The Mysterious Avada Kedavra

Recently, his daily nap had been canceled without fail.

The sensation of perceiving the Avada Kedavra spell had given Ryan quite a shock.

After investigating it repeatedly, Ryan discovered that "Avada Kedavra," the incantation for the Killing Curse, was an ancient Aramaic phrase, a language some scholars believed Jesus Christ had used to preach.

It meant "Let the thing be destroyed," or simply, "Destroy it."

More interestingly, "the thing" here did not refer to life, but to disease.

Its English pronunciation was also very similar to abracadabra. Abracadabra came from Hebrew and was used somewhat like an imperative magical command. Put more plainly, it meant something like, "Now is the moment to witness a miracle." Could its inventor have come from the East, surnamed Liu and named Qian?

Why had the creator of this magic made it in the first place? Even Ryan, merely perceiving it now, felt as though he had touched death itself.

Could it really have been Death?

Ryan had once used Detection on Peverell, the surname of the three brothers from The Tales of Beedle the Bard.

The feeling had not differed much from investigating the Avada Kedavra spell. Could Peverell even have been Death's surname?

So Voldemort, a descendant of the bloodline passed from Peverell to Slytherin and then to Gaunt, had been especially adept with Avada Kedavra because of his highly magical birth—one that took his mother's life from the moment he was born—combined with slaughtering his own family?

In the end, he had even died twice because the curse rebounded. Could this spell have been created and passed down by Death so that wizards would harvest souls for him in advance?

And both rebounds had happened when he tried to kill Harry Potter, who was suspected to be descended from the youngest of the three brothers. As for why nothing happened when he killed James Potter... ahem, perhaps James simply did not qualify.

"Magic really is wonderful. I still need to work harder—and keep a lower profile."

So lately, Ryan had continuously used his Detection skill, hoping to connect with certain invisible things.

But he had found nothing. Still, if spells truly were merely keys, then it was understandable why even the Smith Family lacked pre-school education so badly, without even basic Magic Books. After all, Ryan's parents had graduated from Hogwarts. Their textbooks should have been kept at home, shouldn't they?

Normally, a young wizard's magic probably only became stable around the age of eleven. If a wizard's magic truly was the omnipotent force the books boasted about, then young wizards with quick minds and no restraints might suffer adverse effects from learning magic.

For example, when Harry Potter was bullied by his cousin, he would unconsciously teleport in an instant without suffering Splinching. Yet Apparition, which had the same function, could cause Splinching if one was careless while learning it. Without supervision, it would be easy to lose one's life. Then there was making the glass at the zoo disappear, or Neville falling from an upstairs window only to bounce back up—flying across the whole garden before landing on the road. These were all things pre-school wizards could do. But once they enrolled and came into contact with magic, those miraculous instincts vanished.

Yet ever since crossing over, Ryan had never felt any of those things. Relying on his exceptional talent, his Protego and Expelliarmus had continuously improved without him understanding—or rather, studying—Magical Theory. At the same time, insights different from the existing magical system kept surfacing in his mind.

Perhaps he had taken a detour. Some magical knowledge could be used, and even improved upon, once learned, but that did not mean it was completely correct. It might merely be a relative truth.

Especially when most magical knowledge seemed more like prose or personal magical insights.

What Ryan truly needed to do was excavate his own instincts, use his exceptional talent to remember them, and continuously use and upgrade them. If there were other needs, he could name them and spread them widely. Or he could use several of the most common spells—Incendio, Aguamenti, Lumos—as keys, ignore everything else, keep grinding away at them with time, and break through the limits on his own.

Moreover, the more wizards there were in a place, the easier it probably was to learn magic. In the original story's terms, it was a magical field. A magical field could distort and interfere with electrical devices, but it should also soothe a young wizard's magic and guide it toward greater stability.

A magical field was like cloud storage. One wizard uploaded magic, while incantations, hand gestures, or willpower were the password. Use them, and one could download it and make it one's own. As for why some foreign spells did not work domestically, it was simply because they had not been uploaded, or because the password was wrong—they had another name here.

No, it could not exactly be called downloading. Every spell that was not self-created, after its first casting, relied on one's own independent source of magic for subsequent use.

Through incantations, emotions, and gestures, one opened the treasure vault of information within the magical field. Then, through subconscious memory, it became one's own.

And Hogwarts, a school filled with traces of wizards studying magic for over a thousand years, had to be a place where learning was simpler and easier to delve into.

No wonder most employees at the Ministry of Magic could not even cast a complete Protego.

After all, not every wizard in Britain attended Hogwarts. Some received family workshop-style education, like Voldemort's relatives, the Gaunt family. With little magical residue around them and unprofessional teaching on top of that, their level was easy to imagine.

Ryan found it rather wondrous. The more he researched and used magic, the more these insights that differed from the existing system made him feel that wizards were more like natural reality warpers. They could make everything develop according to their will. But while wizards living together and the development of educational systems had certainly increased the wizarding population, they had instead lost some of the power described in ancient books.

Some weaker wizards feared natural disasters and intense destruction, which in turn made Ancient Magic harder to learn. That, too, counted as an invisible curse. Furthermore, Ancient Magic had originally been inherited from the earliest batch of wizards, those who could be called gods. Later wizards who wanted to wield the same great power and give it a name could only use extremely long incantations. They were difficult to remember, more likely to fail, and could even be lost entirely.

Magical expenditure also had to be considered. The ability to warp reality was powerful, but it depended on the cost. Later wizards, whether naturally born rough stones—that was, Muggles—or descendants of wizards who had been passed down through the generations, did not possess such terrifying magical power.

Modern magic had developed on this basis as well.

And in duels, shorter modern spells were more powerful. No matter how great or terrifying a spell's power was, one only needed to defeat its caster before they finished reciting the incantation. These Ancient Magics were probably more like nuclear weapons. The Ministry of Magic would not let them circulate freely.

But longer incantations also meant greater difficulty in casting. There were probably very few wizards left who could cast ancient spells. It was not that there were no wizards strong enough to use Ancient Magic, but that spells were merely keys. As long as they could open the door, that was enough. Further development depended more on the wizard himself. Why use a hammer when a key would do? A short incantation did not mean it could not develop into greater power. Modern magic was easy to learn but difficult to master, yet that did not prevent exceptionally talented wizards from continuing down that path.

Still, had all those wizards called gods truly disappeared? Were the Deathly Hallows really forged by Death? The world after death had already been confirmed to exist, but what kind of place was it? Was the veil behind the Department of Mysteries truly the underworld?

For the first time, Ryan felt an urge. I need to run a test. I need data.