Dumbledore gently swept his hand through the air.
A line of words appeared beneath his passing palm, dancing and burning like flames.
[The hidden refuge reveals itself neither by day nor by night; whoever dwells here shall enjoy eternal slumber.]
Zhang Xiao silently read the words several times, then asked curiously:
"Professor, is this a riddle Voldemort left to open the door?"
Dumbledore chuckled as though he had heard something terribly amusing, unable to stop laughing.
"Zhang, as I just said, Tom did not design this to let people open it.
"There must be a way to open it so he could enter himself, but he certainly wouldn't leave a riddle for people to solve."
Dumbledore raised a finger and gently tapped his temple.
"But all magic has a fundamental foundation. Even compound magic as extraordinarily complex as this is made up of individual spells.
"As long as you can find what lies at the very bottom, you can work out what the person who cast it was thinking."
That sophisticated?
It was like cracking a password. Everyone else used brute force, but Dumbledore was different. He went straight to the security question and used it to deduce what the person had been thinking when they set the password.
The question was, how did he do it?
Zhang Xiao couldn't figure it out, but he had one very good habit: when he didn't understand something, he asked. There was nothing embarrassing about that.
"Professor, how did you do that?"
"It's very difficult. It requires not only an extremely advanced understanding of magical theory and technique, but most importantly... a wealth of experience."
Dumbledore spoke casually:
"Time grants these things to everyone equally."
He paused, bringing that topic to a close, then turned to the obstacle Voldemort had created at the