Parseltongue and the Basilisk (II)

There was a Basilisk below.

That was right—Carmichael's Magic Core had "told" him there was a Basilisk below. The Ascension Ritual had not only increased his total magical power; the magic circle implanted within him had altered that yin-aspected magic, granting it the ability to precisely identify the Basilisk's magical fluctuations.

It was not memory, not knowledge, but something more fundamental, etched into the structure of his magic—a match like a key and a lock. His magic was telling him: You found it. This was the trace left behind by that serpent.

Carmichael took a deep breath. The air was cold, so cold that the inside of his nostrils ached from the frost.

He withdrew his hand and fixed the stone's exact position in his mind—not through coordinates, but through relative positioning by magical perception. Starting from that oak door, he had walked thirteen steps. At the fourteenth step, on the wall to his right, roughly four feet above the ground, it was the seventh stone.

He continued onward. His fingers left the wall, but he no longer needed to touch it. The lingering magical traces of the Basilisk appeared in his perception like a glowing line—not the kind of light seen with the eyes, but the kind felt through the skin in darkness, like something burning not far ahead: faint, yet impossible to extinguish.

That line stretched from inside the wall to beneath the floor, then from beneath the floor to above the ceiling, twisting and breaking intermittently like an uncertain route on a map, drawn and erased, erased and redrawn.

Carmichael followed that line. He passed corridor after corridor, descended one staircase, climbed another, crossed an unused, dust-filled foyer, and finally stopped before a half-open door with the faded words "Girls' Lavatory" painted across it.

His magical perception