HP: Alchemy? Nah, It's Crafting

"Kasen, my dear friend! Congratulations on striking it rich!"

Kasen had just finished busily teleporting an entire vault's worth of alcohol back to his office with Ender magic. The instant he returned to the office himself, he heard that decidedly inhuman voice.

"What the fuck..."

Kasen instinctively looked toward the area where he had just teleported the alcohol.

Sure enough.

Exactly half of it was gone!

"...Heh... hahaha..."

How did that saying go again?

When someone became speechless enough, they really would start laughing.

"Has Professor Kasen gone mad?"

"I don't know. My mum says people sometimes go crazy if they drink too much."

"Then should we get Madam Pomfrey?"

"Madam Pomfrey can't stop Professor Kasen. At a time like this, we should get Professor Grindelwald!"

"You're right! You go find Professor Grindelwald, and I'll get Professor Dumbledore. The two of them together should be able to handle it!"

The muttering of several young wizards in the distance drifted into Kasen's ears on the wind...

"I'm actually not crazy..." Kasen said, awkwardly pursing his lips.

.....

That was simply how the weather at Hogwarts was. One moment it was gloomy and unpredictable, and perhaps a month later...

It was still gloomy and unpredictable.

Over the past month, Kasen had finally gotten to enjoy being a complete slacker.

With the book Clay had helped him revise, teaching had become much easier. It was like writing a novel with an outline, teaching with a lesson plan, or cooking with a recipe.

He no longer had to worry about what he was supposed to teach the next day.

Of course, being a slacker only applied to teaching. Everything else remained just as busy.

For example, when it came to searching for Voldemort's Horcruxes, they still had very few clues.

What they currently knew was that Voldemort had seven Horcruxes in total.

The diary was destroyed.

The Resurrection Stone ring was destroyed.

Slytherin's Locket was destroyed.

Harry Potter was right under Hogwarts' nose and, for the time being, was not in any serious danger.

As for the remaining three Horcruxes, Dumbledore actually had some suspicions, but he had absolutely no idea where they were.

"Wait... you already have suspicions?" Kasen asked in surprise, looking at Dumbledore, who had come to visit his office.

"Obviously. Think about it. What do the three Horcruxes we've already destroyed have in common?" Dumbledore asked.

"The diary, the Resurrection Stone, the locket..."

Kasen's eyes practically spiralled with confusion.

"Let me add something. The Resurrection Stone is one of the Deathly Hallows. The locket belonged to Slytherin. As for the diary, it was something Tom had used continuously from his Muggle days into his years as a wizard," Dumbledore added.

"So all of his Horcruxes are either extremely valuable objects or items with great sentimental significance," Kasen said after finally catching Dumbledore's obvious hint.

"That's right. Tom is proud, so proud that ordinary objects aren't even worthy of becoming his Horcruxes. Fortunately, that works in our favour. If he had simply picked up a random stone from the roadside, turned it into a Horcrux, and thrown it into the sea, we might spend our entire lives without ever finding it," Dumbledore said with a nod.

"Not necessarily. There might be some kind of locating spell or something," Kasen said, still holding onto a little optimism.

That remark happened to remind Dumbledore of something.

"Speaking of locating magic, I remember you once built a huge module that could search for things through tags."

Kasen shook his head. "I've already tried that more than once. The principle behind tag searching is too broad. It can only locate things that are extremely rare, like something with only one or two examples in the world."

"Strip away the essence of Voldemort's Horcruxes and they're really just fragments of a torn soul. If you search only for souls, there are conservatively seven billion on the planet. If you search specifically for torn souls, you still get twenty-seven million matching tags."

Dumbledore shook his head. "No, no. I mean searching directly for those precious objects. Relics similar to Slytherin's Locket. If Voldemort was willing to target Lord Slytherin's relic, there's no reason he wouldn't also target relics belonging to the other two founders, Lady Ravenclaw and Lady Hufflepuff."

"Why not Gryffindor?" Kasen asked.

"Lord Gryffindor's relic is the sword inside the Sorting Hat. Only a true Gryffindor can draw it out. Voldemort clearly doesn't have that ability, and a true Gryffindor would rather die than help Voldemort pull out that sword," Dumbledore explained.

"Mm-hm... that makes sense. If I were Voldemort, I might indeed use relics belonging to the Four Founders as Horcruxes. But it still won't work. Tag searching looks at the essence of an object. If you fed Slytherin's Locket into the system for analysis, it would only give tags like silver, metal, gemstone, and magic. It wouldn't give abstract tags like Slytherin or Horcrux."

"The same applies to everything else. For example, your tags would be human, soul, and magic, not Dumbledore or Headmaster. The system is actually very literal."

Kasen spoke helplessly.

"Then what was the point of building that enormous thing in the first place?" Dumbledore asked speechlessly.

"There may be lots of Horcruxes, but there aren't many Greatwood trees or Wilderness monsters in the whole world. I can just search through them one by one," Kasen said, rolling his eyes.

It was all Voldemort's fault.

"That's right! It's all Voldemort's fault!" Dumbledore agreed.

Voldemort: ??? Are you two all right???

Dumbledore glanced at the pocket watch hanging from Kasen's chest.

"All right, it's about time. I should be leaving."

???

"Why do I get the feeling you spend every day pretending to be busy?" Kasen commented.

"How can you call it pretending? I genuinely have something to do today. Two students told me there's a discount on hamburgers in the Muggle world, so I'm planning to go and sample them."

With that, Dumbledore leisurely wandered away.

Kasen looked at the calendar sitting on his desk...

"But it's already Friday?"

...

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