Lulling His Roommate to Sleep, Beginning a Nighttime Excursion

6:20 p.m.

As soon as dinner began, Harry eagerly made his way to the Great Hall, with Tom and Ron following behind him.

The food in Great Britain was simply terrible. Harry had always treated eating as nothing more than replenishing his body's energy.

Now that he had come to Hogwarts, where delicious food was everywhere, one of the things Harry looked forward to most each day had become his three meals.

They picked a spot and sat down.

"Just as expected of the wizarding world—their medical standards are truly advanced," Tom remarked as he looked toward the entrance of the hall.

The students who had suffered broken bones during Flying Class had all recovered by now. Not one of them even had a bandage on, yet they were able to come to dinner on their own.

However, the first-year Slytherin students who arrived one after another all kept their seats as far away from Tom and the other two as possible, unwilling to get near them.

It was both rejection and fear.

During dinner, someone from the neighboring table cautiously approached them.

"Tom, Professor McGonagall took you away earlier. Are you all right?"

It was Daphne.

When she saw Tom being taken away, she had thought he was going to be expelled and that she would never see him again.

Not standing up to help Tom during Flying Class had made her feel terribly guilty. She felt she had not been a good friend, and she desperately wanted to make it up to him.

To that end, she had even written a letter and planned to have an owl deliver it back to the Greengrass Family, asking her family to help Tom and keep him from being expelled.

As one of the Twenty-Eight Families that had not yet declined, the Greengrass Family was no less powerful than the Malfoy family. Keeping a student who had made a mistake from being expelled was a simple matter for them.

"It was nothing. I was just invited to become a Quidditch Beater."

"What?!" Daphne was stunned.

It was not just her. The other students around them were stunned as well, especially the younger Slytherins, who all choked on their food.

Quidditch was a sport that placed great demands on physical strength. There were no weight classes, and everyone competed together, so it was generally played by older students whose bodies had mostly developed.

Yet Tom had not only joined Quidditch as a first-year, but had become a Beater, a position that demanded even more physical strength.

Ridiculous. It was simply ridiculous.

"Then have you prepared your flying broom?" Daphne asked curiously.

"No, but Professor McGonagall said the school would provide support."

"All right, I understand." Daphne answered absentmindedly, then immediately stopped eating and hurried out of the Great Hall.

School support? What kind of support could the school possibly offer?

At most, they would provide some common, run-of-the-mill broom. How could that sort of broom bring out Tom's true strength?

Daphne decided to revise the letter and find a way to get her family to contribute some money to help him.

That way, she could more or less make up for her earlier mistake.

Watching Daphne arrive in a flurry and leave in an equal flurry, Tom and the others were all somewhat bewildered, with no idea what the girl was thinking.

"I got taken away earlier too. Why didn't she ask if I was all right?" Harry suddenly felt as though he had been ignored.

"Don't know." Ron shook his head.

The two blocks of wood who had yet to catch on looked at each other, each seeing clear, unclouded stupidity in the other's eyes.

After dinner came a period of free time.

Tom rested on his bed in the dormitory, practicing magic with his wand in one hand until curfew arrived.

The prefects from each House set out one after another and began patrolling the corridors, checking which dormitories had not yet turned out their lights.

Draco immediately lay down on his bed and pretended to be asleep.

Half an hour later, the patrols were over, and the prefects had all gone back to sleep...

Now was the time!

Draco's eyes snapped open.

They had agreed earlier to ambush Tom, and now that everyone was asleep, it was the perfect opportunity.

Crabbe and the others should still be awake, ready in the next room at all times, just waiting for him to knock on the door tonight and give the signal to attack.

He would pay back every bit of pain he had suffered in Flying Class today!

However, just as Draco sat up and was about to get out of bed, he noticed a furtive figure.

The figure quietly walked to the door, intending to leave.

"Tom, why are you also..."

Before Draco could finish, Tom suddenly stepped in front of him and covered his mouth and nose with one hand.

"Relax. Feeling dizzy is normal."

"Mm! Mm!"

Draco tried to struggle, but the large hand over his face seemed to possess immense strength. No matter how hard he tried, he could not break free and could only whimper helplessly.

Very soon.

After successfully coaxing Draco to sleep, Tom quietly slipped out of the dormitory.

There was an old saying at Hogwarts: "A student who has never sneaked out at night has had an incomplete school life."

On the surface, the school had established numerous rules to regulate student behavior. But any upperclassman who had attended for a few years understood that breaking school rules was no big deal—the real problem was getting caught in the act.

Tom had not come out for a midnight stroll today because he had entered a rebellious phase. He planned to visit the Three-Headed Dog and test the effects of [Animal Friend].

There were too many people around in the morning, making it unsuitable.

He had almost been spotted by Draco just now.

Good thing he knew how to coax children.

Since the Potions professor's office was relatively close to his common room, Tom decided to check that place first.

Standing before the office, Tom stared at the utterly motionless door.

He could sense a trace of magic from its lock. It seemed to have been sealed with some kind of spell.

That made sense. After all, the storage room contained Snape's entire fortune. If those ingredients were put up for auction, even several thousand Galleons might not be enough to buy them all.

So when Snape rested at night, he would definitely lock the door.

"Not easy to get in."

Although Tom knew Alohomora, leaving aside whether his current magical strength was enough to break the lock, avoiding the school's investigation afterward would also be a problem.

He had gathered some information this time. He would come back another day.

After leaving Slytherin's dungeon.

Tom looked around at the darkness surrounding him.

Since he was already out, he might as well take this chance to learn more about the castle.

To prevent students from sneaking around at night or trespassing into restricted areas, the school had deliberately not provided maps of the castle.

Forget first-years—even older students did not know the purpose of many classrooms and rooms. Some students had even graduated without ever hearing the name Room of Requirement.

Now that the opportunity was right, he could visit some places that were inconvenient to explore during the day while the night was quiet, and draw a map of Hogwarts in his mind.

Time flew by.

Half an hour later, Tom had successfully familiarized himself with most of the castle's interior.

He encountered Filch on patrol several times along the way, but fortunately, he was clever enough to avoid him every time.

Yet as he wandered around, he arrived near Hufflepuff's common room.

Although both Hufflepuff and Slytherin's common rooms were located underground, one was in the southern part of the castle, while the other lay directly beneath it.

Though it was already midnight, as long as one approached Hufflepuff's common room, one could smell an enticing fragrance.

The scent was practically the nemesis of dieting. Even someone without a sweet tooth would have their appetite stirred by one whiff.

After descending a spiral staircase, Tom arrived in a spacious underground chamber filled with wooden barrels and a painting.

As a transmigrator, Tom naturally knew that the Kitchen lay behind the painting, and he also knew how to enter it.

Just as he raised his hand toward a green pear in the painting.

A door handle suddenly appeared on it.

"Huh? I haven't even tickled the pear yet."

As the painting opened from within, two fiery red heads poked out from behind it.