Yeah, Yeah, You're Right About Everything

"Yeah, yeah, of course." Gavin rolled his eyes, a rare sight.

"So you were actually up on the Astronomy Tower, fighting a Wild Dragon that was about to attack Hogwarts."

"Exactly."

"And to protect everyone at the school, you hurled it off the top of the tower."

"That's right."

"But to avoid causing a panic, the school settled on an official story: you had a little accident while testing magic."

"Perfectly reasonable."

"Gu." Justin sat on a sofa in the Hufflepuff Common Room, still holding a slice of buttered bread. His expression was complicated. "Have you put brushing us off on autopilot now?"

"That means you keep asking the same questions," Gavin said mildly.

He sat across from them with a book open on his knees, not even looking up. The fire burned brightly in the fireplace, making the Hufflepuff Common Room comfortably warm. Beyond the round windows, the daylight was a cool gray, filtered through soil and grass roots. It was the perfect setting for every student to laze away a rare break.

Of course, it was also the perfect setting for his roommates to keep interrogating someone who had just blown up half the Astronomy Tower.

Ernie was still sitting up straight.

His questioning was much more formal than Justin's.

"But you should at least give us a version that's a little closer to the truth." He looked at Gavin earnestly. "At least tell us whether you're going to attempt something similar a second time."

Justin immediately turned to him.

"Wait. Why does your question sound more dangerous than my dragon?"

"Because I'm seriously assessing the risk," Ernie said, entirely unapologetic.

"How did you develop a Headmaster-Level sense of crisis?"

"My upbringing."

"That's terrifying."

Gavin finally looked up from his book.

"Don't worry." He gave them a reassuring look. "I won't blow up any more towers in the near future."

Justin fell silent for two seconds.

"Why did that sound like 'not in the near future' instead of 'never'?"

"Because I'm trying to be honest."

"That's worse," Justin said sincerely.

Cedric came in just then. Hearing the last part, he asked casually:

"What's worse?"

"Gu's practicing how to make his roommates feel unsafe without them noticing," Justin reported at once.

"He didn't start that recently," Cedric said without a shred of mercy.

Gavin looked up at him.

"Do you still want to continue training today?"

Cedric promptly drew his neck in.

"...I didn't say anything."

This had become a common scene in the Hufflepuff Common Room lately.

On the surface, everyone had accepted the official explanation that "Gu had a little accident while testing magic." In private, no one believed it. Every few days, someone tried a new theory on him: a dragon, an Ancient Curse, an out-of-control Alchemy Array, the remnants of a Forbidden Curse, or even an Astrological Artifact hidden in the Astronomy Tower that had backfired.

Gavin refused to explain any of it.

Or rather, he brushed it all off with an attitude of yeah, yeah, you're right about everything.

It worked remarkably well.

When someone brushed people off naturally and thoroughly enough, after a few rounds of questions they often began to suspect they would never get the truth.

The only problem was—

Being watched and questioned so relentlessly was annoying in itself.

And when he already had other, genuinely troublesome matters on his mind, it did even less for his mood.

Those other troubles fell into two main categories.

The first was the professors.

Within a couple of days of returning to school, Gavin noticed that the professors were treating him differently.

They were worried he might have another accident, and as a result, they paid far too much attention to his every move.

Professor McGonagall was the most natural about it. She merely called on him more often in Transfiguration and was especially fond of having him demonstrate spells on the spot. She looked very much like a guardian who knew you had secretly blown up the kitchen last time and now insisted on watching whenever you went near the stove.

Professor Flitwick was more direct. He had Gavin demonstrate nearly every spell in every class, as though Gavin were a teaching aid whose every last drop of magic had to be put to use.

Professor Sprout was the same. In Herbology, she smiled as she asked Gavin to tell Devil's Snare apart from another, harmless vine, then added a little awkwardly:

"Remember, you don't need to save anyone today, dear. You only need to get through class safely."

"..." Gavin could only nod. "I'll try."

Only Snape went in the opposite direction. He grew even less civil toward Gavin, looking at him whenever they met as though Gavin owed him several pounds of Dragon Blood.

During Potions Class, the Dungeon Classroom was as cold as ever, and the flames beneath the cauldrons cast the whole room in a dim glow. When Snape reached Gavin's desk on his rounds, he glanced down at the ingredients Gavin had prepared and spoke coldly:

"How surprising, Mr. Gu. Someone capable of blowing a hole in the Astronomy Tower with such artistry can't even cut Porcupine Quills at a decent angle."

Beside him, Justin immediately lowered his head further to avoid being caught in the crossfire.

Gavin looked at his Porcupine Quills, which were cut perfectly well.

"Professor, I thought—"

"You do a great deal of thinking." Snape cut him off, his gaze cold and sharp. "Unfortunately, your ability in Potions seems nowhere near as impressive as your talent for destroying school property."

After that, the students at the nearby tables fell so quiet they hardly dared let their stirring rods make a sound.

Gavin was silent for two seconds.

"Thank you for the advice, Professor."

Snape stared at him, plainly dissatisfied that his jab had landed on something as yielding as cotton. But he could find no fault with the reply. In the end, he swept onward in his black robes to make trouble for other students.

