A certain Hogwarts professor of runes.

Chapter 353 Magic Rune Cards

Felix was eating breakfast in the school auditorium, flipping through the day's newspaper. Rita Skeeter wrote a scathing and unvarnished critique of the trouble Alastor Moody had gotten into the previous day, and also took a jab at Mr. Weasley.

In this report, Moody is portrayed as a troublesome figure who “cannot distinguish between a normal handshake and premeditated murder,” while Mr. Weasley is mistakenly referred to as “Arnold Weasley,” and the story resurfaces, mentioning the flying car from two years prior.

Felix reread it. This woman was very good at reporting the facts in a half-hearted way—only the part of the facts she needed, and then adding her own distorted interpretation to arrive at an absurd conclusion.

Overall, however, some useful information can still be gleaned. For example, the female official mentioned above who has been missing for several months likely refers to Bertha Jorkins.

……

Felix entered the Ancient Runes classroom ten minutes early, where a few students were already scattered around the seats.

“Hello, Felix.” Luna looked up from her magazine and greeted him happily, as if they had met somewhere else, like in a clearing in the Forbidden Forest, rather than in a classroom.

Felix smiled. "Hi, Luna. You're in third grade too?"

“Yes.” She stared blankly for a moment. Ginny, who was next to her, was already used to it and pulled the magazine closer to herself. They had just been playing a quiz game in the magazine, and there were prizes for guessing correctly.

Luna stared at Felix with her big, misty eyes and said, "Just one more thing, I liked your Christmas present. Did I tell you?"

“Oh, uh, I did say that, I remember it was…” Felix paused for a moment, a question he hadn’t considered, “nine months ago.”

Two rows away, a gray-haired boy suddenly raised his hand, looking at him expectantly.

"Hello?"

Felix was somewhat surprised. He pulled out a long piece of parchment and carefully examined the red patterns on the boy's wizard robes. He then looked down to search for the boy's name from Gryffindor.

“Professor Hyp, my name is Colin. Harry Potter recommended me to take this course, and I also really like magical puppets!” He said, raising his arm high.

Felix stroked the list on the parchment and nodded to him, saying, "Crivy, class hasn't started yet, we're just chatting."

"Can we get the magic puppet today? Can I pick one myself?" Colin asked excitedly.

"Of course, I will also grant all of you access to the ancient runes lessons on the 'Question Parchment,' where you will complete many of your assignments for this academic year..." Felix said.

The number of students in the classroom gradually increased.

Luna and Ginny held the Quibbler magazine and tried to guess the riddles inside. Luna picked up the page with the riddle and looked at the shadows through the light. "I think it's an origami hat."

“I didn’t see anything,” Ginny said. “By the way—why did you call the professor by his name?”

“Because we’re friends,” Luna said cheerfully, taking out a quill pen and sketching out the shape of the hat she imagined.

Ginny was still pondering the riddle: "Something with an empty belly, yet it associates with wisdom; you can't see it when you need it, and you don't need it when you see it." She tossed her fiery red hair, realizing, "That's right, what else could it be?"

She snatched Luna's pen and wrote the word "hat" in the blank space of the answer. The page in the magazine fluttered off and folded itself into a hat, which Ginny put on Luna's head.

“Alright—” Felix stood on the podium, looking at the packed classroom, and said, “Welcome, students! I’m glad to see that the number of people who have signed up for the Ancient Runes class has increased again this year.”

After he finished calling the roll, his gaze swept over the young wizards present, who were all staring expectantly at Felix.

"Since it's the start of the new semester and your minds are still relatively clear, let's talk about some thought-provoking topics," Felix said. His voice wasn't as enthusiastic as it had been at the beginning; it was much calmer, and the students below quickly got into the flow.

"Of course I hope you will do well in this course, but first I want to clarify one fact—"

The knowledge in the textbook is just my most basic requirement for you. If you want to stand out or make a difference in this subject, whether you want to become a pure scholar, or want to combine runes and alchemy to recreate ancient magical artifacts, or follow in the footsteps of ancient wizards and experience the wonderful feeling of powerful and tyrannical ancient magic taking shape and being released from your hands, I can teach you all of these things, provided that you meet my requirements.

