Chapter 447 - Tagging Along With the Old Man Pays Off

Chapter 447: Chapter 447 - Tagging Along With the Old Man Pays Off

Edgar’s humanity was something that shone. Kindness, resilience, loyalty, a stubborn refusal to hurt anyone.

That was what Dumbledore had lit. But humanity was far more than that. Greed, envy, hatred, cruelty, paranoia, fear, brutality, selfishness, control, sadism. Those were human nature too.

Everyone had a dark side. Some held it down with reason, some bound it with morality, some sealed it away so deep that even the host didn’t know it was there.

But what if you found one of those buried evils and then light it.

The evil would grow inside the shell on its own and form a new balance with the host. He wouldn’t feel anything was wrong, because it had been his all along. It was just held down before, and now it was let out.

Take a die-hard Death Eater, head full of Pure-blood fanaticism. Protect that fanaticism, light it, amplify it, and he’d become an even purer believer. But that wasn’t bad enough.

Try a different direction. Light his fear of Voldemort instead. Would he flinch at some critical moment, or even betray? Light his envy toward a colleague. Would he stab someone in the back?

Amplify something that was already in a person’s heart and he wouldn’t feel manipulated. He’d only feel he’d finally found his true self. He might even say thank you. Far cleaner than the Imperius Curse, and far more thorough. The Imperius Curse was external control. It left traces, it could be discovered, it could be resisted.

The reverse worked too.

Even an evil man had soft corners in his soul. A childhood memory, someone’s smile, a moment his hand had faltered, crushed at the very bottom under hatred and grudges and self-interest.

Dig them out, protect them, light them, let them burn. Make a mass murderer suddenly remember a cat he’d kept as a child one late night. Remember it until his heart ached, until his hands started shaking, until he couldn’t lift his wand.

The corner of Regulus’s mouth twisted.

What Guardian will protected had nothing to do with light or dark, let alone good or bad. Those were divisions people made up themselves. Human nature was born with two faces, and he could choose which one to protect, which one to light, which one to amplify. He could even protect one part while suppressing another, changing the balance inside a soul.

An interesting extreme hypothesis.

He couldn’t manage Dumbledore’s ignition trick yet. That road was too long. But he could take a different route.

Light source magic could implant a thought, but once implanted it couldn’t withstand being cleared out by reason. Guardian will could protect something that already existed, but couldn’t create it from nothing.

Put the two together, each handling one stage. Light source plants the false thought, Guardian protects it so reason can’t clear it away. It would sit in the shell, growing together with the real ones, and after long enough you couldn’t tell them apart.

He already had a foundation in Light source magic. Implanting false information had been tested on Bella. It just didn’t work directly on creatures with intelligence. Merge the two paths into one, and there was a lot more he could do.

These ideas had only just come up tonight. He hadn’t thought them through, but he had a direction.

He’d find some lucky wizard to try it on later.

Tagging along with the old man really did pay off.

He pulled back from these scattered thoughts.

Dumbledore took out his wand, and Regulus’s eyes followed.

A fairly long shaft, light in the hand, very old, the surface worn to a warm sheen.

Not the Elder Wand.

Dumbledore turned, eyes blinking, then raised the wand and circled it once above his head. Relaxed and casual. No incantation, just a full arc of the wrist.

Dozens of tiny points of light scattered from the tip and sank silently into every werewolf. The ones biting, the ones howling, the ones rolling on the ground, the ones chasing their tails. Each one caught a point, and not one of them reacted.

Regulus swept over them with Magic Perception.

Tracking magic.

The points had attached to each werewolf’s magical core. Tiny, hidden, not interfering with any function, impossible to find with ordinary detection. They’d only activate when a werewolf’s magic changed, a shift in location, a change in numbers, an abnormal fluctuation, and then send the change out. When the camp expanded, when it moved, when Greyback left.

The old man really was thorough. One trip, check on Edgar, and collect intelligence on the way out.

Regulus understood his approach.

Breaking up this camp wouldn’t have been technically difficult at all. But it couldn’t be done. Greyback would gather a new pack, bite more people, and set up somewhere else. As long as Voldemort was around and the Ministry kept doing nothing, the werewolf population could always grow. Werewolves were the kind of thing you could have as many of as you wanted. The hard part had only ever been managing them.

Besides, Dumbledore didn’t hold back on a battlefield, but this wasn’t a battlefield. Most of these werewolves were victims. Killing them would be punishing the victims, and there was nowhere to lock them up either. No prison could hold sixty-odd werewolves. Azkaban wouldn’t take them.

And a camp wiped out overnight would tell Voldemort the Order had started going for the kill. He’d throw everything into building his army, churning out werewolves with no regard for losses, and accelerate the war. One camp in exchange for the war breaking out early in full. That didn’t add up any way you did the math.

Strategic patience. Dumbledore was very good at that.

And sixty-odd werewolves were Voldemort’s resource, but they didn’t have to be only Voldemort’s. Greyback was the head, but the pack had people like Edgar. Forced in, still holding their humanity, possibly open to turning. Not every werewolf embraced the beast the way Greyback did. Many were only here because no place else would take them in.

With some deliberate intervention, Edgar could become a foothold inside the pack later on. They didn’t need to turn everyone. Just a few key nodes, and the Werewolf Army would no longer be a solid block.

Of course, that was for the future. It needed time, luck, and Edgar holding on himself.

And there was the most important problem of all. Voldemort would trace the source of the information.

The only people who knew this camp’s location were inside the Death Eaters. Lucius was the handler. Lucius had brought him here. Greyback had seen his face.

If Voldemort found traces of Dumbledore’s magic here, even a hint, he’d work backward. Who leaked the news, who had recently dealt with werewolf matters, who knew the location. Lucius Malfoy’s name would come up. So would Regulus Black’s.

There’d be no proof, but Voldemort didn’t need proof. In his logic, suspicion itself was a crime.

The Black family’s position right now was delicate. Openly on Voldemort’s side, quietly keeping a line open to Dumbledore. The moment Voldemort suspected, that line would have to be cut, and once it was cut the family’s strategic flexibility in the war was gone.

So tonight, not a single trace could leak.

Dumbledore was skilled enough. The tracking magic was blended deep into the werewolves’ own magic, never triggering, never showing itself. An ordinary Death Eater could come here and see nothing, and Voldemort wouldn’t come himself. He couldn’t even be bothered to see his own Death Eaters, let alone go to an abandoned mining village to smell werewolf piss.

Of course, if Regulus took matters into his own hands and burned this pack himself, like last time, one clean blast of Fiendfyre, that was another story. Voldemort would be angry, would think the Black family’s whelp was being reckless. There would be punishment, but nothing serious.

He was practically the poster boy for young wizards in Voldemort’s camp, and to a large extent, how Voldemort treated him was how he treated every Pure-blood heir. A thirteen-year-old heir, strong enough, with a big enough temper. What was burning a werewolf camp?

A matter of face, and face could always be smoothed over. But there was really no need. Not now, at least.

Dumbledore put his wand away and glanced at Regulus, a question in his eyes.

All done. Shall we go?

Regulus gathered his thoughts, tugged the corner of his mouth, and nodded at the old man.

The two of them walked toward the edge of the camp, skirting the gray shapes chasing and biting each other. Moonlight fell over the wasteland, and the hills rolled on in the distance.

At the edge, Regulus looked back.

In front of the broken wall, the gray wolf crouched where it was and lifted its head to look at the moon. Its tail swept lightly across the mud, then curled back around its front paws. It lowered its head again and stayed quiet.

Regulus turned away. Dumbledore held out his arm, and Regulus took it.

Crack. The two of them were gone.

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