Only after Snape had gone did Justin draw a very quiet breath.

"Does he hate you even more lately?"

"You have to understand. One day you'll have a midlife crisis too." Gavin seemed used to it.

"..."

Clearly, Dumbledore had told the professors something. At the very least, he had told them Gavin needed closer attention. The other professors had chosen to pay attention. Snape had chosen to make it pointed.

As for Quirrell—

Quirrell had also been paying noticeably more attention to him lately.

That made Gavin the most uncomfortable of all.

Unlike the other professors, Quirrell was a serious danger in his own right. If Professor McGonagall watched you a little more closely, at worst it meant your Transfiguration wasn't accurate enough. If Quirrell took an interest in you, things became far more complicated.

In the first Defense Against the Dark Arts class after school resumed, Quirrell called on Gavin several times, with almost unprecedented initiative.

"G-Gu, Mr. Gu, what is the most important principle when dealing with the remnants of a Low-Level Curse?"

"G-Gu, Mr. Gu, if you can't cast a Defensive Charm in time, what would you choose first?"

"G-Gu, Mr. Gu, when it comes to objects bearing traces of Dark Magic—"

The questions came one after another.

Every one of them concerned identifying and handling Dark Magic.

Gavin answered without leaving an opening, but he grew increasingly wary.

Because Quirrell clearly wasn't just curious.

He seemed to be confirming something.

Or perhaps testing something.

Before class ended, as the students began packing away their books and parchment, Quirrell remained by the lectern. He glanced Gavin's way twice, clearly wanting to speak but hesitating.

That felt even more dangerous to Gavin.

When a stammering Professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts who usually seemed eager to avoid every student suddenly gave a first-year Hufflepuff a look that said, I have something I'd like to discuss with you alone—

There was no way to take that as a good sign.

Especially when the man was currently host to Voldemort's wraith.

So Gavin gave him no chance to speak.

"Sorry, Professor." He picked up his schoolbag first, his manner perfectly natural. "I still need to go to the Headmaster's Office."

Quirrell visibly froze.

"Oh... d-do you?"

"Yes."

"Then, th-then off you go."

"Thank you, Professor."

Gavin turned and left.

Once outside the classroom, he even quickened his pace.

However much Gavin enjoyed research, he had no desire to approach a high-risk specimen with no nose that spoke Parseltongue.

The other troublesome matter was that Gavin's own research had hit a bottleneck.

By now, he could enter the Consciousness Space fairly reliably.

He could also approach the two different whorls at will—the black one and the white one. Or, as he now preferred to think of them: the corrupted Manas Consciousness and another, relatively positive and less corrupted Manas Consciousness.

The question was, what came next?

Just because he could do it did not mean Cordelia could.

That was the fundamental problem.

He had worked out what was happening in his own Consciousness Space, but that did not mean someone else's mind was built exactly the same way.

Besides, Cordelia had never had the opportunity to spend years meditating and observing herself as he had, let alone draw on the various mental disciplines he had practiced in his previous life.

For her to enter her Consciousness Space as he did, use her Sixth Consciousness to make an active choice, force her way past countless distracting thoughts through cognition, then approach that other center of attachment—

It was almost impossible in the short term.

"So I still don't have a control group." Sitting in the library, Gavin stared at a line in his notes and slowly frowned.

A single case with no control group could not establish much.

That was the difference between an experiment and a repeatable process.

Experiments produced all kinds of results by accident. That was a far cry from obtaining a result reliably.

He might be an unusual case himself. He could not assume that everyone with an Obscurus was the same.

He urgently needed some way to confirm what was going on inside Cordelia.

Did she also have layered Manas Consciousness?

Or was there only an Obscurus?

Was her Consciousness Space like his?

Or was it completely different?

The question now was—

How?

How could he enter someone else's Consciousness Space?

As far as he knew, the Muggle World had no way to do that. Plenty of novels described methods, though, such as Possession.

Do I need to practice leaving my body next? Is that even possible?

Gavin sank into thought.

"Perhaps the Imperius Curse?"

It was one of the Unforgivable Curses, but he quickly dismissed it—or rather, put it low on his list of options. Judging from what little he remembered of it from films, it probably was not suited to such precise work.

After all, even with his degree of control, a moment of joy had nearly made him lose his grip. He had no idea how precisely the Imperius Curse could control another person.

Soon, another possibility occurred to him.

If the Consciousness Space existed, was it wholly private and sealed off? Or could it be reached through some deeper structure shared by everyone?

That thought brought Jung to mind.

Jung had said that everyone's unconscious minds were connected.

"The Collective Unconscious..." Gavin softly repeated the term.

It was originally a psychological concept.

But drawing a comparison across disciplines with Buddhism's Alaya Consciousness might not be entirely impossible.

As the fundamental cause common to all life, Alaya Consciousness held countless seeds and carried the flow of existence.

What if that "river" was not his alone, but a fundamental current of consciousness shared by everyone?

Would that mean—

He might be able to use it to approach someone else's consciousness?

The idea was bold and dangerous.

