Chapter 164

What he saw, caused him even further unrest.

There was mana in the cat's body, but it wasn't flowing as normal and healthy mana should have been. Instead, it was entirely frozen. Completely still at every single point. Unmoving, unresponsive…petrified.

The curse, or whatever it was, went much deeper than any spell he'd ever seen. Harry finally understood why his Healing Touch had shown that Unknown Primary Error.

The Healing Touch skill worked by traveling through the flowing eddy currents of the patient's mana and using the patient's own mana to completely heal them, which was why the skill didn't take any mana from Harry as cost.

But here…here the patient's mana was frozen…vestigial…useless.

This Petrifaction was beyond his ability to heal. At least for now.

Harry sighed, and was about to switch the Mage sight off, when he suddenly caught sight of something and stopped.

In glowing letters, invisible to any eyes except those gifted with Mage Sight, there was written a message on the paper note that the Headmaster had handed him, which was still clutched in his hand.

Keep an eye on Draco Malfoy

And in one striking moment Harry realized that he'd never even considered the possibility that Draco Malfoy knew of whatever plan that his father had cooked up. While it seemed very unlikely that Lucius Malfoy was the type to involve, or even trust his son, the thought was not outside the realm of possibility.

Dumbledore, who knew that Harry did occasionally talk to Draco, must have decided to tell him to keep an eye on him since a fellow student talking to the younger Malfoy would set off lot less alarm bells than it would if the Headmaster did it.

He promptly decided to keep an eye on the Malfoy heir, and headed into the Hospital Wing, where he handed over the petrified Mrs. Norris to the matron, who, after some questioning, let Harry go.

It was getting late, Harry thought as he walked towards the Ravenclaw tower. The rest of the guys would probably have fallen asleep by now. If he were being perfectly honest with himself, he was getting a bit sleepy too. It had been a long first day.

He had a couple of plans to test out tomorrow, which could possibly help in case any student fell prey to this crazy plan Malfoy had cooked up.

Harry idly wondered whether the Room of Requirement was any good at finding grown Mandrakes.

The next morning, Harry realized that the Room of Requirements was very good at finding grown Mandrakes.

Rotten ones.

After a bunch of digging around and asking the Room for any information on the Room itself, Harry learned that the Room of Requirements worked on the basis of Transfiguration, and could only create non-organic andnon-magicall things. Any organic or magical object that it furbished to its user wasn't created, but summoned from somewhere that Harry found no information about.

In short, NO food.

Thus when he asked for grown Mandrakes, the room presented him with the only Mandrakes it could summon from its storage. Old, rotten and useless ones.

So Harry waved goodbye to that idea as it went down the drain.

Bugger.

Furthermore, his second idea, which was to contact Nicholas via Hedwig this morning, also went down the drain.

By lunch, Nicholas sent Hedwig back with a letter, saying that there were no above ground and legal sources that were selling Mandrakes, since they weren't in season anywhere on the planet.

Further worsening the situation was the fact that Nicholas and Perenelle had cut all access to their shadier contacts before faking their deaths. So the magical equivalent of the black market was out of his reach as well. Nicholas had moreover added that it was highly unlikely that Mandrakes would be available even on the black market until the next January.

Bugger.

All that was he could do now, was to make the Game give him some sort of Botanical skill and help Professor Sprout's batch grow faster, which wasn't going to be easy since the game was a sarcastic little bitch when it came to respecting Harry's wishes about what abilities he should get.

Bugger.

After getting buggered thrice on the same day, Harry decided that he would give his brain and arse some much-needed rest, and headed to the History of Magic with the Ravens and the Gryffindors for a good hour of nap-time.

But even that small relief was not to going to be granted to him.

Halfway through the class, Hermione put up her hand, much to the ghostly Professor's surprise. Apparently, her early morning library research about the Chamber of Secrets hadn't been as fulfilling as she would have liked it to be.

"Miss?" Binns asked, acknowledging Hermione.

"Granger, Professor. I was wondering if you could tell us anything about the Chamber of Secrets," said Hermione in a clear voice.

Dean, who had been sitting with his mouth hanging open, gazing out of the window, jerked out of his trance, the Patil twins simultaneously looked like two meerkats that had caught sight of something of interest and Neville's elbow slipped off his desk.

Professor Binns blinked.

"My subject is History of Magic, Miss Gangrene," he said in his dry, wheezy voice. "I deal with facts, not myths" He cleared his throat with a small noise like chalk s!-ping and continued, "In September of that year, a subcommittee of Sardinian sorcerers…"

He stuttered to a halt. Hermione's hand was waving in the air again.

"Miss Grant?"

"Please, sir, but don't legends always have a basis in some fact or the other?"

Professor Binns was looking at her as if he'd seen a ghost. Harry was sure no student had ever interrupted him like this before, alive or dead.

"Well," said Professor Binns slowly, looking more awake than Harry had ever seen him before, "yes, one could argue that, I suppose." He peered at Hermione as though he had never seen her properly before. But the whole class was now hanging on Professor Binns's every word. Even the most unobservant of students could could have told you that he was completely thrown by such an unusual show of interest.

"Oh, very well," he said slowly, racking his ghostly memory, that somehow seemed to have perfect recall of all things Historical, but couldn't remember a student's name, "Let me see…the Chamber of Secrets…You all know, of course, that Hogwarts was founded over a thousand years ago by the four witches and wizards. Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin. They built this castle together, far from prying Muggle eyes, for it was an age when magic was feared by common people, and witches and wizards suffered much persecution."

He paused, gazed blearily around the room, and continued.

"For a few years, the founders worked in harmony together, seeking out youngsters who showed signs of magic and bringing them to the castle to be educated. But then a rift began to grow between Slytherin and the others. Slytherin wished to be more selective about the students admitted to Hogwarts. He believed that magical learning should be kept within all-magic families. He disliked taking students of Muggle parentage, believing them to be untrustworthy. After a while, there was a serious argument on the subject between Slytherin and Gryffindor, and Slytherin left the school."

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