Hogwarts: Dumbledore reigned over the wizarding world.

Chapter 217 Omens of Death

The method he currently uses is still very "rudimentary". He can only set up multiple membranes in advance at locations where sound will occur, wait for the diffused sound waves to hit the membranes, and the membranes will automatically "transcode" the sound waves and emit infrasound waves in his direction. Then he receives, filters, and "transcodes" them.

When the cruise ship passed by, he set up barely perceptible membranes near several small islands along the way. This was his subconscious caution. The fact that "Return to the Void" accurately locked onto the cruise ship indicated that there were likely wizards monitoring and tracking it in the vicinity, and he needed to confirm whether they were hostile.

On the other hand, it is also an experiment on the spell that is still under development.

Using sound waves as a carrier of information presents many challenges. For example, sound waves have very high requirements for the density of the propagation medium; the higher the density, the farther they can travel.

Seawater is an ideal medium for propagation, and the membrane that Warn designed was almost entirely in close contact with the seawater.

A similar technology, called underwater acoustic communication, is also used in Muggles.

Another issue is the attenuation of energy during sound transmission, which is insurmountable. The intensity of sound waves when a person speaks cannot travel very far. That's why Vaughn used the magic membrane to convert it into infrasound, taking advantage of the penetrating power of infrasound.

Finally, there is noise. Currently, the spell does not have the ability to specifically capture specific waveforms. When the membrane is placed in the environment, before the magic that sustains it completely disappears, it will convert all the sounds that vibrate its surface into infrasound and emit them.

This requires extensive experimental analysis of waveforms and filtering processing.

Warn's current filtering methods are still quite rudimentary. It took an entire afternoon just to translate the transmitted infrasound waveform before he could barely reconstruct what the information transmitted from the membrane was.

As he listened to the dialogue between the two membranes vibrating in the air, Vaughn's expression gradually became strange.

"It's Wilkinson again—"

He recalled telling Dumbledore just yesterday to be careful, that "DeSantis" might exist not only in America.

Unexpectedly, it seems that we have caught a glimpse of the other party's activity today.

What puzzled him even more was that the conversation revealed Wilkinson seemed to be asking them to observe his fate.

As for the other party being able to "meet" him in the South China Sea, that's not surprising at all.

Their group crossed the Pacific Ocean without any attempt to conceal their route, making it easy for anyone with a keen eye to analyze their path.

"Back in America, I sensed that Wilkinson was particularly interested in me; otherwise, he wouldn't have immediately used the Dreamcatcher to teleport over when the contract sensed Josiah Parker's death."

"It was the same after we met. He had absolutely no interest in werewolves or wizards from the Magic Council. He just kept arguing with me the whole time—the situation was complicated at the time, and I overlooked that. Looking back now, it's really strange!"

"destiny----"

Vaughn's talent for the game was practically nonexistent, and he never directly or indirectly saw what his fate would be.

Only Dumbledore had described to him that his fate was a void, yet possessed a tangible "mass," causing the web of fate to be strongly disturbed when it was around him.

Those descriptions were all Dumbledore's subjective understanding and feelings, and then further processed in terms of language and wording. Vaughn could not understand what they were really like.

From the conversation between the two, we can tell that the person called "Secretary" was commissioned by Wilkinson to confirm some kind of "abnormality" in the traces of fate on his body.

"What was Wilkinson trying to confirm when he came to arrest me?"

With too little information, Vaughn couldn't analyze much. After thinking for a while, he put those many questions deep in his memory.

Compared to the "anomaly" that he couldn't understand at the moment, another piece of information revealed in the conversation between the two people attracted Vaughn more: "Dumbledore, twilight—that young voice believed that Dumbledore was about to ascend to immortality, and in the context of traditional Eastern culture, ascension to immortality is used to refer to death—a legendary omen of death—"

Vaughn suddenly remembered when Dumbledore took him on his first journey through the Aether, and how he had seen the light of dusk in the hazy "clouds" of the Aether.

At that time, Dumbledore simply said that the twilight had been drawn by him, and then changed the subject.

"Back then, I didn't know much about Ether or Legend. Apart from noticing that he was acting a little strange, I thought it was a matter of his privacy and didn't pay much attention. Now it seems that it was a sign of Legend's death."

Vaughn's mind was in turmoil for a moment.

He wanted to find Dumbledore and ask him what had happened.

