Chapter 424 Abandoning Conventions

Schelling had originally given up on searching for Narida Vulcanova's secret room. After all, he was unfamiliar with Durmstrang, and a few days of exploration would not allow him to fully understand the secrets of the castle. July was almost over, and he had no more time to waste here.

Who would have known that on the evening of July 7, after he had just finished dinner and was walking back to his dormitory from the auditorium, he met a ghost dressed in black armor.

The ghost was covered in armor from head to toe, so Schelling could not know the ghost's appearance, identity, or gender. He only knew that he called himself the "Black Knight" in Old English, and his deep and hoarse voice made it impossible for Schelling to tell whether he was a man or a woman.

This was also the first time that Sherin had dealt with ghosts since coming to Durmstrang. After all, the ghosts in Durmstrang all looked particularly eerie and strange, and not so friendly.

For example, every time it was mealtime, there was a fat ghost named Edmund Grubb who tried his best to prevent the little wizards from coming in to eat. It was said that he died after accidentally eating poisonous berries at the table, and he couldn't bear to see the living enjoying delicious food in front of him.

The black knight stretched out his hand and stopped Xie Ling. In response to Xie Ling's question, he did not explain anything, but just mechanically repeated his signal for Xie Ling to follow him.

But Shalling knew magic to deal with ghosts. In Hogwarts, even Peeves didn't dare to mess with him, so he was not afraid that this would be a trap. So he followed the Black Knight around a long empty corridor and came to a long-abandoned classroom.

When I pushed the door open, the old wooden door creaked sharply, and the room was filled with dust and cold air. Old desks and chairs were piled up randomly on the side, and there were torn textbooks on the podium, and I could vaguely make out the annotations about forbidden spells.

Xie Ling didn't care about these, his eyes were attracted by an ancient statue in the corner of the classroom.

It was a statue of a wizard wearing a complicated robe, holding a scepter, with cold and sharp eyes. Strangely, the base of the statue was not completely in line with the ground, as if it had been slightly moved. Schelling touched the statue with his wand and found a string of ancient runes engraved on the scepter. After identification, he recognized that these runes formed a warning: "The path to wisdom requires abandoning the conventional path."

Very interesting sentence.

The gist is that only by giving up following your usual habits can you make new discoveries.

So what is it in this castle that wizards have been accustomed to using in the same way for a thousand years without any changes?

First of all, the classrooms and the auditorium can be ruled out. The location and layout of the classrooms cannot have remained unchanged for a thousand years. The same is true for the auditorium. For example, the battle ranking list was not something that existed when the school was first established. After all, the first generation of principals was not known for their enthusiasm for duels. It was probably something that was not available until the second generation of principals.

The bathroom is also impossible. In the 17th century, because the Muggles invented the plumbing system, all the bathrooms in the castle were renovated, just like Hogwarts, in order to introduce the plumbing system so that the wizards living here could enjoy the pleasure of bathing comfortably.

Xie Ling thought hard for a while, and suddenly realized that there was a place he had not been to in recent days.

hall.

Because Xie Ling had always used the pumice stone specially provided for specialists, he never had to climb the spiral staircase in the foyer!
When Xie Ling turned around and was about to leave the classroom, he found that the black knight had disappeared at some point.

Dinner time had just ended, and the hallway was probably crowded with little wizards. Xie Ling could only suppress his restless thoughts and wait for midnight to come.

So he asked a dwarf in the auditorium to bring a cup of fragrant coffee to his dormitory, and then went back to the dormitory to continue studying his book on black magic.

……

The night in Durmstrang Castle was shrouded in a deep silence, with only the occasional muffled curses from the dwarf night watchmen passing by.

Schelling came to the deserted foyer.

"Show yourself quickly!" Xie Ling waved his wand majestically, sweeping the magic across the entire stone steps, even the handrails on the left and right were not missed.

He activated the Magic Eye plug-in, which can observe the magic attached to all objects. Although everything in Durmstrang Castle has magic attached to it to a certain extent, if there is a hidden space, the strength and fluctuation of the magic will definitely be different.

Sure enough, on the seventh stone step counting from the bottom, Xie Ling vaguely discovered something strange.

Schelling tried tapping various parts of the stone steps with his magic wand. After many attempts, which took more than an hour, he finally made a row of small words written in ancient Runic appear on the stone steps - "Disappearing Stairs".

Combined with what I just discovered in the abandoned classroom, "You need to abandon the routine", then...

The foyer is on the ground floor. The conventional way to use the stairs is naturally to climb up. The opposite way means... to go down!

Thinking of this, Schelling abandoned all distractions, concentrated his mind, imagined that this was a spiral staircase leading downward, and stepped onto the stone steps.

The surrounding scene suddenly changed. Xie Ling's mouth corners slightly raised, he knew he guessed right.

What appeared before Xie Ling's eyes was a secret passage of stone stairs extending downwards, pitch black and bottomless.

