Chapter 685: The Ancestral Gaunt House (Edited)

It was a stone house, with walls covered in moss, fallen tiles, tree branches poking through the roof, and small windows thick with old grime.

Nettles grew densely around the house, tall nettles that reached the windows and obscured most of the door, which Dumbledore could only faintly see the outline of.

Dumbledore didn't rush into the house but, with a wave of his wand, turned a stone into a figure on the ground and instructed it to remove the nettles to uncover the door.

As the figure approached the door, a flame erupted on the ground in front of it, reducing the stone figure to a pile of white ashes in the blink of an eye, and burning the nettles clean.

But the dirty-looking wooden door remained intact, and Dumbledore could even see the different shades of knife marks on it...

He knew, from Ogden's memories, that they were made when Marvolo Gaunt had stabbed the snake into the door for amusement.

Dumbledore approached the trap that the puppet had just triggered, crouched down to carefully identify it, and then raised his wand, casting a multi-colored light on the ground.

But just as he managed to disarm the trap on the door, a venomous snake emerged from under the ground and bit Dumbledore.

Dumbledore's body flickered, and with a deafening burst, he shifted to a spot five meters away, while the snakes quickly dissipated into black smoke after their failed strike.

"Careless." Dumbledore sighed as he looked at the corner of his coat.

He had narrowly dodged in time, but a snake had touched the corner of his coat, and where it had touched, a huge hole appeared as if something had corroded it.

Dumbledore regained his composure and approached the Gaunt House with even more caution than before.

Voldemort's protective magic in the Gaunt House was cunning, hidden, and dangerous all at once. But with Dumbledore's careful handling, the magical traps were broken one by one.

Dumbledore took almost an hour to push open the broken wooden door, which was so old that it collapsed as soon as Dumbledore pushed it, crashing to the floor in a pile of splinters.

Dumbledore stood at the threshold of the door, cautiously peering inside...

The interior of the house was simply furnished, with furniture that had deteriorated over time and was covered in a thick layer of dust from being vacant for so long.

The floor was overgrown with weeds, with fungi growing in some places, and white cobwebs in some of the highest corners and among the branches protruding from the outside.

Dumbledore conjured another puppet and sent it through the room without triggering any more traps. It seemed that Voldemort had only placed defenses outside the house.

However, Dumbledore didn't let his guard down and, wand in hand, carefully searched the grounds of the Gaunt House.

As the house wasn't very large, and Voldemort was likely confident in his own preparations outside, Dumbledore soon found the ring that Ogden remembered in one of the drawers in the inner room.

Dumbledore grabbed the ring and stared at it with a determined expression.

The black stone set in the ring, engraved with a triangle, a circle, and a vertical line, was the symbol of the Peverell family, but Dumbledore knew it as the symbol of the Deathly Hallows, the symbol he and Grindelwald had chosen when they wanted to leave their mark as young men.

Through this symbol and the information he had discovered with Grindelwald, Dumbledore had guessed the true nature of the black stone when he had looked at Ogden's memories: the Resurrection Stone, his most desired of the Three Deathly Hallows.

Dumbledore rubbed his fingers over the design of the Deathly Hallows on the black stone, and his face changed.

In the end, he couldn't resist the desire to see his parents and his sister again, so he put the ring on his right index finger.

Just as Dumbledore tried to activate the power of the Resurrection Stone, a terrible energy burst from the ring, and his right hand dried up as if drained of blood, rapidly spreading from his hand to his arm.

"Grr..."

Dumbledore groaned and fell to his knees.

He fought against the pain in his arm, quickly removed the ring from his finger, threw it far away into a corner of the room, and grabbed his wand, which had just fallen to the side. He pointed it at his drying and blackening right hand and murmured some words.

When Dumbledore's spell took effect, his right hand gradually stopped deteriorating, and the dryness and charring ceased near his right shoulder. However, Dumbledore was not pleased.

Although it was no longer worsening, he sensed that the ring held a very malicious curse that he had only temporarily repressed. A curse that continued to drain his magic and, when his magic ran out, would explode once again, and he would no longer be able to prevent its spread.

"Greed is indeed one of the original sins..." Dumbledore looked at his right arm like a charred corpse and shook his head with a bitter smile.

Death was not something terrible to him, but now that Voldemort had returned, Harry had not yet grown up, and Fish... was not to be trusted, he still needed to contribute his own strength to the fight against Voldemort.

That's it, Fish!

Dumbledore, still struggling, suddenly reacted at the thought of Fish...

Just because he couldn't do anything about the curse, doesn't mean Fish couldn't do anything!

The spell called Serenity had saved the Longbottoms from being hospitalized for over ten years.

Dumbledore regained his composure, raised his wand with his left hand, and used the Fiendfyre Curse on the Resurrection Ring he had just thrown into the corner.

A fierce flame shot out from the tip of Dumbledore's wand, forming a phoenix the size of a palm that resembled a shrunken Fawkes from Fish's Animal Shrinking.

Under Dumbledore's control, the fiery phoenix flew to the corner where the ring was and pecked at the Resurrection Stone embedded in it.

"Crack!"

With a crack, a web of cracks appeared on the stone, and the ring melted into a puddle of liquid from the heat of the fire.

At the same time, black gas escaped from the cracks and was engulfed by the flaming phoenix flying above.

Dumbledore dispelled the palm-sized phoenix and gazed in astonishment at the cracked stone for a moment before taking a step forward and picking it up.

This time, he didn't think about the Resurrection Stone and kept it in his pocket. Then, he restored the old Gaunt House to its previous state... Even the traps he had broken reappeared.

Once this was done, Dumbledore Apparated with a deafening crack, disappearing.