Damian and Eureka Asghar packed the ancient texts together, planning to make comprehensive copies once they transported them back to the village.
Just as Damian thought there were only books in this sealed room, he suddenly noticed something highly unusual tucked into the back of one of the wooden shelves.
When he pulled down a heavy tome, he found a bizarre, dried fungus hidden underneath it.
Its cap consisted of deep red, jellyfish-like tentacles, and there were striking geometric patterns running up its stalk.
This was a Void Mushroom!
Damian had seen Void Mushrooms before in the Other World. Originating from the Endless Void and the Gap World, these bizarre fungi grew by feeding on the mysterious red energy known as Void Power.
But this was the Hogwarts universe, and Damian had never seen a Void Mushroom here before.
A complete world possesses absolute dimensional barriers that completely isolate it from the Endless Void.
If Void Power manifested in a complete world, there were only two terrifying possibilities. Either a native of this world had mastered the ability to travel between planes and brought it back, or this world had been actively targeted by a Void Creature.
Void Creatures were terrifying entities from the Endless Void that existed solely to consume and annihilate entire planes.
Damian possessed the Key—the metal disc—that allowed him to travel between worlds, but he had never visited this specific vault before. The Void Mushroom couldn't have been left by him.
As for the other possibility... if a Void Creature had targeted the HP universe, Damian felt a sudden, icy knot of genuine worry.
The sheer strength of a Void Creature capable of shattering world barriers was extraordinary, far beyond anything he could currently handle. The power gap between Void Creatures was immense, with the most powerful ones capable of devouring entire worlds.
However, he quickly realized a comforting detail. The defensive jinxes on these books indicated they had been stored for at least five or six hundred years. Thus, this Void Mushroom was at least half a millennium old.
If a Void Creature had truly targeted this world and hadn't completely eroded the dimensional barrier over hundreds of years, then it likely wasn't a fully mature, plane-devouring entity.
Pushing his worries aside, Damian examined the texts on this specific shelf. He found that they were all heavily related to Ancient Runes.
Oddly, he noticed several books that were completely blank, showing no traces of ink or writing whatsoever.
"Ancient Runes..." Damian frowned, suspecting that the blank pages were intentionally erased magical data, perhaps even a hidden Meditation Method.
He drew his wand. "Reparo." The spell washed over the parchment, but it had absolutely no effect.
"Black, what are you doing?" Eureka asked, looking confused by Damian's actions.
"Many books on this shelf are entirely blank. I'm trying to see if I can restore the text with magic," Damian explained, though he kept his deeper suspicions to himself.
Eureka flipped through one of the blank books, scratching his beard in confusion. "Strange. Could the ink have simply faded?"
"It shouldn't have," Eureka muttered to himself. "This library is an independent, folded spatial pocket. Once hidden, it enters a completely sealed state, as if time itself has stopped flowing."
The goblin shrugged. "Forget it, let's just take them all back. We can let the old man study them. We'll split the blank books fifty-fifty."
This was the last bookshelf. After packing the remaining texts into his magically expanded pouch, Damian swept the room with his True Magical Perception. He found no other hidden items or secret compartments.
"I'll help you make your copies when we get back," Eureka promised. "The old man has specialized alchemical items for duplicating books; he can even perfectly replicate moving magical images."
"These books have been stored for centuries and hold immense intrinsic value. We adhere to our agreement; I get half of the originals," Damian stated firmly.
"Fine, let's go back," Eureka agreed after a brief moment of calculation.
Damian walked back to the center of the room where the magical pool rippled quietly. Taking a breath, he jumped in, feeling that disorienting sensation of the world instantly flipping upside down.
When Damian stabilized his footing, he found himself back in the dried-up riverbed, surrounded by the giant Basilisk statues.
He glanced around. Luna and Puff Puff hadn't returned from the nearby orchard yet.
Just as Damian was about to cast a Patronus to send Luna a message, his True Magical Perception flared violently. Magical fluctuations were suddenly radiating from the surrounding Basilisk statues!
"It seems Herpo the Foul's books aren't so easy to take," Damian muttered, his eyes narrowing.
"What did you say?" Eureka had just emerged from the pool and hadn't sensed the impending danger.
