Chapter 15 Rituals

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Chamber of Secrets, Ritual Room.

An hour before midnight.

Harry is in the Ritual room just an hour before his birthday making all the final preparations for his enhancement rituals.

To understand how an enhancement ritual works you first have to understand the difference between a wizard and a muggle. The answer is their soul, even from birth a wizard's soul is many times stronger than a muggle's soul.

It's our strong soul that allows us to tap in the natural flow of magic and use it to bend and break the laws of reality. That's why wizards can leave behind ghosts or exist in spirit form and even possess others.

As a result of having a stronger soul, a wizard's mind and senses are far more developed from that of a muggle's. A wizard's mind can process information, visualise data, retain information, etc far beyond the limits of a muggle mind. Every wizard has the potential to have a perfect memory to a certain extent through occlumency training.

Due to this a wizard's physical body is also much faster, with better dexterity, more agile and has much faster reflexes and reaction speed when compared to a muggle's body. This is why a high pace sport like Quidditch can exist in the wizarding world.

That's why even before the rituals a wizard's body is already much better than a muggle's body, but the enhancement rituals take this to the next level.

Enhancement rituals work by enhancing the wizard's soul even further. In ritual magic, it is said that the body is a reflection of the soul thus the changes made to the soul reflect on the physical body.

For the past month, the portrait of Slytherin has been helping harry modify his set of three enhancement rituals into a set of seven enhancement rituals.

This set of three rituals is meant to enhance all three core aspects of a wizard, their magic, mind and body. These three rituals were developed by Dumbledore in his youth by modifying and strengthening other rituals. This is the same set that Dumbledore used to enhance himself.

Dumbledore was 21 years old when he performed these rituals. Almost all wizards and witches perform enhancement rituals when they turn 21.

Geniuses like Dumbledore and Voldemort improve on the already available rituals to make their own powerful personal set of rituals, but not everyone can do this because the more powerful the ritual is the harder it is to perform.

A wizard can only perform a set of enhancement rituals once in their lifetime and this set is only limited to three or seven individual rituals. This is because all of the enhancement rituals have to be in balance with each other and the wizard, so a wizard can't just find and perform the seven most powerful enhancement rituals because the more powerful an enhancement ritual is the harder it is to balance.

So when an average wizard or witch turns 21 they choose a set of three rituals among the sets available to the general populace, these sets have been improved, tried and tested for thousands of years. Among these sets, the wizard chooses the set that enhances the aspects that are most relevant to them. For example, a potioneer or healer would choose the rituals that focus mainly on enhancing their magical senses and their control over magic.

Ancient and powerful Houses have their own set of enhancement rituals that focuses on their family magic. Take House Black, in their long history they have developed their own set of rituals for their members that enhance all aspects of a wizard far more than the normal set of rituals available to the general population, but the most significant boost is made to the offensive powers of the wizard. Wizards and witches of House Black are born with an affinity for offensive magic due to the family magic passed down through their blood and with this set of rituals this is further enhanced to the next level. These rituals can only be performed by members of their House because the rituals work with the family magic in their blood so they won't work on a person without it.

Certain organisations like the Potioneer's Guild, Auror Department, Enchanter's Association, etc have also developed their own set of rituals for their members. The Auror Department has a set of seven enhancement rituals that enhances all aspects of the wizard, it provides such all-around improvement that wizards from powerful Houses sometimes join the Aurors for it instead of performing their own House rituals.

That's why a full-fledged Auror is physically more comparable to a super soldier like Captain America than to a normal human.

The rituals made by Dumbledore and Voldemort are even better than those of the Auror Department, while they give the same level of enhancement to the body like the ones used by Aurors but they also provide an even stronger enhancement to mind and magic.

As a result, these rituals are far more complicated and harder to perform, so only geniuses like Dumbledore and Voldemort can perform them perfectly. If an average wizard tries to perform these rituals they will fail and a failed enhancement ritual is even worse than death.

If a failed ritual doesn't outright kill you it will cause all kinds of mutations to occur in the body. Limbs can morph into all kinds of odd shapes until they are barely recognisable, entire organs can disappear from the body, it can even cause the brain to regress into a primitive state leaving the wizard as nothing more than a beast trapped into a man's body.

This is why performing enhancement rituals is very serious business and normally a wizard only performs them after turning 21 years old. Most wizards and witches who are not experts in Ritualistic magic procure the services of a ritual expert to help them through this process. These experts help wizards find the right date and time for them to perform the rituals based on arithmetic calculations and astrology, help them understand the rituals they are attempting to perform, etc.

This is why a wizard spends months sometimes even years making preparations just so they can perform these enhancement rituals perfectly.

Take Harry's father for example, Potter family magic gives its members a very strong affinity for mind magic and Transfiguration, but it also causes vision problems for some of its members and they need glasses just like his father. This vision defect is fixed by performing House Potter's set of enhancement rituals.

Even though James Potter is a gifted wizard and could have performed the enhancement rituals at 17 like other gifted wizards from powerful houses do, he waited four more years even with poor eyesight just to perform them perfectly when he turned 21. That's because the potter family rituals are powerful and shouldn't be performed haphazardly without making adequate preparations.

The results speak for themselves, just in his late 20s his father is already one the strongest Aurors in the department's entire history.

Now at the age of seven Harry is about to perform rituals that are even stronger than his family rituals.