Chương 323: Ch313- Science!

Astoria stepped through the door and took a deep breath. The room was full already. Her father stood near the window with her mother, Belladonna. Daphne was at the back with Neville. Nicolas and Perenelle occupied the chairs nearest to Dumbledore. Miranda stood near the window. Beside her were Fleur and Selena. Bathsheda stood to the right of Cassian. And there was a snake draped across the back of Cassian's chair. A large one. It lifted its head when Astoria walked in.

Xenophilius Lovegood was near the fireplace, looking mildly delighted about everything. Luna sat on the windowsill beside him, holding a mug with both hands. Cassian was at the centre of it, leaning back against his desk with his arms crossed, looking like a man who'd organised a gathering and was already reconsidering the wisdom of it.

"Ah," he said.

"Right. Everyone's here." Astoria's mother stood immediately.

"Astoria." Her father gave a reassuring smile. She took the empty chair between her mother and Daphne. Daphne reached over and squeezed her hand. Cassian unfolded his arms.

"Before we start," he said, "I want to explain something. About Miss Lovegood." Xenophilius looked up from the fireplace. Luna tilted her head over her mug.

"Is that alright?" Cassian asked, looking at them both. Luna nodded without hesitation. Xeno beamed.

"Oh, absolutely. I've been waiting years for someone to take her seriously in a room like this." Cassian turned back to the room.

"Miss Lovegood has an ability most of you haven't encountered. She reads magic. Not thoughts or intentions per se, but the shape magic makes. The way it moves through a person, the places it sits, the places it doesn't. Most magical abilities like this get diagnosed wrong or explained away. Miss Lovegood's was no different. Nargles, Wrackspurts, all the rest of it, those weren't nonsense. They were her framework. A child trying to make sense of something she felt before she had the words for it."

Perenelle leaned forward slightly. Nicolas's mouth opened.

"A living Seer?" Perenelle asked.

"Not quite." Cassian shook his head.

"Seers get images, fragments, impressions of what will happen. Luna doesn't predict anything. She perceives the present state of magic itself. The difference is-" He paused, trying to find the right analogy.

"A Seer reads the river. Miss Lovegood reads the water." Perenelle sat back, eyes bright. Nicolas said quietly, "We've read accounts of it. Very rare throughout history."

"Very," Cassian agreed.

"It's been rare for centuries. Luna's mother had something similar. Different expression, same root." Cyrus cleared his throat.

"And this is relevant to Astoria because-""Because she's going to do most of the heavy lifting today," Cassian said, nodding toward Luna.

"The blood malefication Astoria carries isn't structural. It moves with her magic, not through her blood as a fixed object. Standard diagnostic spells catch the edges but miss the shape. Luna sees the shape." Her mother's hand was still in her lap, looking worried. Astoria herself hadn't said anything yet. She was looking at the snake on the back of Cassian's chair. The snake looked back.

"Right," Cassian said, following her gaze.

"That. Yes. I should explain Nagini." He walked near her.

"She's a Maledictus. Born human. The curse runs in her blood, not placed there by someone, born with it. Over time it overwhelms the human form. The transformation eventually becomes permanent." He said it plainly, the way he said most things that were uncomfortable.

"She came to us a few months ago. She's been helping Bathsheda and me understand how blood-based curses interact with the magic and gradually alters the reality of a person. Her experience is... specific." Neville stared at the snake with wide eyes. Astoria's mother gasped softly, "She's conscious? She understands us?"

"Every word," Cassian said. Nagini lifted her head and looked at her.

"Now," Cassian said, looking around the room.

"Bathsheda and I have something that can actually help Astoria today." He let that settle for a moment before continuing.

"As for Nagini." He glanced toward the snake.

"That's a different matter. Her situation's already permanent. We'll need a great deal more study before we can even think about reversing it. But she helped us understand what we were dealing with. We couldn't have gotten this far without her." Belladonna was on her feet before he'd finished the sentence. Her eyes were wet. She crossed toward the chair, looked at the snake, and said simply, "Thank you." She looked like she might actually hug it. Nagini looked at her for a moment. Then she dipped her head.

Bathsheda looked around the room.

"We'd like your help testing a theory," she said, "and assisting with a ritual for Miss Greengrass." Nicolas leaned forward.

