The Old Ones of Hogwarts

Chapter 535, Section 544: Believers in Deep Space 9

As an expert in intimidation.

Voldemort did indeed succeed in frightening the Death Eaters.

Everyone present turned pale, their hearts filled with the intense intimidation of Voldemort.

This was the effect Voldemort wanted. So, with his goal achieved, when Roll's screams finally faded into intermittent, wheezing sounds like a broken bellows due to exhaustion and extreme pain, and his body ceased its violent struggles, only intermittently convulsing, Voldemort reluctantly withdrew his magic. "Th-thank you, Master."

This might be the kind of subordinate Trump most wants.

He was tortured so much that he still had to thank his boss for his kindness.

Luo Er lay there like a completely melted lump of mud, his eyes vacant, saliva and blood dripping from the corners of his mouth, only the faint rise and fall of his chest proving that he was still alive.

"Take him away. Don't let him die," Voldemort ordered indifferently. This was one of his important experimental subjects. As soon as the order was given, two masked Death Eaters stepped forward and dragged Rol like a dead dog toward the shadowy passage on the side of the hall, which led to the deeper dungeons or to the "medical" treatment. After treating Rol, Voldemort seemed to have lost interest in staying any longer.

He slowly rose from his high stone throne, his long black robes flowing like the night sky. He glanced at the respectfully standing core servants below.

A glint flashed in his scarlet eyes.

"Increase vigilance. Be on the lookout for any unusual magical fluctuations or reports of powerful strangers," he hissed. "That guy who suddenly appeared... I need to know everything about him. Disperse."

He gave the order.

"Yes, Master!" the crowd replied in unison, bowing as they took their leave.

Voldemort's figure vanished silently, as if blending into the shadows, through a hidden door behind the stone seat, to continue his dark research on immortality, power, and the capture of prophecies.

The oppressive atmosphere in the hall eased slightly, but the tension remained. Yaxley straightened up and began to quietly assign investigation tasks to several of his capable subordinates.

Lucius Malfoy breathed a slight sigh of relief, nodded to Yaxley, and hurriedly left. He needed to go back and think about how to use his network of connections to investigate this suddenly appearing unknown threat without arousing suspicion. This was related to the Malfoy family's status in the Dark Lord's eyes and his own safety.

"And me?"

Barty Crouch licked his lips, his eyes gleaming with anticipation, seemingly regarding the hunt for the "mysterious wizard" as an exciting game.

This guy is a madman.

He's even crazier than Voldemort.

However, he remained fiercely loyal to Voldemort. The dark lair returned to a blood-stained "order," and undercurrents of revenge and searching began to quietly surge in the underground world.

In the direction Voldemort was heading.

The hidden door behind the stone seat slid open and closed silently, completely shutting out the lingering smell of blood, the gasps of fear, and the whispers of the Death Eaters, each with their own thoughts.

Voldemort had no interest in any of this.

Behind the door was a narrow, sloping stone staircase, barely wide enough for one person to pass, winding its way down into the ground. The rough stone walls on either side were devoid of any lighting, save for the ominous, eerie green glow emanating from the tip of Voldemort's wand, barely illuminating the distance ahead. The air was cold and damp, carrying the distinctive stench of earth and rock, and an even deeper, indescribable sense of antiquity and oppression, as if accumulated over countless years.

The stone steps seemed to have no end.

Only Voldemort's steady, light footsteps echoed in the absolute silence, their rhythm so regular it seemed inhuman, more like some cold-blooded creature gliding through a cave.

Because of dangerous magical transformation.

Voldemort is indeed far removed from humanity now.

And now.

Voldemort sought to seize even more dangerous powers—this was his most private and heavily guarded personal sanctuary and laboratory. Located deep beneath the Death Eaters' London stronghold, it was shrouded in layers upon layers of extremely complex dark magic barriers, spatial folding spells, and powerful Muggle expulsion and confusion spells.

Even his most trusted servants, such as Yaxley or Bellatrix, were rarely allowed to enter.

the reason is simple.

This place houses his most precious collections, his most forbidden research findings, and is also where he conducts his darkest and most dangerous magical experiments, which must never be known to outsiders.

"Da da da, da da da~"

After descending countless steps, the view suddenly opened up before them. A huge, naturally formed underground cavern, crudely expanded by magic, appeared out of sight.

