January's bitter cold seemed to have frozen time itself. Students hurried through the castle corridors wrapped tightly in their robes, their white breaths vanishing instantly into the frigid air. The abandoned classroom was colder than ever, yet Snape seemed completely unaware of it.
He had succeeded.
Drawing inspiration from the Half-Blood Prince's notes, he had made an extraordinarily dangerous modification to Whispers of the Soul, transforming it from a broad emotional influence into a precise "memory extraction" targeting the lingering mental imprints on specific objects. At that moment, he held a palm-sized crystal dish in his hand. Within it swirled a thin strand of silver mist that constantly twisted and shifted—an incredibly faint fragment of memory he had extracted from the gap in the spine of a copy of Arithmancy and Grammar left at Wilkes's usual seat in the library.
The process had been extremely taxing on his mind. Snape's face was even paler than usual, but his black eyes burned with nearly feverish excitement. He glanced at Lin Yanqing beside him. Lin Yanqing was fully focused on maintaining a simple shielding barrier, preventing the magical fluctuations from the extraction from leaking out.
"Are you ready?" Snape's voice carried a trace of weary hoarseness.
Lin Yanqing nodded, his wand steadily pointed at the floor as the barrier's glow remained stable and gentle.
Snape hesitated no longer. He lightly touched the tip of his wand to the silver mist in the crystal dish. Closing his eyes, he murmured an awkward incantation.
In an instant, fragmented, chaotic images and sounds flooded into their minds like a burst dam—Snape took the lead in deciphering them, while Lin Yanqing sensed several blurred fragments through their contract and his connection to the barrier:
· Dim light, like some storage room crammed with clutter. A hoarse