Novel Full Chapter 344: Father, Do You Know About the Manhattan Project?
Chapter 344: Chapter 344: Father, Do You Know About the Manhattan Project?
Orion set his teacup back on the desk.
"When casting, you have to hold the target in your mind as a single whole." Regulus’s gaze drifted to the stack of letters on the desk. "This pile. Dozens of envelopes, different sizes, different paper weights, some thick, some thin. But when you look at it, your mind registers one thing. A stack of letters."
He lifted his eyes back to Orion. "Lock onto that. Hit it."
Orion listened without so much as a furrowed brow. He understood this. Wizards had always worked that way.
Casting was casting. You had a target in mind, you aimed at it, and the magic handled the rest.
"A wall is a wall, a building is a building, an estate is an estate." Regulus continued. "No matter how many rooms are inside, how many walls, how many pillars, in the caster’s mind, it’s one thing."
Orion nodded.
For him, this wasn’t a threshold. It was closer to the natural state of spellwork.
But the next sentence caught him off guard.
"That cognition isn’t passive, though. It can be actively adjusted."
His brow creased.
"A building," Regulus said. "You can treat it as a whole and hit it, let the Disintegration Curse act on the entire structure. Or you can lock onto the foundation alone, hit the foundation, and let everything above collapse on its own."
Another example. "A mountain. You can lock onto the whole mountain, or just one face, and let that face shatter."
He held Orion’s gaze. "Cognitive precision determines the spell’s scope. The tighter the lock, the more precise the strike. The wider the lock, the broader the devastation."
Orion’s fingers rested on the rim of his cup, turning it slowly.
He’d always treated looking at a target and striking as a single, self-evident act. It had never occurred to him that the looking itself could be decomposed and used.
How large you perceived. How finely. At what scale.
Regulus had taken apart something he’d done for decades, and once it was open, there were moving parts inside.
"Everything I’ve described so far has a physical form, a boundary." Regulus’s voice carried on from across the desk. "Stone, walls, structures, mountains. They have outlines. They have edges. Locking onto them isn’t difficult."
A pause. "But what if the target has no clear boundary?"
Orion’s fingers stopped.
"What about a body of flame? A stretch of water? A mass of air? A gust of wind? Or even... a region of space?"
The crease in his brow deepened. His mind raced, sorting them into categories.
Bounded solids. Stone, buildings, mountainsides. Easy to lock, easy to strike. Immediately usable.
Visible but unbounded. Flame. You could see it, sense it. Locking on would demand sharper cognitive precision, but at least there was something to grip.
Formless and unbounded. Water. Another step harder. Defining the scope was itself a cognitive threshold.
Invisible and unbounded. Wind. Air. What would you even use as an edge?
Perhaps the air inside a sealed room, with four walls serving as the boundary. But that was a specific scenario. Move to open ground and the logic fell apart.
And space. That was too abstract.
He tried, in his mind, to treat the study’s space as a target and lock onto it. His cognition couldn’t reach it.
He could traverse space. He couldn’t frame it.
Not yet.
His expression turned serious. He understood now what Regulus had meant by far exceeded expectations.
This spell was directly tethered to the caster’s own capabilities.
Magical reserves determined the scale of destruction. Magical precision determined whether the spell could penetrate at all. Cognitive compression determined what could be treated as a target.
The stronger the caster, the stronger the spell.
Orion had seen more spells than he could count. Most had fixed effects. A flame spell produced fire. The Disarming Charm knocked a wand loose. The Killing Curse killed.
The caster’s strength determined how much power a spell carried, but never changed the spell’s nature.
The Disintegration Curse was different. It grew with its caster. In different hands, at different levels of mastery, it could be an entirely different thing.
Spells like that existed in the wizarding world, but they were vanishingly rare.
The Patronus Charm was one. The stronger the caster’s spirit, the more solid the Patronus.
Occlumency was another. The caster’s willpower determined the strength of the defense.
But those operated on the spiritual plane, tied directly to inner states.
