Chapter 270: Department of Mysteries
"I thought that Ravenclaw students were usually shrewd, but it doesn't seem to turn out to be, I'm right, Miss Akihara, Miss Lovegood." Snape walked slowly from the mouth of the alley and said coldly:
"Professor Flitwick would be disappointed if he knew that you were blatantly violating the school rules, and Umbridge would have been more willing to deal with students like you who make mistakesβ"
Luna stared at Snape with wide eyes, as if she looked a little angry, and Qiu Zhang was even more worried, she opened her mouth several times to say something "Professor......, but Snape ignored it.
"But I'm not interested in you, now, tell me - where is Harry Potter?" Snape said sternly, the hooked eyes on their noses, scanning back and forth between the two of them, their expressions cold and harsh.
"Over there......" Luna gestured to the old phone booth, "they're all down, besides, Professorβ"
"What?" Snape had already walked to the phone booth, pushed the door open with his left hand, and asked back.
"I saw Samantha, Walter...... also went down, the two dark wizards who were wanted......"
Snape gave Luna an unfathomable look, and he smacked his lips and said with a slight sarcasm, "Good luck Miss Luna, you should know that you should have been killed by the Requisition Curse or some other unforgivable curse when you ran into those two people." β
He turned around, stepped into the phone booth, and whispered to the two men outside, "Now, you two get out of here, I'll explain this to Professor Flitwick when I get back, but don't think you can get yourself out of here, you're all Potter's friends, I know." β
"We're not." Luna muttered under her mouth, and then she walked over to the phone booth and complained, "But Professorβwhere are we going?" β
"How could a Ravenclaw student ask such a question? That's not something I should be thinking about. β
Snape dialed the dial as he spoke, and after a while, after seeing a silver badge protruding from the chute, the phone booth slowly sank for the third time tonight, carrying Snape's figure, and disappeared.
"He's gone." Luna turned her head and whispered to Qiu Zhang.
"What?" Qiu Zhang rubbed her head, she still felt groggy.
"I'm going down." Luna said as she walked into the new phone booth and gently stroked the dial with her hand.
"What did you say?" Qiu Zhang was startled, still still not understanding what Luna meant, "You mean, you're going to the Ministry of Magic too?" But Professor Snape has already said let's leaveβ"
"We're here." Luna looked at Akira firmly, "Harry Potter down there, Hermione Granger down there, Draco Malfoy, Daphne Greengrass...... Professor Snape, they're all down there, there's got to be something big going on there. β
With her mouth slightly open, Cho looked at the girl in the phone booth incredulously, as if she had met Luna Lovegood for the first day, and she sighed faintly and exclaimed, "I didn't expect you to be so adventurous. β
"It's the spirit of exploration, autumn, that you can acquire knowledge."
"But it's dangerous there, you see it too......" Qiu Zhang stopped what she was about to say, and looking at Luna's expression, she understood that everything she said was in vain.
"You can go back to school with a broom and inform Professor Flitwick of this, in case you need helpβ" Luna pointed to the two broomsticks on the corner, and she didn't know when they appeared, but Akihari remembered that she hadn't passed out until she passed out.
After Luna finished speaking, she looked back at the dial, thought about it, and said to herself like a dream: "I can see clearly...... Remember it was...... 6β¦β¦ 2β¦β¦ 442β¦β¦ It's done. β
The voice of the indifferent woman rang out again in the phone booth, "Welcome to the Ministry of Magic, please say your name and do something." "It's probably an old phone booth, the busiest day of the year, and after the wizards mostly commute to work with Floo powder, few people take this phone booth anymore.
"Hmm...... Luna Lovegood, here's something to do, I'd like to think about it...... Contingencies? Luna cupped her cheek in one hand, thinking, when another voice sounded beside her.
"Qiu Zhang, it's the same thing as her."
Luna looked at her classmate with a little surprise, who gave her an annoyed look, "Am I a cowardly deserter?" β
"But who's going to inform the professors?"
"It took us an afternoon to fly here, and it's too late for me to fly back on a broomstick, you just want me to leave, don't you?" Qiu Zhang stared at Luna with burning eyes, leaving the latter speechless.
"Professor Snape won't rush over without notice, don't worry, two of us are better than one."
Luna nodded, it could be seen that Qiu Zhang was a little nervous, they followed Ning An to practice combat magic for a while, but the real actual combat was the first time, and the enemy was still unknown, the two slowly took out their magic wands, pinned the two badges they had just spit out to their chests, and sank rapidly towards the ground as the phone booth shook violently.
ββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββββ
Harry was standing in a large circular room, everything in it, including the ceiling and floor, was black, some of the same black doors with no doorknobs or markings separated from each other by some distance and embedded in the black walls around them, and some candles with blue flames dotted the walls, cold, faintly shining, making the floor look like there was a pool of black water.
"Where shall we go?" Ron asked, there were twelve doors in front of him, twelve of them were exactly the same and completely indistinguishable.
In Harry's dreams, he had walked through the room without hesitation, and had come straight to the door at the opposite entrance, but now there were twelve doors around him, and as he stared at which one to choose, twelve doors spun around the four of them at once.
"What is this going to do......" Neville's face tightened, a cold sweat oozing from his forehead.
"Don't move yet." Hermione calmly looked around, and she said unconcernedly, "I think it's confusing us from which door we came in." β
"Yes, again, we don't know which door we need to go through." Ginny nodded in agreement.
Harry looked anxiously at the twelve identical doors, and now it was harder for him to identify the exit than it was to find an ant on the black floor, and any of these twelve doors might be something he needed to traverse.
