Hogwarts' Golden Glory

With a muffled roar, the stone door swung open completely, as if some heavy mechanism had been unlocked from the inside.

Dust pattered down from the cracks in the door, appearing like floating gold dust under the gray-green fluorescent light, before slowly settling to the ground and settling into a thin layer of fine dust.

Kane stood at the door without going in immediately.

He first saw light—not the cold light of the gray-green ore, but a warmer, denser light, as if it were reflected simultaneously from many metal surfaces, layered and overlapping.

The vault was larger than he had imagined. Much larger.

The dome is so high that the top is almost invisible. The walls are made of polished rock, but the rock surface has been carved with layers of grooves, each filled with something.

The entire left wall was made of galleons piled up to waist height from the floor. They weren't neatly stacked, but rather tilted, piled up, and naturally accumulated like sand dunes, many of them having stuck together into chunks. They reflected light, illuminating the left half of the room as a flowing, liquid gold.

On the right are rows of wooden shelves, the dark wood surface bearing fine cracks from the weight of time.

The wooden shelves were filled with various containers—crystal bottles with silver rims, filled with liquids of different colors, some of which glowed faintly in the dark; metal boxes sealed with lead seals, their surfaces engraved with family crests; and stacks of parchment scrolls, their edges yellowed and brittle, as if they had never been opened.

Along the wall directly in front were some larger objects—several picture frames wrapped in oilcloth, a silver crown-shaped object inlaid with rubies, an ancient longsword with a scabbard studded with pearls, and a slender object covered in dark velvet on a separate stone pedestal.

Dumbledore paused as he entered the vault, his gaze lingering for a moment on the wooden shelves.

"These things don't all belong to the Lestrange family. Some were stored here by Voldemort, and some are much older..."

He didn't finish speaking, but Kane understood what he meant—some of these items didn't belong to this era, nor to the current magical world.

Kane shifted his gaze from the items to a spot slightly behind the center of the vault.

There stood a stone platform that was taller than the surrounding objects, its surface dark, like basalt that had been scorched.

On the table sat an object, alone, surrounded by nothing else, as if deliberately isolated from all other valuables. It rested on a dark velvet cushion, its body a dark gold, with no obvious signs of wear, gleaming with a restrained, non-glaring sheen in the light that mingled with gray-green and warm gold.

Hufflepuff's Golden Cup.

Kane stopped about six feet from the stone platform, not moving any further. He glanced down at the ground around the platform, then looked up at the golden cup itself, and said, "It's enchanted. Not by fairies, but by someone who added it later."

Dumbledore walked over and stood beside him, also looking down at the golden cup: "Can you tell which one it is?"

Kane didn't speak. He took half a step forward, squatted down, and carefully examined the surface of the golden cup.

On the cup wall, you can vaguely see some very fine lines. They are not decorative patterns, but more like some kind of rune variant. They are engraved very lightly, as if a mercury pen was used to draw on the metal surface and then smoothed it out, leaving only traces that are almost invisible to the naked eye.

“The Copying Charm,” Kane said. “It doesn’t copy the cup. It copies the ‘action of taking the cup.’ If someone reaches for the cup, this charm will mimic their action, creating a false ‘taking’ before they touch the cup. They will think the cup has been taken, but in reality, they are only touching an illusion. The real cup will be moved to another location and covered by the mat again after they let go.”

Dumbledore took a step forward and knelt down in front of the golden cup noodles: "Can you undo it?"

Kane did not answer immediately.

He stared at the extremely fine lines for a while, then reached out, not to touch the golden cup, but to hover his hand in the air about a palm's width above the rim of the cup.

His fingers didn't move or touch anything, but after hovering for a while, the fine lines engraved on the cup began to slowly brighten, as if sensing something.

As they light up, they display several different color changes, and with each change, their position and angle shift, like something that is breathing.

"It doesn't recognize touch, it recognizes intent," Kane said. "When you reach out towards the cup, the spell reads your hand movements—whether you extend your left or right hand, the width of your fingers, the strength of your grip—and then creates a 'copy' of those movements so you can take that copy, while the real cup remains in place. It's not for defending against attacks, it's for defending against taking."

Dumbledore looked at him: "Do you have a way to get around it?"

Kane didn't answer. He lowered his hand, stood up again, took a half-step back, and closed his eyes. He stood quietly for a few seconds, as if mentally reviewing some action. Then he opened his eyes and reached out again—this time, his hand didn't reach for the gold cup, but rather across it, towards the edge of the cushion behind it. His fingers stopped about an inch from the edge of the cushion, not touching it, just remaining there.

His movements were slow, as if he were dividing a long path into many sections, checking each pause one by one. Then he moved forward a little further—this time, his fingertips touched the edge of the mat. The golden cup didn't react. The thin lines didn't light up. The replication spell wasn't triggered.

Kane moved his hand along the edge of the cushion, around to the base of the gold cup, and gently lifted the entire cushion with his fingertips—the cushion, not the gold cup itself.

He lifted the mat and the gold cup together smoothly without tilting. The gold cup did not shift at all on the mat, as if it had been placed on the mat from the beginning, and the mat itself was something that could be taken away.

Dumbledore didn't speak. He watched as Kane picked up the cushion and the golden cup together and placed them on the edge of the stone platform to the side, then picked up the golden cup separately from the cushion.

The moment the golden cup was picked up, the fine lines flashed briefly, but no action was taken.

It was as if a door had been opened, but the clock outside had not rung. Kane looked down at the golden cup in his hand. The texture through the cushion felt real; the cup walls were smooth and even, the handle's contours conformed to the curve of his palm, and the inscription at the bottom was clearly legible: "Helga Hufflepuff, with mercy as our faith, with the soil as our root."

"Got it," Kane said.