The mastermind behind Hogwarts

Chapter 488 The Four Corpse Books

Dumbledore looked toward Azkaban and could see the outline of the prison, but he could no longer sense the magic and presence of the Aurors inside.

"I can't sense it anymore either; my magic seems to have dried up," Moriarty said, frowning. He tried to use spells like the Shattering Curse, the Ironclad Curse, and the Killing Curse, but he couldn't.

"A magic-forbidden zone?"

Dumbledore's tone was tinged with frustration.

In the Middle Ages, wizards developed magic circles to prevent fairies from using powerful forbidden spells.

Dumbledore had only ever read about the so-called anti-magic realm in ancient books.

"It's too early to draw conclusions," Moriarty said, shaking his head. "I tried using water elemental magic, you see—"

Moriarty held up a finger, and a small water ball spun like a planet above his fingertip.

Dumbledore's eyes hardened. On the surface, it looked like a water sphere, but he could sense its vibrant life force and surging energy.

"Let it go down in our place."

Moriarty tossed the water balloon gently, and it flew into the tunnel.

Not long after, a muffled explosion was heard from underground.

A plume of smoke billowed from the tunnel entrance, accompanied by a foul stench.

Moriarty waved his hand, a breeze swept away the smoke, and Moriarty gestured to Dumbledore: "Now we can go down."

Dumbledore nodded, and Moriarty explained his intention: "A person who has turned himself into a lich will not trust anyone but himself, so he must have set traps in his lair."

"I even suspect that this isn't his lair," Moriarty said gloomily. "In fact, he could appear at any moment; he's not dead."

The difficulty of dealing with a lich depends on how long it takes to collect the Life Box.

One lich alone is troublesome enough.

But the old man wasn't just a lich; judging from the skulls he threw and the meteorites he dropped, he had added something else to his lich body.

"Of course I'm not dead!"

A skeleton suddenly emerged from the ground on the island, right to Moriarty and Dumbledore's left.

The skeleton's mouth split open in a crooked arc, its teeth chattering, and a gleeful voice rang out: "Of course I'm not dead! Of course I'm not dead!"

After repeating itself several times like a broken record, the skeleton stopped moving, then with a snap, the skull fell off, and the entire skeleton completely disintegrated and fell to the ground.

Moriarty and Dumbledore exchanged a glance and entered the tunnel.

"Crunch, crunch..."

The staircase, made of some unknown material, reeked of decay, and Moriarty and Dumbledore had been walking on it for 20 minutes.

"I feel that the stairs have no end," Dumbledore said, looking around.

The underground was pitch black, and Dumbledore and Moriarty, who were unable to use magic, couldn't use the Glowing Charm either, but they could feel that the air was becoming thinner.

"Do you ever feel like we're just going around in circles?"

Moriarty stopped and said solemnly.

"I thought I was just getting old, it was all in my head," Dumbledore said with a laugh. "Always getting stuck in the stairwell, unable to get out, if I weren't a wizard, I would have thought I'd encountered a ghost."

Moriarty's heart skipped a beat: "The Penrose Steps?"

"What did you say?" Dumbledore asked, intrigued.

"If it's the Penrose Stairs, then it'll be difficult," but Moriarty's eyes instead revealed a deep smile, and he said, "With the Penrose Stairs combined with anti-magic techniques, no matter how powerful a wizard is, they will be trapped here."

A staircase that always goes up or down but never ends is the Penrose staircase.

The terrifying thing about the Penrose Steps is that people keep going up the steps but keep going around in circles on the same level.

If Moriarty and Dumbledore truly have no way to manipulate magic, they will surely be trapped here and die.

But Moriarty laughed.

"A spark ignites civilization."

He murmured something, and a bright red flame appeared on his hand.

Flames slowly rose, and the entire tunnel was instantly ignited!

The blazing flames were like rioting prisoners; the stairs were no match for them. Moriarty and Dumbledore remained unmoved as the stairs burned away, and they smelled the stench of burning corpses.

At the same time, the old man's voice rang out!

"Oh dear, you're cheating!"

"Natural elements cannot be used!"

His voice was frantic, and tinged with a hint of resentment.