The cave ceiling is high up, with many strangely shaped stalactites hanging down, some of which are still slowly dripping water droplets containing a faint magical power, which gather on the ground to form puddles that shimmer with an eerie phosphorescence.

The cave walls and floor had been roughly leveled and were covered with dense, dazzling runes and magic circles that exuded a strong sense of darkness and blasphemy.

These rune systems are extremely ancient and chaotic. Some are hybrid variations of Norse runes and black magic, some seem to be forbidden parts stripped from Egyptian or Mesopotamian necromancy, and others are completely unrecognizable, twisted and bizarre, as if they come from mad ramblings beyond human reason.

Speaking of knowledge level.

Voldemort was indeed quite knowledgeable.

Master of Black Magic.

In the center of the cave was a circular altar about ten feet in diameter, made of black basalt.

The altar's surface is as smooth as a mirror, but upon closer inspection, countless extremely fine, dark red veins, resembling blood vessels, can be seen flowing subtly within the stone.

Around the altar, some unsettling objects were arranged in specific positions and at specific angles: dried eyeballs of unknown magical creatures soaking in a viscous green liquid; rosaries made of human finger bones and obsidian fragments; several heavy ancient books with covers made of what appeared to be human skin, chained together; and some crystal vessels containing strangely colored liquids that were constantly bubbling or writhing.

It looks very evil.

The air was thick with the pungent odor of sulfur, rotting flesh, aged blood, and a cloyingly sweet spice. The only light sources here, besides Voldemort's wand, were a few flames lit with mermaid oil at the edge of the altar—eternal flames of the West, their light tinged with a ghostly blue. Far from dispelling the darkness, their glow only cast an even more eerie and unreal hue over the entire space.

"I know I'm almost there."

Voldemort walked to the altar, his crimson pupils sweeping over the familiar surroundings. His long, serpentine face was expressionless, but deep within his eyes burned a light far more intense, purer, and more…greedy than when he punished Rol or ordered the hunt for the mystic. Power.

The power of eternity.

Beyond the mundane, beyond life and death, beyond Dumbledore, beyond all known magical limits… the ultimate power. This is his eternal pursuit! It is the core driving force deep within his soul!

Dominating the magical world, purging Muggle bloodlines, establishing a new pure-blood order... these are certainly his goals, but in essence, they are all means and manifestations of acquiring and demonstrating that ultimate power.

Yes, he was no longer satisfied with ordinary dark magic, nor with the pseudo-immortality of a split soul brought about by Horcruxes.

The current Voldemort craves more, yearning to touch the true, chaotic, and primal roots of magic, yearning to become some kind of... higher-level being.

All this longing came about several years ago when he stumbled upon a batch of parchment scrolls written in a long-lost, eerie script in a looted ancient Mediterranean wizard's tomb. These scrolls contained fragmented records about "beyond the stars," "the sleeping god," and "the indescribable blessing."

There is hope.

He found a dangerous yet alluring direction.

The text was distorted and difficult to understand, containing bizarre fragments of information, full of contradictory and crazy whispers, but it revealed the "cold truth about the universe" and "powers that transcend good and evil".

And the suggestion of "establishing a connection with the 'deep space' through a specific ritual to gain infinite knowledge" was like the sweetest poison, deeply attracting this second-generation Dark Lord.

He devoted tremendous effort, using his extensive knowledge of dark magic and the resources he had plundered, to decipher, verify, and experiment bit by bit. He discovered that the "power system" these records pointed to was completely different from any known school of magic; it was more ancient, more...inhuman, and full of subversion of order, logic, and common sense.

But it also seems to hold unimaginable potential.

The cold mark in Rol's soul, though seemingly different in nature from the chaotic madness of this "deep space" system, only fueled Voldemort's thirst for power—to see if there truly existed a power beyond the comprehension of ordinary wizards! Whether it was the cold "raven" or the chaotic "deep space."

he!

Voldemort!

You must master all of them!

We must conquer them all!

"I can! Of course I can! Only I can!" Voldemort murmured. Tonight, he felt good; inspiration, or rather, that greedy throbbing of power deep within his soul, was particularly strong. To Voldemort, this was perhaps a reminder from fate. So, it was time to try again, to try to establish a clearer, more stable connection with the "deep echoes" described in those parchment scrolls.