The Disintegration Curse cared about none of that. It responded only to raw cognition and magical ability. No emotion involved, no spiritual prerequisites. Pure capability, tested head-on.
Orion was quiet for a long time. Then he raised his head.
His earlier judgment had been overturned.
Before walking into the study, he’d assumed the Disintegration Curse was War Magic. Powerful, useful, but functionally within known territory.
Now he realized it didn’t belong to any known territory.
It was a framework. What the framework could contain depended on how far the caster could go.
A spell that grew.
Regulus kept his tone light. "You asked about the ceiling earlier. If the caster’s magic is strong enough, reserves deep enough, intent sharp enough..."
He met Orion’s eyes. "In theory, this spell has no ceiling."
The study went quiet. A flame jumped in the hearth, a single pop breaking the silence.
A long moment passed before Orion gave a slow nod.
Regulus stood, amusement in his eyes. "Want to try?"
Orion looked up at him, then rose as well.
Regulus raised his right hand, palm up. Magic surged from within, pooling in the center of his palm. A structure began to materialize in the air above it.
The main trunk was thick and bright. Several tiers of branches split upward from the center, those branches splitting again into finer offshoots, the thinnest ends tapering to needle-point motes of light.
The whole structure resembled an inverted tree, roots above, canopy below. Every fork pulsed with movement, magic flowing along prescribed paths from trunk to tips.
Orion studied the model, gaze intent.
Unlike the utter alienness of confronting the Decomposition Curse, this time he could read the pattern at a glance.
"Branching tree structure." Regulus traced a finger along the model’s trunk. "Magic enters at the root, passes through two and a half circuit loops for modulation, narrows at the terminal nodes, compresses, then releases. The output carries oscillation properties."
Orion examined the model without rushing to act. He scanned the structure top to bottom first.
The trunk’s angle. The positions of the branch nodes. The thickness gradient at each tier. The compression ratio at the terminals.
In his mental space, he built a copy and fed magic into it.
The magic traveled half a loop through the trunk, reached the first branch node, split into the offshoot, and dissipated inside. Never made it through.
The branching angle was off by a few degrees. Once the magic entered the offshoot, it lost containment and scattered.
He demolished the copy, adjusted the angle, rebuilt.
Another run. This time the magic completed two and a half loops, reached the terminal, but the release point didn’t fire. Magic bottled up at the needle tip and flowed backward.
The terminal compression ratio was wrong. Too narrow. The magic couldn’t squeeze through.
He widened it by half an inch, ran it again.
Magic released from the terminal, but without the oscillation property. What emerged was ordinary, unmodified power.
The oscillation modulation at the nodes hadn’t been done right. The conduction layer and the oscillation layer had bled together.
He separated them. Outer layer for conduction, inner layer for oscillation.
One more run. Magic left the trunk, followed the branching path through two and a half loops, completed oscillation modulation at each node, funneled into the terminal, compressed, and fired.
What emerged carried an amber-brown tint, edges trembling.
He opened his eyes.
The model was built. Next came actual casting, but the compression window was the problem.
Wand in hand, he rehearsed the incantation internally, pre-running the wrist rotation’s arc and timing, confirming the window between the spell leaving the wand tip and contacting the target. Less than one hundredth of a second.
Regulus stood beside him, flicked a finger. A brass paperweight on the desk lifted, traced an arc through the air, and settled on the floor in the center of the study.
Not large. About the size of a man’s fist, surface polished smooth, the simplified Black crest engraved on its base.
Orion glanced at it, raised his wand, aimed.
Reversed overhand. Strike down. Half-inch wrist rotation at the lowest point.
"Quassare."
A beam shot from the wand tip and hit the target.
Fine shards of light splashed outward from the paperweight’s surface, as if something had detonated against the outside before the beam forced its way in.
The cracking from inside was shorter than expected. A thick fracture split the brass down the middle, but it didn’t shatter. It cracked. Nothing more.
Orion eyed the fracture line and frowned. Too slow on the compression.
The magic had still been in its diffuse state at the moment of contact. Most of it spent itself on the surface. Only a fraction penetrated.
