Flight! Flight!

At last, Ye Ting's first flying lesson began.

This flying lesson was shared by Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff. Together, the first-years from the two houses numbered around thirty or forty.

The lesson was held on a flat lawn, with the forest at its far end. In the distance, black trees swayed in the wind.

Before they arrived, around forty brooms had already been laid out neatly across the field.

Ye Ting had heard Cho Chang complain that Hogwarts' brooms were far too old, and all of them had one problem or another: some would shake violently if they flew too high, while others had the bad habit of veering left or right in flight.

Before long, their teacher, Madam Hooch, arrived.

She had short gray hair and yellow eyes, like an eagle's.

"All right, what are you all waiting for?" she snapped. "Each of you stand beside a flying broom. Quickly, quickly, we don't have all day."

Standing in the middle of the group, Ye Ting disdainfully picked up a crooked old broom, its twigs sticking out in every direction.

Hermione stood beside him, curiously examining a broom that was nearly bald.

"Hold out your right hand over the broom handle," Madam Hooch called from the front. "Then say, 'Up!'"

"Up!" everyone shouted.

Ye Ting did not shout along with them. He merely recited it once in his mind, yet the broom obediently jumped into his hand.

Silently casting such a simple command, one that barely even counted as a spell, was no challenge for him.

But for the young wizards, only a very few could manage it.

Hermione Granger's broom merely rolled over on the ground, while some people's brooms did not move at all.

None of his three roommates succeeded either. Terry Boot and Anthony Goldstein's brooms became tangled together, while Michael Corner's broom smacked its owner hard in the face with its handle.

After a long bout of noisy confusion, they finally moved on to the next step.

Madam Hooch demonstrated how to mount a broom without sliding off over its front. She walked up and down the line, correcting their grips.

"All right, when I blow my whistle, push off with both legs and leave the ground. Push hard," Madam Hooch said. She even used Neville Longbottom as a bad example: his posture was improper, and he pushed off too hastily. Once airborne, he lost control, flew into the Forbidden Forest, and broke his wrist.

"Hold your broom steady, rise a few feet, then lean forward slightly and drop straight back to the ground. Listen for my whistle—three—two—one—"

What followed was another mess. Many fell to the ground before even rising half a meter. Hermione barely steadied her broom and took a full minute before managing to hover in the air.

Perhaps because Padma Patil was of Indian descent, her broom took her through an aerial acrobatic routine. Many young wizards tilted their heads back and watched her with envy.

But Ye Ting could clearly see that her face had gone pale, and her hands were clutching the broom for dear life—those acrobatics were probably not what she wanted.

Justin Finch-Fletchley's broom kept spinning him around in place until he grew so dizzy that he fell to the ground.

Ye Ting was the best flyer among them. He rose into the air with effortless ease.

What did it feel like? The air howled through his hair, his robes billowed behind him, everyone below grew smaller and smaller in his eyes, and Hogwarts gradually spread out in full view.

He could hear sounds rising from the ground—girls screaming, Terry Boot and the others shouting enviously—but as he continued to climb and accelerate, even those sounds seemed to fall away behind him.

In fact, through his day-after-day dedication to training, his body had been steadily evolving and growing stronger.

By now, his physical abilities, balance, and reflexes had long surpassed human limits. That allowed him to handle a flying broom better than anyone else, and to perform many highly difficult maneuvers.

Riding his broom, he darted through the skies above Hogwarts. He dived through bridge arches, circled the towers several times, and even performed a few barrel rolls during his dives.

The high-speed flight deeply stimulated his nerves, and the adrenaline made his blood boil.

He had always been calm and composed. Even in his previous life, he had never done anything particularly outrageous. But now, this kind of flight revealed another side of him—a craving for thrills, for testing his limits. The feeling of conquering life and death amid the razor-thin divide between them was intoxicating.

Perhaps I was never meant to be someone who played by the rules.

With that thought, he flew even more boldly.

He remembered the aerobatic performances he had once watched at air shows.

Those pilots sat in cockpits, controlling their planes indirectly through sticks and instrument panels, yet they could perform so many dazzling, exaggerated maneuvers. Now that he was personally controlling a flying broom, whose responsiveness and agility surpassed an aircraft's by several times, there was no reason he could not perform those moves as well.

He rode his broom back over the lawn.

There was enough open space there for him to practice aerobatics—though, of course, he also wanted to show off—and so he began to try.