All I saw was...

He walked to one side of the altar, where there was a cage forged from black iron, containing two Muggles—a man and a woman, who appeared to be a middle-aged couple, dressed in ordinary work clothes, and were unconscious, clearly under a powerful sedation and tranquilizing spell. These were two of the "sacrifices" that Voldemort had ordered his men to capture from remote villages.

The parchment scrolls vaguely mention that certain frequencies of pain, fear, and the wails of the soul can serve as "incense" to attract "deep space gaze" or to pry open some kind of "veil."

"Swish swish~"

Voldemort waved his wand, and the iron cage opened silently.

Two Muggles were lifted up by an invisible force, levitating and moving to the center of the black altar, where they lay down side by side. Their bodies twitched slightly, showing their resistance.

Clearly, even while unconscious, these two individuals seemed to instinctively sense the extreme danger.

"To sacrifice yourself for me is the glory of you filthy ones." Voldemort began to slowly walk around the altar, chanting an extremely difficult, broken-syllable incantation that did not conform to any known rules of language.

The voice was sometimes deep and roaring like an abyss, sometimes sharp and piercing like the scraping of glass, creating eerie echoes in the empty cave, as if countless unseen beings were whispering to him in the darkness.

As the incantation continued, the tip of his wand stopped emitting a green light and instead flowed out something extremely viscous, somewhere between a liquid and a gas—a dark substance whose color could not be accurately described, as if it were a mixture of the deepest night sky, putrid blood, and some kind of irrational madness.

The dark substance dripped onto the dark red patterns on the altar's surface, and those patterns immediately swelled and pulsated like activated blood vessels, emitting a faint but unsettling gurgling sound.

"Coo coo coo~"

As Voldemort cast his spell, the ancient, blasphemous runes on the ground around the altar lit up one by one, emitting eerie green, dark purple, or murky yellow light. This glow intertwined with the dark red pulsation of the central altar, forming a bizarre and disorienting magical array. "Zzzzz!"

The temperature inside the cave plummeted, and tiny, salty-smelling ice crystals condensed in the air. The eerie blue flames of the eternal lamps flickered wildly, casting long, twisted, and pulsating shadows that projected Voldemort's figure onto the cave walls. The shadow swelled and deformed, as if it had acquired an independent and ferocious form, making it look extremely eerie.

"Respond to me!"

Voldemort was completely immersed in the dark ritual, his scarlet pupils contracting to the thinnest vertical lines, reflecting the wildly flowing magical light and an almost pilgrimage-like fanatical desire.

At this moment.

He could sense a vast, cold, chaotic gaze, filled with boundless knowledge and... indescribable malice, being slowly drawn and pulled towards him from some incomprehensible, indescribable, and timeless "depth" by the ritual and the "energy" about to be released by the two vibrant lives on the altar.

perhaps.

If it were any other wizard here, they would realize something was terribly wrong and panic, but who could blame them but Voldemort, who was casting the spell and was a mad wizard who had ruined his own mind?

"Giggle giggle!!!"

Facing malicious stares.

Voldemort even let out his classic snarl.

ecstatic.

Then, as the chanting of the incantation reached a jarring climax, Voldemort suddenly raised his wand high, the tip pointing directly at the dark, invisible dome of the cave!

"With fear as the guide! With souls as the steps! With flesh as the key! Open! The gates to the deep space! Answer my call! Grant me eyes to see the truth! Grant me the power to control chaos!" The last syllable was uttered as if he had exhausted all the magic and will he could muster at that moment. The dark substance gushing from the tip of his wand surged instantly!

They coiled around the bodies of the two Muggles in the center of the altar as if they were living creatures!

"Uh... Ahh!"

The effects of the Stun Curse were forcibly broken, and indescribable pain instantly overwhelmed the nerves of the two Muggles.

To be honest, it wasn't just simple physical pain; it felt as if countless cold, suction-cup-like tentacles had burrowed directly into their brains, stirring their consciousness, draining their life force, and simultaneously pouring the most extreme fear and despair into the depths of their souls! That's the point.

Perhaps Saruman and others are very familiar with it.

pity.

They don't live in this day and age.