<h4>Chapter 228: Mystery Services Division, Death Chamber</h4>
"After a trial in the court of Wisengamo, Peter Pediru has vited thirteen statutes, including the Regtions for the Strict Restriction of the Use of ck Magic, the Criminal Code of the British Magical Community, and the International Law of Secrecy, and has been sentenced to life imprisonment in Azkaban!"
The verdict of Amelia Bones, the head of the Division of Magical Law Enforcement, was actually quite fair, and theoretically no one should have any doubts about it.
Yet Sirius was still uneasy.
Because he knew that Animagus could easily escape from the many Dementors in Azkaban.
The big ck dog he had transformed into at the time was not really a critter anymore without attracting anyone''s attention, and a much more stealthy rat would surely have made it easier to break out of the prison.
After Sirius brought this up in court, Amelia Bones promised to use a tighter cell to hold Peter in order to prevent him from escaping Azkaban by using the Animagus transformation.
Without waiting for Sirius to raise any further objections, she callously announced the end of the trial.
"Bones doesn''t even realize that this isn''t going to be solved by a different cell!" Leaving the courtroom, Sirius said with a depressed look on his face, "Creatures like rats are the most annoying, and the slightest inattention will set it free."
"Even if we keep Peter inside a fully enclosed cell, won''t we have to bring him food? That dead rat could have gotten out of the window while the food was being delivered, and there''s no way the person delivering the food would want to get up and keep an eye on that window every day!"
Sirius clenched his fists, "If you ask me, a coward like that who betrays his friends should just be killed to prevent him from doing anything bad again."
"It''s okay, he''s not in a position to shape-shift anymore." Drac waved his hand with care.
"What?" Sirius looked at him in shock.
"I snuffed out the source of magic power in his bloodline by hand before I left, in this life, he''ll be a good mute." Drac smiled tantalizingly, but his smile was extraordinarily cold.
"That rat, if he does escape, will definitely go looking for Voldemort to be his backer, and then it will be a bit of a pain in the ass to deal with. Thinking about it that way, it might as well be settled once and for all."
"Well done, Professor Drac!" Sirius waved his fist in ecstasy, "Hahahahaha, Peter the traitor, this is what he deserves!"
"Professor, could a wizard who was able to cast spells ever turn back into a dud again?" Harry asked curiously, blinking.
"Of course." Drac said, "There are actually magical pacts or ck magic that can aplish this, it''s just a bit brutal so very few people would go through with it."
"So ... Professor are you using magical contracts or ck magic?" Ron asked as he probed over as well.
"The time for a magic contract to take effect will be slow and the conditions are more demanding." Drac slowly hooked up the corner of his mouth.
"What do you say?"
...
Dumbledore led Harry and Ron back to Hogwarts through the firece in the main hall of the Ministry of Magic, while Sirius did the same back to 12 Grimmauld ce through the firece.
Drac ostensibly stepped into the firece with Dumbledore and the others back and forth, but he had no thoughts of returning to Hogwarts so soon.
He threw down a handful of Flyway Powder inside the firece but said nothing about his destination, allowing the green mes to consume him directly.
Flyway powder trips that didn''t call out their location tended to connect to a random firece.
For example, there was a witch named Violet Diliman who got into a firece without pronouncing any location after a fight with her husband in the middle of thest century, and then escaped her original husband by falling in love at first sight with the man who randomly teleported to the location ...
Drac''s trip to this flyway powder was different, however.
Before the firece could pick a random destination, Drac forcibly reversed the orientation of space so that the firece was instantly connected to an all-toomon torch.
The next moment, apanied by a shower of green sparks, Drac''s figure leapt out of the mes of one of the torches beforending lightly on the ground.
"Whew, this should be about the right spot." Drac patted the slight amount of hearth ash that had gotten on his body and surveyed his surroundings with interest.
