107 Chapter 104
You cannot enter or exit the ID when in proximity to a supercharged magical nexus. Error Code : PS
"Error code PS…Philosopher's Stone. Damn it!" Harry let out his mana and took stock of the virtual maelstrom of mana that was the Philosopher Stone's ambient magic. Something with that much power in the wrong hands…Harry let out a shudder.
'It looks like Dumbledore is going to get his wish of hero testing after all,' Harry thought as he opened the door. Immediately, the harp that was playing the music stilled. With a dash of Unicorn Boost enhanced speed, Harry promptly opened the trapdoor and jumped through before Fluffy could wake up.
Cold, damp air rushed past him as he fell. With a muffled thump, he landed on something soft. He sat up and felt around as his eyes slowly adjusted to the dark. His hand brushed against some sort of leaf. He was sitting on a plant.
'Sprout's trap!' Harry realized as he quickly looked around. He was sitting on a Devil's Snare! He quickly let out a massive wave of fire from his hands, burning the entire floor full of plants to a crisp.
Freeing himself from the few remaining tendrils and dusting off the ashes that had gotten on his clothes, Harry activated Unicorn Boost and zipped down the stone passageway.
Halfway through, Harry's ears caught a soft rustling and clinking that seemed to be coming from up ahead.
He reached the end of the passageway and saw the brilliantly lit chamber before him, it's ceiling arching high above. It was full of small, jewel-bright birds, fluttering and tumbling all around the room. On the opposite side of the chamber was a heavy wooden door.
Harry zipped through the room to the other side, bracing himself for the birds to collectively dive for him and attack him.
Nothing happened.
Relieved, he pulled the handle, but the oaken door was locked. 'Alohamora' Harry intoned. The door didn't budge.
Looking back at the chamber and the glittering birds flying around, Harry realised something. They weren't birds. They were keys.
Harry's left eye developed a twitch. He looked at the door, then at the broom in the corner of the room, then back at the hundreds of keys fluttering around. The twitch was getting progressively worse with every passing second.
"Oh hell no" He muttered, turned back to the door and unleashed a concentrated beam of fire at it. Within a few seconds, a massive burning hole opened up in the oak door and the resulting fire was put out with some water Harry'd pulled from the air around him.
He peered through it into the next room.
It was so dark he could barely see anything. Sending out his Area Sense, he froze in place when he sensed thirty two massive foes filled with mana. Sending a ball of fire into the room through the hole, he briefly illuminated the humongous humanoid figures of pure stone that were on either side of the room.
He was left feeling really glad that he hadn't stepped through the hole into the room. Who knew what those figures would have done if he'd stepped into the room? Maybe even attack him! Not even he could take all of those at once. He would have been torn limb from limb.
Stuffing his Cloak back into his inventory and pulling out Gandiva, he let loose explosive arrow after explosive arrow into the room, not caring too much where they hit.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The explosions ripped through the room as Harry felt the mana dissipate from the stone statues.
He stepped in through the hole. Light suddenly flooded the room.
'Wait a minute' he thought as he took in the destroyed black and white chess pieces and the chess board on the floor.
Was he supposed to play his way across?
"Bugger that," he said to himself as he stepped through the rubble and towards the next door before he pushed it open.
A disgusting smell filled his nostrils, making him pull his robe up over his nose. Eyes watering, he saw, flat on the floor in front of them, a troll, even larger than the one he had taken out back in Halloween, out cold with a bloody lump on its head.
Glad he didn't have to fight this one, Harry pulled open the next door, half expecting a dragon to jump out as the next trap, but there was nothing frightening in here, just a table with seven differently shaped bottles standing on it in a line.
He stepped over the threshold, and immediately a fire sprang up behind him in the doorway. It wasn't ordinary fire either, it was purple. At the same instant, black flames shot up in the doorway leading onward.
Harry shot a jet of water towards the flame from his wand. It evaporated before it even touched the flame. He tried controlling the flames using his powers, but found them uncontrollable.
A little wary, he observed the black flames.
Black Hell Fire
Magical flames which can completely destroy most forms of matter. Hell-fire can cause excruciating pain upon contact or instead cause instant death. It's black in color and immune to flame freezing & extinguishing. It can be rendered ineffective by an appropriate antidote.
And then he turned and observed the purple flames that led back the way he'd come from.
Purple Hell Fire
Magical flames which can completely destroy most forms of matter. Hell-fire can cause excruciating pain upon contact or instead cause instant death. It's purple in color and immune to flame freezing & extinguishing. It can be rendered ineffective by an appropriate antidote.
He was trapped. Finding nothing else to do, he picked up the roll of paper that was lying next to the bottles and read.
Danger lies before you, while safety lies behind,
Two of us will help you, which ever you would find,
One among us seven will let you move ahead,
Another will transport the drinker back instead,
Two among our number hold only nettle wine,
Three of us are killers, waiting bidden in line.
Choose, unless you wish to stay here forevermore,
To help you in your choice, we give you these clues four:
First, however slyly the poison tries to hide
You will always find some on nettle wine's left side;
Second, different are those who stand at either end,
But if you would move onward, neither is your friend;
Third, as you see clearly, all are different size,
Neither dwarf nor giant holds death in their insides;
Fourth, the second left and the second on the right
Are twins once you taste them, though different at first sight.
A logic trap. A puzzle.
For a second, Harry wished he could call this trap a stupid one. But he had a pretty good idea about how most of the wizarding population seemed to lack any ounce of logic or common sense. Keeping that in mind, this trap was actually a fantastic deterrent to anyone who wanted to steal the stone. Unfortunately, it appeared that Quirrell did have some amount of common sense.
Fortunately, so did Harry.
He burnt the clue paper to a crisp. Looking through all the bottles, he dismissed the ones that were full and quickly picked the one that was half empty.
Quirrell had to have used the right potion to go through the hellfire, so the one potion that'd get him through would have to be the one half-used.
It was the smallest one of them all.
He promptly threw the others into the wall, shattering them and making sure that there would be no potion left to let Quirrell get out through the purple fire behind him in case Harry couldn't stop him.
Taking a deep breath, he turned to face the black flames.
"Here I come," he said to the empty room and drained the little bottle in one gulp.
It felt as though ice was flooding his body. He put the bottle down and walked forward bracing himself, he saw the black flames licking his body, but couldn't feel them. For a moment he could see nothing but dark fire. Then he was on the other side, in the last chamber.
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