.
Another theory was that it might be reading the nature of the students' magic. According to the Spellcraft Research Group, a wizard's "aura"—in other words, the nature of their magic—was related to their personality traits, feelings, and even emotional state.
Of course, perhaps the hat possessed both mechanisms.
But compared with