"What kind of ritual?" Cassian scratched his cheek.

"That's the interesting part." Bathsheda pulled a roll of parchment from the desk and spread it flat. The diagrams on it were dense, annotated in two different hands, her neat script alongside Cassian's, which looked as though it had been written in a hurry during some late night that probably involved cold tea and an argument.

"The malefication isn't sitting on top of her magic," Bathsheda said.

"It's not an external curse you can peel away. It's woven into the magic itself. Into every part of what she is." Perenelle's eyes moved to the parchment.

"You mean it replicates."

"Yes," Bathsheda said.

"Every time her magic regenerates, the malefication regenerates with it. It doesn't weaken over time. Doesn't stagnate. It adapts." Miranda turned slightly from the window.

"Then extraction's off the table."

"Completely," Cassian said. Dumbledore's fingers pressed together.

"And you've found a way around that."

"We think so," Bathsheda said carefully.

"The method's... unconventional at best."

"How unconventional?" Nicolas asked. Cassian tilted his head.

"Depends how you feel about Muggle science." That got a reaction. A few of them looked at him with a frown. Miranda looked at him.

"Go on."

"Right." Cassian crossed his arms.

"Blood curses pass through families. Sometimes they skip a generation. Sometimes they don't. But the pattern's consistent, it travels through bloodlines the way inherited traits do." He paused.

"Which means it's genetic." Perenelle's brow creased.

"Genetic."

"Magic isn't biology, Cassian," Miranda said flatly.

"It overlaps more than you think," Cassian replied.

"We've just never had the language for it." He gave a look at others making sure they're following.

"Muggles figured this out a few decades ago," Cassian said.

"Every living thing, humans included, carries information about itself inside every single cell. Instructions. A blueprint. They called it DNA." He glanced around the dumbfounded faces.

"Think of it like a scroll. Except instead of one scroll in one place, there are millions of identical copies, one inside every cell in your body." Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions. Dumbledore was watching him with that expression he wore when something was new but not unwelcome.

"And the malefication," Perenelle said slowly, "is written into the scroll."

"Into every copy of it," Cassian said.

"That's why you can't extract it. There's nothing to extract. It's part of the text." Nicolas sat back.

"Ah. You'd have to rewrite it." Cassian pointed at him.

"Exactly."

"Are we certain," Dumbledore said slowly, "that what you propose alters only the affliction, and not the essence of the person it resides within?"

"If we do it right," Cassian said.

"Yes." Cyrus Greengrass asked quietly, "Is that really possible?"

"Muggles are working on it." Cassian said.

"They're still early, they've mapped parts of the blueprint but they haven't cracked editing it yet. They've got something called CRISPR, which is essentially a tool that can find a specific piece of the text and cut it out." He glanced at Bathsheda.

"We adapted the concept." Miranda moved closer to the parchment.

"You're talking about a magical equivalent."

"A ritual that does the same job," Bathsheda said.

"Find the malefication at the root, in the instruction that keeps producing it. And rewrite that instruction." Perenelle looked at Nicolas. Nicolas spoke carefully.

"Has this been attempted before?"

"Not exactly," Cassian admitted.

"The theory's borrowed. The application's ours." Miranda gave him a flat look. He gave her a mild one back. Dumbledore cleared his throat lightly.

"How did you arrive at this? The CRISPR framework." Cassian scratched the back of his neck.

"I was reading Muggle medical research. Lost my magic for a bit two years ago as you all know, had a lot of time on my hands and not much else to do. Ran across the concept. Sat with it for months." He shrugged.

"Then Nagini came to us. Watching how her malefication worked, how it distributed itself, that's when it clicked. Her situation's permanent, the transformation's already complete. But Astoria's hasn't finished yet. The window's still open." Belladonna's hands tightened in her lap. Perenelle looked at the parchment again.

"The ritual itself, walk us through the structure." Bathsheda stepped closer to the desk and pointed at the first diagram.

"We use Miss Lovegood as a lens. She reads the shape of the malefication, where it sits in Astoria's magic, how it's distributed. That gives us a target."

"Without her, we'd be working blind," Cassian added.

"Then?" Nicolas asked.