But after calmly considering it, he suppressed the impulse. If he were willing to tell him, Dumbledore would have already done so. The old man had changed the subject several times, clearly not wanting to make the matter public.

Moreover, Deng Xiaoping always appeared indifferent to death, calling it another great adventure.

Perhaps—he may have been happily awaiting death all along!

"Ha," Vaughn didn't know what to say. He sat in the suite for a while, his thoughts in turmoil, before finally unable to resist leaving the room.

It was already night, and the cruise ship was anchored near an island in the Strait of Malacca. Busy Muggle boats, both near and far, instinctively bypassed this area, ignoring the anchored cruise ship.

With a slightly salty sea breeze blowing, Tonks and Isabella, along with several furry werewolf children, lit a campfire on the deck.

Blue flames floated in mid-air, leaping and dancing with the witches' wands, making the wolf children laugh.

scream.

Dumbledore was among them; he used fairy fire to transform into a giant Bengal tiger, chasing after the children with bared teeth and claws.

A scene of joy and happiness.

Looking at everything under the night sky, dusk, death—such heavy words seemed to become Vaughn's illusion.

Vaughn ultimately didn't voice his doubts.

Dumbledore always said that he enjoyed talking to intelligent people because there was a kind of unspoken understanding between them that words could not match.

Although he was dismissive of so-called "smart people," to some extent, Deng wasn't wrong. The "smart person" he considered, Vaughn, did indeed share a tacit understanding with him.

He was dying, but he didn't want to say it. Perhaps he had his own reasons!

After careful consideration, Vaughn didn't ask any more questions, but he wasn't in a good mood. After all, even though he disapproved of many things about Dumbledore, and even though the two had almost clashed, in practice, Dumbledore really didn't have much to say about him.

At least, Lao Deng is a fairly reliable and trustworthy "partner".

The cruise ship stopped in Malacca for one night, and set off again early the next morning before the sun had even risen above the horizon.

This time, we won't stop; instead, we'll cross the Arabian Sea and the Red Sea in one go, enter Egypt, and then stop briefly in Cairo.

According to the estimate of the wizard captain dispatched by the Federation, the entire journey would take about 30 hours of "speeding".

Vaughn locked himself in his suite. The speeding cruise ship wasn't suitable for conducting precise experiments, so he passed the time by studying spells and organizing notes.

For many people, this kind of life would be boring, but for Vaughn, it's an activity that calms his anxious emotions and helps him forget his troubles.

Pandora came to see him in the middle of that time.

She came to ask Vaughn about the development system for those new spells.

"So, your new R&D system uses Muggle knowledge? You're using Muggle knowledge as a solution to the curse theory?"

In the cruise ship suite, Pandora frowned slightly.

She and Vaughn have known each other for almost three years. Their families live close by and visit each other frequently, so they have naturally discussed the development of spells quite a bit.

After meeting Vaughn, she suspended her spell development work, which was also related to her previous exchanges with Vaughn. Vaughn believed that the current spell development was too chaotic, with no principles to guide how to do it, and no practical rules to tell the direction and scope of the development.

To this end, Vaughn also deconstructed the meaning of spells and wand gestures, arguing that both are "languages," an abstract way for wizards to "understand" the composition of matter.

Just as humans initially created language to describe objective things.

The only difference is that they describe different things. Human language describes things that objectively and truly exist. For example, an apple, no matter the language, Apple, Lamela, Pomme—it all refers to an apple.

The "apple" is a real and objective thing.

The objective entity is the law of human language.

However, the "language" in which wizards create spells has no rules, because what they describe are not objective entities that can already be observed, but things that can be "fictionalized," created, distorted, and summoned by magic and emotions.

Imagine if there were no apples in the world. Apple, Lamela, Pomme—would you still understand what these words mean?

Therefore, when we read philosophy books, once they discuss metaphysical things, they feel that they become mysterious and esoteric. If the author does not use analogies to explain, you simply cannot understand what he is talking about.

The development of spells faces such a dilemma.

Therefore, Pandora had great faith in Vaughn's thoughts and ideas. She had always hoped that Vaughn could summarize a set of rules or principles to set a unified standard for the development of spells.

In the end, Vaughn chose a Muggle?

She looked at Vaughn with an incredulous expression: "You believe that Muggle knowledge can serve as the truth of magic—"

"No, I never said it was the truth."

In the suite by the window, Vaughn, engrossed in organizing experimental data, interrupted her without looking up: "It's not just as a tool for interpreting the wand's movements—"

"Wand gestures? Tools?"

