448 Chapter 447 Exchange

It did seem to have been deserted for a long time, apparently at the beginning, as Lucius had said, the Aurors of the British Ministry of Magic had carried out a major search through the house.

Jon wondered if Lucius had left him in the dark, that he had made a discovery here when the first search had been carried out, a discovery that had not been communicated to him.

But what Jon was sure of was that if Adrien had used this house as a depository for one of the gems, he must have made certain means to keep anyone who did not possess the ring from finding the gem's location.

This was something Jon had learned from finding the first two gems. Even though it seemed as if this unknown wizard had left gems lying around all over the place where one could find them if they looked carefully enough, they were basically either in his former laboratory or a place where he had lived, and the condition for finding them was that they all had to have the ring as a key.

No one else apparently had that condition except Jon.

So Jon didn't waste any time looking around, he just pulled out the ring he had around his neck and started walking around the house with the ring in his hand.

His search was obviously the right one, and it wasn't long before he found a spot on the floor near a window where the ring had apparently reacted to something special.

Jon then managed to pry open this floor, but underneath there was just an empty patch of ground.

He didn't dwell on it but kept digging, and after digging down another ten or twenty centimetres, he finally found an ancient wooden box.

After cleaning the dirt off the box, he carefully took it out of the pit.

And inside the box, there lay a tiny pale blue diamond-shaped gem!

***

Inside the darkened room, the liquid in the cauldron was gurgling and bubbling out.

Snape was standing guard over the cauldron, and he pulled out a small glass vial and carefully began to pour a third of the white powder from the vial into the cauldron.

The powder seemed to soothe the irritable liquid in the cauldron, so that it no longer became a boiling mess, but calmed down like a pool of stagnant water.

Snape put the lid back on the cauldron, it would take another ten minutes or so before the potion could be ready and in the meantime, he would need to entertain a 'guest' who had come from afar.

The fireplace on the wall lit up with a green flame, and then a young man, who looked to be under thirty at most, emerged from the fireplace.

He was in what looked like an extremely cold region and was wearing a heavy robe, a knitted hat and three or four scarves around his neck in what should have been early summer weather.

"Tsk tsk, Britain is different after all. Hello, I suppose I should address you as Mr Snape, it may be the first time we meet, but you can call me Eric."

Snape saw Eric's young face, and no particular expression showed in his gaze.

"That leader of yours doesn't believe what I said in my letter?"

Eric could tell that this was Snape's lack of trust in his age and his not-all-that-impressive reputation, but he still had that gentle smile on his face.

"Please don't misunderstand, it is already a sign of my lord's great respect for your letter that I have made the trip out of the North Pole, otherwise, as originally planned, I would not have returned to Europe so easily unless we had made a major breakthrough in our project."

Snape didn't say anything more cryptic in response to his words, just asked lightly.

"So what kind of commitment can you make instead of him?"

Eric didn't say anything more which might make it perfunctory, he simply took a piece of parchment out of his pocket and unfolded it in front of Snape.

By the dim light of the candle, Snape could see what was promised on the parchment, and the name underneath, which even now still made the whole of the Great Magical Governments' hearts skip a beat.

Just after showing Snape what was on the parchment, Eric put it away again and said with a raised eyebrow.

"Now it is time to show your good faith, Mr Snape, my lord has given you enough in return for that letter of yours."

Snape lowered his head again and slowly lifted the lid off the cauldron, and a white vapour filled the room at once.

This vapour was laced with an indistinct smell, and Eric frowned as he was enveloped in it, but when he relaxed his breathing and tried to inhale it slightly into his nostrils, his face was abruptly surprised, and then his surprise turned to delight!

"Your reward is nothing more than a hollow promise, but what I can give you is something tangible."

Snape didn't bother to look at Eric's reaction at this point, he simply stirred the liquid that had become clear and colourless in the cauldron and proceeded to fill a glass vial with it.

He then casually tossed the vial to Eric, who reached out in a panic, forgetting to even use his magic out of fear of the vial falling to the ground.

Snape meanwhile pulled his drawer out and retrieved a notebook from it, tossing it to Eric as well.

"It contains the various ingredients needed and the detailed steps to make it, as long as the Potions Master your lord finds doesn't have a troll brain, following the steps on it will have a success rate of at least thirty percent."

Hearing this Eric couldn't help but snap out of his surprise and smack his lips.

"Only thirty percent, that's not enough to make it mass-producible."

Snape's face showed disdain but did not make another sound, he simply did not want to answer such an amateurish question, every newly developed potion, to reach the standard of mass production requires not only countless attempts and improvements, luck plays a large part, how could he have the time and energy to experiment with this now.

"I don't care what you guys want to do, as long as you can abide by the contents of that contract, then I won't spill the beans about the formula and effects of this potion."

It had been a surprisingly productive day for Eric, and he happily stowed both the finished potion and the recipe notes in his robe pocket, then turned and sprinkled a small amount of Floo powder back into the fireplace, and said one last thing before departing from this place.

"My lord's will not renege on his promise, Mr. Snape, he is not like the lord you once served."

----

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