"Then we build a containment lattice," Bathsheda said.

"Not to hold the malefication in but to hold it still. Long enough to work on it. The malefication adapts constantly. The moment it senses pressure, it shifts. The lattice stops that." Perenelle leaned forward.

"What anchors the lattice?"

"Several things," Bathsheda said.

"That's partly why we needed people in this room." Dumbledore's eyes moved between them.

"You need combined magical input."

"Strong, varied input," Cassian said.

"The lattice has to match the complexity of what we're holding. One or two people can't hold it stable long enough. The malefication will adapt around them." Miranda folded her arms.

"And once it's still?"

"We introduce the correction," Bathsheda said.

"A sequence, it has to be precise. We're not destroying the malefication so much as overwriting the part of her magic that keeps generating it." Silence again. A long one. Then Nicolas said, "If the sequence is wrong?" Cassian didn't look away from him.

"The malefication accelerates." Cyrus stood up from his chair. Cassian held a hand up.

"Which is why we're here with this many people in the room, and why we're not doing anything today without your questions answered and your agreement given. Nobody is rushing this." Cyrus looked at Astoria. Astoria was watching Cassian. She hadn't moved since Bathsheda had started explaining.

"How precise does the sequence need to be?" Perenelle asked.

"Very," Bathsheda said.

"We've run calculations for three months. Nagini helped us map the distribution pattern. The sequence accounts for how Astoria's specific malefication has been behaving, not a generic version. Hers." Perenelle was quiet for a moment. Then she turned back to the parchment, and this time her expression had shifted into something closer to professional interest.

"Show me the containment structure," she said. Bathsheda pointed to the second diagram. Miranda moved closer to look. Dumbledore stood from his chair and came to the desk. Nicolas followed. The discussion stretched well past midnight that first evening, and then resumed the following afternoon after everyone had slept and eaten and, in Cassian's case, consumed an amount of tea that alarmed even Bathsheda.

Miranda worked through Astoria's malefication in a separate corner with Fleur and Selena, the three of them crowded around the diagnostic parchment Bathsheda had prepared. Miranda ran every standard test first, then a few others that weren't standard at all, cross-referencing the results against the diagram Cassian had drawn. Selena flagged two anomalies. Fleur caught a third. They called Miranda over, pointed, argued quietly for a few minutes, then agreed that Cassian and Bathsheda's mapping was accurate.

The malefication sat exactly where the diagram said it did, distributed across Astoria's body in a pattern that would've been invisible to anyone who didn't know what to look for. Miranda made a note and passed it along. Nicolas and Perenelle took the ritual itself apart piece by piece. They didn't rush it. Perenelle was the one who went straight for the containment lattice, pulling the parchment close and working through the structure with a quill and a cup of tea that she kept forgetting to drink.

Nicolas focused on the correction sequence, sitting back and walking Cassian through each step aloud, testing whether the logic held from end to end. It did, mostly. There was one section where the sequencing had an edge case neither Cassian nor Bathsheda had anticipated, and Nicolas caught it in about twelve minutes, which was mortifying. Cassian crossed his arms and said nothing while Nicolas explained it. Bathsheda took notes. They adjusted the sequence accordingly, and Nicolas didn't say anything more about it.

Cyrus and Belladonna read through the whole process separately, asking questions as they went. Cyrus wanted to understand each stage in full before moving to the next. Belladonna was less concerned with the mechanics and more concerned with Astoria herself, asking things like what she'd feel during the lattice, whether the correction would hurt, how long she'd need to recover. Cassian answered everything they asked, and when he didn't know, he said so plainly. Luna sat with Astoria through most of it.

At one point Cyrus asked her directly what she could actually see in Astoria's magic, and Luna thought about it for a moment before answering that it looked like a thread that had been spun into the wrong colour and then woven so deep into the cloth you couldn't pull it free without unpicking the whole thing. She said the correction, from what she could feel of the plan, should work more like replacing the thread before it got woven in, except in reverse, which was strange, but magic often was.

By the second afternoon they'd gone through enough of it that the room had shifted from guarded to something more workable. Miranda sat down. Nicolas stopped referring to his notes. Perenelle refilled her tea. Astoria's parents looked at each other.

