9 Chapter 9

Disclaimer: If you recognise it, surprise, I don't own it.

Chapter 5– Mind Restored But Still Messed Up.

Edited: 10/03/2023

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I don't even know how long it has been this time. I have just been so absorbed by this book and learning everything from it. If it wasn't for the fact that I had already developed my Occlumency and was constantly keeping my mind clear while reading the book, then I would totally believe that I was being affected by some kind of dark magic, but no, I am not, this is all my own obsession.

I possess a superhuman thirst for knowledge. that could be the golden finger I was given when I was dropped into this universe. There is so much knowledge in this book, and not all of it is good. In fact, let me rephrase, none of it is good, but maybe it can do good in my capable hands. At the very least, it will improve my life, and that is my greater good.

However, before I can focus on any of the knowledge to manipulate and subvert the minds of others, I first have to solidify my base, meaning my own mind. Then, I have to conquer my own mind before I can start conquering the minds of others, and man, am I glad that I focused on the first part of Occlumency, as it made this part a lot easier for me.

First came the sorting and categorising of all the memories stored within the mind. This by itself would have been quite challenging if I did not already learn to clear my mind, this allows me to cut through all of the bullshit and dive right into my mind, but this by itself is pretty hard.

Thank god that there was a spell given in the book to help with this process, and it is a pretty good spell as well, as it is easy to perform and doesn't need much knowledge in the way of magic to cast. Also, this spell has a side-effect that I don't think the creator meant to create.

The best way I can describe it is that the spell basically does to you what The Ancient One does to Stephen Strange in the MCU Dr Strange movie released in 2016. it sends your mind on a wild trip. Still, instead of through the multiverse, it makes you hallucinate and get in touch with nature. in plain terms, it makes you high.

Apparently, that is what you need to do to start making a mind palace or whatever you want to call it. The book says mind fortress. The spell is designed for the caster to first clear their mind of everything and then cast the spell on themselves. With the emotions being suppressed, the magic works on the only thing available, which is the memories, so you take a deep dive into the abyss.

Of course, with me being so excited the first time I used the spell, I did not read the book properly, and so I cast the spell on myself without using my Occlumency and properly clearing my mind, which led me to the discovery of the side effect undiscovered by the previous wizards who used this spell, probably because they weren't so stupid to use it how it was not intended.

Anyway, since I did not suppress my emotions, I went on a wild trip full of colours and sounds that I had no idea the origin of, like that one time I was peer pressured into trying mushrooms but 10 times worse. I woke up on my toilet in my underwear and with about 5 different pictures of myself around me. I don't know what happened, but I think my latent Gilderoy got a chance to come out for some fun.

After that, I made sure to read all of the texts thoroughly and adequately before I did any practical work. Of course, you can not be expected to use this spell anytime you want to use Occlumency, so it is more like training wheels that are used to help you gain an experience of travelling into your own head and memories and eventually, you can dive into your own mind without any aid which I have managed to do. However, I may visit this spell in the future since a high like this without having to ingest any sort of substance could be quite lucrative.

After over a dozen trips into my own head, I began to get the hang of diving in and managed to do it without the aid of the spell. But, of course, the journey there was quite painful as I had to see hundreds of memories of Gilderoy Lockhart being Gilderoy Lockhart and past memories of myself being myself, with the both of them blurring and intertwining with each other.

But eventually, I managed to separate all the memories into three piles, with them being old Gilderoy, past life and new Gilderoy. With that done, I further separated the memories and categorised them one by one until I had a proper catalogue. However, it only made sense to my own brain since, to anyone else, they are just motes of light floating in the abyss.

With that done and the memories being correctly categorised, I got to modifying the old memories of Gilderoy Lockhart and eliminating most of the emotions from them, leaving only minute remnants as they may come in handy one day and adequately bringing them into the fold to be apart of my mind with the muted emotions and feeling giving me complete control and all memories without any of the personality.

However, some little tidbits did escape and come through, but it was negligible in comparison to the advantage I gained. Now that I have fully categorised my mind and sorted out my memories, it is time to build some proper defences and make my mind into a veritable fortress, so that I can go forward without being scared of anyone discovering my origins.

First of all, I had to separate the black abyss that contained my memories from the rest of my mind. I did this by literally shrinking it until I was left in a pure white expanse with a pure black ball clasped within my palm, now it is time to start with the creation of my mindscape, and I begin by doing the best thing anyone can do when they start a project, copy and paste.

