He focused even harder and stared with all his might.
On this timeline, where every scene was already blurred, the farther into the future he looked, the more indistinct and unrecognizable the images became. By the time he reached the segment where the Goblet of Fire appeared, the picture was already blurrier than eight-hundred-degree nearsightedness—aside from people with extremely distinctive silhouettes like Dumbledore and Maxime, everyone else could only barely be distinguished by age and gender.
And yet even so, the impact of Leach University going public should have been unmistakably obvious.
At the very least, the entire magical world should have gone through a round of upheaval. The university's real-world campus should have been established. Countless gifted young witches and wizards should have flocked to apply...
But none of the scenes showed any of that.
"Forget it. I already felt that Leach University formally going public at that point was a little unreliable anyway..."
After observing carefully yet again and still failing to reach any useful conclusion, Avada could only set the matter aside for the moment.
After all, everything that needed to be done had already been done. The university going public was only a matter of time. And the deadlock in magical society was not something that could be broken so easily. So whether Grindelwald's prophecy had been wrong or the future shown by this timeline was incomplete, neither possibility would affect the university's plans continuing forward in an orderly way.
"Now then, back to the main issue. Let's see whether I can find the future me's soul research results. Even if the images are too blurry to show anything very specific, even just a spellcasting motion or the shape of an instrument would still be useful!"
He decisively shifted his attention.
"According to my current plan, I'd first borrow the Elder Wand from Dumbledore, use its principles to reverse-engineer a method for simulating the remorse effect, and then I could finally start dealing with the soul fragment inside Harry. Along the way I might also drag Dumbledore into discussing some of the problems, since he's already begun researching the soul as well."
"In other words, I should be appearing around Dumbledore rather frequently. Merlin's beard, thank goodness his appearance is distinctive... Let me see where the scene of Dumbledore lending me the Elder Wand is..."
"Wait, where am I?!"
After searching carefully, he discovered something unbelievable.
In this blurry timeline he was observing, only one of his Nathan Clarke doubles was still diligently teaching classes for the university, while his real body—Avada Kendavia, Hogwarts fifth-year student—had no place of his own in any of it!
True, in those blurry images he could not make out a single face clearly, so he could only judge people's identities by their rough outlines and what they were doing—for example, the old man with a long beard and glasses was Dumbledore, the abnormally large woman was Maxime, the one with the absurdly prominent eye was Moody, the man often standing beside Dumbledore and Maxime was Karkaroff, and the one always fooling around with a red-haired boy and a curly-haired brown-haired girl was Harry Potter...
And by all rights, if he was wholeheartedly researching the soul, he ought to be in frequent contact with Harry and Dumbledore.
Yet in none of the future scenes did anyone resembling him ever appear beside them!
Harry was simply fooling around normally with Ron and Hermione, while Dumbledore was calmly serving as a judge, with absolutely no figure nearby that could possibly be Avada!
"What's going on?"
A strange fear rose within him.
"Could it be... me... Don't tell me I'm dead?"
"But if that were the case, why is Nathan Clarke still active as usual? Did someone else take over control of him?"
"And if I had really died or disappeared, then neither Dumbledore, nor Harry, nor Baron and the others would ever sit back and ignore it, right? But in those scenes they're all acting normally..."
"...Did something really happen to future me?"
He could not help looking back again at the "starting point" of this timeline.
It began with next year's opening feast.
Then it suddenly occurred to him that being trapped in the timeline in consciousness, leaving the real body completely unable to act seemed like a perfect explanation for his disappearance.
And if the identity of Nathan Clarke were being maintained by Professor Baker, Grindelwald, or one of the few people who knew his true identity, then that explanation would have no holes in it at all...
"No, wait..."
"I think I'm here!"
Just as his gaze settled on the Hogwarts opening feast, he suddenly spotted his own figure again at the Hufflepuff table.
"The build, the hair color, the seat—they all match... So I was still there at the opening feast?"
"Then when did I disappear... the Goblet of Fire reveal!"
"From the opening feast until the Goblet of Fire was revealed, I was still living normally at Hogwarts. Then once the Goblet was revealed—once registration for the Triwizard Tournament began—I suddenly disappeared?"
"What happened in between?"
He tried to scratch his head, only to remember that he currently had no body, and fell into baffled confusion.
"A secret mission from Dumbledore? Hidden retaliation from the pure-blood families? Or was I actually focused on researching the Invisibility Cloak, which meant I had to keep it over myself for long periods of time, so I simply couldn't be seen?"
"From the opening feast to the Goblet of Fire reveal... that's less than a month total. What could happen? What would happen?"
"And next year I'm supposed to have O.W.L.s to prepare for too. Dumbledore shouldn't deliberately assign me extra tasks, should he?"
Now that he could not even find his own figure, the whole idea of "learning in advance how to separate Horcrux soul fragments" had naturally become nonsense.
And for some reason, the excessively blurry future scenes also meant the amount of information he gained was very limited.
This was probably going to be another pointless trip into the timeline—one that would still leave him bedridden for over a week afterward.
"Let's go... find that giant sphere of light and get killed back out of here."
Thinking helplessly to himself, he reluctantly began moving forward along the timeline.
As the future stretched onward, the scenes became blurrier and blurrier, until at last they blurred into complete illegibility. Farther ahead, things simply turned into a mass of single-toned chaos.
It seemed that eternal darkness and silence had once again become his only companions...
Until a familiar ray of light suddenly dispelled the darkness around him.
"It's coming."
Avada sighed within his consciousness, then resigned himself and cast his gaze toward the deepest reaches of the endless timeline—
That immense, brilliant sphere, vast as a star, once again filled his entire field of vision.
"So what exactly is this thing..."
"..."
"Wait, I'm fine?!"
(End of Chapter)