Damian acted instantly to test the durability of the stone carvings.
Slashing his wand, he fired off a concentrated Runic Wind Blade. A sharp sound of breaking air rang out as the transparent, arc-shaped blade swept across the nearest Basilisk statue, instantly slicing its head clean off.
It seemed these stone carvings weren't forged from highly durable magical stone.
"What in the world are you doing?!" Eureka yelped. Lacking True Magical Perception, he hadn't realized the trap had been sprung.
"Be careful. These statues are coming to life," Damian warned sharply.
Sure enough, the Basilisk statues began to writhe and move. To Damian's immense relief, they were merely animated stone constructs, not real Basilisks. If hundreds of statues had suddenly Transfigured into living, flesh-and-blood Basilisks, he would have fled the continent immediately.
Damian smoothly waved his wand, directing his magic at the sparse green weeds growing along the riverbank. Through massive scale elemental Transfiguration, the grass aggressively mutated into thick, giant vines.
Countless heavy vines lashed out, violently binding the animated Basilisk statues.
The stone constructs were significantly weaker than Damian had anticipated; they couldn't even snap the transfigured vines to break free.
Damian's wand flashed repeatedly, unleashing explosive blasting curses that shattered the restrained Basilisk statues one by one.
"You're quite impressive, Black!" Eureka praised, watching the one-sided destruction.
However, even after Damian reduced the final statue to rubble, his True Magical Perception warned him that the danger hadn't passed. The magical fluctuations hadn't disappeared; they had rapidly flowed underground.
"It's not over yet," Damian said, his expression turning entirely solemn.
A second later, both Damian and the goblin felt a deep, terrifying tremor beneath their feet, accompanied by a faint, muffled roar.
Damian's face changed. "Run!"
He sprinted toward the edge of the riverbed, with Eureka scrambling frantically on his short legs close behind.
The ground began to shake violently, threatening to split open.
Realizing that running was far too slow, Damian whipped his wand down. He instantly transfigured two massive, thick vines to erupt from the soil, wrap around their waists, and physically launch them high into the air and away from the collapsing epicenter.
The moment they cleared the riverbed, the entire geological structure catastrophically caved in, swallowing the roots of Damian's transfigured vines into a massive sinkhole.
Mid-air, Damian seamlessly cast a Levitation Charm, slowing his descent to land steadily on the grassy bank.
Eureka wasn't so lucky; without a wand to catch himself, he slammed heavily into the dirt and was instantly knocked unconscious.
Damian looked back at the destruction. The space where the stone array had been was completely gone, replaced by a massive, bottomless cavern.
The seismic vibrations hadn't stopped. Instead, they grew increasingly violent, and the terrifying roars echoing from the abyss became deafeningly clear.
Whatever was climbing out was clearly not going to be easily dealt with. Damian quickly cast a lightening charm on the unconscious goblin.
He then seamlessly transitioned to Other World Runic Magic, mentally constructing the 16 Runic Scripts required for the Invisible Hand.
A massive telekinetic hand materialized, gently scooping up the lightweight goblin and lifting Damian himself, granting him sustained, rapid flight away from the crater.
"Boom—!" Before they had flown far, a deafening explosion of earth and stone erupted behind them. Something massive had just breached the surface.
Unwilling to look back and risk fatal eye contact, Damian quickly executed a wandless Runic spell: the Mimbulus Mimbletonia Charm.
The spell instantly captured a three-dimensional holographic recording of the area behind him without requiring a physical camera or direct line of sight.
He had a grim premonition that the creature emerging from the abyss was a real Basilisk. If he looked back with his own eyes, he could fall victim to its instant-death or petrification gaze.
Sure enough, the holographic projection provided by the Mimbulus Mimbletonia Charm confirmed his worst fears. An impossibly huge Basilisk had slithered out of the sinkhole.
Just the exposed upper half of the serpent was already significantly longer and thicker than the thousand-year-old Basilisk hidden beneath Hogwarts.
Strangely, this monstrous Basilisk was fundamentally different from what Damian knew of their anatomy. Its massive head lacked eyes entirely, leaving only deep, empty eye sockets in its scaled skull.
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