Chapter 80: Apprentice Wandmaker (Edited)

Ollivander stared at the rune for a long time and let out a sigh, "Good, your runes are now qualified."

By "qualified" Ollivander meant that they were ready to be carved into the wood of a wand. He stood up and made way for Tom to sit at his workbench.

"Come, you can start making your first wand ever." Ollivander gave a gentle smile, like an old farmer watching his fruit tree bear beautiful fruit. At the same time, he brought a large chest full of all kinds of wood he had collected, Tom even saw in it some bamboo sticks.

"Take your pick, it's on the house." Ollivander was very generous, a wandmaker's first wand was not to be taken for granted, although he knew that a novice's first wand was going to be a real eyesore, but it was not to be taken for granted.

After a moment's thought, Tom picked up a piece of wood, not one of the stranger woods like bamboo or golden bamboo, but ebony.

Ebony is black in color, but since it is a dense material, it feels great to carve, and since it is heavy in the hand, it gives it a great texture. Tom likes this denser material best.

Mr. Ollivander has trimmed each of the woods and they are no more than 20 inches at the most. Tom took this ebony, trimmed it slightly, cut it to fifteen inches long and split it. The wood had been selected, and the core had to be chosen.

Tom ignored Ollivander's box of core materials and pulled out a bright blue feather.

Ollivander was slightly surprised, "Is that an Occamy quill?". He took it from Tom's hand gently and looked at it seriously for a moment.

"I can't believe it's a feather from the wing of an Occamy..." Ollivander looked at Tom, but didn't question the feather's origin, "Remember, son, we wandmakers have a basic rule of trying not to kill: we only buy fire dragon hearts from the merchants who sell them."

Naturally, Tom had to "borrow" the feather from "Naughty", the Occamy, and had to persuade him for a long time until he convinced him to give him a feather that was about to fall out.

The Occamy that Tom had was named "Travieso," a Spanish word meaning naughty and fitting the character of a baby Occamy.

Tom carefully inserted the quill into the wand, then began to carefully carve the runes on the inside of the wand. He made no changes: the basic runes had been carefully outlined by generations of wand makers and were like a basic formula that was difficult to change. Naturally, Tom didn't want to add anything else. Like calculating the potential energy of an object by applying the formula E=m.g.h, Tom wasn't going to go overboard.

There were a total of seven runes. Tom carved them very slowly and it took him an hour and a half to complete the carving. At the last step, Mr. Ollivander pulled out a thin piece of paper and stuck it on the wand. It took him a minute to remove it.

"Ministry of Magic regulations state that all wands must have a trace attached."

Once the trace was added, Tom combined the two pieces of wood into one, and a rough wand was made.

The rest of the work consisted of sanding, polishing, waxing, adding the base and other finishing touches.

When Tom finished the last step, a plain, unadorned wand was sitting on the workbench, super plain in fact, with no decoration on the wand at all. As soon as he finished, the system sent a notification.

[First wand successfully made! Varitology talent unlocked, varitology test completed]

[Talent: Varitology: 8 (Gifted)]

[Advancement task completed, varitology advancement completed! Wand upgrade completed, the stick you made can now be called a wand].

[Varitology Level 1 (0/200)]

Tom took the wand, pointed it at the carving knife on the table, which immediately increased several times in size, then Tom put the wand away, and the knife returned to its original size.

"When using an Occamy feather as the core of a wand, the wand prefers Transfiguration." commented Ollivander, taking the wand from Tom and looking at it carefully, "Your wand is qualified. You can call yourself an apprentice wandmaker."

He complimented Tom. It was normal for a wandmaker to teach his disciple the advanced runes he had mastered after this step, but Tom was only a part-time apprentice, and not even his master, and that connection was not enough for Ollivander to hand over to him the runes that had been passed down through the family for thousands of years. He knew there would always be an heir in the family.

What he had taught Tom before was the basics, something any wandmaker in the world would know, and he didn't mind teaching it to him.

But Tom really had talent, so Ollivander thought about it for a moment and handed Tom a pamphlet: "I have nothing else I can teach you next. These are some of the runes I have learned over the years in my exchanges around the world, including some that are not commonly used by wand makers, they are all there, you will have to learn them yourself, I hope you learn something."

Tom thanked Ollivander, took the booklet from him and ran off to study it for himself. After Tom left, Ollivander thought to give Tom a new task.

Tom's task was to keep an inventory of the wands left in Ollivander's store, indicating wood, core, length, and position, so that Ollivander could explore new combinations of wands. It's not a very technical job, but it's a lot of work.

Tom looked at the rune booklet for a while and discovered that the runes it contained did not fit the standard set of runes, many of them meaning "expansion", "enhancement", "life stealing", etc. I suppose it's true that the wand makers were looking for soft, neutral runes of stability, guidance, concentration, etc., and these runes and their ideas are simply the opposite.

But Tom thought otherwise. Since this was about carving runes into magical materials and making changes in the flow of magic, can he carve runes into other mediums without using all kinds of wood?

So he asked Mr. Ollivander this question, and Ollivander was stunned for a moment before bursting out laughing, "You think exactly like I did when I was young! I also had the same whimsical idea, and to be honest, whoever came up with such an idea should be more of an alchemist than a wandmaker."