It was a deep corridor stered with dark tiles, and two rows of torches stuck in the dark tiles of the walls flickered with a blue-white light, adding a bit of mystery to the whole space.
At the end of the corridor was a lone, ck door ...
This was the corridor of the ninth underground level of the Ministry of Magic.
The lone door of the Department of Mysteries had aroused Drac''s curiosity even before the start of today''s trial, and the familiar power inside the door had also raised Drac''s idea ofing to have a look.
As for Fudge and other officials from the Ministry of Magic, they had only just finished Peter''s trial and had not long passed through this corridor. They simply would not have thought that Drac would go and return, tantly appearing in the important ce of the Ministry of Magic!
Drac stood in the corridor and carefully surveyed the ck doorway in front of him.
The door didn''t have any knob or keyhole, only apletely t panel, the probability was that it was powered by magic.
Drac didn''t have a clue after looking at it for half a day, so he shrugged and took a step straight forward, appearing behind the door in an instant.
Since he could phantom shift anyway, opening the door wasn''t that necessary for him.
Behind the door was a circr enclosed room. The room was covered with dark marble floors, and the floors were scrubbed clean to the point of reflecting, making their color almost look like they were covered in ayer of empty bright standing water.
There were a number of candles in the room emitting a cold blue light, reflecting the twelve knobless doors on the circr wall.
From time to time the twelve doors would swap positions, and the walls would spin up so quickly with them that if it was without the correct magical key, nothing could determine exactly which door was the correct one they were looking for.
Not only that, the Department of Mysterious Affairs has only five researchboratories, respectively, "brain", "prophecy", "time", "death" and "love". "Death" and "Love".
Among the twelve portals, excluding the five researchboratories, the remaining seven doors are all extremely dangerous mechanisms.
However Drac naturally would not be bothered by such means.
None of the mechanisms behind the doors posed much of a threat to him, and he had absolutely no intention of looking for a specific door -
What was behind every door he wanted to go in and have fun, finding that familiar power from before instead became a secondary matter ...
Drac casually pushed one of the doors open.
The door opened noiselessly, and behind it was a long, narrow rectangr room filled with constantly dancing lights, the entire room glowing like a gem.
Watches of all kindspletely filled the room, with different pendulum clocks, quartz clocks, pocket watches, wristwatches, and other clocks on disy everywhere. "The sound of ticking hands resounded in all directions.
There were several muted people wearing pure ck wizard robes who were standing in front of various experimental equipment, working in silence, expressionless and without uttering a word.
When they saw Drac suddenly walk in, they also just shrunk their child holes for a moment, and with hardly any sign of surprise, they raised their wands and aimed them at Drac who was surveying the surrounding area with interest.
These mutes had been working here for who knows how long, and now seemed to have fallenpletely into numbness, as if they had long since lost such luxuries as joy and sadness ... in the Division of Mystical Affairs, which had left them gradually devoid of their sanity, or even their humanity!
"Strange." Drac frowned slightly, "What are you all working on every day? It''s surprising that you''ve gotten yourselves into this whole state."
However, those muted people acted as if they hadn''t heard what Drac had said in the slightest, just casting attack magic spells with little lethality at him with expressionless faces.
"What a hindrance."
Drac snorted and raised his hand to clutch all the iing magic spells in his hand.
Immediately afterward, he recited an incantation-
"One forgets all (Obliviate)."
The movements of all the mutes suddenly froze, and their eyes became nk.
"Fainting (Supefy)." Followed by a second spell.
The mutes all fell to the ground in a stupor.
"No point, no fight at all." Drac bristled and looked up at the furnishings of this room.
There was a huge, crystal jar shaped like a clock form, with bright light emanating from it from time to time.
This clock-form jar was constantly producing a dancing, bright light, and within its crystalline running water floated a small, jewel-bright egg.
And as this egg was held up by the bright stream of water inside the clock jar, it suddenly broke apart, and a tiny hummingbird then flew out from inside the egg shell.
