"Getting Story Points doesn't seem too hard. So the exchange prices in the shop..."
Altair opened the System shop. Rows of listings filled the screen.
Character: Gandalf Exchange Price: 10,000 Story Points (Requires Narya, Glamdring, World Acceptance) Note: Can increase the One Ring's unlock progress by 20%
Character: Saruman Exchange Price: 10,000 Story Points (Requires a Palantír, an army of five thousand Uruk-hai, World Acceptance) Note: Can increase the One Ring's unlock progress by 20%
Character: Sauron Exchange Price: 50,000 Story Points (Requires the Nine Nazgûl, the Seven Dwarven Rings, the Three Elven Rings, the Eye of Sauron, World Acceptance) Note: Sauron can increase the One Ring's unlock progress by 25%. If Sauron cannot be summoned, the One Ring can only ever be unlocked to 99% at most.
Note: Characters that require World Acceptance cannot be summoned until the required acceptance level is full.
Altair let out a slow breath.
Items were manageable. Story Points, patience, done. Characters were another matter. Most of them needed bonded items before they could even be summoned, and once he added up the exchange costs for those items, the total climbed fast.
Sauron was the worst of it.
Also, essentially unavoidable.
Dark Supreme almost certainly required 100% unlock progress, and reaching that meant summoning Sauron. Which meant fighting him. Because Sauron would come for the Ring the moment he arrived, and there was no version of that conversation that ended peacefully.
Then there was the matter of World Acceptance.
Altair had already asked the System about it. Characters flagged for World Acceptance couldn't be pulled on demand. The acceptance meter had to fill first, and filling it meant laying the groundwork himself. The wizarding world needed to know who Gandalf, Saruman, and Sauron were. Not just the names, but a genuine belief that such figures existed somewhere.
Not everyone had to be convinced. Most wizards hearing the names and taking them seriously would be enough. But it still had to be built, piece by piece.
"I'll just take it slowly. There's no rush anyway."
The Story Point rewards weren't large, but Altair was patient. He was eleven years old. Voldemort's resurrection was still years away, and until then Hogwarts was safe enough, provided he didn't go out of his way to create problems.
"Besides, I still get two free summons every month. Even if each one only moves the needle one or two percent, that adds up."
Something stirred in his chest. He pulled up the System.
"System, I want to draw a Lord of the Rings item."
Items first. Test the waters.
"Ding! Congratulations, Host. You have successfully drawn the item Saruman's Experimental Notes."
A book appeared in his hands. Black parchment binding, old, heavier than it looked.
Not a bonded item for the Ring. Not a bonded item for Saruman either. Altair's expression flattened slightly.
Then he opened it.
His face changed.
It was Saruman's experimental record for breeding Uruk-hai. Every step laid out in detail, every material listed. And among Saruman's summoning requirements was an Uruk-hai army, which made the notebook considerably more interesting than it had first appeared.
Beyond that, the notes included methods for brewing certain potions and a collection of ancient spells, each entry complete with incantations, wand movements, and the mental and magical conditions required. The System had already made the necessary adjustments. Materials that didn't exist in this world had been substituted with equivalents that did, and the spells had been adapted to fit the rules of the Harry Potter world. Saruman's power as a Maia was rooted in spiritual force rather than spoken casting, so the spells in the notebook were reconstructions rather than transcriptions.
None of that diminished their value.
Through this notebook, Altair could learn magic that had never existed in this world, brew potions, and manufacture Uruk-hai himself.
"If I use these well... they'll carry weight in future missions. And they'll go a long way toward building Saruman's World Acceptance."
The shape of something was already forming in the back of his mind.
He read through the materials list carefully. Most of what the Uruk-hai process required was unfamiliar, but a few entries stood out. Centaur blood. A troll's heart.
"There are centaurs in the Forbidden Forest. As for trolls, Professor Quirrell is going to bring one in on Halloween. I'll need to plan this carefully."
He stored the notebook in his System space and sat back. Not a bonded item, but genuinely useful. And if today's luck was holding, there was no reason not to press it.
"System, summon a Lord of the Rings character."
"Ding!"
"Congratulations, Host. You have successfully summoned Sméagol! The One Ring's unlock progress has increased by 15%!"
"Congratulations, Host. The One Ring's unlock progress has reached 20%! Ability unlocked: Necromancer!"
Altair went still.
Then the grin broke through.
Something surged up from deep inside him, powerful and distinctly wrong. He recognized it immediately. The Necromancer ability, live and unlocked.
"Sméagol?"
He checked through the System. Sméagol was Gollum. The Hobbit who had carried the One Ring for nearly five hundred years.
That explained the fifteen percent. Outside the major characters, probably only Gollum could move the dial that far in a single pull. By sheer depth of connection to the Ring, his bond ran closer than some members of the Fellowship.
"Not bad."
On his first day with the System, the Ring's unlock progress was already sitting at 20%.
That wasn't decent luck. That was something else entirely.
"If the One Ring reaches 100% unlock, what happens to the System?"
"The System will provide the Host with three divine artifacts of an even higher tier to choose from."
No hesitation, no evasion. Altair nodded slowly, but he kept the excitement at arm's length.
Today had been lucky. Genuinely, unreasonably lucky. But luck didn't hold forever, and he had no way of knowing how long the road to 100% actually was.