It was a very smooth oak door, with no doorknob and no keyhole—only a faint silver light glowing on the doorframe. It appeared out of nowhere, as if it had always been there, just hidden by a Concealment Charm.
Leon reached out and gave it a gentle push.
The door opened.
He walked in.
The room was much larger than he had imagined. The ceiling looked as if it could reach the clouds, bathed in a soft, warm light—the source unknown, yet it evenly illuminated every corner. Rows of bookshelves lined the walls, filled with various ancient-looking magical books and scrolls.
In the original books, Hermione had commented that apart from certain particularly advanced Dark Arts texts, one could find almost any book they needed here.
Several humanoid training dummies stood in the corner. Some were tattered and covered with traces left by spells. Further away, there was even a small magical practice field, with complex rune arrays drawn on the ground.
In the exact centre of the room sat a simple wooden desk with a lit oil lamp on it.
As if it had been waiting for him.
Leon slowly walked into the room. The door closed silently behind him, disappeared, and turned back into a wall.
Good. Now he could check the system messages. There must be some interesting things in there.
[Main Quest 1: The Road to Hogwarts — Completed.]
[Distributing quest completion rewards...]
A drowsy feeling surged into his mind. Leon felt his consciousness slowly sinking toward the edge of slumber. The warm yellow light cast a hazy halo on his eyelids, and then—everything suddenly stopped.
It wasn't just his consciousness that stopped. It was the whole world.
He couldn't hear any sound. He couldn't see any light or shadow. Even his heartbeat disappeared. He floated in pure nothingness, with no reference points up, down, left, or right, as if he had been stripped of his physical existence, leaving only pure perception.
And then—
A flood of information rushed into his brain.
It wasn't learning. It wasn't understanding. It wasn't any cognitive process he had ever experienced. It was a direct infusion of knowledge. It was like countless rivers simultaneously pouring into a small lake, like an entire library being instantly stuffed into a single study, like ten thousand books opening at once with every page of text jumping into his eyes simultaneously.
History of Magic, Charms, Potions, Herbology, Transfiguration... Every subject, every year, every point of knowledge.
They brought a violent impact as they poured in, as if someone was scouring his cerebral cortex with a firehose. He felt immense pain—not physical pain, but a tearing sensation that was much deeper, echoing from the depths of his soul. His consciousness swayed in the torrent of knowledge like a small boat in a storm, ready to capsize at any moment.
But he didn't capsize.
Because his brain was expanding.
It wasn't a physical expansion—although he could feel his skull heating up and his temples throbbing. It was a more abstract expansion; his capacity was increasing, his processing speed improving. The lake that could originally only hold a small stream was suddenly widened to accommodate an entire mighty river.
He could see his thoughts.
After the knowledge poured in, it wasn't haphazardly piled up. It automatically categorised itself, filed itself, and created indexes. History of Magic knowledge automatically connected into a timeline, with every event marked in its correct position. Charms knowledge was sorted and stored: offensive spells on the left, defensive spells on the right, everyday spells in the middle. Potions knowledge formed a network structure; an ingredient automatically linked to all the recipes it was part of, and a recipe automatically linked to all the steps it required.
It couldn't even be called learning. It was simply an upgrade. A reconstruction of his brain's hardware. A remaking of his cognitive framework.
[Fast Learner perk loaded successfully.]
Then came the second wave of impact.
This time it wasn't knowledge, but physical change.
He felt his muscles contracting and relaxing, every muscle fibre being rewoven. Those physical weaknesses he had never noticed—the stiffness in his lower back from sitting too long, the shortness of breath while running, the unnatural exertion when lifting heavy objects—were corrected one by one, replaced by a more efficient and stronger structure.
His bones were growing slightly hot. Calcium was redepositing, bone density increasing, the arrangement of his trabeculae optimised to better withstand impact.
His heart and lungs were adjusting their rhythm. His heartbeat became more powerful yet slower, each contraction pumping out more blood. His lung capacity expanded, his breathing became deeper and more efficient, oxygen absorbed more fully, carbon dioxide expelled more thoroughly.
He felt strength.
It was a stable, controllable strength welling up from deep within his core. He could clearly perceive how much weight he could lift, how fast he could run, how high he could jump. These numbers weren't estimates; they were exact knowledge, as natural as knowing his own name.
[Peak Physique perk loaded successfully.]
And then—
The third wave of impact.
It was a completely different experience. If the physical enhancement was about getting stronger, then Lightning Reflexes was about getting faster—but faster was far from enough to describe it. He felt his perception being accelerated.
He could see the reaction pathway—a stimulus entering through the senses, travelling through the nerves, reaching the brain, the brain making a judgement, issuing a command, the command travelling back to the limbs, and the limbs executing the action. Originally, this process required time. An unavoidable delay.
Now, that delay was compressed.
His neural reflex speed was compressed to the absolute limits of a normal human. His nerve conduction velocity was optimised, synaptic transmission accelerated, and his brain's ability to process stimuli raised to its theoretical peak—before subsequently surpassing that very limit.
He could anticipate.
Not the kind of anticipation that predicts the future, but anticipation based on observation, logic, and instinct. If a ball flew at him, he didn't need to wait for it to be in mid-air to start calculating its trajectory—the moment he saw the throw, the trajectory was already calculated. If a person lunged at him, he didn't need to wait for them to move to prepare his dodge—the moment their muscles tensed, their action was already read.
His body would automatically react before his conscious command even arrived—but that before was so short it was almost immeasurable, so short that to onlookers, it appeared simultaneous.
He could feel this speed integrating into him.
As natural as breathing. As instinctive as a heartbeat. As thoughtless as a reflex.
[Lightning Reflexes perk loaded successfully.]
PS: This step is merely the initial form of the protagonist in the prologue of Hogwarts Legacy.
The most terrifying episode: Voldemort was so scared after seeing the fifth-year transfer student that he hid under his covers and couldn't sleep.
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