Given the increasingly abundant teaching aids and decreasing difficulty of this course, I will correspondingly raise my expectations for you. The benefits are obvious—you will gain more than previous students, and this time, I will guide you to a more interesting and mysterious realm.

He waved his hand, and dozens of cards flew out of his robe, landing precisely in front of each young wizard.

“Inscription cards,” Felix said briefly. “I hesitated between inscription knives and inscription cards, but in the end I decided that inscription cards were more suitable for beginners who knew nothing about it.”

"The magic rune engraving knife is actually suitable for engraving magic rune circuits, but you are still far from that point."

The young wizards listened attentively, somewhat bewildered by these unfamiliar concepts. However, Felix did not intend to elaborate on them, but simply made a distinction before moving on to the next step of the lesson.

He held the card upside down, showing the front to the students. As he infused the card with magic, the original markings on it gradually lit up. He explained, "The reason it's suitable for beginners is because its only requirement for you is to infuse a stable amount of magic. You already have two years of magical practice, so this step isn't an insurmountable obstacle."

As he finished speaking, the patterns on the card were fully illuminated, projecting an egg-sized spherical light from the card. It was composed of countless tiny points of light, dimly lit, and from a distance, it looked like a bright, fuzzy sphere.

"This is a magical script that symbolizes light. You only need to know it for now. Look, doesn't it look like a little glowing ball of fluff?"

"The corresponding rune is the image on the card, which looks a bit like a torch; its actual appearance is this—"

An invisible hand appeared in the air and outlined a golden symbol. The young wizards compared the symbol with the picture on the card, and it was exactly the same.

Felix smiled and grasped the golden rune. "In later lessons, you will understand the meaning of this rune, and then you can transform it into the image you see in the projection—that's its magical symbol. Like this—"

He opened his clasped hands and displayed them to the students. The golden runes transformed into small, glowing orbs of light. Then, Felix released the restraints, and the orbs completely transformed into a bright white light.

"Alright, let's start practicing."

"Felix announced. The young wizards all gripped their cards, their brows furrowed, trying to infuse them with magic. After a short while, Felix saw their little faces flushed red, their mouths tightly shut, so serious that one would think they were about to face a duel that could cost them their lives at any moment.

He moved among the students, reminding them, "Think about how you transformed the goblet in Transfiguration class, making the magic flow evenly and steadily... Learn to relax. Forcing it will only make your magic intermittent. This is just a game..."

With the power of language, the young wizards calmed down and their progress began to accelerate.

Felix muttered to himself, "I'm so glad we didn't use the Weasley twins' prank cards, or the classroom would be full of mice."

Unexpectedly, yet logically, Luna was the first to succeed. Perhaps she was the only one in the entire class who truly treated it all as a game. "Look, just like Pu Rongrong," she said.

Remarkably, Felix heard from her that he recognized a creature.

Puffy is a very popular wizarding children's pet. Their bodies are spherical and covered with soft, creamy-yellow fur, which does resemble the orbs of light projected by spell cards. And, importantly, this creature is not fictional; it actually exists.

“Ravenclaw, ten points. And another one,” Felix said, showing her a stack of cards, “choose one more, Miss Lovegood.”

Luna stared wide-eyed, asking with great interest, "Are there runes for the Curved-Horned Snoring Beast?"

"……No."

Felix handed her a spell card symbolizing frost; he thought they both needed to calm down...

Chapter 354 New Developments at the Weasleys' Wizarding Tricks

After class, the third-grade wizards filed out of the classroom, each carrying a half-foot-tall magical puppet, excitedly discussing the content of their first lesson.

Felix stayed behind and ticked off a form. He wrote down the number 17 next to the name 'Luna Lovegood,' which represented the number of cards she had encountered in class.

In fact, the young wizards became increasingly skilled at infusing the cards with stable magic as the class progressed. In Felix's view, today was truly just an introductory lesson, especially compared to the upcoming sixth-grade classes—

"Sixth grade is a crucial year..."

“Don’t do that, Professor,” Fred and George cried out in class, sounding aggrieved. “We’ve only just experienced the .Ls year!” The other students murmured their agreement.

They had heard similar things for a year, and they were all traumatized. Several timid students seemed to be dragged back into the bitter previous school year. Just thinking about the difficult days made them tremble as if they had some kind of aftereffect.

The students felt a pang of sympathy. They looked around, searching for the source of the sound, their emotions disjointed.

