"What... is that thing?" Harry stared dumbfounded at the thing before him, his neck aching as he craned his head back.
He was not the only one. Almost everyone at Hogwarts today had an aching neck.
The center of the Quidditch pitch should have been empty. An arena had been built there for the champions to contend with the fire dragons during the First Task, then dismantled to leave the space empty again. Now, something enormous and indescribable had appeared there.
It seemed to be a plant.
But there could not possibly be any plant in the world that size. Not even counting the world of wizards.
Harry had watched a variety show about world records. It had included the tallest trees in the world, which were apparently a kind of tree called mountain ash. Heights of over a hundred meters were nothing unusual for them.
After entering the wizard world, Harry had also once heard someone mention in passing that the wizard world actually had even taller trees. There was a Magic Oak nearly three hundred meters tall at Uagadou, the magic school in Africa.
It was Uagadou's greatest source of pride.
Some of the school's facilities were even built on that immensely huge tree.
Yet even Uagadou's sacred tree, compared with the enormous thing before him, might have surpassed it in overall size, but definitely fell short in height.
The plant before him seemed to be an immensely huge vine-at least, that was what it looked like. Huge leaves with a fresh, tender green sheen grew from the dark brown vine.
There was no way to tell how tall it was from the ground, because it already extended into the clouds, its top completely out of sight.
Harry even had the feeling that this thing was like the