Hogwarts: Oh no, I've become Voldemort!

Harry and Ron in the car quickly turned around and saw Cyrus standing among the spiders, pointing his wand at the exit. Only now did they realize just how powerful this "Mr. Riddle," who had once displayed such prowess, truly was.

With no obstacles, the car sped up the slope and left the depression.

Thank you for your 1000-point donation to Mingyue Mujixu, thank you so much!

Chapter 76: Trading Life for Life (Thanks to ErdouDadios for 1)

Harry and his friends raced through the woods. The car followed a route it clearly knew well, skillfully weaving left and right, searching for the widest opening.

They left the forbidden forest, and there were no pursuers behind them.

Harry turned to look at Ron, whose mouth was still open, as if making a silent scream, but his eyes were no longer bulging.

"Are you OK?"

Ron stared blankly ahead, unable to utter a word. After a long while, he finally opened the car door, crawled into the pumpkin patch, and began to vomit violently.

“Following the spider,” Ron said weakly, wiping his mouth with his sleeve, “I will never forgive Hagrid! We’re lucky to have survived!”

“I’ll kill him when he gets back from Azkaban!” Ron said viciously, pulling out the broken wand.

“I dare say he didn’t think Aragog would hurt his friend,” Harry said.

“That’s Hagrid’s problem!” Ron said, pounding on the wall of the cabin. “He always thought monsters weren’t as bad as people made them out to be. Look at him! Locked up in Azkaban!” He started to tremble uncontrollably. “What’s the point of sending us there? I’d like to know what we’ve actually figured out?”

“It’s been confirmed that Hagrid never opened the Chamber of Secrets; he’s innocent,” Harry said.

Ron snorted loudly.

Clearly, in his view, Hagrid was far from innocent from the moment he hatched Aragog in the cupboard.

Harry went to Hagrid's house to retrieve the Invisibility Cloak and draped it over himself and Ron. The two sat down together, looking back into the depths of the Forbidden Forest, waiting for Cyrus.

“If you ask me, it was a good thing Mr. Riddle wrongly accused Hagrid fifty years ago!” Ron said. “Otherwise, Aragog would still be sitting in some room in the school. You saw it yourself! It doesn’t eat people, but what about the other spiders? I bet if Hagrid wasn’t looking, they would have eaten the entire school in no time!”

Harry desperately wanted to defend Hagrid, but having just escaped the jaws of those spiders, he couldn't bring himself to speak. He himself had nearly been killed, and Mr. Riddle's fate was still unknown!

The two could only sit there waiting anxiously, praying that "Mr. Riddle" would be safe and sound.

But the waiting time was too long.

"That monster sounds a lot like Voldemort, and the spiders are afraid to say its name."

Ron shuddered: "Then please don't mention it either, okay?"

Harry sighed and looked up. The sky wasn't as dark as before. The clouds seemed to have all dispersed, and the moonlight shone on the empty pumpkin patch like a blanket of frost.

He collapsed wearily in the pumpkin patch, and suddenly he saw the sky brighten in the depths of the Forbidden Forest.

The firelight shone into the night sky!

He suddenly stood up.

"Ron, look over there!"

-

"Ultimate protection."

Cyrus watched the car's taillights disappear into the darkness. Some spiders still tried to chase Harry, but he cast a magical barrier in their place, enveloping the hollow. The spiders swarmed towards the unseen magical wall and were instantly incinerated by magic.

Therefore, they had no choice but to turn their attention to Cyrus alone.

Large swarms of spiders covered the undulating open space. There were probably thousands or even tens of thousands of giant eight-eyed spiders in front of Cyrus. The largest was bigger than a car, and the smallest was about the size of a hunting dog.

Like sharks that have caught the scent of blood, they swarmed towards Cyrus like madmen. The spiders crowded together, densely packed, afraid of falling behind and missing out on the chance to taste human flesh.

Hundreds of thousands of legs pounded the ground, producing a series of rhythmic, resounding thuds, as if the entire Forbidden Forest was shaking with their footsteps.

Even Cyrus, who wasn't afraid of spiders, got goosebumps all over.

It was as if you had knocked on a wooden cabinet and seen hundreds or thousands of termite larvae crawling together.

Or perhaps it's a cave where tens of thousands of snakes are intertwined together.

The contorted body rose and fell continuously within the crevice, a nauseating sight.

But Cyrus didn't kill them all immediately. He pointed his wand downwards and forcefully plunged it into the ground. Instantly, a powerful surge of magic erupted from him, the shockwave blasting away all the eight-eyed giant spiders that were about to engulf him!

It left an empty space.

He calmly took out a crucible, the potion inside still boiling.

The spiders wouldn't give up easily! They swarmed forward like locusts! With so many of them and Cyrus's small body, everyone was afraid that if they were a step too late, they would miss out on everything!

The sharp spider legs pounded into the ground like nails, and the successive spiders relentlessly trampled over those in front of them as they advanced. They piled up higher and higher, almost forming a high wall.

It turned into a surging black wave!

Cyrus watched them die with cold eyes, and then he lit a fire.

The flames burned, then suddenly exploded like a gushing spring, spreading to every corner.

