Quest Update

"I think it might be because she's a Metamorphmagus," Hermione said after pondering Aya's words for a long time.

"What's a Metamorphmagus?" Ron and Harry asked together, loudly enough to attract Hagrid's attention as he watched the fire by the stove.

"Oh, that's a rare talent," he said, waving his spoon. "A student who was a Metamorphmagus graduated a couple of years ago. She was remarkable, she was. Yes, Ron, Charlie ought to know her. They were in the same year."

"He's never said anything about that." Ron was a little surprised.

"That girl was a Hufflepuff. I heard she went to work for the Ministry of Magic after she graduated," Hagrid recalled, stroking his great beard.

"Being a Metamorphmagus is a gift, supposedly an ability you're born with. You can change your appearance at will, including your hair color, facial features, and even your height, but you can't completely transform into another species." Hermione explained rapidly, then asked, "Aya, could you change those things before?"

"...I could?" Aya thought back and realized the ability was remarkably similar to character customization!

"That makes sense. In that case, wouldn't everyone in the Spirit Clan be a Metamorphmagus?" Harry struck one hand with the other. "Aya, how come you've never changed your appearance?"

"I don't want to," Aya said with a pout. She still had some character customization vouchers in her storage that the player had gotten from events, but her appearance was the product of two hours of meticulous work by the player. From her creation until she transmigrated more than two years later, she had never changed anything about her appearance except her hair. "Changing how you look isn't fun at all. And it's not just the Spirit Clan. Where I'm from, most people like me can do it."

"What an extraordinary place," Hermione marveled. From her earlier reading, she had thought Metamorphmagi were rare.

Harry frowned and racked his brains for a while. Suddenly, he felt something was a little off.

Aya didn't seem to miss the place where she used to live very much?

"Aya, what did you mean when you said you didn't have a family?" He leaned close and asked her in a low voice.

"Exactly what I said? What else could it mean?" Aya looked up in some confusion and took another sip of tea.

"I mean, I mean-parents, relatives, or someone else?" Harry gestured as he spoke.

"We don't have anything like that. We, um... to put it in your terms, we're born and raised by nature. At most, we have a guardian? Family? I guess that counts?" Aya scratched her head. After spending a summer playing at The Burrow, she had realized her previous view of the player had been somewhat biased.

The player was good, the player was great, but compared with a mother like Mrs. Weasley, it seemed a little different.

"..." Harry remembered all the things he had imagined before and curled his toes in embarrassment. He wanted to shake Aya and demand she give him back his guilt!

"But coming here did mean leaving my only family behind. I don't know how she's been doing since then," Aya sighed.

"..." Never mind, she didn't have to give it back.

Easygoing as he was, Hagrid naturally failed to notice Harry wavering back and forth. He went to pick vegetables from the garden, and the children followed him outside.

"Those pumpkins are huge!" Aya's eyes lit up, and she ran over. Several chickens that had been pecking at the vegetable patch scattered.

There were twelve enormous pumpkins in the backyard vegetable patch, each half as tall as a person. They looked big and beautiful.

"Growing nicely, aren't they?" Hagrid said happily, watching Aya lean over a pumpkin. "They'll be ready for the Halloween feast. They'll be even bigger by then."

"What fertilizer did you use on them?" Harry asked curiously. He had to look after the garden for the Dursley family, so he knew a little about gardening, and he had never seen a variety of pumpkin this big.

"Heh heh, I gave them a little-how should I put it? A little help."

"An Engorgement Charm, wasn't it?" Hermione studied the enormous pumpkins with interest. "You did a very good job."

"These pumpkins are... nice and cool..." Aya said, pressing her cheek against the cold pumpkin.

"All right, all right, don't crush it," Hagrid said, lifting Aya off his precious pumpkin. "Nothing can go wrong with them."

Aya finally had a proper meal at Hagrid's-just her. Harry and the others refused to stay, no matter what, and while Hagrid's lunch was enough to share with one person, splitting it among all four of them would have been a stretch. Hagrid was a truly enormous eater.

Aya rummaged through her backpack and found another turkey as a return gift for the meal. Both sides were delighted, and Hagrid kept asking Aya whether the food was to her taste.

"Other than being a little sour, a little salty, a little thick, and a little sweet, it's pretty good," Aya said in appraisal, spooning some of the sauce over her bread. "It's better like this."

