Voldemort's voice brought Wormtail's thoughts back to the cave. He hurriedly looked at the potion before him. Its color was beginning to turn green again.
He hastily added the last of the unicorn blood and continued stirring.
He had been here for over a month. Though the Dark Lord kept calling him an old friend and saying things that moved him,
he still sent him into the Black Forest to hunt unicorns, collect Nagini's venom, and process all sorts of herbs. For those that could not be found in the Black Forest, he even had to go elsewhere to trade.
At last, he had gathered enough of the potion ingredients the Dark Lord needed.
Wormtail had never been particularly good at Potions, especially advanced potions like this one, which required a month to brew.
Even with the Dark Lord guiding him from the side, his performance was so poor that the Dark Lord's temper grew increasingly foul.
And so he had stumbled his way through an entire month.
When the potion began turning rose-red, Voldemort reminded him again:
"Add those bodies. Put them all in at once, slowly. Don't throw them in. Turn up the heat first."
In a fluster, Wormtail used his wand to turn the flames up high, then took several snake corpses, shriveled like zombies, from the box beside him and slowly lowered them into the cauldron.
Then he touched the cauldron with his wand, quietly reciting the supplementary spell the Dark Lord had taught him.
Voldemort had carefully selected those snake bodies. They were snakes he had possessed for relatively long periods, and they carried a strong trace of his presence.
As time slowly passed, the potion gradually turned deep red.
"Wormtail, this is the final step. I hope you don't make a mistake. Slowly lower