Arc 21Chapters 504–528
No recap yet.
No recap yet.
After the Battle of New York, wizards and Muggles faced rising tensions as surviving Dark Wizards attacked civilians to provoke a war. Zhang Xiao stopped one attack and then visited Wu Jiayou, where he discovered that Wu had mistaken him for a deity and put up a statue of him.
Zhang Xiao returned the Golden Toad to the Wang Family, cleared away the aura it had absorbed, and left them after telling them to remove his statues. He resumed traveling around the world, but Dumbledore’s note gave his journey a new purpose: investigating suspicious places connected to Tom.
Zhang Xiao investigated Dumbledore’s vague lead about Voldemort’s longtime hideout in Ireland, narrowing thousands of castles down to abandoned properties and searching them himself. By nightfall, he sensed something unusual at a castle on an island in a lake and realized he had found it.
Zhang Xiao broke through Voldemort’s magical protections around McDermott Castle and entered the hidden, richly furnished home nested inside it. He explored the residence, found Tom’s notes and gifts, and ended at a familiar black-covered notebook on the study desk.
Zhang Xiao read Voldemort’s diary and learned how he had pursued bodily transformation through snake magic and a special fire. The diary’s final clue led Zhang Xiao to suspect that Voldemort’s hidden laboratory was concealed inside a giant snake statue.
Zhang Xiao discovered Voldemort’s hidden underground dungeon and uncovered records linking his experiments to Slytherin and a mysterious secret in Greece. Dumbledore asked Zhang Xiao to continue investigating the looming crisis and suggested Egypt’s Pyramid as a place to explore the gods’ secrets.
Zhang Xiao met Bill in Cairo and secured permission from Gringotts to visit a pyramid. When Bill suggested the unexplored Pyramid X-1, the goblins outfitted them with elite supplies and prepared a flying carpet for their expedition.
Zhang Xiao broke through Pyramid No. X-1’s defenses, transforming the Windless Land into a lush oasis and revealing an entrance marked with Egyptian gods. After Bill identified it as possibly Osiris’s pyramid, Zhang Xiao called in powerful allies before entering.
Zhang Xiao, Bill, and the goblins entered a pyramid and explored its upper levels, discovering an illusion-filled replica of the pharaoh’s home. At the second level, they found rows of preserved people kneeling before a golden coffin, and Zhang Xiao realized they had once been alive.
Zhang Xiao and his companions explored the pyramid’s levels, uncovering a sequence that suggested Osiris had designed it as a path of reincarnation. They entered the final chamber, where a crushing pressure and absolute darkness trapped them as the entrance sealed shut.
Zhang Xiao endured a crushing darkness in the Pyramid, inferred that heaven and earth had to be separated, and split the darkness and ceiling with a powerful axe strike. He found the Deathly Hallows symbol on a crumbling door, and after his grandfather divined that he was safe, he prepared to enter.
Zhang Xiao entered the black desert beyond the Pyramid and discovered a ruined temple filled with the remains of an ancient battle. He restrained the revived wolf-headed corpse of Anubis after it cried out for Zeus, then flew toward an even grander building in the distance.
Zhang Xiao discovered Isis pinned to Osiris’s statue, then found Osiris’s corpse and witnessed a recorded account of the Olympian gods attacking the Egyptian Ennead. Dumbledore, Grindelwald, Nicolas Flamel, and Bill examined the pyramid’s ruined entrance and learned they would have to wait outside for Zhang Xiao.
After discovering a recording of the Greek gods and the bodies of Egyptian gods in the Underworld, Zhang Xiao returned to camp and told Dumbledore and the others what he had found. Nicolas Flamel explained that ancient magic had been much stronger, and Dumbledore described how mastery of detection spells could let a wizard see spells directly.
Zhang Xiao learned that a Magical Eye could reveal spells and help wizards combine them freely, while Nicolas Flamel explained how standardized incantations shaped the way magic worked. Dumbledore revealed that he had seen the magic network, a hazy and incomplete structure underlying the standardized system.
Dumbledore explained that the developing magic network could let Muggles use magic through wands, but he warned that the Church was the wizards’ enemy. The group staged a supernatural spectacle above the Church’s Brussels headquarters, where Zhang Xiao appeared as an angel and prepared to confront it as Longinus.
Zhang Xiao posed as an angel and used magic, scripture, and spectacle to turn the Church’s followers against its senior clergy. After the Church was thrown into chaos, he planned to travel to Greece and learned that the ancient gods had been powerful wizards whose abilities depended on faith.
Nicolas Flamel explained how faith may have created and eventually destroyed the gods of antiquity, while Zhang Xiao’s plan helped expose the Church leadership’s crimes. After searching Atlantis and the deep ocean for clues, Zhang reached Mount Olympus to investigate the mysterious Divine Mountain.
Zhang Xiao discovered the distant, magically concealed palace of the Greek gods from Mount Olympus and received Dumbledore’s advice on finding its entrance. In Athens, his search for ancient festivals led him to Professor Vervidakis, who privately asked whether Zhang Xiao was a wizard.
Zhang Xiao and Professor Vervidakis identified the ancient Olympic Games as a possible route into the Greek gods’ divine realm and recreated the sacred flame ceremony. After Zhang Xiao sent House-elves to carry the flame across the ancient city-states, he led Vervidakis toward Mount Olympus to wait for the gates to open.
Zhang Xiao brought Vervidakis to Mount Olympus and opened the gates to the ruined divine realm, where they found evidence that the Greek gods had been destroyed. Zhang Xiao suspected that Christianity had wiped them out for the sake of faith, but he then discovered a chair bearing the Hogwarts crest inside the ancient palace.
Zhang Xiao investigated the abandoned palaces of the Olympian gods and found evidence that someone from Hogwarts had visited the divine realm. He discovered Salazar Slytherin’s former laboratory and a note inviting his descendant to find him, ending with a sketch of a place Zhang Xiao thought he recognized.
Zhang Xiao discovered that Slytherin’s parchment contained an unfinished Portkey spell and completed it, expecting to find the location Slytherin had left for him. He arrived in a foggy place face-to-face with a Dementor and realized he was in Azkaban.
Zhang Xiao followed a Dementor beneath Azkaban and found Salazar Slytherin’s preserved records, which revealed that Slytherin had created the Standard Book of Spells to build a magic network and prevent wizards from warping reality into another apocalypse. Slytherin had planned to contain the dangerous desires within his own body until the network could share the burden, leaving Zhang Xiao to wonder what had happened to him.
Zhang Xiao pieced together how Slytherin tried to contain the world’s accumulating negative desires and learned that the effort cost Rowena her life and transformed Godric into the giant squid. After asking the strange Dementor whether Slytherin was all right, he discovered that it was Orasia Slytherin, Slytherin’s wife.