Tris could not understand how Draco had dared to pick a fight with him.
Using magic would have been one thing. After all, magic did not depend on physical strength or fitness. But Draco clearly was not good enough at magic yet, at least not enough to fight with it.
Choosing to face him head-on with physical strength, though? Tris thought that was even more idiotic.
Draco was slightly taller than Harry, but almost as skinny. Strength? None. Stamina? None either. And yet he intended to fight Tris, who had been training with the system's help.
He was practically begging for a beating.
And that was exactly what he got. Half a minute later, Draco lay on the floor with a swollen, bruised face.
With only a little dirt on the hem of his clothes, Tris dusted off his hands and looked down at the groaning Draco. He chuckled. "Malfoy, what gave you the courage to fight me? Merlin's underpants?"
Draco lay on the floor, staring at Tris with fury all over his face. But deep in his eyes, a trace of fear lurked.
It was not as if Draco had never been beaten growing up. Lucius's fatherly love could sometimes hit like an avalanche or a tsunami; Narcissa simply held him back most of the time.
When Narcissa was absent, Draco received his fair share of beatings.
But Lucius was his own father, after all, and knew how to hold back. Tris might not have been as strong as Lucius, but he had no sense of restraint.
He had barely fought anyone in his previous life, and this was his first fight in this one.
Draco, who had claimed that first, suffered dearly for it.
There was not a single part of his body that did not hurt.
"You... you, Weasley! You actually hit him! I'm going to tell... tell..." Pansy, who had been sitting beside Draco, finally snapped out of her daze and hurried over to him.
She wanted to threaten Tris, only to realize she had no idea whom to tell.
Her father, or Draco's?
He did not seem afraid of them.
Their Head of House? Draco had only just finished detention, and their Head of House did not seem particularly concerned about him either.
Pansy had no idea what to do. Then Tris glared at her, looking ready to beat her up too, and she instantly shrank back, cowed.
As a rule, Tris was unwilling to hit girls. He did have a bit of male chauvinism in him.
But if some clueless little girl actually provoked him, he did not believe he had to put up with it.
Having been reborn, Tris maintained that as long as his moral standards were low enough, nobody could guilt-trip him. Torment himself? Set boundaries for himself?
Impossible. Absolutely impossible.
"Keep yapping, and I'll beat you up too." Tris blustered at Pansy.
Sure enough, Pansy was too frightened to speak.
Tris snorted and turned to find a corner where he could read. But the moment he turned around, the system screen popped up on its own.
That gave Tris pause. In the month or so since the system had appeared, it had only ever shown up without being summoned at one particular time: ten every evening, to remind him that he had an unfinished task.
If Tris completed all his tasks ahead of time, the system might not appear for an entire day, or even several days. It really made its presence scarce.
It was only seven now, well before the nightly tally, and Tris had already completed today's targets. Yet the system had appeared on its own.
Curious, Tris checked the notification.
[Super invincible study god system notification: the host has been detected completing an intense competition and has received one random treasure chest. Open it?]
An intense competition?
Tris froze, then instinctively looked back.
Draco had just gotten up with Pansy's help. When he saw Tris turn back, he assumed Tris had not had his fill and wanted to keep going. Frightened, he stepped backward and put Pansy in front of him.
"You... what do you want?" Draco put on a fierce front despite his fear. "I'm telling you, I'm not afraid of you! Just now... just now, my foot slipped, that's all. I fell."
His foot slipped? More like he was trying to slip out of it.
Seeing him like this, Tris could not help questioning his earlier assumption. Did beating up someone this cowardly really count as an intense competition?
There had clearly been nothing intense about it!
Unable to figure it out, Tris decided to test it directly.
A great man had once said, "Practice is the sole criterion for testing truth!"
"Oh, is that so? Then I'll give you another chance. Let's go again." Tris chuckled and walked over, shoved the shrieking Pansy aside, and started grappling with Draco again.
"Grappling" was not quite the right word.
The first time, Draco had attacked of his own accord and initially traded a few blows with Tris. This time, the earlier beating had already scared him. It became a completely one-sided beating, with Tris pinning him to the floor.
"Don't... stop hitting me! I was wrong! I shouldn't have provoked you! Waaaah, Dad, save me!" Draco could only take a few blows before begging for mercy. He even started shedding little pearls of tears.
Seeing that, Tris felt that continuing really would be a bit much.
He stopped at once, stood up, and pointed at Draco. "Had enough?"
"Yes!" Draco nodded immediately. Of course, once this was over, young master Draco would turn around and go right back to defiance. For now, though, he would definitely say yes.
Wouldn't saying no just earn him another beating?
Little Dragon might not have been bright, but he understood something as simple as getting beaten up being unpleasant.
"At least you know what's good for you." Tris dusted off his hands. "I'm telling you, show off in front of me again, and I'll beat you up every single time."
