What was there to fear?

After saying those words, Gerald let out a long breath inwardly.

Since he had already run into Harry, there was no point pretending anymore.

Interfering with the plot, changing the future-dwelling on those things was pointless.

He was no seer. He had no way of knowing what consequences each intervention might bring.

But he knew one thing very clearly.

Even without his interference, this timeline already had more than enough tragedies.

Fred, Cedric, Sirius, Lupin, Tonks...

Had he personally bought all those alchemical materials for Fred just to watch him die in the ruins of Hogwarts a few years later?

That would be a fucking terrible waste.

Besides, Fred and Cedric had once been nothing more than characters in a book to him.

Now they were living, breathing people who lived alongside him and attended classes with him.

Of course he couldn't just stand by and do nothing.

Beyond that, he had to find out whether his father's and grandfather's deaths had been accidents or someone's doing.

So whether he enlisted Dumbledore's help or acted on his own, he had to capture Peter Pettigrew.

The plot would be affected sooner or later.

As for the risk of a butterfly effect, he accepted it.

But accepting it didn't mean fearing it.

He knew about all of Voldemort's Horcruxes, and he had an immortal cultivation method.

Once he grew strong enough, what was there to fear?

Besides, what he was about to do wouldn't necessarily have much effect on the early plot.

He only wanted to make these next two years a little easier for Harry.

Meanwhile, Harry's expression changed when he heard Gerald's words.

"Did Aunt Petunia send you to test me?" Harry's voice grew guarded. "I didn't do those things. Those strange things weren't my doing. The glass broke by itself, and my hair grew back on its own. I don't know what happened-"

"I know."

Gerald cut him off.

"I know you didn't do those strange things on purpose, but they really did have something to do with you, because you're a wizard."

Wind swept in from the end of the street, stirring the Christmas decorations hanging from the lamppost.

Harry Potter stood beneath a streetlight on Privet Drive, his emotions tangled.

He was like someone who had been groping through the darkness for a long time and suddenly caught a glimpse of light.

But that light was so bright and unfamiliar that he instinctively closed his eyes.

He shook his head without thinking. That was the Dursley family's standard response: anything remotely abnormal had to be denied.

"Don't make fun of me."

Harry's voice was a little hoarse.

"Wizards... magic... none of those things you're talking about exist. They're fairy tales, bedtime stories for little kids. I'm almost ten, not three."

"You can judge with your own eyes whether I'm lying."

Gerald held out both hands. Under Harry's puzzled gaze, they quickly began to change.

A flame rose from his left palm, while arcs of lightning coiled around his right hand.

"What's-"

"A little magic. I'm a wizard, just like you."

Gerald smiled as he spoke, then gently closed his hands. The flames and lightning vanished together, as though they had never existed.

But only he knew that he had actually lied.

Ever since leaving Hogwarts, he had been saddled with that troublesome thing called the trace.

Any magic performed outside school would be detected by the Ministry of Magic.

Fortunately, he also had cultivation spells.

Harry fell silent.

It wasn't as though he had never wondered.

His hair had grown back to its original length overnight. Once, when Dudley was chasing him and beating him up, he had been cornered against a wall with nowhere to go, only to find himself on the kitchen roof a moment later.

Those strange incidents had always made him think he was a monster.

If there was an explanation for all those things, if he wasn't a monster...

"Am I really a wizard?" Harry finally asked.

His voice was very quiet, as though he were asking a question whose answer he dared not hope for.

"Of course. In another two years, you'll go to a school of magic just like I do. Someone will come especially to take you there."

"A school of magic?"

"Hogwarts. It's a place for people like us to learn. Every young wizard in Britain goes there when they turn eleven."

As Harry listened, he thought to himself.

So I'll go to Hogwarts too. Then I can leave Aunt Petunia's house. I don't know what kind of place it is, but it shouldn't be any worse than this, right?

Almost instinctively, Harry pushed that thought down the moment it arose.

He couldn't get his hopes up. Years of experience had taught him that hope was dangerous.

But that thought was like a seed, already blown into the soil by the wind.

Even if he pushed it down, it would sprout again.

"Why are you telling me all this?" Harry asked another question.

The Dursley family had never given him anything he didn't have to work for.

He had cleaned the entire house just to get an old T-shirt Dudley no longer wanted.

He had washed the car all summer just to be allowed one proper dinner at the table.

So he instinctively wanted to know what Gerald expected in exchange for telling him these things.

Gerald looked down at him.

Beneath the streetlight, the Chosen One looked shockingly thin and frail.

"Because you'll find out sooner or later. Knowing a few years earlier won't hurt. Come on, I'll walk you home. I happen to have something to discuss with your aunt."

Without giving Harry a chance to refuse, he turned and headed toward Number Four, Privet Drive.

Harry stood there in a daze for a moment, then hurried after him.

The two of them reached the Dursley family's front door, one following the other.

Harry reached out and pushed the door open.

"Boy, how long does it take you to put out the rubbish?!" Vernon Dursley's roar came from the living room, followed immediately by his large, purple face emerging from behind the sofa.

He spotted Harry first and was about to add a few nastier remarks when his gaze landed on Gerald, who had followed Harry inside.

"Who said you could bring someone home?"

Petunia rose from the sofa as well.

She was much thinner than Vernon, with a long neck and a perpetually pinched expression.

"Shut up! How dare you?" Gerald roared.

Vernon Dursley froze.

No one dared tell him to shut up in his own house, let alone a brat who looked only a few years older than Harry.

"You little brat, who are you? You-"

He never managed to finish.

A flame had appeared out of thin air in Gerald's right palm. The orange-red fireball revolved slowly above his hand.

Petunia's face went white in an instant, her lips trembling violently.

"You're like them? You're a... no, you're still a student. You aren't allowed to use magic outside school."

"Is that so? You're welcome to see whether I dare. You're his own aunt. How could you treat him like this?"

Petunia turned deathly pale, looking as though she had aged five years in an instant.

Harry Potter was shocked by those words.

His gaze moved from the fireball in Gerald's hand to Aunt Petunia's face.

He finally understood why, all these years, her reaction whenever something strange happened had never been confusion, but anger and fear.

She had known he was a wizard all along.

Gerald sent the fireball circling around his body.

"If I find out you've abused Harry again, you know what will happen."

Gerald knew that what he was doing amounted to a bit of moral coercion.

Petunia was indeed under no obligation to raise Harry, but that was certainly no excuse to abuse him.

If she didn't want to raise him, she could simply have said so.

If she had taken Harry in out of fear of Dumbledore, then she ought to have shown Dumbledore that same fearful respect, rather than venting all her fear and resentment on a child.

On that subject, the person Gerald found hardest to understand was Dumbledore.

That great wizard had stationed Mrs. Figg in this neighborhood as his eyes and ears. He knew perfectly well what sort of life Harry was living, yet he had never intervened.

The blood protection required Harry to live with a blood relative, but that didn't mean he had to live in a cupboard.

Honestly, given the childhood Harry had endured...

The only reason he hadn't become the third Dark Lord was that he was kind enough not to.