{Edited} The Chaotic Traveler - Chapter 7: Don't Do Drugs, Smoke Herbs (Patreon)

AN: Edited chapters do not count toward monthly quota's

My eyes burn, but that's ok. I should probably stop procrastinating on writing Ouroboros by editing this story. Yeah, I'll do that tomorrow. I blame Plum, again.

Not beta read yet.

Chapter 7: Don’t Do Drugs, Smoke Herbs

‘I need to start pulling back on the potions.’ Jin finally admitted to himself by the last week of August.

He scratched his cheek as he looked at the knee-high mound of empty potion vials in his warehouse. ‘I may have gotten a bit overzealous with the drugs.’

Jin's funds were dwindling to fuel his rapid progress, even as he sent his elves out to… acquire Muggle money from posh Muggle English country clubs to convert to Galleons at the bank.

However, the Goblins were starting to raise issues, and Jin got warned in no uncertain terms that the authorities would be notified if he didn't stop. 'Drugs are an addiction, but progress feels so goooooddd~.’

The downsides were quite clear, as without the potions, Jin couldn't focus nearly as much as before, and his emotional instability returned with a vengeance, as if it were insulted by his use of potions to ignore it.

Jin's habit of growling had worsened, and after realizing he had scared a poor bookstore employee, he apologized and rushed back to his room. 'It has to be these damn animal instincts.’

At first, he thought it was his fractured mind, and while that was true to an extent, Healer Thorn had told him in no uncertain terms that this was a natural process for animagi.

He would keep noticing changes until his animal form finished growing, and among them were mood shifts and easily aggravated flare-ups on top of his mental issues.

It only took a day without potions before he got fed up. 'Enough of this; I'm finding the source.'

Focusing his mind through his annoyance wasn’t easy, but Jin pushed through into his mental plane and noticed an odd red tint to the air. ‘I’m going to find you this time.’

Jin had looked before but found no notable source.

Yet now it had been weeks, and something was stirring, giving Jin a trace to follow.

He mentally grabbed hold of the emotional resonance and followed the thread, jumping off his growing central island and falling below.

A minute later, he pierced the edge of his mental dome and returned to the dark void, following the trail until he abruptly hit an invisible barrier somewhere beneath his mental plane.

Jin could tell something was there, but no matter how hard he pushed, it wouldn't budge.

"You are a shitty roommate, dude!" Jin slammed his fist into the wall with sheer stubbornness, forcing his way in like he was tearing through a film until it gave.

"Wait, that worked?" Jin had a moment to blink before a tug whisked him inside, and he found himself falling into a dome-shaped biome.  

And he entered from the top.

“Oh shit!” Jin fell through the sky of an expansive tropical rainforest, the area smaller than his own dome, yet far more detailed than he ever managed.

Jin tried to calm down and force his will on the world, slowing his fall, but for the first time since he began his Occlumency practice, he felt resistance in his own mind.

“Uh, oh.” Jin saw the oncoming trees and winced before he smashed into the canopy, crashing through branches as he fell to the jungle floor below, cursing with each impact.

He hit the ground with a dull thud and stared up at the sky peeking through the canopy with dead eyes. "Ow."

His everything hurt, but nothing felt broken as he slowly pushed himself to his feet. ‘Can I even break a bone in my mind?’

Studying his surroundings, Jin frowned.

The forest felt real to his senses.

The scent of damp dirt filled his nose, humid air caressed his skin like he was swimming, and the echoes of an active ecosystem surrounded him.

It felt like he'd been transported somewhere in the world, not to another plane inside his mind. ‘Is this still my mind?’

Jin was in a clearing, staring around, and barely had a moment to take it all in before he heard a growl in his ear.

And then he woke up sweating, back in his room at the Leaky Cauldron, his heart pounding in his ears, his mind splitting with a migraine that wanted to crack his head.

His eyes were wide at the phantom pain of pressure on his neck.

