"Cedric Gray."
Once Minerva McGonagall saw the boy clearly, she couldn't help drawing a sharp breath.
The child standing before her was only eleven, but his face was impossible to ignore. Pale blond hair fell over his shoulders, and his features were so lovely he looked less like a real person than someone who had stepped out of a painting.
His clothes were old and oversized, and his face was smudged with dirt. He looked a mess, yet none of it diminished his looks.
Of course, he was still far too young to be called handsome. For now, Cedric was simply an endearing child, and that alone was enough to soften many hearts.
But when he met her gaze, his pale green eyes were full of wariness and surprise he hadn't managed to hide.
"Who... who are you?"
He demanded an answer at once.
His accent was a little strange, but she had no trouble understanding him.
"I'm the deputy headmistress of Hogwarts, and I also teach the Transfiguration Spell. My name is Minerva McGonagall. I've come to see you today because you're about to enroll..."
By then, McGonagall was struggling to keep her composure. Her brows twitched several times, and her voice grew stern.
"So, Mr. Cecil, could you please let go of that poor owl first?"
Cedric had the unfortunate messenger bird firmly in his grip.
The owl shot McGonagall a pleading look and beat its wings frantically, but no matter how it struggled, it couldn't escape those hands that looked anything but strong.
McGonagall glanced aside. A jumble of things lay at the boy's feet: wild garlic pulled from the ground, basil leaves, a small rust-covered knife, and a fire he had just lit.
It looked very much as though, had she arrived a little later, Hogwarts' old feathered messenger would have ended up in a pot.
At the thought, McGonagall breathed a quiet sigh of relief.
The boy's circumstances were so unusual that she had followed soon after sending the owl. Otherwise, Hogwarts might have been one messenger owl short by the end of the day.
She searched the ground for a moment and soon spotted the letter tossed to one side.
Fortunately, it was still intact. If he had used that to start the fire too, she would have had to go back and write another.
"Child..."
Cedric still hadn't let go. McGonagall was considering how to persuade him—or, failing that, how to retrieve the owl with magic—when the boy suddenly flicked his wrist.
He moved as though he were throwing away something red-hot.
The owl flew from his hand.
The owl: "...Squawk?"
It clearly hadn't expected to be flung away. It hit the ground with a smack and rolled twice. A good while passed before it managed to get up, its feathers covered in dust.
As soon as its wings worked again, it fled without so much as a hoot, flapping into the distance as if something were after its life.
Cedric watched it make its hasty escape and finally seemed to come to his senses. He raised a hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead, then looked at the older woman who had introduced herself as Minerva McGonagall.
No wonder that damned bird was so hard to catch.
Hogwarts had sent it to deliver a letter.
He'd actually crossed over into the world of Harry Potter!
Cedric hadn't originally belonged to this world. After arriving here, his parents had vanished, and he had been sent to an orphanage as a young child. Eventually, he grew so sick of the bland food there that he ran into the wild and survived on whatever he could find. A year had passed that way.
An underage boy didn't survive a year in the wild through luck alone. Cedric had the one thing every transmigrator needed: a system.
His was called the Gourmet System.
When it first activated, it strengthened his body from head to toe. Without that, he would never have survived in the state he'd been in.
But that initial boost wasn't the system's most important feature. Whenever he ate something, he gained enhancement points. Eating certain special creatures also gave him a chance to acquire their abilities.
Eating the same food again wasn't entirely useless, but the more often he ate it, the weaker its effect became.
To build up those points, Cedric had finally made up his mind to leave the orphanage. Meat was so rare there that a month might pass with only a few servings. If he stayed, he would never accumulate many enhancement points.
Over the past year, he had eaten rabbits, all kinds of wild birds, and whatever else he could catch, including wild dogs.
But ordinary animals yielded pitifully few points, and none qualified as special creatures. Even now, he had yet to gain an ability from anything he had eaten.
He had never been able to figure out what counted as a special creature.
McGonagall's arrival had opened a new door for him.
This was the world of Harry Potter.
A world full of magic, with strange things hidden everywhere.
More importantly, he was a wizard himself.
When Cedric thought of the magical world, spells and enchanted objects weren't the first things that came to mind. It was something else entirely.
"Damn it! Now I finally know what counts as a special creature!"
No sooner had that thought appeared than another came crashing in.
"I finally have a chance to taste some truly top-tier ingredients!"
McGonagall watched him sink into his happy daydreams and, for a moment, had no idea what to do with him.
She had never met a child like him.
An orphan who had run away at ten and survived alone in the wild—and on their first meeting, he had been trying to stew an owl.
Any one of those troubles would have been enough to give her a headache. Somehow, this boy had all of them.
McGonagall couldn't help wondering whether he had been bullied throughout his childhood and had fled into the wild because he was too stubborn to bow his head, determined to find his own way to survive.
With that thought, she looked at Cedric's face again. She could no longer keep her voice as stern as before.
"Mr. Cecil?"
No response.
She softened her voice and tried again.
"Mr. Cecil?"
This time, Cedric finally came back to himself. He wiped the corner of his mouth on instinct, though there was nothing there, then asked:
"What is it, Professor McGonagall?"
"I wanted to ask whether you're willing to leave with me now."
McGonagall continued to coax him patiently.
"To the magical world where you belong."
"Do you even need to ask, Professor McGonagall?"
Cedric's eyes lit up.
"I can't wait to see everything in the magical world."
Especially all those adorable, edible ingredients.