The Basilisk's corpse lay there quietly.
The snake skin, not yet spoiled, had lost its flesh and all its nutrients, leaving it without even medicinal value. Whoever had killed this poor giant snake had not wasted a single scrap of usable energy.
This was absolutely heartbreaking for Ian. He had always regarded the Basilisk as his big baby, whom he had never met. Yet his big baby had been snatched away and slaughtered.
"Tom! It had to be Tom! It couldn't have been anyone else but Tom!"
The damp smell of mildew mingled with blood and flooded his nose and mouth. Ian's hand holding his wand trembled slightly with rage. He had researched quite a few potions specifically for raising Basilisks.
These included, but were not limited to, Rapid Regeneration Potion, Three-Sheds-a-Day Potion, and Rapid Fang Growth Potion. These painstaking, painless, harmless inventions had now directly lost their purpose.
The Basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets was gone.
Where was a Young Wizard supposed to find a second precious, endlessly renewable Potion Ingredients factory? Calculating based on the time it would take to raise six generations of Basilisks, he had lost at least hundreds of millions, perhaps even billions, of Galleons this time.
"Even if that damned Tom came back to life and let me harvest his kidneys for a thousand years, it still probably wouldn't make up for my devastating losses." Ian raised his wand and buried the Basilisk on the spot with a pained heart.
He looked toward the damp, dark passage ahead and decided that since he was already here, he ought to search around and see whether Slytherin's Chamber of Secrets contained anything that could still be salvaged.
Anything he could recover would help.
As for missing class on the morning of the first day of