The giant spiders were caught off guard by the sudden spread of flames. The scorching fire collided with the black spider horde, and the flames mercilessly burned their limbs and flesh!

They let out terrifying howls, but the flames were like poison; once you were touched, you couldn't get rid of them, and they spread rapidly!

The burning spiders are like monsters in the flames, struggling desperately. The spiders in front want to escape, but the swarm keeps pushing them forward. The burning spiders are like demons in the flames, rampaging through the spider colony and passing the flames on to even more spiders.

The flames ignited the entire depression in an instant.

Isn't this a kind of passing on the torch?

"Wait—humans—"

Aragog cried out and pleaded, but Cyrus paid no heed.

Even setting aside the fact that the eight-eyed giant spider also wanted to kill them, that was enough for Cyrus to be ruthless.

Moreover, the value of life is only equal in alchemy; in a person's eyes, the life of a spider is clearly not equivalent to the life of a human.

The flames burned relentlessly, robbing the spiders of their bodies and souls. Their bodies turned to ashes in an instant, leaving only red liquid flowing towards the sky, gathering above the crucible to form a blood-red river.

The entire depression suddenly transformed from a deathly graveyard into a spring of life.

The spiders that were not yet dead fled from the flames in fear, but all their escape routes had been blocked by Cyrus with that "ultimate protection." He was the only one in the flames who was completely untouched. In the scorching sea of ​​fire, Cyrus's gaze was colder than the coldest winter.

In an instant, all the eight-eyed giant spiders became sacrifices for him to refine the magic stone.

Life can only be measured by life. In exchange for tens of thousands of lives, this time, the red liquid left in the crucible became even thicker, looking like a large pot of blood plasma.

Thank you so much, Dadios, for the 10000-point reward! Thank you so much, darling! I'll add an extra chapter for you later! Mingyue's extra chapter will be after the book is released. I've calculated that I currently owe Mingyue about six chapters across both accounts, plus one chapter for other rewards, and the five chapters I promised on the release day, meaning a total of 12 chapters to update. Ugh! Looks like I won't be sleeping Friday night, sob sob.

Chapter 77 Final preparations

The intense heat of the fire attracted Harry and Ron's attention.

Harry nervously looked back at the castle, wondering if the professors inside had noticed anything amiss.

Ron was filled with worry. The firelight on the horizon dimmed the stars, and the darkness on the horizon seemed to be blurred by water, turning orange-red. Mr. Riddle had not returned yet.

Having gone through so much, Ron's legs seemed to float away, turning into a wisp of smoke, but his head felt incredibly heavy. But at this moment, he seemed to have forgotten the horrors of the Forbidden Forest, forgotten his fear of spiders.

“No, Harry, I have to go find her!” Ron said resolutely.

Mr. Riddle didn't care, but Ginny—she was his sister!

“Let’s go!” Harry ignored his exhaustion and the fact that he had only escaped death a few hours earlier. Without hesitation, he stood up with Ron, took a deep breath, and resolutely strode towards the Forbidden Forest once again.

However, before the two of them reached the edge of the forbidden forest, they saw a small shadow emerge from the jungle.

“Ginny!” Ron’s heart skipped a beat, as if he had suddenly regained his strength. Only now did he truly feel as if he were standing on solid ground.

He rushed toward the shadow, tripping and rolling in the mud. But this didn't stop him; he scrambled to his feet and landed at Cyrus's feet.

"What... are you doing?" Cyrus was surprised that Ron would give him such a grand greeting upon meeting him.

Are you alright, Ginny?

“Not a hair on my head was hurt.” Cyrus didn’t correct Ron’s way of addressing him, but simply flicked his hair to indicate that he was unharmed: “Those spiders wouldn’t let me go, thinking that their numbers would wear me down, so I had to take a little time to kill them all.”

He casually uttered words that terrified both Harry and Ron, to the point that the two silly boys suddenly realized they should be more worried about the spiders than about each other.

"They're all dead?"

"I dare say Hagrid will be very sad when he gets out of prison."

“Sad? Maybe he won’t be sad if those spiders eat us,” Ron complained. “It’s almost dawn, we’d better hurry back. Otherwise, it’ll be bad if the professors catch us.”

Harry put an invisibility cloak on Ron, and Cyrus cast a spell.

Back in the Gryffindor tower, they didn't go back to their rooms but instead rested on the sofas in the common room. Cyrus gave Harry and Ron each a large bottle of energizing potion to perk them up. Harry also took the opportunity, while the others were still asleep, to tell Cyrus his guess.

“It was indeed Myrtle who was killed fifty years ago, but I’m afraid I don’t have any leads on her, otherwise Hagrid’s name would have been cleared long ago,” Cyrus said apologetically.

"Don't feel guilty, it's not your fault. Keeping an eight-eyed giant spider at school is no better than keeping any other monster." Ron still harbored a lot of resentment towards Hagrid, but no one would be more forgiving than him in this situation.

"No matter what, we still have to give it a try." Harry didn't want to miss even the slightest opportunity.

“We were in that bathroom, just three toilets away from her, and we still couldn’t ask her,” Ron said, frustrated. “Now…”

These days, searching for spiders is bad enough for them. And they want to sneak into the girls' restroom for an extended period of time, avoiding the teachers?

It's simply impossible!