Hagrid nodded with a smile.

By the time Aya finished eating and returned to the castle, Hermione had already gone to the library, while Harry and Ron had gone to play on the pitch. Aya didn't stay in the common room long before deciding to wander around the castle and complete her weekly system quest to touch the glowing spots.

There weren't many people in the castle on Saturdays. Most students were in their common rooms or the library, and on Hogsmeade weekends, there were only first- and second-years around. No one wanted to tackle those annoying staircases during their time off.

But with Xiaohua around, none of that was a problem.

Xiaohua the cat, who automatically knew the way and could bypass the staircase challenge, had become the most popular pet at Hogwarts. Luckily, Xiaohua neither ate nor pooped. Otherwise, he might have been lured away with dried fish or attacked and abducted at his most vulnerable.

"Hey, Xiaohua's out for another stroll!" a Hufflepuff greeted them as they reached the dungeons. He had a meat pie in his mouth, a large bag of bread in his arms, and flour on his cheeks.

Aya barely remembered the names of people from other houses, but she still recognized those who had fed her. She gave an aloof nod, and after the Hufflepuff gave Xiaohua a stroke, Aya found herself with a meat pie in her mouth.

Onward!

"By the time I finish my rounds, I won't even need dinner. I really should have come in the evening," Aya chattered to Xiaohua. That had been her original plan, but she intended to study the red item over the weekend, so she had made time to start sweeping the castle that afternoon.

Sure enough, Aya had little appetite at dinner, and Ron exclaimed that she had been poisoned by Hagrid's cooking.

Aya ignored him and turned to make a request of Harry.

"...Are you getting ready to cause trouble for Lockhart? He doesn't have a turban for you to steal." Harry's eyes lit up. That afternoon, while he and Ron were playing on the pitch, Colin had kept taking pictures of him. As a result, Lockhart, who had been passing by, had thought Harry was handing out signed photos. Harry had been so angry that his head was practically smoking-though Ron said he was both angry and embarrassed.

"No, why would I go after Lockhart?" Aya shook her head. "I don't want his signed photos. But, Hermione, if you want some, I can steal a few for you."

"No stealing!" Hermione warned, raising her fork.

"You make it sound like I actually want to steal them," Aya grumbled under her breath. "If I had a dozen of those photos in my hands, I'd have nightmares tonight." She was used to seeing blood and gore, but that didn't mean she wasn't afraid of mental attacks. Quirrell had cunningly attacked her with his stench last semester, leaving her traumatized.

There were hundreds of photos on the desk in Lockhart's office, all wearing the exact same smile at a glance. The sight gave Aya goosebumps-don't ask how she knew. She hadn't expected a professor's office to open with a single Alohomora either.

Remembering that, Aya couldn't help shuddering. Her mind filled with images of Hermione covering their entire dormitory with Lockhart's photos. Besides Aya, Lavender and Parvati also liked Lockhart quite a bit. That would be terrifying.

After saying goodbye to her three friends, Aya wandered into an empty classroom and took out the black notebook to examine it.

To her surprise, the moment she took it out, the diary opened by itself. Its pages were completely blank, but Aya felt as if something had taken control of her. Why only as if? Because she noticed she seemed about to walk out of the classroom, whereas her understanding of being controlled was having her movements restricted and being unable to move.

Aya used Sensing on Xiaohua and swapped places with him. The control debuff on her transferred to Xiaohua as well, and the enlarged cat held the diary in his mouth. Rather than removing the control effect from him, she curiously followed him outside.

At that moment, the quest list refreshed with the latest progress.

[A diary conceals an important secret. It has begun to act. Please follow in its footsteps to find the school year boss.]

[Please capture a rooster alive: 0/1]

[Please find information related to the boss: incomplete]

[Please find the dungeon entrance: 0/1]

[Defeat the boss: incomplete]

"So many?" Aya was a little surprised. She had thought this semester's quests would be drawn out over a long time, just like last semester's.

Aya strolled along behind Xiaohua, whose legs moved awkwardly, and muttered to herself as she looked at the quest list. "A rooster? Hagrid has some, right? Dungeon entrance, let me see... automatic tracking! Ah... it's on the third floor. Information related to the boss-ah, that can't be tracked automatically. 'Defeat the boss'-ah, 'This quest will activate automatically after entering the dungeon entrance.' All right, then."