"Yes." Vaughn paused his work, carefully choosing his words before asking, "What was the biggest obstacle we discussed earlier regarding spell development?"

"—According to your theory, it's about giving precise definitions to spells and wand gestures—"

In fact, Vaughn had done the work of defining things before, such as spells representing the final effect of a magic spell, a kind of mystical activation and simplified ritual.

Vaughn believes that it accounts for a small part of the challenges in spell development, since spells can still take effect even if they are pronounced incorrectly, although the effect may be significantly different.

There are many real-life examples of this in the history of magic. The most typical one is the story that Professor Flitwick loved to tell when teaching first-year students—a wizard cast a levitation charm but mispronounced a syllable, resulting in a bull being summoned and pinning him to the chest.

Vaughn determined long ago that errors in spell syllables would only affect the expression of the spell's true effect, but would not affect the fact that "the magic has been successful."

The two also conducted some experiments on this, such as deliberately mispronouncing the spell syllables to determine whether the magic was successful, what the effect was, and whether there were any patterns.

The result was that the magic succeeded, but the effect was random and unpredictable.

Even if the same syllable is mispronounced every time, a wrong "magic success" will lead to completely different results. Sometimes it will result in an explosion, and sometimes it will result in a puddle of water that will drench you.

Pandora even attracted a Muggle in his pajamas, that poor Brazilian from the Southern Hemisphere, who vomited as soon as he arrived.

According to his description, it felt like he had suddenly fallen into a wildly spinning washing tub, and he was thrown around in a daze.

This is a very obvious apparition effect, and it's achieved remotely, from thousands of miles away.

Pandora was overjoyed and worked tirelessly to replicate the effect, but unfortunately, she never succeeded in subsequent experiments.

"Now, I've revised my previous definition somewhat. I believe a spell is a kind of objective language." This naming doesn't mean it's truly objective, but rather indicates its function: to describe phenomena that are about to become objective facts, the ultimate result of the spell.

"And the wand gestures, which I have redefined as abstract language," are the process and foundation for the success of magic. If we compare a perfectly replicated spell to building a house, the "house" itself is the result defined by objective language, while the "abstract language" is the framework that realizes it, allowing the house to truly appear before our eyes—in other words, before it appears, it is unknown.

"Because it's unknown, we've never been able to definitively deduce its meaning. A wand gesture, simply put, is using a wand to outline shapes. But why do the same lines, dots, folds, and hooks ultimately create completely different spells? What do those lines or infinitely subdivided dots actually represent?"

Pandora listened in stunned silence, and after a moment, she asked in a daze, "Now, you've deciphered their meaning using Muggle mathematics?"

Vaughn nodded, then shook his head: "We only deciphered a part of it."

As he spoke, he sighed, "After all, Muggle mathematics is not perfect either."

Mathematics is an alternative to Muggle science.

Most other sciences in Muggles fall into the category of "experience," which means that one has a knowledge of objective entities and phenomena before deducing, experimenting, verifying, or falsifying them based on that knowledge.

Mathematics, on the other hand, can be called a system of truths with a priori knowledge. That is to say, when it understands and describes objective things, it often deviates from the realm of experience and falls into a state of almost "fantasy". For example, when calculating a certain space or "matter", the concept of elements is defined first, and then the calculation rules (axioms) are defined.

Based on these definitions, a massive system was then built.

Therefore, many things described by mathematics are unlikely to happen or exist in reality; it is a system of free "imagination".

For humans, calculation is just calculation, with no impact on reality. But when Vaughn first introduced this system into the spell through his extraordinary perception and understanding of space, and a flash of inspiration, it became a different story.

His mind was completely opened.

Aren't those shapes that make up the wand gestures lacking objective references and unable to be given precise definitions? Then, can mathematics, which is equally abstract but has a complete logical system, gradually discover the hidden patterns between the components of the shapes by continuously defining elements and axioms—building them little by little—and finally obtaining a system that can form "magic"?

This is a huge project.

So far, Vaughn has only succeeded in creating one "dimensional gate," so he needs wizards to join him in his research.

Pandora is undoubtedly the best choice.

That's why he said so much to her.

But Pandora, who comes from a wizarding family, doesn't seem to be too accepting of how Muggle knowledge can be so integrated into spells.

At the end of their conversation, Vaughn could only advise her to think it over again and gave her the suggestion: "I think you'd better go to a Muggle university, such as Oxford or Cambridge, to really learn Muggle mathematics, instead of just having a superficial understanding under my influence as before."