And its boldness was precisely what made it so tempting.

That night, Gavin waited until his roommates were asleep before beginning his experiment in the dormitory.

With Pipi keeping watch lately, he did not dare go to the Room of Requirement. At the very least, he could not reveal yet that he had discovered its secret.

He sat cross-legged.

Closed his eyes.

Slowed his breathing.

His awareness sank little by little, and soon he returned to that familiar Inner Landscape.

An expanse of white.

In the distance were the black Whirlpool and the white Manas Consciousness.

Below him lay that quietly flowing "river."

This time, Gavin did not look at the two whirlpools first.

His gaze—or rather, the "eyes" of his consciousness—fell directly on the river.

If Alaya Consciousness really was some equivalent expression of the "collective unconscious"—

Then perhaps the answer lay here.

He slowly drew closer from above.

At first, nothing seemed unusual.

The river kept flowing, quiet and boundless, with no clear sense of direction, like a real river in the physical world, without a ripple on its surface.

But before he could get too close, Gavin abruptly sensed something wrong.

He found that the boundaries of his sense of "self" were beginning to loosen.

The sensation was terrifying.

It was a more fundamental, indescribable feeling of dissolution. As though the thin membrane enclosing his "self" had suddenly begun melting away, bit by bit. He still knew he was there, but the word "self" was growing unstable, blurry, as though it might be swept away at any moment.

His thoughts no longer belonged entirely to "him."

His perceptions began to scatter, too.

Even his awareness of the action "I am approaching that river" began to blur, as though his thoughts might cease to exist in the next second, merging with those of every other living being.

He felt himself becoming infinitely small, submerged beneath everything else, returning to nothingness.

Was this what death felt like?

Gavin broke out in a cold sweat.

Instinctively, he fought with all his strength to pull himself out of Meditation and snapped his eyes open.

The wall lamp was still there.

So were his roommates.

The dorm room was still the dorm room.

But his breathing was ragged, his hands and feet were ice-cold, and a fine layer of cold sweat had already formed on his back.

"...So that's what it was."

He sat where he was, taking several seconds to recover something like a normal heartbeat.

So this was what losing himself felt like.

He had heard before that some astronauts experienced an intense sense of alienation from themselves upon seeing the Earth in its entirety from space. Back then, he had only understood the words literally: presumably, they felt small, as though individuals did not matter all that much.

Only now did he understand.

That "alienation" was not a passing sentiment.

It was an impact that acted directly on the boundaries of one's identity. A person would suddenly realize that the "self" they had thought so stable might not be nearly as solid as they imagined. From a perspective high enough, broad enough, and fundamental enough, it could even be rapidly washed away.

When he tried to approach Alaya Consciousness, the "river" shared by everyone, that sensation had been amplified to the extreme.

The profound terror between life and death.

"Did you have a nightmare, Mr. Gu?"

Pipi's voice came from beside him.

Gavin turned his head and saw that it had appeared at some point. It stood by the wall, watching him anxiously with its big eyes, its ears drooping a little.

Perhaps he had made too much noise when he jolted out of Meditation, or perhaps it had been keeping an eye on him lately, and he had triggered some sort of magical monitoring mechanism.

Gavin looked at it and remained silent for a moment.

"I'm fine." He shook his head.

Then he paused and added, "It was just a nightmare."

Pipi was clearly still a little worried.

"Would you like some hot tea, Mr. Gu?"

"...Yes."

Pipi disappeared for a few seconds, then reappeared with a cup of warm tea.

Gavin took it, his fingertips touching the side of the cup. Only after swallowing a mouthful of warm, reassuringly tangible tea did he finally begin to dispel the feeling that the "torrent of collective consciousness" had nearly swept him apart.

He lowered his head to watch the steam rising from the tea. A long time passed before he murmured to himself:

"So it still won't work?"

He had to admit that late at night, it was very easy to feel low. There was a reason so many people in his previous life had gotten moody at midnight, and Gavin, too, was slipping into self-doubt.

Pipi's ears twitched.

"What won't work, Mr. Gu?"

"I thought I could find a way around it at a deeper level." Gavin looked out the window. "Now it seems I can't, at least not yet."

It was not merely that he could not do it. He could not casually try again at all.

If he got even a little closer, that feeling of losing himself would return. He had managed to pull out in time once, but what about after another two attempts? No one could guarantee that, the next time he came back, he would still recognize himself.

Just as someone who had tried to end their life might find it hard to muster the courage for a second attempt after being rescued.

Pipi stood quietly beside him.

It did not understand Alaya Consciousness.

Nor did it understand the collective unconscious.

But it could tell that Mr. Gu was not doing well at all.

Gavin took a sip of tea. The warmth traveled downward, but it failed to truly quell the disappointment deep inside him.

His research had reached another dead end.

For now, the route to other people's consciousness through Meditation was blocked. He had yet to think of a way through. After all, no one knew whether this river could actually be entered, or whether he would simply dissolve into nothingness.

Looking at the pile of notes spread across the desk, he suddenly felt a genuine trace of helplessness for the first time.

At last, he spoke those words:

"Am I really unable to do it after all?"