Nicolas Flamel and the Magic Stone

Time slipped quietly by amid these peaceful yet fulfilling days, steeped in the scent of books.

Lin Yuan's store of knowledge was expanding at a terrifyingly frenzied pace.

When he had first arrived in this world, his understanding of it had been nothing more than a framework made up of a few keywords—"magic," "Wizards," "Hogwarts," and the like.

Now, however, he had filled that framework with countless bricks of knowledge gathered from books, making it increasingly concrete and clear.

From the History of Magic to Charms Studies, from magical creatures to alchemical symbols, from Ancient Runes to goblin currency wars... everything was categorized, organized, and analyzed within his soul, then compared and verified against his own vast body of cultivation knowledge.

He had even begun to delve into the Dark Magic books locked away in the library's deepest reaches—the Forbidden Section.

Naturally, he had not gone there to "borrow" them.

Madam Pince would never hand the key to the Forbidden Section to a first-year student who seemed quiet enough in her eyes, yet somehow always felt off.

He had simply walked in.

On a silent night when the entire castle was immersed in its ancient slumber, Lin Yuan's figure appeared soundlessly before the entrance to the library's Forbidden Section like a ghost.

It was a heavy wooden door made from some unknown black wood. Arm-thick iron chains hung across it, faint magical gleams flickering over them, while the air was permeated by an old, dangerous stench.

Any wizard standing there would feel a prickling pain on their skin, as if countless fine needles were piercing them—that was the warning formed by dozens of vicious curses and defensive spells woven together.

Lin Yuan merely stood there quietly, his expression unchanged.

Then he extended a pale, slender finger. At its tip, a wisp of golden True Essence, finer than a strand of hair and condensed to the utmost extreme, flashed and vanished.

With that finger, at a speed beyond the limits of the naked eye, he instantly drew a simple "penetration" rune array on the impregnable wooden door, composed of only three basic runes.

Bzz—

There was no sound and no light, only an imperceptible ripple in space that skimmed across the door like a dragonfly touching water.

Then, without triggering the layers upon layers of vicious curses that could shred the soul of any intruder, or the defensive magic capable of blocking siege spells, he simply walked inside as easily as if passing through a thin morning mist or a soft curtain of water.

The door behind him remained unchanged. The chains were still there, the spells remained active, as though nothing had happened.

"Too crude."

Standing in the dusty, ink-scented air of the Forbidden Section, Lin Yuan shook his head lightly, deeply disappointed by the world's top-tier "security system" that he had just "cracked."

"It does not even have the most basic Spatial Lock or Law Perturbation. All its defenses merely stack and trigger at the energy level. As long as one bypasses the threshold of energy detection, all of it is meaningless."

An assessment automatically surfaced in his soul.

"It is practically a vault with nothing but a rusty iron lock on its door. It keeps out gentlemen, not me."

In the legends of the cultivation world, the defensive formations of even a moderately sized sect's Scripture Repository would inevitably involve interference with the Law of Space.

Any unauthorized intrusion would directly trigger spatial displacement, banishing the intruder into turbulent spatial currents.

More advanced formations could even disturb the laws of an entire region, instantly sending the intruder's spiritual energy into chaos and causing them to explode to death.

But here... all he could say was that it was very peaceful.

The books in the Forbidden Section emitted an aura far more dangerous and malevolent than those outside.

It was as though countless eyes watched from the darkness, while innumerable resentful souls whispered between the pages.

Lin Yuan strolled past row after row of bookshelves, his gaze sweeping over books bound in Dragon Hide or human skin.

He spotted a Dark Magic book, brimming with vicious curses, that described in detail how to create a Soul Artifact.

The pages still seemed to retain nauseating wails, as though they had been left behind by souls being torn apart.

"Splitting the soul?" Lin Yuan frowned, not out of fear or disgust, but with the caution of a researcher encountering an unorthodox yet ingenious experimental proposal.

"Trading the integrity of the soul for an anchored form of 'pseudo-immortality'... It is a bold idea." His soul analyzed it at high speed. "From a cultivation perspective, it is self-destructive and utterly foolish. The soul is the fundamental tool cultivators use to comprehend the Great Dao and pry at the laws. Damaging it is equivalent to cutting off one's own path forward."

"But from another perspective, this Soul Artifact technique proves that the 'soul' in this world is a tangible entity that can be physically cut apart and sealed by an energy form known as 'magic power.' This is an important law parameter."

He tagged the information as "Verification of the Soul's Physical Nature" and stored it in his database.

He also found books describing the Cruciatus Curse and the Imperius Curse.

"Mm, these are valuable samples." Analytical light gleamed in his eyes. "Spells that directly act upon the mind and will. Though their casting methods are crude, requiring the caster's own intense emotional fluctuations as a 'power amplifier,' making them inefficient and unstable. Still, they prove that 'will' can be twisted and 'pain' can be directly generated by energy. This indicates that a direct conversion pathway exists between the mind and energy in this world."

He marked this information as a key node in the "Mind-Energy Conversion Pathway."

Just as he calmly dismantled and analyzed this "Dark Magic," feeling that this world's magical limits probably only revolved around such "applied techniques," an ancient book on "alchemy," casually placed in an inconspicuous corner at the deepest end of the Forbidden Section, caught his attention.

The energy fluctuations it emitted were entirely different from the chaos and resentment of the other Dark Magic books. It possessed a restrained, harmonious, and near-perfectly stable structure.

It was like finding an elegant and efficient line of "Hello, World!" amid a heap of garbled code.

Lin Yuan pulled it from a stack of miscellaneous books.

The book had no title. Its cover was made of some tough leather, marked only by a simple symbol: a circle, a square, and a triangle.

He opened it.

Its contents were obscure and profound, filled with all manner of symbolic signs and metaphors.

But to Lin Yuan, a "reverse engineer" attempting to decipher the laws of the entire world, the logical chains behind those symbols could not have been clearer.

For what it recorded was this world's most advanced understanding and application of Matter Transmutation and Life Alchemy!

This was practically the pinnacle of this world's application of "physical laws" and the Life Law!

"Found it."

For the first time, Lin Yuan's interest was truly piqued.

He rapidly flipped through the pages. The symbols and illustrations were swiftly decoded and reconstructed within his divine soul, turning into clear formulas of laws and models of energy conversion.

Then, two repeatedly appearing terms, both heavily emphasized, leapt into view.

One was the "Philosopher's Stone"—the Magic Stone.

The other was "Nicolas Flamel."