He adjusted the wrist rotation, pushed the timing forward a bit, locked onto the paperweight again.
"Quassare."
This time no light splashed on impact. The surface was untouched.
Before he could so much as frown, a rapid, dense crackling erupted from inside the brass. Tight, rapid pops, not loud, but relentless.
Then the paperweight split from the center. The fracture faces were jagged, uneven. Seven or eight irregular chunks scattered across the floor.
Orion lowered his wand and stared at the debris in silence.
Then he raised it again, aimed at a flagstone near his foot. "Quassare."
This time he didn’t stop. Sustained output.
The beam struck the flagstone’s surface. A fraction of a second later, a muffled boom sounded from within. The surface bulged, and the entire slab disintegrated into powder and fragments, spreading across the floor in a flat layer.
He lowered his wand and regarded the remains. A faint, barely-there smile touched his face.
Regulus watched the results and nodded. "Well done, Father."
Orion looked up. Something amused flickered through his eyes, a look that said don’t patronize me.
His tone was easy, carrying a trace of humor. "The spell’s demands on magical control are high, but it’s not impossible. The compression step needs drilling. Speed and precision can’t coexist at first."
"A few runs and it becomes habit," Regulus agreed.
Orion walked back behind the desk and sat down.
He had the basic form now. Shattering the paperweight and the flagstone had cost almost nothing, standard output.
But Snell Rock, a granite island half the size of a Quidditch pitch, reducing it to rubble and sinking it, the magical reserves that would require, if not equal to his full capacity, couldn’t be far off.
Which meant Regulus’s current reserves, if they hadn’t caught up with his own, were close.
Orion leaned back in his chair and studied the boy across from him.
He remembered the last time they’d sparred in the training room. Half a year ago.
That bout hadn’t been easy, but it hadn’t been difficult either. He’d taken it at seventy or eighty percent.
Half a year. And the gap had already closed this far.
At this rate, the next time they crossed wands, winning wouldn’t come easily.
He watched Regulus, and something complicated stirred.
Pride, certainly. Across several generations of Blacks, this son’s talent ranked first without question.
A kind of wonder, too. Thirteen years old. This level. Say it aloud and no one would believe it.
And something harder to name. Like watching a kite he’d launched with his own hands climb higher than he’d imagined, the string still in his grip but no longer needed for pulling.
When the Decomposition Curse had been beyond him, he’d felt regret, but also a kind of peace. His son had reached a place he couldn’t follow. That was worth regretting, but unreachable meant the boy had gone further than his father, and what father had grounds to complain about that?
This time was different. He’d learned it. Beyond satisfaction, there was something more tangible.
One spell wouldn’t advance him as a wizard. He was fully formed. But it enriched his arsenal.
The next time a situation called for demolishing a hardened target, he wouldn’t have to grind through it with Blasting Curses layer by layer.
He looked at Regulus, wanting to say something, then decided he didn’t need to.
With the Decomposition Curse, what he’d felt was out of reach. This time, he’d touched it.
And not just the spell. What his son had handed him.
Regulus had never hoarded his magic. Space Warp, the Decomposition Curse, he’d explained them all, taught them hands-on.
Three spells. If they eventually entered the family’s Chamber of Secrets, they’d become new additions to the Black legacy.
These weren’t on the ancestral inventory. They’d been developed by the current heir’s own hand.
Under this generation, the Black family’s foundation had deepened another layer.
The investor got his return. The thought crossed his mind, and he nearly laughed out loud.
Two Whomping Willows, a hundred thousand Galleons at minimum, and now his son had not only created new magic but turned around and taught it to him.
He was still turning this over when Regulus spoke.
"Father."
Orion looked up.
The smile on Regulus’s face was wider than before, light in his eyes.
"What I just showed you is the spell in its completed form."
Orion’s interlaced fingers tightened a fraction.
Completed form. Meaning the initial state.
There was more above it.
Regulus’s tone stayed easy, but his gaze settled on Orion’s face and lingered a beat before asking: "Father, do you know about the Manhattan Project?"
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