Why spend all those hours creating and sculpting my own little world when I can steal a world from the minds of others? Finally, those hours of playing video games and watching youtube are going to come in handy.

Thinking it through, I begin to sort through all the memories in my mind, through the countless hours of gaming, looking for the perfect map to bring to life in my mindscape. I look at Los Santos, Liberty City, Kamurocho, Springfield, Harran, Skyrim, The Wasteland, The Commonwealth, New York, Yokosuka, Konoha and many more, trying to find the perfect map that can be brought to life within my mind that is as equally detailed as it is big and confusing.

Finally, setting on the one after many deliberations and comparisons, I think this one is actually quite perfect as I only will know the exact features of this land. For everybody else, it will be pretty confusing.

Using all of that useless information in my brain for once, the locations of missions, weapons, NPC's and all that other stuff locked inside my memories that my Occlumency has helped me divulge to a really sickening degree, why do I know how to dangle an NPC from a bridge and not kill them and then swing them around?

Focusing entirely on those memories and those games, I begin to pull on them and bring them out of myself and into my surroundings. I begin to feel the world form around me and the atmosphere starting to exist. I can feel as each tiny grain of sand appears, and each brick is placed. I can feel the animals begin to spawn, and the NPCs begin to form. I can feel each tress roots start to spread through the ground and-

"KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK"

THIS PIECE OF SHIT, ASSHOLE! Can't he just leave me alone, for one goddamn day, just one? The beautiful world that was beginning to form around me starts to disappear and turns into motes of nonexistence as it rapidly disintegrates before my eyes. Then, just when I was getting somewhere, this bastard comes and bugs me. All I want is a little peace and quiet so I can make some self-improvement.

Except this bastard can't take even a single day off, every day without fail since the last time I saw him, this Digby Dickhead Digworth has shown up rain or shine and knocked on my door, and with each day, he stays a little longer and knocks a little longer, recently he has even begun to-.

"GILDEROY, GILDEROY OPEN UP! I KNOW YOU ARE IN THERE. YOU CAN'T HIDE IN THERE FOREVER!"

-Shout while he stands outside my door, and I can only thank the previous Gilderoy Lockhart for getting an entire floor of this building for himself and making sure that all the sounds are isolated. I have no idea why he had that done, and I don't want to question it either, even though I probably have the answer knocking around my noggin somewhere.

This man has been shouting at my door every day. Even though I told him that I would be in the Antarctic for the foreseeable future, I could think nothing of it if it had been a few months, but he started showing up the day after I told him I would be leaving, so he clearly never believed me.

Angry that he had just disrupted the culmination of all the hard work I had done, I stalk towards the door, ready to swing it open and give him a piece of my mind. What is the fat little man going to do anyway? Damn the consequences, I am angry, and I need someone to take it out on, and who better than my main frustration over these last few months.

I walk towards the door, reach my hand out towards the handle, firmly grasp it, ready to throw it open, and deck this pug-faced man right in the face. Still, the cold steel against my flesh gives me a moment of calm, and I quickly pull on my Occlumency to calm my mind before I do anything rash.

My emotions are rapidly suppressed, and rationale begins to retake control. I think through all my options and identify the correct thing to do at this junction in time. But, first of all, somehow, the man outside this door unequivocally knows that I am in this building, and I have been for the past few months.

Therefore, he knows that I lied about where I was going and what I was doing and yet he only knocked on my door until recently, meaning that my lies were not out of the ordinary for him. He was not shocked by them, he only started to shout recently as I had taken too long, and I know that Gilderoy in the past never took off for this long, so that could be why he is worried and shouting down my door, but that doesn't explain why he started the very next day after I lied to him.

While some things do not add up and are starting to concern me, the fact remains that I am not prepared to open that door and venture out into the world, even with full access to Gilderoy's memories. He is a very underdeveloped wizard in terms of mastery, yet he had a talent that even I am surprised at. Moreover, the man was so unbelievably vain that he constantly applied and maintained all sorts of vain charms and used all kinds of household magic.

At the same time, that seems relatively unremarkable, but he was actually maintaining multiple spells while casting dozens of others. To put it simply, the man simply had magic reserves that were astounding, and yet he wasted all of his talents because he saw some other people doing better than him and decided to give up on that subject entirely. What a fool. Regardless of what this man knows or wants until I have adequately learned magic to suit my abundant reserves, I will not be paying attention to anything else.