The Shopkeeper of All Worlds in the British Wizarding World

Chapter 466 Harry's Journey (Please subscribe, please bookmark, please vote)
At nine o'clock in the morning on the second day after Ryan and his family's engagement ceremony, two blue birds flew to where Ryan and his family lived with a parchment letter that was larger than themselves. At this time, Ryan, who had sent his parents to the flight back to Qiantang last night, had just gotten up from bed.

"Hermione, the results of our previous OWLs exams are out." Ryan shouted to Hermione who was cleaning up in the bathroom.

"What? Oh, it's finally here. I hope I did well in the exam this time. The cross-border mail across Europe and Asia plus the time it takes to go through customs is really making us wait a little anxious. If it were in the UK, I think we should have received these mails a week ago." Hermione walked out of the bathroom, wiping her wet face with a dry towel.

After tearing open the envelope impatiently, the two took out the letter and read it. As expected, they got ten excellent grades in the exam, which meant that they could choose the courses they had planned to take this year.

"I just don't know how my friends are doing." After looking at the test results, Hermione nodded with satisfaction, and then asked Ryan, "What do you think Harry and the others are doing now?"

"I'm not sure about the others, but I guess Harry must have a lot of things to do. After all, he is the designated savior. He will definitely be busy during the holidays. Maybe Professor Dumbledore takes him out on an adventure." Ryan revealed.

This was indeed the case. A week ago, Headmaster Dumbledore went to Privet Drive to rescue Harry from his uncle's house. After delivering Harry's luggage to the Burrow, Dumbledore and his entourage appeared in the yard of an abandoned village, with an ancient war monument and several benches in the middle of the yard.

After following Professor Dumbledore for a while, passing an empty tavern and several houses, Harry finally couldn't help but ask, "Well, Professor, where are we? And what are we going to do here?"

"This is the charming village of Badley Barberton, Harry." Dumbledore walked ahead, turned a corner, passed a telephone booth and a bus shelter. "Well, as you can see, we are short of professors every year. So now we are here to persuade one of my retired colleagues to come back to work and return to Hogwarts. As for the reason for calling you here, you will know in a moment."

Harry and Dumbledore then discussed his scar (Harry: "Thank God, it doesn't hurt anymore.") and also talked about the recent situation. For example, Emmeline Vance's death and Amelia Bones' serious injury (Dumbledore: "Ms. Bones was indeed lucky that day. When Voldemort was looking for her, Percy happened to visit her with his team, so she was lucky enough to stay alive, but poor Bones will probably spend Halloween at St. Mungo's.")
As they chatted they approached a neat little stone house set in a garden. Dumbledore looked down the well-kept path and with a sinking heart saw that the front door was hanging askew on its hinges.

"Harry, draw your wand and follow me closely." Dumbledore took out his wand and said in a low voice. At the same time, he glanced around to make sure that there was no one around, lit his wand, and quietly walked into the room. Harry also raised his wand nervously.

As they walked down the hallway into the living room, they saw a mess: a grandfather clock was smashed at their feet, the clock face cracked, and the pendulum lay a little further away, like an abandoned sword. A piano was overturned on the ground, and the keys were scattered everywhere. Nearby, there was also a broken chandelier with fragments glittering. Cushions were thrown all over the place, already deflated, and feathers were sticking out of the cracks. Broken glass and broken porcelain were scattered all over the floor like powder. What was worse, Harry saw a lot of dark red sticky stuff splattered on the wallpaper with his sharp eyes. He used his wand to follow the red stuff and found that even the ceiling was full of these things.

Was this an attack? Harry thought, but after a closer look, he felt something was wrong. He had read several detective books during his break a while ago, and Ryan criticized some of the plots in them as worthless. He also talked about some of the simplest crime scene judgments. Based on what Ryan had said before, Harry couldn't understand why there were few footprints on the floor, only some broken furniture, if the situation in the room meant that a fierce battle had broken out?

"You can see that something is wrong, right?" Dumbledore said calmly, looking at the thoughtful Harry. "I think this is just, ah, a joke played on us by an old friend."

After saying this, he walked quietly to the side of a sofa with Harry, with a relaxed and even increasingly naughty expression on his face. Then he poked the bulging back of the sofa with the tip of his wand. A bald, fat old man's head suddenly popped out from the top of the back of the sofa, and he cried out in pain: "Merlin's beard!"

Soon the armchair became a fat old man standing there, rubbing his belly with his hands: "You didn't have to poke so hard with the wand, Albus. It hurts so much. And where did I give myself away?" "Horace, if the Death Eaters really came, they would have left a Dark Mark over the house." Dumbledore said, "By the way, let me introduce you, Harry, come and meet my old friend and colleague, Professor Horace Slughorn. Horace -"

"I know him, Harry Potter." The old man looked at Harry's forehead and said, "His picture is everywhere in the recent newspapers." He walked to the door and locked it.

"Shall I help you clean up?" Dumbledore asked politely.

"Please come in!" After saying that, the two old men stood back to back and waved their wands in unison. The furniture jumped back to their original positions one by one, the decorations returned to their original shapes in mid-air, the feathers returned to the cushions, the fragments of the silver photo frame on the ground reassembled into photo frames and flew back to the desk, and the chandelier finally returned to the roof. The damaged and dirty places in the whole house were restored to their original state, and under the light that was turned on again, the house suddenly became warm.

"You think you can convince me with him, do you? I tell you, Albus, the answer is no!" Slughorn said, "The fact is that I am an old man, Albus. A tired old man who has the right to live a quiet life and enjoy some material comforts."

"A life of hiding?" Dumbledore pointed out. "I think they are looking for you too."

"Yes, I have to move every few weeks, but Albus, look at the casualty rate of professors in your school - are you leaving?" Looking at Professor Dumbledore who stood up, Slughorn immediately asked expectantly.

"No, I just want to ask if I can use your bathroom." Dumbledore said. Watching Dumbledore walk away, Slughorn said to Harry who was looking at him: "You look a lot like your father, except for your eyes."

"I know, like my mother." Harry nodded. He had heard this so many times that he was a little tired of it.

"Lily Evans is one of the smartest students I have ever taught." Slughorn seemed to be lost in memory. "If you consider that she is a Muggle-born, it is even more amazing. I often say that she should be a student of our college, but every time I always get her unceremonious answer."

"You are--" "I was the head of Slytherin House at the time." He glanced at Harry. "Don't look at me like that. I'm not a prejudiced person. Two years ago, I saw in the newspaper that two of your classmates who won the Order of Merlin should be Muggle-born wizards. It was the same back then. Many of my favorite students were Muggle-born, such as your mother, and Dirk Cresswell, who was one grade below her. He is now the director of the Goblin Liaison Office."

At this point, Slughorn became excited and pulled Harry to look at the photo frames piled up on his cabinet. "These are all students I taught before, such as Barnabas Guffey, the editor-in-chief of the Daily Prophet. He often sends owls to me to listen to my views on current affairs. Ambrosio Froome, because he got a job because of my introduction, he now sends me candies and preserves every once in a while. Another example is this, Gwenog Jones, the captain of the Holyhead Harpies. As long as I want, I can get free tickets anytime. It's a pity that I haven't been to see it for a long time."

The old man looked a little depressed: "I haven't contacted any of them for a whole year. This feeling of being forgotten by the whole world is terrible."

(End of this chapter)