Moriarty gave a disdainful smile: "Still hiding your true colors, Extis! How many people have you killed this way!"

"Extis?"

"Extis?"

"Extis?"

The old man seemed to be deep in thought, repeating the name over and over again.

His tone was full of confusion and contemplation, and Moriarty couldn't help but wonder, could the old man really not be Extis?

Moriarty was just bluffing the old man, because after the stairs were burned down, there were piles of bones on the ground.

The stairs were also made of bone!

The old man's voice disappeared. Moriarty and Dumbledore had gotten used to it and treated him as a lunatic, since he had escaped from a mental hospital anyway.

Dumbledore said with a smile, "Thanks to you this time, it seems that the anti-magic field here cannot seal elemental magic."

"I don't believe that Extis or the old man from earlier are capable of setting up a magic-suppressing field."

Moriarty turned his gaze deeper into the tunnel, where there was an open space.

"Perhaps the secret to being unable to use magic lies there."

As Dumbledore and Moriarty were about to move forward, the remaining bones on their backs quickly assembled into a human body.

"brush!"

A bluish flame of his soul flickered from his empty eye sockets, and the old man roared at Moriarty, "Don't move!!!"

Moriarty and Dumbledore turned around together, and the old man screamed like a madman, "Get out of my way! Get out of here! Don't step into my precious library with your filthy, rotten, worthless flesh! Aaaaaah!"

It charged forward with a strange cry and fought Moriarty to the death!

"Get lost!"

Moriarty snorted and flicked his staff, causing wind elemental magic to gather in the air and form a giant fist.

"Thump!"

The giant fist slammed down on the old man with unparalleled ferocity.

The remains were smashed to pieces, with countless fragments flying out and scattered all over the ground.

But the old man's voice continued unabated: "Natural elements again! I hate natural elements! The human body is the true source of power! The greatest and most wondrous thing in the world is the human body!"

"Please don't go in! Please don't go in! I beg you..."

"You can go in, but only if you bring two heads! Old man, I'll allow your left knee to go in; young man, I'll allow your genitals to go in! Four only, no more!"

"Aaaaaah!"

"I'm so angry!"

The old man alternated between cursing and pleading, but neither Moriarty nor Dumbledore paid him any attention.

As if remembering something, the old man burst into laughter: "Haha, I can kill you all!"

Laughing, he reassembled a skull, stared intently at Moriarty's back, dug his hands into his eye sockets, and with a forceful pull, broke the skull off.

"Piu!"

The old man used the same trick again, throwing the skull on the ground.

"boom!"

A sudden tremor came from the sky outside!

Moriarty turned his head, his eyes sharp. He was prepared and raised his magic wand, this time using fire elemental magic.

A giant sword made of flames appeared in the sky above the island, like a floating skyscraper.

The flaming greatsword shot out like a rocket, crashing into the falling meteorite and slicing it to pieces as easily as cutting melons and vegetables.

"Let's go."

After resolving everything, Moriarty said to Dumbledore.

"The more he obstructs it, the more valuable the contents are."

Moriarty grew increasingly curious: what was inside?

The two walked in and were shocked by what they saw.

More than a hundred bodies were laid out on the ground.

There were rotting things, and white insects crawled all over them.

Some had already turned into skeletons, but the flames of their souls flickered in their eye sockets, as if mocking them.

Some of the corpses were intact but completely bloodless, with their eyes wide open.

There are corpses with incomplete organs, posed in various positions.

His body was covered in blood and bone marrow, as if someone had drained all the fluids from his body and poured them over him.

Have……

"Gurgle gurgle..."

Moriarty and Dumbledore felt a surge in their stomachs.

The acid in my stomach felt like it was taking an elevator up to my throat.

however!

Behind these corpses were four large books.

Each one was so large that it reminded Moriarty of a public bathhouse.

However, the thickness of each book is different.

The thickest book was open, but there were no papers or pages inside.

There were only skulls.

Or rather, each skull is a page of a book!

All sorts of heads: normal-sized human heads, beast heads the size of wild animals, and fairy heads the size of fists.

And... a whale head the size of a small hut.

(End of this chapter)