Will made his way to the Headmaster's Office with practiced ease, but Dumbledore was nowhere to be seen. Only a thick pile of materials sat on the headmaster's desk.
On closer inspection, he found a parchment note on top: Will, I have some business to attend to outside. These are the materials on Soul Studies.
Will leafed through them casually. The pile looked rather haphazard, not because Dumbledore had left everything in a mess, but because the materials themselves were such a jumble—yellowed paper books, parchment of varying ages, and even a few stone tablets.
That alone showed how scarce materials on Soul Studies were.
Will put the materials away and left the Headmaster's Office without lingering. He had other things to do.
By now, Will had thoroughly mastered the Water of Despair. He had spent the past two days getting himself into the right condition and preparing ingredients. After all, he was about to begin developing the Happiness Potion.
Will currently had two approaches in mind. The first was to develop it through the properties and effects of its ingredients—in other words, to create the Happiness Potion purely through Potions.
The other was to analyze and master the magical structure of the Water of Despair, find a way to adjust it into a structure with the opposite effect, and then work backward from that magical structure to derive the potion.
Both methods had their advantages and disadvantages. For the first, purely Potions-based approach, he could collaborate with Snape and Dumbledore. The three leading figures in Potions in the wizarding world could pool their ideas, and even bring in outside help, such as a Potions Master like Slughorn.
With the four of them working together, it might not take very long once they had a direction for their research.
The