As soon as it appeared the hummingbird was lifted to the very top of the jar so that it could spread its wings and fly high up where it was not covered with liquid.
But whenever it tries tond on the surface of the water to get a drink, its feathers get wet again, and then the whole bird is brought back to the bottom of the jar, enclosed in its egg once more, and the shell is made whole again.
This process repeats and cycles over and over again.
The hummingbird in the jar also keeps getting older and older until it falls into the water, then is reborn and gets older and goes on an endless cycle ...
Drac had been looking around this room for half a day before he finally decided that this was the Time Chamber of the Division of Mysteries.
Not only because of the many clocks around, as well as the countless objects here are associated with "time", but also the clock-shaped jar there is a strong atmosphere of time energy.
Drac had sensed this kind of aura in the time converter that he had brought from Hermione.
"That means ..." Drac''s eyes lit up.
His eyes scanned around the Time Chamber, and sure enough, he saw a whole cab of pendants neatly arranged in a ss cab with a golden circle and an hourss that could be turned-
A cab of time changers!
Drac suddenly remembered that at the time, after Dumbledore had discovered that he had taken Hermione''s time-turner, he had told him that the Ministry of Magic didn''t have an abundance of time-energy and only had enough for in-house research as well as a handful of samples for students to use.
"I really believed Dumbledore''s evil ...," Drac said through gritted teeth as he looked at the cab of time converters in front of him.
He took one of the time converters from the cab as a matter of course and then woke up the mutes and added a confusion spell.
Once that was done, Drac left the Time Chamber and walked towards the next room door.
The time energy was not the familiar aura that Drac had sensed before; he could sense that it was much closer and more mysterious to him.
...
In the next three rooms, Drac sessively saw a piece of brain soaked in green solution, rows of crystal balls filled with high shelves, and a fountain spraying a liquid simr to an ecstasy.
These three rooms represented "Brain", "Prophecy", and "Love" respectively.
Together with the first room Drac entered, "Time", then thest room is the research room that represents "Death".
I don''t know if it''s because it''s too empty, but the Hall of Death is a bit bigger than the previous rooms.
The room was dimly lit, square in shape, and recessed in the center, forming a huge stone pit, about twenty feet deep.
Stone steps encircled the entire room, like stone benches, gradually descending one by one, each step steep, like a step ssroom, or a Wizengamot courtroom that had been visited only a short time before.
In the center of the pit was a raised stone tform, on top of which stood an arch of indeterminate material, apanied by a sense of historical vicissitudes, but at the same time dpidated, giving the impression as if it were about to fall at any moment, but in fact immovable as a mountain.
There was no wall support around the arch, a tattered ck curtain or drapery hung on it, even though the air was cold and there was not a single breeze, it was gently swaying, as if there was a kind of unknown power fanning it.
Upon seeing this drapery, Drac''s heart, which hadn''t beat in a thousand years, suddenly pumped.
"Is that the power of ... death?" Drac muttered, but then he shook his head, "But this is death, not darkness ... Then how could this power bring about such a familiar feeling?"
He exhaled deeply and slowly raised one hand, crimson magic power pooled in his hand and gradually condensed into a blood-colored river.
Drac then took one step at a time, following the stone steps around him, towards the archway in the very center of the room, towards the drapery that was constantly swaying without wind.
With each step, the familiar feeling grew stronger, and the crimson magic power gathered in Drac''s palm also produced more and more distinctive fluctuations, as if it wanted to meet the curtain at any time.
As if another thousand years had passed, finally, Drac walked to the side of the archway, only one step away from the curtain.
He reached out his hand and slowly touched towards the curtain.
However, the crimson magic power in his hand came out first, meeting the curtain like a river flowing into the sea.
The curtain was ck, while Drac''s magic power was crimson, but after the two intertwined with each other, it was hard to tell them apart, as if they came from the same source!