The Ashford estate was a Victorian relic, slowly rotting away in the mist of Kent.
Most of the portraits on the walls kept their eyes shut, pretending to sleep.
A house-elf named Cliff, shriveled like a strip of bark, spent his days banging his head against the walls while muttering about pure-blood glory.
And Cassius, Lucian's father, avoided him like a plague.
He did not dare meet Lucian's eyes.
Meals were delivered through the house-elf, along with a few elementary magic textbooks meant to help his son "return to normal."
For Lucian, this indifference was ideal.
As his body stabilized, he fully grasped the nature of his reborn gift: the inner sight.
It was not merely enhanced perception. It was an elevation of awareness.
The world shed its surface colors and textures, revealing semi-transparent structures.
He no longer sensed light and sound as ordinary people did. Instead, he saw magical channels, material nodes, stress points.
Energy in the air flowed like colored currents.
Weaknesses, cracks, and blockages in magical circuits were highlighted in his vision.
It was also a torment.
The magical world looked like a poorly fired porcelain vessel riddled with fractures.
Magic constructs were inefficient. Spell structures were sloppy. Logical frameworks were incomplete.
And worst of all, he could not turn it off.
To understand how flawed the foundations of this world truly were, Lucian practically moved into the long-neglected Ashford family library.
Weeks passed.
When he finally closed the last book, he stared at the red annotations covering his notes and let out a long breath.
"Arrogant and foolish," he muttered, shutting a well-regarded copy of [Moste Potente Potions]. "Endless redundancy, and the crucial steps are left to chance."
In his previous life, he had given up admission to a prestigious computer science program to study archaeology and cultural preservation instead.
He preferred peeling back history's layers, separating truth from decay.
"If I had magic like this before, the damaged relics I restored would have regained their true brilliance. These wizards waste everything."
He leaned back in his chair.
As for the direction of this world, he knew only fragments.
The Boy Who Lived, Harry Potter.
The noseless Dark Lord, Voldemort.
The greatest white wizard, Dumbledore.
And the clever girl, Hermione.
The gears were already turning.
In A History of Magic, The Rise and Fall of the Dark Arts, and Important Magical Events of the Twentieth Century, the name Harry Potter appeared repeatedly.
Since he was here, he might as well witness the spectacle.
....
One quiet afternoon, Lucian attempted to practice the internal cultivation method he had once studied: inner alchemy.
In his previous life, it had been little more than meditation—refining breath and focus.
But in this world, when he guided the violent magical force known as the Obscurus along the pathways of the meridians, even the first attempt nearly burned him from the inside out.
Pain flooded through him, threatening to consume his will.
Lucian remained calm.
In his inner sight, he traced the texture of the magic like he once handled fragile porcelain.
He endured the tearing sensation as channels scorched and reopened.
Carefully, he extracted a single strand of energy from the chaos and devoted all his concentration to soothing and redirecting it.
Sweat soaked the carpet beneath him.
Time lost meaning.
When the first thread of energy completed a full circulation and faded from black into deep gray, finally settling into his lower dantian as a stable vortex, Lucian nearly collapsed.
At a thought, the refined magic responded instantly.
On the table, a cracked porcelain teacup lay in pieces.
Under his guidance, the fractures aligned. The structure reconstructed itself, not merely glued but restored at the structural level.
This was not the simple Reparo spell described in Standard Book of Spells, Beginner.
That spell reattached fragments.
This was reconstruction.
He had found his path.
In a world where people waved sticks and shouted Latin phrases, he would walk a different road.
An alchemist.
A cultivator of structure and truth.
Still, the process consumed tremendous energy.
"I need a wand," he concluded quietly.
...
On the last morning of July, a long-eared owl crashed clumsily against the dining room window, delivering a thick parchment envelope.
Hogwarts.
The wax seal bore a lion, serpent, eagle, and badger.
Lucian ran his fingers over the textured paper.
The founders' legacy. The Restricted Section.
Interesting.
...
Behind the Leaky Cauldron, Cassius stood stiffly in a heavy black cloak despite the heat.
He tapped the brick wall with his wand, eyes constantly flicking sideways.
Lucian stood beside him, dressed in a minimal dark mandarin-collared coat. He had refused traditional wizarding robes.
In his hand was a simple cane carved from a branch taken from the estate garden.
He looked less like a first-year student and more like a young nobleman traveling incognito.
The bricks shifted and reassembled, revealing the winding cobblestone street of Diagon Alley.
The air smelled of baked bread, potion ingredients, and excitement. Colorful robes swirled past. Cauldrons stirred themselves. Books screamed from shop windows.
To Lucian, it was visual noise.
Magic pulsed everywhere—failed spells, enchanted merchandise, creatures radiating raw energy. The air vibrated with chaotic fluctuations.
Lucian removed a pair of silver-rimmed glasses from his pocket and put them on.
They were his own creation.
After countless failures and nearly exhausting every crystal fragment in the estate, he had etched crude runes into the lenses.
They were imperfect and drained his refined magic slowly, but they filtered excess magical information.
The world quieted.
The glaring threads faded into subdued gray.
"We'll split up," Cassius said abruptly. "I have business in Knockturn Alley. Buy what's on your list. The gold is at Gringotts. Here's the key."
He pressed a black key into Lucian's hand and left without waiting for a reply, disappearing into a side alley as though shedding a burden.
Lucian watched him go, turning the key between his fingers.
The Ashford crest—a burning white ash tree—was engraved into the metal.
"Perfect," Lucian murmured.
And stepped into Diagon Alley alone.