Chapter 12: Snape's Hazing (Patreon)

The Slytherin first-years around them held their breath.

Draconia's breath caught too. She bit down on her lower lip, her watery gray-blue eyes full of tension and conflicting feelings.

Part of her desperately wanted her all-powerful godfather to crush Raven's arrogance and win back the face she'd lost in Diagon Alley. But another part of her, for reasons she couldn't name, felt her fingertips clench the hem of her robes of their own accord as Snape's gaze, deep and dangerous as an abyss, fell on Raven.

"Raven Capet."

Snape looked down at the boy before him, his sallow face half-hidden in the flickering candlelight. His voice was low and even, yet it delivered an obscure question that would have driven despair into even the upper-years.

"Suppose you are neutralizing a Swelling Solution by adding dried nettles and crushed pufferfish eyes, but during the heating stage the magical backflow suddenly deflects, and the potion begins to throw up irregular dark purple bubbles… How would you remedy it?"

The whole classroom fell into dead silence.

Hermione's raised hand slowly sank. Her eyes were blank with bewilderment and shock.

This wasn't in the first-year textbook at all! It wasn't even in the appendix of Magical Drafts and Potions!

Draconia's small face paled a shade. She raced through the notes stored in Malfoy Manor's family records, only to find she couldn't even begin to grasp a subject like "magical backflow deflection."

Yet under everyone's stares, Raven rose calmly to his feet.

His ebony-black robes made him look even taller and more composed.

With the newly acquired [Magic Circuit Analysis Sight], the interlacing ley-line currents of magic and the laws of how substances reinforce and counteract one another, which he had glimpsed last night, now resolved into a clear, intuitive chain of logic.

"That's simple, Professor Snape." Raven's voice didn't waver. It rang clear and steady through the dungeon. "The dark purple bubbles aren't caused by a conflict between ingredients. The heat makes the free magic inside the pufferfish eyes react with the damp air of the dungeon itself, a 'secondary catalysis' that forcibly strips away the dried nettles' astringency."

Meeting Snape's slightly narrowing pupils, Raven went on without haste. "A traditional textbook might suggest quickly adding two drops of armadillo bile to suppress it by force, but that would drop the purity of the whole cauldron below passing."

"The optimal solution is to remove the heat source at once, swap the usual silver stirring rod for a more inert obsidian rod, and sweep a half-circle clockwise along the cauldron's rim. That guides the excess ionized magic into the stone floor. Then add half a gram of unground, frozen dittany bark."

Raven raised his eyes a little. His black gaze met Snape's hollow, lifeless eyes across the empty air, and one corner of his mouth curved into a flawless, faint smile. "Done that way, it neutralizes the mutation perfectly, and it also shortens the Swelling Solution's volatile settling period by fourteen percent."

The instant he finished speaking, the entire Potions classroom was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop.

Hermione's mouth fell open. Her quill dropped onto her parchment with a soft clack, and she was so stunned she couldn't say a word.

Draconia, seated beside him, stared with wide eyes up at the unruffled boy next to her, her mind completely blank.

She had assumed Raven merely had a solid grounding in theory. She'd never imagined that, faced with her godfather's merciless, far-beyond-the-syllabus question, he could not only give the correct answer but improve a traditional potion recipe on the spot!

Snape stood where he was. Beneath his robes, his fingers rubbed together almost imperceptibly. Deep in those black eyes, so long without a ripple, a flicker of fierce turbulence and astonishment surfaced, rare as a comet.

Obsidian to channel ionized magic… That was no conclusion reached by rote memorization. This eleven-year-old first-year had already touched the deepest essence of Potions, "magical field resonance"!

Even Lily back then… even he himself, at eleven, could never have possessed such terrifying insight and originality!

After several suffocating seconds of silence, Snape slowly withdrew his gaze. With a flick of his black robes, he strode back to the front of the room.

"Rigorous reasoning. Entirely correct."

Snape forced the words out through his teeth, his voice still even, though everyone in the dungeon could hear the turbulence suppressed beneath that calm. "Five points to Slytherin. Because someone has finally proven that in this castle, besides grass-brained trolls, there may occasionally appear a wizard who has actually brought a brain to class."

The entire Slytherin side erupted in low, excited murmurs!

In the very first lesson of term, Head of House Snape, famed for his harshness and coldness, had for once awarded a first-year a full five points outright!

But before Draconia could recover from that swirl of shock and secondhand pride, Snape's voice, cold as a blade, slammed down again.

"Now, everyone, open your textbooks to page ten.

Follow the steps on the board and brew a Cure for Boils in pairs." Snape struck the blackboard sharply with his pointer, and his indifferent gaze swept between Raven and Draconia like a knife. "Capet. Malfoy. In view of the 'rapport' and the eagerness to converse you displayed at the breakfast table… the two of you will share a single cauldron."

"What?!" Draconia shuddered and gasped out the word, her snow-white face flushing bright red in an instant!

[Ding. You have left a deep impression on the mind of the Potions grandmaster "Severus Snape," overturning the first-year assessment process.] [Causality Reversal Points +260.]

["Draconia Malfoy" is experiencing emotional fluctuation. Causality Reversal Points +140.]

[Current total Reversal Points remaining: 1720.]

Listening to the crisp chime in his ear, Raven calmly picked up his obsidian toolbox, turned his head, and met the young lady's flustered, watery gray-blue eyes. He arched one brow with perfect elegance. "So, Miss Malfoy… looking forward to working with you?"