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The next morning, the owls flapped their wings, delivering fresh copies of The Daily Prophet to the Hogwarts long tables.
The front-page headline was printed in bold letters: "Ministry of Magic Attacked Last Night! Mysterious Dark Wizard Breaks In!"
The students eating breakfast immediately erupted into a frenzy, with buzzing discussions rising and falling.
"Did you see today's Daily Prophet?" a Gryffindor student shouted, waving the newspaper. "This is too brazen! A Dark Wizard actually dared to attack the Ministry of Magic!"
"I saw it, I saw it!" a friend nearby leaned in, pointing at the small print below. "Look here—'Minister Cornelius Fudge personally deployed the forces, and the Auror Office reacted quickly. The Dark Wizard involved has been successfully apprehended and sent to Azkaban to await trial.' The Ministry of Magic moved quite fast this time!"
"Didn't they? I heard that Dark Wizard wanted to do something to that fraud Professor Lockhart, but he was caught on the spot. The Ministry of Magic does have some skill after all."
...These words drifted into the ears of Lynn and his three companions without missing a single syllable.
They had originally been discussing Lockhart's miserable state from last night and that lingering smell in low voices, but upon hearing these discussions, their footsteps halted in unison.
The gazes of William, Edgar, and Ollie simultaneously focused on Lynn's face, their eyes filled with confusion, as if to say, "Buddy, when did you get locked up?"
Lynn: "..."
He expressionlessly picked up a passing copy of The Daily Prophet, quickly scanned the article written with such feigned seriousness, and his mouth began to twitch uncontrollably.
I was caught? How come I didn't know? Azkaban... they didn't even send me a visitor's notice.
William pushed his glasses, seemingly stifling a laugh. Edgar was definitely stifling a laugh, his shoulders shaking. Ollie silently lowered his head, continuing to spread jam on his bread, his eyes curving into crescents.
Lynn shook his head and concentrated on dealing with the bacon and fried eggs in front of him...
Time seemed to be under a Slowness Charm, yet also seemed to be surreptitiously fast-forwarded. Amidst Lynn's busy schedule of squeezing in every possible moment to search for traces of the diary, it slowly flowed toward Christmas.
Hogwarts was draped in silver, and the corridors were hung with ribbons woven from holly and mistletoe, filling the air with a warm festive atmosphere.
Most students had gone home for the holidays, leaving the castle feeling empty and serene.
By the Black Lake, snow covered the banks.
Lynn appeared here once again, fully armed—thick wool cloak, dragon-hide gloves, and a small, permanently warm heater placed beside him.
He hadn't been here in a long time. The last time he came... was back when he had resolved to "temporarily quit fishing and focus on finding Tom."
"Sigh, balance work and rest, balance work and rest."
Lynn muttered to himself, skillfully carving out an ice hole, baiting the area, hooking his carefully prepared special bait, and casting the line.
The fishing line sliced through the air and fell into the lake, the float drifting silently on the water's surface.
Lynn wrapped his cloak tighter and sat down on a small folding stool, once again transforming into "The Thinker" by the Black Lake.
Only this time, it was difficult for his thoughts to fully concentrate on the float.
Where on earth did Tom go?
During this period, he had drastically reduced the time spent on his beloved fishing career, spending almost all his spare time wandering through the castle.
The dormitories, the areas near the common room entrances of each house, classrooms, library corners, even the trophy room and the broom shed—he had basically conducted a carpet search of both crowded and deserted places.
To this end, he even went as far as to "sacrifice his charms," maxing out his [Affinity] to use a "coquettish pleading" tactic on several upperclassmen girls, especially the well-informed Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff girls, asking them to help keep an eye out for an old black diary circulating among the female students.
His roommates mocked him for several days because of this, and even Lynn himself felt a sense of shame whenever he recalled that experience.
However, he still found nothing.
"Damn you, Tom!" Lynn stared at the motionless float and cursed viciously.
"When I find you, I'll skin you alive, shred your pages and soak them in a manure pit for fermentation, and extract your ink to give to Old White as mouthwash! Fuck you, you @#$%! pen!"
Time slipped away minute by minute beside the motionless float—from afternoon until the shadows lengthened, and then until twilight closed in.
Lynn's bucket remained empty, so clear that it reflected his frustrated face.
"I can't find the diary... and I can't even catch a single fish?" Lynn's stubborn streak flared up. "I don't believe it! I'm going to stick it out with you tonight!"
He changed the bait, adjusted the depth, and even surreptitiously threw some magic fish food into the lake that he had grown using [Abundance].
Then, he continued to wait.
Time quietly slipped toward late night, the lake surface reflecting the cold moonlight.
All was silent around him, and the float remained as if welded to the water's surface, not moving an inch.
Lynn sighed and finally resigned himself to reeling in the line.
"Forget it, forget it, it's so late," Lynn comforted himself while packing his fishing gear. "The fish must be sleeping. Yeah, fish have to celebrate Christmas too! It must be that!"
Lynn successfully convinced himself that his blank result tonight was consistent with the laws of nature, rather than a problem with his personal technique or luck.
Having packed everything up, Lynn headed back to the castle carrying his empty bucket and fishing gear.
Hogwarts at night felt somewhat unfamiliar in its emptiness, with only the sound of his own footsteps echoing in the corridors.
His roommates had all gone home for the holidays. Edgar and the others had warmly invited him to their homes, but Lynn was truly not good at dealing with the care and inquiries of elders, so he declined them all with the excuse of having "promised a professor to watch over the greenhouse."
Just then, an extremely familiar hissing sound rang out, interrupting his thoughts.
He had "heard" this sound before—it was that corporate-slave Basilisk!
However, the emotion and content conveyed by the hissing this time were completely different from the weary corporate-slave vibe of "having to work overtime again" from last time.
"Hiss~ Hiss hiss~ (Didn't find anyone... off work~)"
That hiss was filled with a fanaticism for clocking out.
Lynn quickly pulled a pair of glasses from his pocket. This was a piece of professional equipment he had specifically crafted to find the Basilisk and the pipes the day after his raid on the Ministry of Magic—the Hyper-Dimensional Vision Glasses.
Compared to a hand-held magnifying glass, they freed up his hands, provided a wider field of vision, and offered clearer marking of biological heat sources behind walls.
"Let me see... the direction of that sound just now was roughly..."
The originally solid walls and floors turned into translucent phantoms in Lynn's vision.
The piping systems hidden deep within the walls and beneath the floors mostly appeared as a dull gray, representing silence.
Lynn's gaze quickly scanned along the direction of the previous hissing...
Suddenly, in the shadow of a pipe corner, a silhouette that was completely out of place with its surroundings was clearly reflected in his lenses!
"Got you!"