Thinking of this, Harvey walked up the stairs to the second floor of the townhouse.
Facing the unconscious little boy, Harley Keener, in the storage room, he skillfully cast the Memory Charm, erasing the kid's memories of the past two days.
Following that, he cast the Scouring Charm repeatedly, erasing all traces of his own presence.
After confirming there would be no future complications, Harvey was preparing to open a portal back to his estate in the northern suburbs of New York.
Suddenly, a flash of inspiration hit him, and he stopped his movements.
"Wait a minute, the Extremis virus is also a type of physique-enhancing serum. It should be beneficial for researching the physique-enhancing potion."
Although the success rate of the Extremis virus experiment was very low, and there was a risk of turning into a suicide-bomber, it was still a precious physique-enhancing serum no matter how you looked at it.
Harvey felt he couldn't pass this up; he wanted to try any method that might aid his research into the physique-enhancing potion.
After all, enhancing his physique to break through the upper limit of his total magic capacity and increase his strength had almost become an obsession he thought about day and night.
Acting on his thoughts, Harvey drew a circle in the air.
"Sizzle—"
A portal opened.
On the other side was an estate located in the eastern part of Miami.
Under the cover of night, Harvey cast a Disillusionment Charm on himself and stepped through the portal invisibly.
This was the base of the fake Mandarin from the original timeline. According to the timeline, Tony Stark and his best buddy, Colonel Rhodes, should currently be held prisoner here.
However, when Harvey took a stroll around, he was surprised to find that while the fake Mandarin was indeed here...
Neither Colonel Rhodes nor Tony Stark were present.
"Could it be... the timeline has been affected?"
Thinking of this possibility, his heart sank.
If there was one thing he least wanted to see, it was the butterfly effect impacting the timeline of this world.
Harvey pulled out his smartphone and logged into his Twitter account to check the latest news headlines.
When he saw that Air Force One had been hijacked, and War Machine had gone to the rescue only to disappear himself, his face instantly turned as black as the bottom of a pot.
"Damn it, the normal plot shouldn't be like this."
In the original timeline, it was clearly War Machine who was hijacked along with the President.
But now, the plot had changed.
It became the President's plane getting hijacked first, with War Machine going in for the rescue afterwards.
Although the plot deviation wasn't massive, it was a matter worth being vigilant about for Harvey.
"It seems I have to keep a lower profile from now on. Otherwise, if I really mess up the timeline, the consequences will be unimaginable."
Having made a worried, secret resolution, Harvey began thinking about how he could quietly get his hands on the Extremis virus serum.
"Wait, I've got it!"
He thought of a brilliant method, but he still had to figure out where to find Killian.
Portals and Tracking Charms were a pass right off the bat. After all, he didn't have an image of the environment around the target, nor did he have a medium like the target's hair or bodily cell tissue.
And using an owl probably wouldn't work either. A common name like Killian would yield far too many Muggles with the same name.
Relying on an owl to search, even if it could find him, would waste a massive amount of time.
Therefore, with only a name and brief identity information, finding Killian in a short amount of time using magic would likely be difficult.
But Harvey wasn't someone who couldn't adapt.
If magic doesn't work, then use technology.
If technology doesn't work either, then rely on deduction based on existing information!
He was someone who had watched hundreds of episodes of Detective Conan; his deductive reasoning skills were basically maxed out at five stars.
Using artificial intelligence and big data analysis to pinpoint Killian's exact location...
That was a great path, but unfortunately, Harvey didn't have an AI like Jarvis.
So, he could only rely on deduction.
Based on the currently known clues, finding Killian wouldn't actually be too hard.
After all, he was a prophet who knew many details of the original timeline's plot.
For example, that cargo ship docked at a certain port, where Killian planned to hang the President on a global live broadcast.
Or from another angle, he just needed to find Killian's mortal enemy, Tony Stark.
By following Iron Man, he would naturally find Killian.
Having figured everything out, the well-prepared Harvey took out a strand of Tony Stark's hair to use as a medium.
He cast the Tracking Charm.
A dotted white line materialized out of thin air, continuously extending towards the southeast.
He didn't use his "sword flight"; that would still be too slow.
Harvey utilized continuous portals, crossing a hundred kilometers each time, and then cast the Tracking Charm again.
After repeating this 17 times, crossing a full 1,700 kilometers, he arrived at the Port of New York.
This was one of the largest seaports in the United States, located on the east and west banks of the mouth of the Hudson River, within the Upper New York Bay at the western end of Long Island, bordering the northwestern side of the Atlantic Ocean.
The annual cargo throughput of the Port of New York reached as high as 5 million TEUs (Twenty-foot Equivalent Units).
When Harvey arrived at the Bayonne terminal, even though it was already 11 PM late at night...
The terminal remained busy and noisy.
Highly automated loading and unloading equipment of various kinds—such as shore cranes, gantry cranes, container cranes, and floating cranes—were busy hoisting containers onto cargo ships one after another.
He saw the dotted white line extend to Berth 170.
A large cargo ship fully loaded with containers was docked there.
On this large cargo ship painted in red and black, the crew was extremely sparse, and they had even deliberately turned off the large searchlights on the shore.
As a result, Harvey could only faintly make out a few silhouettes patrolling along the gunwales on the deck.
"Acting so sneaky, there's definitely something wrong with this ship!"
Casting the Disillusionment Charm, he easily bypassed all the patrolling crew members, searching all the way from the cargo ship's bridge down to the crew quarters on the lower deck.
By eavesdropping on the crew's conversations.
Harvey learned that their boss's room was the Captain's Cabin located on the bottom deck of the cargo ship.
Following the signage for the various cabins on the cargo ship, he found his way to the door of the Captain's Cabin.
"Alohomora!"
He cast the Unlocking Charm to open the metal cabin door. However, before he even stepped inside, he heard a series of decadent, sexually suggestive moans that left much to the imagination.
"Good heavens. It seems this Killian is no saint either. It's barely nightfall and he's already playing so wildly."
While the effect of the Disillusionment Charm was still active, Harvey walked openly into the luxurious room, whose decoration was clearly a grade above the standard crew quarters.
His gaze swept casually over the living room, and following the location of the sound, he gently pushed open the half-closed bedroom door.
Inside the bedroom lit by incandescent lights.
He clearly saw the target of his trip: the blonde, short-haired Killian with his athletic, muscular physique, currently riding on top of a somewhat familiar blonde babe, thrusting into her vigorously.
"This woman... why does she look like Pepper Potts?"
When Harvey recognized who the woman was, his jaw nearly dropped to the floor in shock.
I never would have guessed... I never would have guessed.
It turns out Pepper actually had such explosive, scandalous dark history!
But it made sense. Although in the original plot, after Killian kidnapped Pepper, it seemed he only injected her with the Extremis virus...
What exactly happened during those two days and two nights of captivity was glossed over.
But judging from Killian's stubborn obsession with seeking revenge against Tony Stark...
It was entirely normal for him to want to exact his revenge by conquering and fucking Tony Stark's woman.