After all that, she could only catch a rooster first and then search the third floor for the dungeon. But...

Why did it feel like Xiaohua was heading for the third floor?

Aya followed Xiaohua around the third floor for quite a while before he finally stopped outside a bathroom. Xiaohua crept inside without disturbing anything.

After making a circuit of the bathroom, he crouched beside a tap and gurgled in his throat for a long time, but nothing happened. Before long, the black diary fell from Xiaohua's mouth, and the debuff on him vanished. The cat shrank back down and sat there, swishing his tail in some confusion.

Aya picked up the notebook and put it in her backpack, then rubbed her chin as she examined the tap. There seemed to be some kind of pattern on it, which Aya thought might be decorative carving on the tap. Finding nothing wrong, she shook her head.

She checked the quest list again. The dungeon entrance was somewhere inside this bathroom, but after searching for a long time, Aya found no entrance. The only thing a little odd was that the bathroom seemed to be abandoned.

After thinking hard for a while, Aya vaguely recalled that this seemed to be a female ghost's dwelling-ah, no, a female spirit's-but because she often made a commotion by crying, Aya rarely entered this bathroom during her nighttime wanderings.

It was all because the ghosts in this world were black and white and not scary at all. Aya often overlooked their existence.

But she wandered around for ages without seeing the ghost return, so in the end she could only go rob Hagrid first.

"Why do you want a rooster?" Hagrid asked, puzzled, standing outside his chicken coop. It was almost curfew. "If you want chicken to eat, you can go to the school kitchens. They have raw, prepared chicken, and cooked chicken too. Lots of it."

"I need a live one, Hagrid." Standing beside Hagrid, who was three and a half meters tall, Aya didn't even reach his waist. She watched Xiaohua pouncing around the coop and sending feathers flying. "You're my only option. Xiaohua! Catch the biggest one!"

"That's the one that crows the loudest..." Hagrid was reluctant to part with it.

"It's fine. I'll bring it back once I finish my quest. I guarantee it'll still be alive!" Aya promised, patting her chest.

Hagrid reluctantly tied up the big rooster and let Aya take it away.

By the time Aya returned to the third-floor bathroom, curfew had already begun. She carried the chicken in her left hand and kept her right hand in her pocket. The resident ghost still hadn't returned, but Aya paid her no mind. Since the dungeon entrance was somewhere in this bathroom, then she would-

Go, Xiaohua! Start the renovation!

As a life-form made of the purest energy, Xiaohua had neither a soul nor thoughts, much less any sense of pain. With his hooked claws and serrated teeth, he completely dismantled the washbasin beneath the tap he had faced earlier, then set to work on the wall. After he dug through it, the faint sound of wind came from the hole.

"A pipe?" Aya leaned closer to look inside, but the hole was too small and too dark for her to see anything. "Xiaohua, make it bigger. At least big enough for me to crawl through—and this chicken too."

Xiaohua continued digging like a dog.

Once the hole was open, the work became much easier. Before long, it had grown three times larger. At its current size, Aya's slender twelve-year-old body could just squeeze through-still on all fours, as if crawling through a dog hole.

Without another word, she sent Xiaohua in to scout, then shoved the rooster through—it pecked Aya before the energetic bird went in. Finally, she worked at squeezing through the hole herself. After struggling for a long time, her stiff tail swished five or six times before she tumbled down.

The system hadn't told her the hole was so deep!!!

Aya felt herself sliding down the damp pipe for a long time. She even saw many branching passages along the way. While she was still thinking that she had to explore those branches later, she finally reached the bottom of the pipe. Xiaohua cushioned her fall; the chicken was fine, and so was Aya.

"It's so dark." Aya stood up and took out her wand for light. The walls on either side were damp and slimy. "Am I as deep as the dungeons now?" She lifted a foot. Her shoes were already half-soaked, and the floor was covered in damp, standing water. Beside her, the rooster flapped its wings and clucked incessantly.

She continued along the tunnel. Because it was so dark, Aya was afraid of running into a monster that would jump out at her, so she had Xiaohua take the lead. She was also afraid of someone coming up behind her. Having heard that roosters belonged to yang and could ward off yin and evil, she tied a rope around its neck and had it walk behind her.