‘I don’t think my animal form liked being disturbed.’ Jin absently rubbed his neck and felt unblemished skin, shivering at the sensation of what he had felt in that single moment. “Right, let’s not do that again just yet.”

With direct confrontation not yet available, Jin turned to an alternative to fix his anger issue and looked at the notes the Healer had left him. 'Herbs?'

0000

It required another trip to the apothecary, and it was safe to say the shopkeeper was not happy to see him.

The door jingled as Jin stepped into [Apocalypse Apothecary], raising his hand for a customary greeting before he was forced to duck beneath a flying petri dish. 

“NO!” James yelled as soon as he saw Jin's face. "I'm not selling you any more Wit-Sharpening Potions! This isn't a drug den! Get out!"

Jin may have sent his House Elves here for shopping once or twice.

A few times.

“Wait, wait, wait, that’s not what this is about, James!" Jin had to dodge half a dozen more objects before finally reaching the aggrieved shopkeeper's counter. "I'm not buying potions today."

The silver-haired man froze mid-throw. “I’ve heard that one before.” He slowly lowered his weapon and gave him the stink eye. "I'm really going to get arrested if I sell you another Wit-Sharpener; my suppliers are asking uncomfortable questions."

“I’m being serious this time.” Jin raised his hands innocently, ignoring the fact that he did, in fact, use that line on the poor shopkeeper at some point. “I just need some advice with herbal remedies.”

James’s eyes narrowed with suspicion, but the man was willing to hear Jin out. “I’m listening.”

It turned out some magically grown herbs had calming effects on various animals when smoked.

They weren't as strong as a Calming Draught, but they were cheaper and healthier than the potion.

Additionally, the Calming Draught made one feel too calm. It instilled a state of calm in a drinker that was difficult to break, making it useless for those who had to work each day.

Instead, Jin could smoke some herbs that helped with specific issues, a perfectly reasonable alternative to taking magical liquid drugs.

James directed him to a nearby smoke shop, where Jin met a man named Morel.

"Healer's orders, eh?" Morel was a big guy with a bigger stomach and a wide, warm smile. "I'm sure I can help you out."

“I appreciate it.” Jin chuckled at the man’s teasing tone. “Think you can find the right mix for me? The apothecary said I’d have to experiment to find the best result.”

“Ha! Maybe if you went elsewhere.” Morel waddled around the front desk and waved Jin over to a row of jars. “I’ve been doing this nearly five decades now. I’m sure we can get you situated quickly enough.”

Jin felt relief at the man’s confidence, and it paid off when, six tries and twenty minutes later, Jin was puffing on a pipe at the counter.

"What do you think?" Morel puffed on an impressive-looking pipe of his own. "Dragonheart Root has a real kick to it.”

“It’s nice." On the first bowl, Jin immediately felt the change. The reddish haze in his mind receded, his shoulders relaxed, and he didn't feel ready to pick a fight at the drop of a hat. "Relaxing.”

"Isn't it?" Morel chuckled and slapped the counter with a meaty palm. "Not a common herb to be purchased, but it's popular with certain crowds."

The man looked like he wanted to say something more but ultimately held his tongue and puffed away with a mischievous glint in his eyes.

Jin missed the look, absorbed in the peace the smoke brought him.

It helped that Dragonheart Root’s cinnamon scent was amplified in its flavor.

The scent wasn’t overpowering, and its medicinal properties soothed him just enough to keep his mind clear without feeling like he was enhancing himself with a potion.

‘I could get used to this.’ Jin puffed out a trail of blue smoke and smirked at the magical product. “It doesn’t have tobacco, right?” He looked over the listed ingredients without recognizing any of them. "I'd rather not develop lung issues."

“Not at all.” The man’s stomach nearly rested on the counter. “I sell premium tobacco if you wish, but my herbal mixes are locally sourced and packed exactly as listed by yours truly; there are no addictive qualities.”

“You pack them yourself?” Jin raised a brow.

