Third Eye

Without realizing it, it was already nearly January. During this time, Ryan had been tirelessly creating fairy fire, enjoying fairy-fire BBQ, and using it to resume some long-neglected alchemy experiments.

December 25 was Christmas, and Penelope and Kate had once again indirectly mentioned in their letters that they wanted to meet him in Hogsmeade over Christmas.

Speechless. Hogwarts would be on holiday for Christmas, and it was a long break too—they would not return until early January. Did those two not have homes?

Most importantly, he was already going to Hogwarts almost every evening. The legend of Ravenclaw's phoenix had become known to nearly everyone at Hogwarts.

They saw each other so often already, so why did they still need to write letters? Even Kate was doing it. It seemed Penelope had led her astray.

That said, through Ryan's unrelenting efforts, Phoenix Metamorphosis had finally reached lv2, and the Nirvana skill it contained had finally been unlocked. It was a skill concerning his future life and death, so Ryan could not help being cautious.

Over the past month, Ryan had deliberately used his Thinking skill again and again. Even his Detection skill had mutated once more, producing a strange wizard's intuition. Ryan could always find books that were relevant yet appeared, on the surface, to have absolutely nothing to do with one another.

Only then did Ryan discover that Nirvana truly could regenerate him, but he had to wait until he was old or severely injured. As for the memories after rebirth that concerned him most, they could be preserved through the Thinking skill. Going through Nirvana once was like taking a nap.

During this period of thought, Ryan also discovered another aspect of wizards beyond magical nature and talent.

The Detection skill had arisen from Ryan's unwillingness to accept that he could not sense magical auras. With the help of his imagination and extraordinary talent, it was closer to the appraisal skill in games. As Ryan's research into magic deepened, it could even connect to invisible spells and, under special circumstances, touch magical fields.

Recently, it had come even closer to the Third Eye mentioned by seers. So long as he wanted to, Ryan could always find the knowledge he needed, though it had to be related to magic. Perhaps this was because magical knowledge itself possessed power. What he was seeking was not knowledge, so much as magic itself. Finding Magic Books was merely a further evolution of his earlier skill.

Just like Ryan's Detection skill, wizards actually all possessed strange intuitions. Take potion-making, for instance. Following the standards in books could only make one a craftsman, but to become a master, one had to control one's magic and follow one's intuition to add quantities different from the prescribed amounts. Only then could one truly brew a potion worthy of being called excellent.

Then there was "me," who had possessed a peculiar intuition for alchemy and mathematics. Ryan had inherited that trait after transmigrating, and with the help of his father's manuscripts, he had completed the Black Knight.

The best-known wizard's intuition was the Third Eye.

Prophecies were not as rare as people imagined. In the Department of Mysteries within the Ministry of Magic, there were many things that only a small number of wizards could access and study. The wizards who worked there were called Unspeakables. Love, space, thought, time, death, prophecy, and more were all subjects of their research.

Among them was a Hall of Prophecy, where countless genuine prophecies were contained within crystal balls. Every single one was real and valid, yet not all would come to pass. To be honest, a prophecy was only one possibility.

A genuine prophecy carried magic within itself. It could not be forged, the seers who made it could not control it, and the wizards who heard it could not forget it.

Considering the many crystal balls explicitly mentioned in the original work, one could imagine just how many seers—or wizards with the Third Eye—there really were.

This intuition was even more evident in foreknowledge of possible futures. Although Divination Class at Hogwarts seemed ignorant and laughable in the eyes of untalented people like Harry and Hermione, in the eyes of genuinely gifted wizards, every lesson was training and development for the Third Eye.

Not every seer was as mad as Sybill Trelawney, believing herself to be a fraud.

As the great-granddaughter of the renowned seer Cassandra, Sybill would, on extremely rare occasions, fall into a trance and make a genuine prophecy before immediately returning to normal.

Her overly powerful gift of prophecy prevented her from remembering her prophecies like ordinary seers could. After making a true prophecy, she forgot it herself.

If not for the Department of Mysteries possessing a magical object with strange powers similar to Hogwarts' Book of Admittance, which recorded every prophecy made on British soil and eventually entered it into a crystal ball,

Sybill might have had only one prophecy recorded in her entire life.

This was also why Divination Class and Arithmancy Class had never been abolished. Though perhaps it was also because Dumbledore had been too deeply impressed by his boyfriend with prophetic abilities.

Ordinary seers were half-conscious when making prophecies. They could remember a small portion of them and truly knew that they possessed the Third Eye, that they had talent.

Come to think of it, Professor Sybill Trelawney could also predict things through tools while awake, though she often did not believe them herself.

At that thought, in the Memory Palace, the book Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince flipped open without wind, to Chapter Ten, Gaunt House:

Harry hurried through the deserted corridor when he suddenly saw Professor Trelawney come around a corner, shuffling a grimy deck of cards in her hands. She read the values on the cards while muttering to herself. Harry quickly darted behind a statue.

"Two of Spades: conflict," she muttered as she passed where Harry was hiding. "Seven of Spades: an ill omen; Ten of Spades: violence; Jack of Spades: a dark-haired young man, probably troubled and unwilling to be questioned by others—"

She stopped, standing right on the other side of the statue where Harry was hiding.

"Oh, this must be wrong," she said in distress. Harry heard her vigorously reshuffling the cards as she walked away, leaving behind only the smell of cooking sherry..."

Professor Sybill Trelawney was just that pitiful. Perhaps it was a curse. Tracing her family line back, they had been priestesses of Apollo. Because they made prophecies recklessly, Apollo had cursed them, and the curse had been passed down generation after generation.

"What a pity," Ryan sighed. If Professor Sybill Trelawney's intuition had been applied to potions, alchemy, or magic, she would probably have become another great wizard instead of being looked down upon even by fellow professors like McGonagall, and being harassed by a mere official like Urimqi in the fifth book, nearly driven away.

Talent was best turned into power. That way, others would not dare to make trouble for you.

To protect Professor Sybill Trelawney, Dumbledore had concealed her identity as the seer who made the prophecy of the star of salvation. No wizard knew that the prophecy which guided Voldemort toward death had come from the mouth of a mad fraud of a professor.

But this also meant she did not receive the boost in reputation. The only identity she could claim was that she was the great-granddaughter of the seer Cassandra.

Voldemort should have known something about prophecies. After learning part of the prophecy from Snape and confirming that it was genuine, he had gone to deliver himself to death.

If Voldemort had heard this prophecy in full, he probably would not have been so foolish.

The key to this prophecy was that the Dark Lord marked him as his equal. Possessing power the Dark Lord knew not was not the key. Only the child of prophecy after being marked was the true child of prophecy, Voldemort's equal. In the end, only one of them could survive.

As long as Voldemort had not attacked a family that had thrice defied the Dark Lord, he could have relied on Horcruxes to cling to life for a long time.

If Ryan had been Voldemort, once a wizarding family withstood two of his attacks, he would never personally attack them again. Could he not have trained subordinates or recruited them instead?

Prophecy only truly came into effect when you believed in it and acted according to it.

Otherwise, where would the Hall of Prophecy have gotten so many genuine prophecies that never came to pass?