Xie Ling summoned five light balls, which immediately illuminated the area three feet around him. His magic eye opened automatically, and the magic fluctuations that permeated the space were captured by his pupils one by one. He no longer needed to worry about any traps in the passage.

As Sherin walked for about 15 minutes, the passage began to become winding, the air became cold and thin, and sparse runes and complex reliefs appeared on the walls.

These reliefs seem to record the life of Narida Vulkanova, the founder of Durmstrang: how she conquered the extreme cold, mastered forbidden magic, repelled her enemies, and finally founded Durmstrang - this is enough to prove that this is the Vulkanova secret room that Schelling has been dreaming of finding, and the text on the wall indicates that her secret is hidden at the end of this passage.

Schelling finally arrived at an emerald-inlaid archway with a Latin inscription on the top: "Knowledge is my sword, trials are my shield." The emerald emitted a faint light, and as Schelling approached, the door opened silently, revealing a solemn secret room.

There seemed to be a thin film at the door of the secret room that was invisible to the naked eye, but Xie Ling's magic eye could see a layer of light silver-white mist swirling around the door. Xie Ling reached out and gently touched the film on the door, and faintly encountered a resistance that was extremely repelling him.

Xie Ling, who had done his homework and read Nalida's biography, knew that Nalida was a great white wizard who did not like black magic. Her secret room must be to prevent her inheritance from falling into the hands of black wizards. Xie Ling had been studying black magic hard in recent days, and he must have been contaminated with a lot of the evil aura of black magic.

After figuring this out, Schelling no longer hesitated and immediately cast the "Magus of the Combined Form" to dissipate the dark magic aura all over his body and simulate the sacred magic aura of Dumbledore's great and bright one.

Sure enough, this time he passed through without any resistance and entered the secret room.

The secret room was deep and dark, with only magic crystals emitting soft green light inlaid around the walls, illuminating the space like a dream. A huge, simple mirror was embedded on the central wall, and the frame was engraved with complex runes and symbols.

An extremely oppressive mysterious force permeated the secret room. Even with Xie Lin's current level of magical skills, he felt that his own magic power was being suppressed.

Xie Ling walked slowly closer and stared at the mirror.

The mirror did not reflect his figure, but was shrouded in a layer of slightly fluctuating mist, as if locked by some powerful magic. In the depths of the mist, a woman's figure gradually emerged - a beautiful woman wearing a classical medieval robe, a translucent figure with a bit of paleness, and a face that was 80% similar to Schelling's statue next to the entrance gate.

"Narita Vukanova?" Xie Ling asked softly, but his tone was more affirmative.

"Welcome, foreign visitor." Nalida's weak voice echoed in the secret room. Her eyes were full of scrutiny and expectation. "It seems that you are not a student of Durmstrang - I recognize the family emblem on your robe. Are you from Great Britain?"

The voice of the woman in the mirror sounded very weak, as if it came from a very distant time and space, and the phantom in the mirror flickered from time to time. Obviously, no matter what happened to her, it was probably not optimistic.

Even so, her solemn expression still showed her majesty and bearing. Sherin did not dare to neglect her and immediately saluted and responded, "I am from the Malfoy family of Great Britain. Nice to meet the headmaster."

"Well," Nalida sighed softly, "Although you are not a student of Termstrang, the fact that you can find this place proves that you are smart and brave enough. And I finally have a chance to talk to you."

Xie Lin frowned and looked at the mirror, feeling a strange breath seeping out from the mirror. He slowly said: "Are you Ms. Vulcanova herself? What happened to you?"

"I'm already dead." Nalida said calmly, "but an evil dark wizard has captured my soul with soul magic and imprisoned it in this cursed mirror, preventing me from going to the world of the dead."

She smiled bitterly. "In this mirror, I have been tortured by a terrible curse day and night. My soul has long been broken. The one who is talking to you here now is just the last wisp of my soul left."

Xie Ling frowned slightly. Although Xie Ling was not a good person, torturing the soul of a dead person for nearly a thousand years was beyond Xie Ling's imagination.

By the way, after subduing a group of Death Eaters, Schelling had made Avery, who was possessed by a shit-eating pig, take poison and die painlessly and peacefully.

In fact, that was just Schelling's bluffing and a means of intimidating the Death Eaters. Even if his plan to subdue the Death Eaters ultimately failed, Schelling never really intended to make Avery unable to reincarnate forever. That would be too cruel and inhumane.

He couldn't help but wonder what kind of hatred would require torturing a wizard's soul to this extent and imprisoning it for nearly a thousand years.

He asked in a deep voice: "What on earth caused you, the founder of Durmstrang, to end up like this?"

Nalida lowered her eyes, her tone filled with forbearing sadness: "It was Harfang Mount, my successor and the second headmaster of Durmstrang. He pretended to be a loyal colleague, but he coveted my wisdom and heritage. He secretly implanted a strange curse into my soul, and when I realized it, it was too late... My body quickly failed, and my soul was imprisoned in this castle, and I can never be freed." (End of this chapter)