"We don't have to think about going back now." Harry said excitedly, "We won't go back until Sirius is foundβ" he said, pulling out his wand.
"Take out all the wands," he whispered, "and we'll try them one by one." β
"Wait a minute," Hermione screamed Harry, who was trying to push open one of the doors and enter, "the mark appears!" β
She drew her wand in midair, and a fiery red X appeared on the door.
"If this door isn't, you can rule one out." Hermione said.
"Good idea." Ron sighed, stepped forward, pushed open the black door, and the four of them crept in.
The low-hanging chain of the chandelier hangs from the ceiling, illuminating the room, and a warm, hazy glow floats in the room, which is particularly bright when a few people walk in from a dark room. The room was almost empty, except for a table, and in the middle of the room was a huge chest of dark green liquid, large enough for them to swim in, and a lot of white stuff was floating slowly around in it.
"What is this?" Ron whispered a little disgusted.
"I don't know." Harry shook his head, disappointed that this was not the room he had dreamed of.
"Let's get out of here." Harry said, "Not this one. β
So they retreated back to the previous room, and the door marked with the red X symbol clicked and closed behind them, and then there was a deafening rumble, and the walls began to spin rapidly, and the blue candle flames on the walls blurred into a faint blue circle of light around them, and under the circle of light was a red golden light, and when everything was still, the twelve doors were rearranged, and one door burned with a fiery red X symbol, indicating that they had already been.
So Harry pushed open another door.
The other side of the secluded curtain stood quietly in the middle of the room, and the curtain had been windless for thousands of years, as if someone was calling for something.
Harry felt a flickering tumbling in his pocket, and Poole seemed to roll over several times in a row.
He quickly climbed down the stone bench floor by floor, came to the bottom of the stone pit, and slowly walked to the stone platform.
"Be careful." Ginny said in a low voice.
Harry stood in front of the door, the arch in front of him much higher than it was when he looked down from the top, and the curtains still swayed slightly, as if someone had just walked through it.
"Who's there?" Harry's voice was soft, he clutched his wand tightly, and a very strange feeling rose from the bottom of his heart, there must be someone standing behind the curtain, and he carefully went around to the other side, but there was nothing but the other side of the tattered curtain.
"Harry?" Ginny was on a tall platform in the distance, whispering at him, and several others looked anxiously at him.
"Anything?" Ron asked.
"I don't know." Harry replied casually, staring at the curtain and pressing his ear back to it, he felt something was heard, and a whisper and muttering came from behind the curtain.
"Let's go." Hermione's voice looked frightened, and she shouted eagerly, "This one doesn't seem to be, let's go to the next one." β
"Wait." Harry said absent-mindedly, and he noticed that the arch, though it was very old, had a unique beauty, and the gently fluttering draperies intrigued him, and he had the urge to pass through the middle of the curtains.
"Harry, we're here to save Sirius!" Hermione shouted at the top of her lungs this time, startling the rest of the group.
"Sirius......" Harry repeated, his expression dazed, his eyes fixed on the drapery, "Ah......h
He finally came to his senses, not noticing what seemed to be an exasperated hiss from Poole in his pocket.
Harry took a few steps back away from the stone platform, his gaze jerking off the curtains.
"Let's go." Reluctantly turning his head to look, he finally slowly walked to the stone bench on the ground floor, and climbed all the way back to the entrance of this room.
"We've got to hurry, we can't find Sirius if we're moving so slowly." When the four of them returned to the black circular room, Hermione said to the others.
The wall spun rapidly again, and Harry picked one random and walked in.
When he saw the beautiful, diamond-like sparkle, he immediately recognized it as this room, the room that had recurred in his dreams, except that usually at the end of the corridor there was a terrible serpent waiting for him.
"It's here." He lowered his voice and said without looking back, and several of them clenched their wands, and they walked through a room full of countless clocks, of all sizes, from grandfather-mounted grandfather clocks to travel clocks and wall-mounted clocks hanging on the walls of their bedrooms.
And so, a rapid, never-ending sound filled the room, like thousands of tiny footsteps, and the beautiful light that jumped like diamonds came from a towering crystal glass bell at the end of the room.
"This wayβ" Harry's new start pounded as he walked ahead, walking down the narrow gap between the tables towards the light source, as he had done in his dreams.
As he approached the bell-shaped glass cover, he could see a glittering stream of air churning inside, and in the flickering light, floated a shiny jewel-like egg, and when it was blown up by the glittering airflow, the shell broke, and a hummingbird emerged, but then as the air flow fell, the bird became wet again, curled up and returned to the eggshell again.
Harry didn't bother to look at these magical things for a while, his heart was beating so hard that it seemed to jump out of his throat, "This is itβthrough hereβ" His tongue seemed to be knotted, and he was almost unable to speak, but several people understood what he was trying to say.
They held their wands tightly in their hands, and the expressions on their faces were serious and solemn, as if they were ready for a battle.
Harry took a deep breath and pushed the door open, and it opened.
At last he came to this place, which was as tall as a cathedral, and was surrounded by high shelves, on which lay one small gray crystal ball after another, and nothing else, but more candlesticks were embedded in the shelves at regular intervals, and a faint light came down from them, and the flames were blue, as in the round room at the beginning, and the inside of the house was cold.
Harry walked slowly, looking down at the dark aisle between the two rows of shelves, not hearing a single sound, not feeling even the slightest movement.
"Row 97 ......," he whispered, looking towards the end of the row, where the silver number on the shelf flashed 53 in the blue glow of the candles.
"Everybody, get your wand ready." Harry whispered, slowly bending down and walking to the right.