"Harry, have you ever heard of someone called the Half-Blood Prince?" Neville asked Harry in some puzzlement after Potions class one day.
"No. What kind of poser came up with a name like that?" Harry asked casually.
"Here, look..." Neville held a battered Potions textbook out to Harry, who saw the words on the flyleaf: This book is the property of the Half-Blood Prince.
"Half-blood? Mixed blood?" Harry looked at the flowing handwriting, which looked as though it belonged to someone rather brash, and was a little surprised himself. "There really is a poser like that?"
Lavender and Ron, who were nearby, heard them and came over too.
"What is it? What is it?" Whenever there was gossip to be had, Ron never missed out.
"I think I left my textbook in Professor Sprout's office," Neville said, looking a little embarrassed.
"So Professor Slughorn lent me a textbook for class today. I saw quite a few corrections in it, and after thinking them over, I found they all made sense."
"Really?" Somewhat surprised, Harry took the book from Neville and carefully opened it-it was so old that he was afraid of damaging it.
Sure enough, he found plenty of corrections inside. After browsing through a few at random, Harry was already certain that they were indeed good revisions.
The clearest example was the changes to the Draught of Living Death, which were very close to the optimized recipe Harry knew.
"I don't know who this was, but at least they knew their stuff," Harry said. "The Half-Blood Prince? Probably a former Gryffindor or Hufflepuff student?"
Slytherin went without saying: almost all its students were pure-bloods. After all, pure blood was what they championed.
It was not as though there were no half-bloods, though. There was one at school right now,