“Of course!” Morel boomed another laugh. “I worked hard for that Herbology NEWT, I’ll have you know.”

“Fair enough.” Jin chuckled and threw in a few extra flavor mixes to say thank you for the help. “Any recommendation on a pipe?”

“Ha! You asked the right guy, my young friend.” Contrary to the twenty minutes it took to find a herb mix, it took Morel nearly an hour to expound on the wisdom of the various pipe styles before Jin could finally choose one. "This one resonates with you, fits in your palm, and has just the right weight to it."

Jin rolled the pipe in his hand.

Carved from a Nundu tooth and lined with a reddish-amber wooden handle, the pipe was a nice match for Jin's eyes. A simple enchantment was carved into it, allowing for easy lighting and magical filtering of harmful substances.

Morel offered to let Jin try it right there in the store, and Jin fell in love with the first bowl. 

“Come back anytime!” Morel joyfully waved him out.

‘I’m sure he’s happy after making such a big sale.’ Jin shook his head in amusement and puffed away, soon returning to his room where he found an oddly affectionate Shadow butting against his chin to get closer to the scent.

"What's with you, girl?" Jin asked, bemused, as the feline meowed like a fire alarm, slapping harmless paws against his bag until Jin poured out a bit of the herbal mix and watched her roll around in it. 'Did I buy magical catnip or something?'

He looked at his pipe oddly, took another hit, and then shrugged as the relaxation hit him. 'Well, this solved my anger problem. If it failed, I'd have to try to work on the emotional control aspect of Occlumency, but that doesn't actually stop emotions. It simply cages them and lets the user release them later. Or bottle it up, I guess, but that's not a healthy choice.'

Either way, Jin was happy with his solution, and so was Shadow.

“Oi, no biting my pipe.”

“Row.”

0000

Unfortunately, with less than a week left before his job started, Jin didn’t have the time to commit wholeheartedly to altering Charms for wandless casting just yet.

The biggest hurdle was grasping the spell's formula, and once he had that, it took hours each time he wanted to alter its parameters.

His final week was instead focused on wand-casting Charms, something that came naturally to him, and memorizing the Magical Beast indexes for his upcoming job so he didn’t make a complete fool of himself and get fired for not knowing simple trivia.

Wand casting was a simple process of Monkey See, Monkey Do. 'It's almost infuriating how little effort these people need to cast.'

One thing Jin never understood from canon was how so many questionably intelligent characters could pass the Hogwarts curriculum. Now, he was thinking that the school cared more about performance than understanding.

‘I can only assume that’s why there are like seven different telekinesis-based spells.’ Jin hummed to himself as he went through the Charms textbooks, idly puffing at his pipe as he pointed his wand off to the side and cast at low power.

Levitation, Light, Fire, Softening, Unlocking, Locking, Mending, Severing.

The first-year spells came and went without much issue.

Simply point wand, flow the Mana, focus your will, say an incantation, and twist the wand in various patterns to make magic happen.

It was as easy as breathing for Jin to learn them all. Yet it wasn't until he reached the Knockback Jinx, as well as the Ice Jinx, in the first-year curriculum that he realized he might have been missing a key element in his judgement; his learning curve.

'Well, that's awkward.' Jin looked at his wand in confusion as the Jinx didn't work on his first attempt, nor on his sixth. 'Performance issues?’

He scratched his head with the wand. ‘I might have underestimated the struggles people go through.’

Casting a simple Jinx wasn't impossible, but it took him as long to get it right as it took to learn three first-year Charms.

‘Is my learning curve that much of a game breaker? Is it like this with other subjects?’ Jin was curious and opened some beginner texts on Transfiguration, finding the earliest example of turning a match into a needle.

The exercise was frustrating; Jin struggled to alter even a tiny portion of the wood's material composition despite putting in hours of work.

He understood the assignment but somehow couldn’t make it work as he wanted.

