He could actually bring things out of Limbo!
Ian had just discovered another astonishing secret.
It made sense, when he thought about it.
If he could bring candy and chocolate into Limbo, then bringing things out of Limbo didn't seem all that surprising.
"This really is a fantastical world."
Ian gazed at the scrap of dress in his hand and couldn't help marveling aloud.
No wonder this was a world shaped by belief.
There were so many mysteries in this world that people had yet to uncover.
If Ian hadn't been lucky enough to gain this talent, who knew how many more years it would have taken for the living to come into contact with anything related to Limbo?
The living had to stop at its threshold.
Only the dead could enter.
Even if Ian told other wizards or scholars who studied Limbo about all his discoveries, they probably wouldn't have any way to verify them.
For most wizards, everything in Limbo was an adventure they could only experience after death.
That was precisely why even the greatest wizards in the world knew so little about Limbo.
It was a realm that only ghosts could enter, yet Ian had somehow brought back a piece of a ghost's clothing. He couldn't help reconsidering everything he thought he knew about Limbo.
"So it's not just some netherworld paradise..."
By all reason, ghosts were merely a form of energy.
And yet the scrap of dress in his hand felt undeniably real.
The boundary between illusion and reality had clearly grown blurry. Ian could only rely on his memories to guess at what was going on. Perhaps this kind of gift to the "living world" wasn't something one could give on a whim?
He had noticed something.
Teacher Mara had deliberately torn a piece off her own dress. With her abilities, she could surely have used anything nearby to conjure parchment convincing enough to fool anyone.
And yet she had needed to tear off a piece of her own elegant, well-tailored dress... Did that mean this was the only way Ian could bring something from Limbo back to the living world?
"Very likely!"
Ian looked at his other hand. Before his figure had vanished from Limbo, he had clearly been holding the wand Teacher Mara had conjured from a metal picture frame.
And yet the wand hadn't come back with him. It was just like the experiments Ian had conducted with the flowers and plants in Limbo when he'd first gained this talent.
At first, Ian had thought it was only natural that flowers and such couldn't be brought back to the living world, since they belonged to the realm of the dead. He'd always assumed Limbo was made purely of "energy."
But now that belief had been disproved. The scrap of dress in his hand, which even seemed to retain a little warmth, forced Ian to reconsider his ideas about Limbo.
Even if bringing things out of Limbo required meeting certain conditions or following specific rules, it still proved that the boundary between life and death wasn't impossible to cross. If a dead person's clothes could cross that boundary, did that mean...the dead themselves could return to the world of the living?
"Whoa... That's a bold idea!"
The more Ian thought about it, the more his heart raced.
This was definitely a forbidden subject.
But if there really were a way to bring the dead back to the mortal world, then, putting aside ethics and all the other messy considerations, it would be an achievement worthy of going down in history!
His great deeds might even be recorded on a Chocolate Frog Famous Witches and Wizards card!
"Fame and fortune are secondary. If I can find Lily Potter's soul and bring her back to this world, won't Harry Potter give me every Galleon in his vault?"
"And if Lily Potter cheers him on a little, forget the traditional Harry Potter leveling-up-and-fighting-monsters routine. We can skip straight to Snape going berserk and smashing Voldemort's head in!"
Perhaps this was just Ian letting his childish imagination run wild.
But who could say for sure?
There was a rule in this world: love was the most powerful magic... And love from a hopelessly devoted simp, taken to the extreme, was still a form of love, wasn't it?
"This has potential! So much potential!"
The more Ian thought about it, the more he felt this was a subject worth devoting time to.
Perhaps the next time he entered Limbo, he could ask Teacher Mara, who clearly knew all sorts of advanced things, about it. The witch in the castle certainly didn't seem like a good person, but she was genuinely teaching Ian magic. Whatever her motives, Ian had already become her apprentice.
No one could know whether their teacher-student relationship would turn out well or badly.
At least for now, having a teacher who could explain things and pass on her knowledge certainly wasn't a bad thing for Ian.
"I wonder if the mirror Teacher Mara wants is the enchanted mirror at school." Ian hadn't forgotten the request the witch had made when they first met. She had accepted him as her apprentice even though he hadn't gotten the mirror, but he could tell she still cared a lot about it.
If someone asked, they should give something in return.
That was Ian's way of dealing with people.
No one owed him anything or had to give him things unconditionally... Even the bag of coins Snape had left him, and the Galleons he'd spent on books and necessities, felt like loans to Ian. He didn't like taking advantage of anyone, and he wouldn't enjoy it.
"Maybe if I find the enchanted mirror and bring it to Teacher Mara, she'll be so happy that she'll teach me the other two of the Three Unforgivable Curses as well."
He'd already learned the Killing Curse.
He was practically booked for Azkaban.
Ian figured it would be a real waste not to collect the whole set.
It was like playing Genshin Impact.
You always wanted to collect every character card.
The reason Chocolate Frogs sold so well was much the same as the collectible-card marketing Ian remembered from the Wizarding World. It all played on roughly the same compulsive urge to collect them all.
"This homework isn't some kind of Dark Magic, is it?" Having sorted through some of his theories about Limbo, Ian finally turned his attention back to the scrap of dress.
The moonlight outside was bright and clear.
But it still couldn't illuminate the faint writing on the scrap of dress.
"Lumos!"
Ian pulled out his Elder Wand. As the spell successfully lit up the area around him, he also gained three points of proficiency in [Lumos].
"I've learned a new spell!"
Ian excitedly brought the light closer to the scrap of dress.
The next moment, he was dumbfounded.
There on the scrap of dress, letters etched in some unknown way twisted and curled in every direction, forming a text he couldn't understand at all.
"Ancient writing?"
Something didn't seem right to Ian.
He felt like he'd seen an explanation of this writing somewhere before.
"The textbook!"
Ian's mind sparked.
He sprang upright from the bed and rushed over to where he kept his textbooks and other things, pulling one from the pile.
Magical Theory, by Adalbert Waffling.
Flipping through the pages from memory, Ian soon stopped at the section introducing the origins of magic. In the passage about Ancient Runes, he found what he'd been looking for.
The same crooked, winding, bizarre-looking writing.
"These are Ancient Runes!"
The textbook was for first-years, so the information it provided was vague and only briefly introduced the subject. But looking at it, Ian finally understood what the witch meant by homework.
It wasn't simply learning a spell.
He also had to learn the Ancient Runes used to record this new spell.
That was right.
The spell recorded in runes might only be part of it.
These crooked, winding runes were the real homework!