Occult Material Selection Method

Research into flying brooms had reached an awkward impasse.

If the team could continue their efforts, bypass Nimbus Company's stacked-enchantment patents, and pioneer a new technique for adding more magic to brooms, they would be able to produce affordable brooms with superior performance.

If the team's research stalled here, their current technology could only support handcrafting brooms at the level of the classic Cleansweep Seven. Yet any broom company still operating on the market could produce brooms better than that. No one would buy such a thing even from a street stall.

The Cleansweep Seven was considered the passing line. Only flying brooms with better performance could seize market share, while those inferior to it could only be eliminated.

After learning that the software development team had encountered an insurmountable technical bottleneck, Fred and George could only shoulder the burden of continuing the research.

The sunk costs were right there. They had invested several thousand Galleons, and if they ended up with nothing to show for it, they would feel they had let down their months of hard work.

So they gritted their teeth and got to work... Wasn't it just new materials? Then they would research them!

The Weasley Twins even stopped attending classes, squatting in the laboratory Zhang San had found for them all day to test new materials. It was not easy to find the most suitable one among the vast sea of magical materials, and the exhaustive method was the most costly approach.

First, the cost was unacceptable. Second, the sheer quantity was enormous. Even if Fred and George spent their whole lives on it, they might not test every possible material and find the best one.

When Zhang San saw George and Fred a month later, the two had turned into scruffy, unkempt research vagabonds.

"What's going on? Our research team hasn't gone bankrupt yet!" Zhang San asked in surprise.

Fred said with bloodshot eyes, "It's too hard! Materials science is too hard!"

Zhang San laughed. Of the four great pits—biology, chemistry, environmental science, and materials science—which one was easy? Fred and George's research task had stepped into three of them at once.

Testing magical materials was much like chemical reactions involving unknown raw materials: the results did whatever they pleased. Moreover, magical materials displayed different magical properties in different environments, adding even more work for the two of them.

"This can't continue. We need a more direct method to find this material!" Fred said firmly.

Christmas was just around the corner, and the brothers still needed to develop more magical prank items to harvest their classmates' wallets. If they poured all their energy and time into researching flying broom materials, they would miss Christmas, the prime market season.

Zhang San felt it was time for him to step in. Since scientific research could not solve the problem quickly, he would use occult methods instead.

This was a world where people could cultivate and wield magic. Occult methods were not imaginary scams, but genuinely effective means.

Hogwarts itself offered occult classes—Divination and Arithmancy.

Divination taught students to predict the future by observing various omens, symbols, and vague images, such as mist in a crystal ball or the shape of tea leaves left after drinking tea. However, this relied heavily on bloodline and talent. Those who could do it could do it; those who could not, could not.

Divination was a fickle ability. Take Hogwarts's Divination professor, Sibyl Trelawney, for example. Her usual predictions were most likely inaccurate, and students often regarded her as a fraud living off Hogwarts's food, drink, and salary.

Yet this "fraud professor" had also made several genuine prophecies—the prophecy of Voldemort's death and the prophecy of Voldemort's return had both come from her, and they carried considerable weight.

As for Arithmancy, Zhang San found it quite familiar when he saw it. China also had its own branch of arithmantic divination—fortune-telling.

Hogwarts students needed to learn to convert letters, names, dates, and the like into specific numbers, then use particular formulas to analyze those numbers' magical properties and relationships.

In China's Eight Characters system, once a fortune-teller established a person's destiny chart, they could calculate a great many things.

Unfortunately, when Zhang San had cultivated at the Celestial Masters' Mansion, he had devoted all his attention to martial training. He had not even looked at technical subjects like fortune-telling. Liberal arts students were naturally enemies of mathematics; this was not something one could learn through effort alone.

As the saying went, nothing in the world was difficult—except math class. Zhang San had been at odds with mathematics in his previous life, so when he went to university, he deliberately chose a major without advanced mathematics—Chinese Language and Literature.

So Zhang San did not know Arithmancy either. He planned to use an even more occult method to help Fred and George find suitable materials.

He opened his Ghost Spatial Bag and took out a bronze compass.

Fred and George immediately became interested when they saw it. "Siri, what is that?"

"A compass. It's something Chinese cultivators use to read feng shui and locate dragon veins," Zhang San answered.

The brothers stepped aside to let Zhang San work. Holding the Ghost Compass as he floated in midair, Zhang San chanted, "Seek dragons and divide gold by observing the winding mountains; each fold is a pass. If the gateway holds eightfold dangers, it cannot escape the form of yin, yang, and the Eight Trigrams!"

"That's so cool!" Fred shouted.

"Does that really work?" George asked skeptically.

Once the Dragon-Seeking Formula was finished, Zhang San's compass began to react. He followed the direction of its needle, passed through the castle walls, and found the target in his own little temple.

Fred and George did not have the ability to pass through walls. They took a long detour out of the castle before catching up with Zhang San. When the two arrived, panting heavily, they saw their ghost classmate floating in the temple, questioning his entire existence.

"What's wrong?" Fred asked.

Zhang San pointed at the flower bed. "What we're looking for is here."

"Gryffindor red roses? Slytherin silver reeds? Ravenclaw blue hydrangeas? Hufflepuff green daffodils?" George asked, as if reciting a menu.

Zhang San shook his head. "I think what we're looking for is Mount Longhu Giant Bamboo."

Time flew by. By the end of 1991, Zhang San had been dead for several months, and the giant bamboo planted here when the temple was first built had already grown five meters tall.

The material the Dragon-Seeking Formula had led Zhang San to was none other than the Mount Longhu Giant Bamboo standing in the courtyard as a feng shui tree.

"Cut one down and take it back for research. I think you'll create a miracle this time," Zhang San said.

He felt that he should have thought of bamboo long ago. In the distant East, working people had long used bamboo to bind brooms together. According to certain mystical principles, since bamboo could be used to make brooms, magically enhanced bamboo had the potential to become a material for manufacturing flying brooms.

Half-convinced and half-doubtful, the Weasley brothers carried a five-meter-long giant bamboo stalk as thick as a bowl back to the laboratory and began another round of materials research.

Before long, Zhang San, who was waiting for news in the little temple, received Ron's urgent eight-hundred-meter delivery of good news. "Siri, Siri... We succeeded!"