Draco stared at him, defiance written all over his face, but he did not dare talk back.
Tris had never expected one beating to make Draco submit. That was fine. If one did not work, he would try two; if two did not work, he would try three. Even according to the original timeline, Voldemort's resurrection was still more than four years away.
Even if he had to pull some Pavlov and Skinner tricks, he could condition Draco thoroughly!
Turning away again, Tris hoped the system would give him another notification.
It did not.
The system interface still displayed only the icon of a single random treasure chest waiting to be opened.
What a shame.
Tris sighed inwardly. He had thought he had finally found a chance to milk the system for rewards. Apparently, he had been getting ahead of himself.
Back in the dormitory, neither Blaise nor Theodore had returned. Tris took the opportunity to sit on his bed, summon the system in his mind again, and open his reward.
At his mental command, a treasure chest appeared on the screen before him and slowly opened.
"These effects suck." Watching the chest open without so much as a golden glow, Tris curled his lip in disdain. In the gacha games he had played in his previous life, even pulling a common card came with a burst of special effects.
A moment later, though, he had no attention to spare for the effects.
Once the chest opened, an entirely unremarkable scroll floated out. Written clearly on its cover were the words-Astral Meditation.
Meditation?
At the sight of it, Tris's eyes widened uncontrollably.
Now that's something worth waking up for!
Since coming to the HP world, Tris had found plenty to complain about. His biggest complaint was that this world seemed a little too obsessed with innate talent.
Talent was extremely important in almost every fantasy or cultivation world, but in the HP world, it still seemed excessively important.
The reason he felt that way was the issue of magical power growth.
There was no such thing as cultivating magical power in the HP world. At least, nothing Tris currently knew mentioned how to increase it.
Instead, many books stated that magical power grew with age: quickly during certain periods, slowly during others, and extremely slowly beyond a certain age.
That essentially meant magical power was tied to age.
For a while, this had left Tris deeply unimpressed with this world's level of magical development.
Yet now, the system had actually rewarded him with a meditation technique! This was something this world did not have.
Thrilled, Tris unfurled the scroll within the system and quickly read through it. Then the scroll dissolved into a stream of light and disappeared.
"Fuck!" Watching the scroll vanish, Tris could not help cursing. Read once, then burn, is that it?
Fortunately, his Thought Maze could turn the fleeting memories formed while reading into permanent ones. Otherwise, with the thing disappearing after a single read, what sort of genius could genuinely memorize it all at a glance?
Then it occurred to Tris that the very first thing the system had given him upon activation was the Memory Palace function, which had also evolved during the first upgrade. Perhaps that had been preparation for things like this, which he would only get to read once.
Thinking of it that way, there seemed little point in complaining.
He searched his Thought Maze, retrieved the meditation method's contents, and began studying it bit by bit. Fortunately, the method seemed to fully account for the possibility of a complete beginner, starting with the simplest fundamentals.
Even some of the terminology had dedicated annotations, as though it were afraid learners might go astray.
Well, the grind dog system might be a bastard, but everything it gives me is genuinely pretty decent.
Tris first finished his remaining push-ups, then washed up and lay on his bed to attempt meditation.
Following the method recorded on the scroll, Tris slowly adjusted the rhythm of his breathing. Gradually, his consciousness seemed to leave his body, falling, falling, and falling still farther.
After an unknown length of time, the falling sensation disappeared.
Tris's consciousness seemed to have entered a peculiar space.
It was a place of absolute darkness, without any source of light or anything he could "see." Tris did not panic. This was exactly as the meditation method had described.
He was even a little amazed. Am I really this talented? I succeeded on my first try!
According to the meditation scroll, even exceptionally talented people usually needed three to five attempts to enter this state, known as the "meditative night."
Once someone entered this state, they had taken their first step into Astral Meditation.
But as delight rose within Tris, the endless night sky trembled slightly, and his consciousness showed faint signs of slipping out. Knowing that his emotional fluctuations were disrupting the meditation, he quickly emptied his mind, focused, and sank back into meditation.
The night sky stabilized again, returning to its earlier stillness.
Following the meditation method, Tris continued constructing the meditation model within his consciousness. As his will flowed, a point of light appeared silently in the darkness that had resembled a still night.
Then came a second, and a third.
Moments later, the formerly lightless "meditative night" seemed filled with stars! This was the manifestation of Astral Meditation's initial formation: the meditative star sea!
Entering this state meant he could begin cultivating his mind and magical power.
I did it!
Tris was overjoyed, but the very next moment, the starry sky abruptly collapsed. As though caught in an ascending ocean current, his consciousness was instantly swept out of meditation and back into his body.
"Fuck!" Tris cursed.
Once again, he had failed to control his emotions.
Shaking his head, Tris instinctively glanced to the side, then froze.
On the two beds beside him, Blaise and Theodore were already sound asleep, their snores rising and falling steadily.
Just how long had I been meditating?