Conditions

"Our shadow at Hogwarts has been discovered."

In an underground palace somewhere unknown, Rance Smith opened his eyes.

The candles around him immediately brightened. Evidently, this was a tomb.

As Rance's voice echoed through the place, deep within the underground mausoleum, low echoes suddenly rose amid the sounds of surrounding bricks and stones cracking apart.

Yet Rance showed no panic at all as he watched the scene, remaining utterly calm.

"We are much later than expected. It seems our kinsman has been very busy."

The speaker was an old man, if he could still be called human.

His skin had a silvery-gray tint, as though he had been poisoned. He was one of the old fellows who had just emerged from the cracked stone walls. At that moment, he floated in midair, clad in a loose robe. Yet even such a robe could not conceal his withered body. He looked like a charred corpse burned by fire—nothing human about him at all.

The others were much the same. Some were even stranger beings with fleshy wings. They looked human, but no one knew what race they had transformed into. Nothing about them looked normal.

Their sole shared feature was the circular emblem branded on the backs of their right hands.

The crest of the Smith Family.

Everyone who had appeared here was an elder who had protected the Smith Family for all these years. They were the Smith Family's wealth—or rather, altered remnants left behind from a previous era.

Dark wizards could alter creatures, so naturally they could alter themselves as well. A great family possessed immense power. If they wanted to achieve a certain goal, it was not particularly difficult.

They had survived.

But surviving through the changes of the times was no easy matter. They had paid a