'Well, that's the trade-off, I guess.' He dropped the attempts. ‘I'll spend some time getting the textbooks into my memory for later review.’

He knew that one day, when his soul was fully healed and he grew strong enough, he’d be able to break the shackles of his limits to 6 spells after he left the world of Harry Potter.

Or at least that's how Zelretch put it.

Jin didn’t know if he trusted the ancient vampire, but he’d consider things more when he didn’t have a time limit hanging over his head.

000

First-year Charms came and went as Jin moved on to the second year.

Disarming, Engorgement, Freezing, Shrinking, General Counter, Slowing, Tickling, and Dancing Feet.

Some he could test in the room; others needed a willing participant in the form of an overly eager House Elf named Bron, and a few simply couldn't be tested, like the Skurge Charm being for cleaning ghost ectoplasm and the Memory Charm being something Jin wasn’t willing to test on his loyal elves.

The third year followed the same trend as Jin breezed through the curriculum.

Cheering, Seize and Pull, and Banishing.

A comparatively short list.

Jin had to stop at the start of the fourth year because of time constraints, but he locked down the first 21 Charms for wand-based magic in less than a week of effort.

It was insane, but Jin was basing his progress not only on the boosted learning curve, but on the week of mental study he put into Charm theory.

Not to mention the deep dive he went into with Arithmancy. ‘And the drugs.’ Jin admitted to himself as he cast a longing look at the empty potion vials.

'Then again, this is just the first step.' Jin held up his wand and eyed it critically. 'A magical focus is important, but I don’t think wands are compatible with me.’

He shook his head and put the stick down. Waving it around made him feel incredibly silly, even if the feeling of magic made up for it.

'A wand is a crutch in this world. Once I leave, who knows what will happen?' Jin needed to cast magic wandlessly first, and then perhaps with a magical focus that worked better with him. 'I'll need to research the benefits of various types of foci and get one that specifically only amplifies my magic, rather than relying on it. My brain will do the heavy lifting.'

Charm work wasn't all Jin did during that last week, as he focused on preparing for his upcoming job. Unfortunately, without potions to support him, Jin had to reread the Magical Beast indexes multiple times to copy the content into his mind so he could review it in his mental plane under time dilation.

'Concentration is a pain in the ass without drugs.' Jin sighed around his pipe as his mind wandered away from the book he was reading. 'Might as well be productive.'

During those periods of distraction, Jin spent more time clearing debris from his mind, laying the foundations that would let him build further boulders from the various memory fragments.

The Harry Potter world was undoubtedly the most cluttered group of fragments he had to deal with. Still, the rest were quite varied in origin. 'Zelretch did say his magic clung to my strongest fantasy desires, but something tells me I hadn't exactly made up my mind of which worlds I desired the most.'

Jin blew out a trail of puffy blue smoke in his mental plane as he observed fragments from around a dozen worlds.

Each one would eventually form its own moon to accompany his HP-Boulder in orbit around his central island.

For the time being, Jin simply created the foundation to sort the fragments, getting an understanding of what worlds he was dealing with. 'I'll probably need months to deal with all this.'

Sitting on his island and watching the orbiting fragments dancing through his mental plane, Jin focused on another factor of his mind.

Defenses.

‘I’m completely unprotected like this. A single glance from Dumbledore or Snape and I’ll be screwed.’ Jin grumbled.

The problem was that Jin’s mind was still damaged, and he wasn’t sure how much he should push it before he gathered all the fragments from his old life.

The first HP-Boulder set itself as an anchor for his mental plane, and Jin was hoping to make a dozen more moons from each world's memory fragments to create more anchors. ‘Perhaps some rudimentary defenses, then? Just something to delay rather than fully defend.’

Rubbing his chin, Jin thought through how to do it before settling on a simple hiding-in-plain-sight strategy. 'If I can't defend, why don't I just distract?'

With an expression of his will, Jin reshaped his central island to resemble the moons he was creating, letting them orbit each other in a rotating pattern and making it impossible to guess where the central island was, since it was constantly in motion.