"If you can understand the essence of mathematics through your studies, you will truly understand what I am talking about—you are currently bound by preconceived notions."

Vaughn values ​​Pandora highly.

This was the first wizard he had encountered so far who genuinely and passionately pursued the essence of magic; he was a natural follower and companion.

Pandora could also sense Vaughn's high regard for her.

In her memory, she had never seen Vaughn be so patient with anyone.

So, after a moment of silence, she nodded: "I'll go to Muggle society to try and learn more—by the way, there's something else I wanted to talk to you about."

"Um?"

"Luna, she's starting school this year too—"

"so?"

"The problem isn't with her," Pandora said, pinching her brow in exasperation. "It's with Isabella—damn it, I don't know what she's thinking, but back in the Alabacia Mountains, she told me she wanted to apply for the Defense Against the Dark Arts professorship at Hogwarts. Didn't you notice how much she's been fawning over Dumbledore lately?"

Vaughn was stunned.

He really didn't notice.

Thinking back, it seems like it was just the night before last that I saw her, Tonks, and Dumbledore playing with fairy fire on the deck.

Why does Isabella want to be the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor?

"I don't know, she didn't say, but anyway, I don't want my daughter to fall into her hands as soon as she starts school—"

"You'd better give up on her idea!"

"Uh—if she really insists, I'm afraid there's nothing I can do."

Pandora looked anxious: "Then you should find her something to do—it's not that I look down on her magical abilities; in fact, I believe Isabella's year-long graduation trip has been very beneficial in keeping her alive in North America, but her personality—it's just too reckless. I don't want my daughter to become like her one day!"

[”

Vaughn was at a loss for words.

Speaking of which, Luna's current neurotic personality isn't much better than Isabella's, is it?

Thinking back to their last meeting, when the blonde girl inexplicably told him something like "busy harassing me," Vaughn chuckled.

Of course, he knew the reason for Luna's personality formation, which might be due to some of her own talents—Vaughn suspected that she might be a natural Legilimency like Queenie Goldstein.

Either she has a great talent for divination.

Thinking of this, Vaughn, who was about to agree, had a sudden thought and said, "I'll give it a try, but you know Isabella's temper. Once she makes a decision, no one can change her mind."

Indeed it is.

In fact, more than a year ago, when Isabella decided to resign from the Ministry of Magic and take a spontaneous graduation trip, both Vaughn and Pandora tried to dissuade her.

There's a reason why graduation trips are becoming less and less common these days—Matthew and Quirrell are prime examples.

The former was targeted by Greyback and turned into a werewolf, falling into darkness.

The latter became Tom's puppet, dying silently and without any value.

Such examples are not uncommon; not all places are as peaceful as England, and danger and darkness lurk everywhere in the magical world.

But Isabella didn't listen at the time. Judging from this meeting, although she was frightened and felt that England was better, she didn't really have any remorse.

"Sigh... Anyway—anyway, think of a way to stop her from poisoning my daughter!"

Saying goodbye to the worried and anxious Pandora.

Vaughn left the suite and went onto the deck.

For the past few days, Dumbledore has been playing with the wolf children on the deck, telling them about the sea creatures they pass by, his experiences in Asia and the Middle East, and the world.

The old wizard's long life was indeed filled with many fascinating stories. Not only did the wolf children listen with great interest, but Tonks, Isabella, and some werewolves who were originally unwilling to be "kidnapped" away from their hometown also listened intently.

When Vaughn found them, Dumbledore pointed to the horizon of the continent on the other side of the ship and said, "—Go through here, and at the end of this landmass, there is the highest mountain in the world. Many wizards believe that the first magic originated there. It is also the place where the International Confederation of Wizards holds its president election, but it is not used often, only in special circumstances—"

"What's that place called, Professor?" a wolf boy asked curiously.

"Bhutan, my child."

"What does it look like?" Another wolf child asked, his eyes gleaming.

"It was a village built on a very, very high mountain, so high that you could walk on clouds. It was covered in snow all year round, and the wind was as cold and biting as a knife."

Before Dumbledore could finish his description, the wolf children lost interest.

"Isn't that the same place we used to live?"

"Yes, high mountains, snow, wind, and nothing else can be seen."

"It's not fun!"

They ran off making funny faces, and Tonks, always eager to play, chased after them with Isabella. As they passed Vaughn, they greeted him.

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