15 Curse

The plan had indeed been laid out far in the future, so it was no wonder Fumengde had found it hard to believe.

But Sherlock had also gained the knowledge he wanted from his father: when it came to wood for wands, living, active wood was indeed the best material.

Take Ollivander's wandmaking process, for instance—he used branches picked that very day to make wands.

"Even if you like purple nanmu wood, you can wait until you're eleven and order a purple nanmu wand from Ollivanders Wand Shop, or go back to the Daba Mountains, Sichuan, find that tree, and break off another branch. But I want to tell you this: even if you like wands made of purple nanmu, the wand that ultimately suits you may not necessarily be made from purple nanmu."

"The wand chooses the wizard, right?" Sherlock looked seriously at Fumengde, who nodded. It was indeed the wand that chose the wizard. Whenever young wizards went to Ollivanders Wand Shop to buy their wands, Ollivander emphasized this point to every one of them.

"That's why I intend to start nurturing a wand that will inevitably be loyal to me in the future."

Sherlock looked at the piece of purple nanmu in the flowerpot. As long as he branded the branch with his own mark, the wand made from it in the future would surely remain loyal to only one master forever.

Over the following days, Sherlock carefully tended the purple nanmu branch growing in the soil every day. One drop of Plant Vitality Elixir each day kept it alive, while also allowing Sherlock to continue studying the secrets and laws behind how plants maintained vitality and grew.

This always made Axinsha, whenever she came to play with her brother, complain about him...

At the same time, Sherlock studied the many books in the study concerning magical plants in the wizarding world.

Moreover, Sherlock discovered that two-thirds of those books had actually been contributed by his mother, Aili.

With Mephisto being a family that revered the Dark Arts, their family collection contained quite a few books on Dark Magic, but very few that truly ventured into other fields of magical knowledge.

Yet after Sherlock discovered the use of the Magic Notebook, neither the first nor the second spell he invented belonged to the category of Dark Magic. Although rumors outside claimed that Sherlock possessed talent surpassing all of Mephisto's ancestors, he did not possess their innate reverence for the Dark Arts.

Such rumors might have been deliberately spread by someone with ulterior motives, intended to ease the wizarding world's fears that, after Voldemort's rule had only just ended, Sherlock might become the third Dark Lord.

In mid-February 1984, after the Magic Notebook's one-month time limit had passed, Sherlock hid alone in his room and sorted through the vast amount of information he had recorded over the past month.

He organized it into matching rules with complete sequences. They included both magical knowledge from the wizarding world and the knowledge of plant traits and cell growth discovered by Muggle scientists.

Sherlock had already thought of a name for his third spell: "Surging Spring Life." Its function was to bring withered plants whose vitality had ebbed away back to life.

It was similar to plant regeneration.

Sherlock also believed that if this spell were revealed to the wizarding world, it would have an even greater impact than the previous two spells.

That was because three-quarters of the materials used to brew potions in the wizarding world were plants, while the remaining quarter came from certain magical creatures.

This situation made magical plants extremely scarce and precious in the wizarding world.

And using a large quantity of plant materials to brew a small bottle of potion capable of saving only a limited number of plants was hardly worthwhile. So Sherlock wondered whether a spell could be used to bring dead or dying plants back to life.

There were actually spells with similar effects in the Harry Potter series.

When Harry had been injured and fallen unconscious because of magic, after he woke up in his hospital bed, there had been a somewhat wilted bouquet beside him. Hermione had made the flowers bloom again, and even in the final Harry Potter installment...

Hermione had once made a wreath of flowers grow from the ground out of thin air before Harry's parents' graves.

Sherlock had specifically asked his mother, Aili, about it. The second spell turned out to be an illusion-type spell, the so-called wreath growing from the ground out of thin air.

As for the first spell, it stimulated the withered bouquet and reverted it to the time when it had been blooming brightly, but afterward, it would wither even faster.

"I hope this works." Sherlock sighed as he recorded the numerous complex matching rules in the Magic Notebook. Then he wrote down the spell's name, "Surging Spring Life," along with its incantation, before eagerly pointing the wand he had borrowed from his mother at the purple nanmu branch in the flowerpot.

"Surging Spring Life."

As he spoke the incantation, the tip of his wand emitted a green glow filled with the vitality of spring, unlike the green light of Avada Kedavra, the Killing Curse recorded in Dark Magic books.

The green light emitted by the Surging Spring Life Charm gave off an exceptionally comfortable feeling.

It was not like Avada Kedavra, so cold that it inspired terrible fear and dread of death.

It seemed that whether life meant death or survival, the light emitted by spells was always green—the green of life. It was as though this color had been assigned a fixed symbolic meaning.

The green spell light shone upon the purple nanmu branch. Visible to the naked eye, the branch, which had previously merely maintained its existence, seemed to advance another step forward. A tiny green bud even sprouted from a small woody protrusion beside it.

"Whew... It worked. This spell really can restore vitality to plants. It's different from those spells that merely stimulate a plant's life force, only for it to wither even faster afterward."

Looking at the purple nanmu branch, now in a state of returning to life, standing quietly in the flowerpot, Sherlock placed it by the sun-facing window in his room. The vibrant light of dawn shone directly onto the tender new bud that had just emerged.

Sherlock eagerly told his parents the good news. After all, a spell that could truly restore life to plants was tremendously useful.

For those who were passionate about brewing potions but could never satisfy their need for potion ingredients, or for wizards whose cultivated plants always died in large numbers due to improper care, simply casting a spell could prevent such things from happening. That was truly a boon for the wizarding world.

When Fumengde and his wife heard their eldest son excitedly describe the powerful effects of the Surging Spring Life Charm, Aili was stunned as she considered the tremendous influence and consequences the spell could bring. Fumengde, meanwhile, merely shrugged indifferently. Though he was somewhat surprised that his son had invented another spell in only a month, he was far less shocked than he had been the previous two times.

He appeared much calmer, feeling mostly happy. After all, Fumengde's foresight and ability to see the bigger picture were far inferior to his wife's.