'That should buy me some time in case of an attack, but what else can I do?' Jin thought over what he had learned and came up with a fun idea. 'How much control do I have over the passive gravity my perk gave me?’

Raising a curious brow, Jin focused on his central island and shifted the gravity it was emitting to encompass the moons.

It took a few tries, but soon enough, Jin laughed as he got himself entirely lost amid a maze of gravitational directions; space shifted so some areas were up, down, left, right, and all around.

The goal wasn’t to defend his mind but to buy time and confound anyone who entered as he worked to eliminate their attacks or the attacker.

‘I’ve never met the man, but I’d love to see Professor Snape lose his shit in this maze.' Jin chuckled and flexed his will to add a final fuck you to any would-be intruders. 'What’s life without some fog?’

His mental pipe burned bright as Jin took a deep breath and exhaled a river of blue, cinnamon-flavored fog into his mental plane, filling the maze and locking the addition in place.

A pant of exhaustion left his lips, but Jin smiled at his surroundings. With an expression of will, he could easily see through the fog, yet without it he couldn’t see a few feet in front of him.

It was the limit of what he could accomplish in a month, but since he was starting from scratch, Jin was happy with the result.

The elves got into the school.

Shadow was being her adorable self and cleaning out the Leaky Cauldron of mice issues.

And Jin was on his way to world domination.

His Animagus form was a work in progress, but its effects were beginning to show.

Looking in a mirror four weeks after his arrival, Jin marveled at the changes. ‘Healer Thorn forgot to mention how quickly the growth spurts were going to arrive, unless this is just my weird situation.’

Jin had grown another two inches in a single month, and his muscles had begun to swell, requiring a resizing of his original clothing that he had mixed feelings about visiting Jamie for.

Jin was never more thankful that House Elves could cook and procure food if he gave them money to buy things with. ‘Sil is a fantastic cook as well.’

Gol was far more of the butler type, handling Jin's miscellaneous issues with a professionalism Jin came to respect.

And Bron was… well, young, enthusiastic, and far more willing to rob a Muggle department store for gym equipment so Jin could get a pump in his warehouse. ‘The less said about his culinary attempts, the better.’

When it came to Mana Scan, however, Jin wasn’t sure how to activate it. ‘It's not exactly Mana Sight; I know it's supposed to be an active ability, but none of the books I found had anything more than theoretical conjecture. I'm hoping Hogwarts has some more practical information.'

Giant’s Skin, Expanded Reserves, Arithmancer, Animagus, Occlumens, and Mana Scan.

They seemed like a lot, but in practice each had a niche usage.

‘Which leaves the last one on my list.’ Jin rubbed his chin as he thought of Apparation. ‘I’d love to say I’m confident, but I’m really not.’

Almost every single book he read warned of splinching, and while Jin was perhaps a tad too confident in some things, much to his own admission, he wasn't suicidal.

Jin wasn’t planning on touching it until he had a much firmer foundation in magic.

Jin’s grind finally came to an end on the bright morning of August 30th as he said his farewell to Tom, with Shadow riding his shoulder, and stepped into the Floo, feeling on top of the world and ready to take on the next challenge.

“Hogwarts Gate House.”

Or at least he was, until he walked out of a fireplace and smashed right into the wall of flesh that was Hagrid, the legendary gentle half-giant, who had been excitedly waiting for Jin's arrival.

Directly in front of the Floo point.

“Welcome!” Hagrid boomed excitedly, barely seeming to notice Jin bumping into him. "Huh? Oh, a hugger, eh? Come ‘ere, little buddy, we got an exciting year ahead of us!"

Hagrid’s arms wrapped around him, and Jin felt his hard-worked spine crack from the greeting.

Less than fifteen seconds into his new job, and he was already down for the count.

It was going to be a long year.

Chapter End.

AN: And we are off to Hogwarts.