Felix chuckled and paced around the classroom. "The reason I say this is because this year, you don't have to worry about certificates, and your accumulated knowledge has reached its peak. This means—"

He paused deliberately for a few seconds before revealing the answer: "We have more time for practice."

Before the students could react, he turned and walked back to the podium, deftly taking out the rune cards and clapping his hands: "My requirement is simple: master at least seven ancient runes through these cards—"

"They can form a magic rune circuit, which I will explain in the last half hour of the lesson."

"But I hope even more that you can discover the fun in it through your own exploration. Let's begin, students. The first person to finish will receive a reward of twenty points."

Soon, in the sixth-grade Ancient Runes Advanced Class, students from the four academies were using rune cards to project rune symbols—a piece of cake for the fifth-grade students who had just gone through hell.

But the key is how to master the magic runes on the cards.

“Oh, right.” Felix seemed to remember something and picked up the roster. “It would be quite difficult to complete this step alone, so I will divide you into groups… Miss Campbell King, don’t look around. I will divide you into groups of three according to the order on the roster.”

And so, the students from the four houses were shuffled, and Felix thoughtfully conjured up small round tables, each with three chairs. The Weasley twins, taking advantage of their surnames, were assigned to a group, and they stared wide-eyed at the Ravenclaw girl opposite them.

"Wow, it's so pretty." The girl looked at the small, emerald green sprout projected on the card, her eyes shining with delight. Then she came back to her senses and looked down at the textbook filled with notes.

"Based on past experience, to master a spell, you must first master its symbolic shape and magical symbolism... This is the most important thing, and we can obtain all of that from the cards. All that's left is—why are you looking at me like that?"

"N-nothing," George muttered, taking a card from Fred, infusing it with magic, and asking in a low voice, "Why do you think the professor did that?"

Fred said, "I guess they want us to have the ability to learn ancient runes on our own."

"are you serious?"

“I heard from people in the ‘future world,’ well, actually Penelope,” he winked mischievously, “that Professor Hyp sees the rune cards as an educational toy.”

“Toy!” George exclaimed, his eyes wide.

“That’s right, just like children’s comic books, but Professor Hyp’s main purpose was to promote practical runes. Penelope said that the professor provided a scenario: a father or mother holding a child and projecting patterns from cards, and as the child grows up, they will naturally become more familiar with runes.”

Joe thought about it seriously for a moment, "If 'Future World' hadn't purchased a batch of Muggle toys, I wouldn't know how lacking our entertainment options were... It gave us so much inspiration! Magic blocks, toy soldiers, colorful bubble guns, prank cards, and the wizard battle cards that came with them..."

The Ravenclaw girl interjected, "Why aren't there any dolls?"

"Uh, excuse me, what did you say?"

“Dolls,” the girl said seriously, “I loved them the most when I was little. I spent all my allowance on them every year, and over the years I collected a whole set!”

The twins exchanged a glance, and Fred slowly asked, "George, what do you think?"

George said in the same tone, "Dude, I think—we should make the most of our last two years in school and find some friends..."

“That makes sense.” Fred nodded, then turned to the girl. “Terry, would you like to join us?”

Terri looked at them in surprise.

"What did you say?"

"Join the Weasleys Wizarding Tricks Company. There's nothing there yet, but it will become the world's largest supplier of prank items and a manufacturer of wizarding children's toys."

“You—um—this is a bit unexpected—” Terry said, somewhat bewildered. “This isn’t another prank by you guys, is it?”

“Of course not. What are your plans for the future? Like, joining the Ministry of Magic?” Fred and George exchanged a glance and asked. It started as a spur-of-the-moment thing, but now they were actually planning to recruit.

"Well... no, I'm from a Muggle family and haven't decided where I'll stay after graduation."

"Then let's give it a try," Fred and George urged.

Terry found herself inexplicably labeled a veteran of the Weasleys Wizarding Arts, and her hand holding the card trembled violently. A blue waterfall projected onto the card flickered and then disappeared.

……

In the last half hour, Felix explained this part of the knowledge and assigned homework.

"Today's paper is about how to efficiently learn ancient magic runes using magic rune cards. I need you to summarize an effective learning plan based on your experiences in class."

After class, Felix overheard the Weasley twins muttering to each other as they passed by—