The Start of Term

Even though he had spent his life in the center of his classmates' attention because of his looks, even though he had learned from Hermione that some wizards even considered him The Chosen One, and even though he quite liked the feeling of being noticed...

Still, when a massive crowd of students actually lined up to follow and stare at him, and even blocked him at the doors of the dormitory and common room just to look, Harry found it extremely uncomfortable.

Yet, this was Harry's first day of school.

However, this situation did bring a silver lining. If so many people hadn't been paying attention to him, Harry felt that he and Ron, who had overslept on the first day of term, definitely would have been late for their very first Transfiguration class.

Mind you, the Transfiguration professor for this year's students was none other than Deputy Headmistress McGonagall. While serving as the Deputy Headmistress of Hogwarts, Professor McGonagall was also the head of one of the Four Houses-Gryffindor. Yes, she was their head of house as well.

Harry couldn't even imagine how their head of house would punish him if he were late for his very first class, especially since Professor McGonagall looked so terribly strict.

To be fair, being almost late really couldn't be blamed entirely on Harry and Ron. Although the two of them had indeed gotten up just a little bit late, normally they should still have managed to reach the classroom before class time with time to spare-as long as they hadn't stopped for breakfast.

Yet, as it happened, while Hogwarts was fine in every other regard, its corridors and staircases were truly a bit absurd.

The corridors and staircases at Hogwarts would shift about randomly at irregular intervals.

One moment a staircase could lead to your destination, and the next it would send you who knows where; one moment you would see the classroom you wanted at the end of a corridor, and the next the end of that corridor might lead straight outside the castle.

This brain-dead design made a lot of curses pop up in Harry's mind, and he just had to say it.

Fortunately, with the help of countless older students who stopped to watch, Harry and Ron finally arrived at the Transfiguration classroom right on time.

Yet even though they weren't late, the Transfiguration class didn't become any easier for it.

Back when he was reviewing at home, Harry had already determined that Transfiguration was the hardest of all subjects.

After all, for the other subjects, Harry could understand seven or eight tenths of the material just by reading the textbook. He had even tried some of the simple spells in Charms and succeeded.

Yet as for the complex descriptions and theories in the Transfiguration book, Harry felt dizzy after just glancing at a few lines.

As for Professor McGonagall, who maintained a stern expression and was strict to a fault, she bluntly stated that Transfiguration was the most dangerous magic young witches and wizards could encounter at Hogwarts, warning all the students in her class that anyone who dared to mess around would be shown the door.

Her tone was dead serious, and Harry didn't doubt her words for a second.

Before the formal lecture began, Professor McGonagall demonstrated to everyone just how far advanced Transfiguration could go. With a gentle tap of her wand against the desk beside her, that wooden desk suddenly transformed into a plump boar.

Harry's eyes shone, and the other young wizards around him looked much the same, but before they could cry out in surprise or applaud in admiration, Professor McGonagall's wand flicked once more. The plump boar rolled on the floor and actually turned into a leopard;

After running in a circle around the classroom, the leopard leapt into the air, transforming into a ball of fire. The fire burned fiercely in midair, then burst apart violently, turning into countless butterflies fluttering gracefully across the entire room.

Harry and his peers were so captivated by the butterflies that they missed whether Professor McGonagall flicked her wand again, but those butterflies quickly flew toward where she stood, merging in midair to form a huge pelican. It then landed beside Professor McGonagall, its wings spreading out and slowly stretching until it resumed the shape of the original desk.

Professor McGonagall's Transfiguration demonstration was mind-blowing!

The young wizards were left dizzy with awe by what could only be called a magnificent performance. Their eyes glowing, they wished they could instantly become wizards as amazing as Professor McGonagall, using their wands to transform the desks or chairs around them-or perhaps that classmate they had long since found irritating-into all sorts of shapes.

Yet Professor McGonagall immediately poured cold water on their enthusiasm.

"Transfiguration is magnificent and subtle, but the difficulty of learning it is the highest of all courses at Hogwarts. I can say without hesitation that if even one-fifth of the students in today's class can manage the first two steps of the demonstration I just performed before graduation, then your seven years here will not have been wasted."

So said Professor McGonagall.

Yet, to Harry's slight surprise, once the class actually began, it wasn't nearly as difficult as he had imagined.

Professor McGonagall's explanations were extremely meticulous and broke down complex concepts into simple terms. The obscure and hard-to-understand content in the textbook seemed to become much easier to grasp when she spoke. Of course, it would have been even better if Professor McGonagall hadn't left a full two blackboards' worth of notes for the students to copy down.

As for the practical portion of the first lesson, Harry felt he had done a fairly decent job-that was, unless he compared himself to Hermione sitting in the row behind him.

Turning a wooden match into a metal needle.

According to Professor McGonagall, this single task alone constituted half the content of the first year of Transfiguration.

That was because it involved changing both the external form and the properties of matter. The former was simple enough, but the latter already counted as relatively advanced magic, at least for first-year students.

Hermione's previous discussions with Percy clearly hadn't been a waste of effort. Her match already basically had the shape of a needle, and an eye for threading had even appeared at the tail end, though the material was still wood and it was slightly thicker than an ordinary needle.