"We agree," Cyrus said. Belladonna nodded.

They set up in the evening, when the castle was quiet and the corridors outside had gone still. The furniture in the office had been pushed to the walls. The rug had been rolled back. Bathsheda had drawn the containment structure on the floor in charmed chalk that glowed faintly blue when the light hit it. Astoria sat in the centre of it on a low chair that Cassian had brought in from somewhere. She was wearing plain robes. Daphne stood near the wall with Neville, far enough back not to interfere with anything.

Nagini had coiled herself in the corner. Luna stood just inside the ring, a few feet from Astoria, eyes half-closed. Cassian finished checking the chalk lines, straightened up, and looked at Perenelle.

"Ready?"

"When you are," she said. He glanced at Astoria. She looked back at him.

"Scared?" he asked.

"Yes," she said.

"Good," he said.

"Don't fight it. If something feels off, say so." He moved to his position at the edge of the circle with Bathsheda. Nicolas took his, then Perenelle, then Miranda, then Fleur, and Selena. Dumbledore stood opposite Cassian, hands at his sides.

"Luna," Cassian said. Luna breathed out slowly.

"I've got her," she said. The chalk lines brightened. Cassian raised both hands, and the white light began to build. The containment lattice rose upward from the chalk in arcs, filaments of magic that locked together overhead like the ribs of a lantern. Then the others added their magic to it, and the lattice thickened. Cassian felt it stabilise under the combined magic. The malefication inside Astoria stirred almost immediately, pressing against the walls of the lattice.

"Holding," Perenelle said.

"Confirmed," Nicolas said. Cassian focused on the correction sequence. He'd gone through it so many times by now that it felt like muscle memory, except it wasn't, because there was nothing routine about this. He found the edge of the malefication where Luna had marked it and began. Astoria gripped the arms of the chair hard. The malefication pushed back the way it always did, adapting, trying to shift. The lattice held it. Luna kept her eyes on it, adjusting, telling Cassian which direction it was trying to move.

He followed her. The correction sequence moved through the malefication the way a needle moves through cloth, finding the structure underneath. Astoria made a sound through her teeth.

"Stay with it," Bathsheda said, supporting Cassian, correcting when he fumbled. Luna's brow furrowed slightly.

"It's louder than I expected," she murmured. Then something changed. The resistance shifted sharply, folding in on itself, slipping sideways in a way that made no sense.

"Luna-" Cassian said.

"It's moving faster now," she said quietly.

"It knows what you're doing." The lattice trembled, the arcs overhead flickering unevenly.

"Reinforce," Perenelle said, sharper now. The others pushed more magic into the structure. It held, but only just. Cassian adjusted, following Luna's voice, but the pattern kept trying to rewrite itself ahead of him. For a moment, he lost the edge of it. Astoria gasped, her back arching in the chair.

"There," Luna said quickly.

"Left, no, not left, through." Cassian caught it again. Taking a deep breath. He didn't stop. He pushed the correction through it. Astoria cried out sharply, her whole body going rigid in the chair. Daphne took a step forward from the wall. Neville caught her arm. Daphne went still. The lattice trembled.

"Steady," Cassian said. Everyone steadied. He held the correction in place, threading it through the last of the root, and then finished the sequence. The malefication went quiet. Cassian lowered his hands. The white light faded. The lattice came down slowly, the chalk lines dimming as it dissolved. Astoria sat slumped in the chair, head bowed, breathing hard. Luna crouched beside her and put a hand on her arm.

"It's still," Luna said.

"The thread's gone." Belladonna crossed into the circle before anyone said anything and went straight to her daughter. Cassian stepped back. He let out a long breath and looked at Bathsheda.

"Well," he said finally, "that worked." Perenelle pressed her lips together, eyes bright. Nicolas sat down heavily in the nearest chair. Astoria looked up. Her eyes were wet, but her expression was something between exhausted and disbelieving.

"It's gone?" she asked. Cassian glanced at Luna. Luna nodded.

"It's gone," she said. Astoria made a small, disbelieving sound. Daphne let out a breath she'd clearly been holding and pressed her hand to her mouth. Neville closed his eyes briefly. Astoria made a sound that broke into laughter, and buried her face in her mother's shoulder.