Chapter 462: Grindelwald's Report, The Scourers

"You'd better have a good reason." Dumbledore's expression turned cold as he stared at Grindelwald, who had suddenly barged in.

He had been doing his best to guide Wade so that such an outstanding student would not go astray in the future.

And then this bastard had stormed in and interrupted them.

So he had better have a good reason. Otherwise...

Without changing his expression, Dumbledore took out the Elder Wand and placed it on the desk.

Grindelwald ignored Dumbledore's murderous glare and looked at Wade instead. "Good, you're here too. Saves me the trouble of looking for you."

"Director, is there something you need from me?" Wade stood up and asked politely, at least on the surface.

"I found something about the people who attacked you." Grindelwald pulled over a chair and sat down without the slightest hesitation, making himself completely at home.

"That's unusual. You investigated for over a month and found nothing, yet now you suddenly have a lead?" Dumbledore asked in a low voice.

"Because these people deliberately let the information reach me," Grindelwald said.

As it turned out, over the past month, after failing to uncover anything useful, Grindelwald had begun relentlessly making life difficult for the pure-blood families.

If he did not know which family it was, then he would simply pressure all of them. Someone among them was definitely involved.

And the pool could not be very large. Only pure-blood families powerful enough to place their members in high-ranking positions within the Ministry of Magic would have been capable of helping plan an attack like that.

Only those people would dare deliberately manipulate public opinion and try to pin the blame on Grindelwald. No one else would have had the nerve.

So for more than a month, every official and employee from a pure-blood family working at the Ministry had been subjected to indiscriminate workplace harassment from Grindelwald.

Ever since he pushed through the Ministry's new recruitment policy, many members of the Alliance had entered the Ministry through examinations and gradually risen to high positions through their outstanding abilities and financial resources.

Once Grindelwald gave the order, the pure-blood families inside the Ministry found themselves facing constant obstruction. High-ranking officials, such as the Minister for Welfare, were personally targeted by Grindelwald.

After more than a month of this, anonymous tip-off letters finally began arriving one after another.

When those pure-blood families had first formed their alliance, they would naturally have contacted as many capable families as possible.

That meant there were bound to be some families that had received invitations but ultimately chose not to participate.

Those families might not know the deeper details, but they would certainly know some of the surface-level information.

And after being dragged into this mess for so long, they were bound to lose patience.

The others had joined forces to cause trouble, while they, who had not participated, were being punished along with them. How could they possibly endure that?

They might have been unable to reveal specific family names because of magical secrecy contracts, but there were still ways to hint at things indirectly.

Of course, Grindelwald did not simply trust the contents of those letters.

So...

He deliberately announced publicly that he had received reports, and even declared that when he eventually settled accounts, he would spare the families that had come forward.

In truth, such a trick was unlikely to fool these shrewd pure-blood families.

But no one dared take the risk.

What if they stayed silent while someone else reported them?

If they had actually obtained whatever they wanted from Wade, that might have been one thing. But the problem was that they had gained absolutely nothing. All their efforts had come to nothing.

Grindelwald's strategy was an open one. He was simply exploiting human nature.

And sure enough, another wave of anonymous reports soon arrived.

Even some pure-blood families with no connection to the attack, desperate to escape the constant pressure being placed on them, wrote down the families they suspected and anonymously sent those names to Grindelwald.

Among the enormous number of reports, Grindelwald really did uncover several useful clues.

He had roughly narrowed the suspects down to ten pure-blood families, though he still could not determine exactly which one was responsible.

More importantly, however, Grindelwald had confirmed the identities of the desperate criminals who had attacked the Hogwarts Express.

The families could be investigated slowly.

But now that those criminals had been identified, Grindelwald had no intention of letting them go.

"Then who were the people who attacked us?" Wade asked.

"The people who attacked you were Scourers," Grindelwald said in a low voice.

"Scourers? Weren't they wiped out long ago?" Dumbledore frowned.

"Yes... At least, that was how it appeared on the surface. Now it seems they were never completely eradicated. At least a small number of them must have remained hidden all this time. After lying low and recovering for many years, they regained some of their former strength."

Wade asked, "What are Scourers?"

"A notoriously vile group," Grindelwald explained. "They originated in America, though their members came from all over the world."

"They were originally a group of wizarding mercenaries," Dumbledore continued. "At the time, the Magical Congress of the United States of America had not yet been established, so they exploited gaps in law enforcement. Whether someone was actually a criminal did not matter to them. As long as there was a bounty to collect, they would hunt them down. Over time, they became increasingly corrupt and brutal. Eventually, they began trafficking wizards and even captured innocent Muggles, passing them off as witches and wizards to Puritan witch-hunters in exchange for payment.

"At least two of the so-called Puritan witch-hunters involved in the infamous Salem Witch Trials were Scourers. After that notorious series of trials, the Magical Congress of the United States of America was founded and issued international warrants for their arrest. They began hunting down and trying these outlaws who had betrayed their own kind.

"But the arrests did not go smoothly. Aurors found it extremely difficult to locate the Scourers who had gone into hiding.

"Later, by chance, several fugitive Scourers were captured, and a great deal of information about the others was eventually extracted from them.

"It turned out that they had formed families with Muggles and disappeared into the Muggle population. There were simply too many Muggles. As long as they did not expose their magic, no one could find them.

"Furthermore, if they had children with magical talent, those children would be abandoned outright. Only by doing so could they continue hiding without being discovered.

"Before they disbanded, they had even agreed to pass down their beliefs to their descendants. Magic was real, and any witch or wizard who was discovered should be destroyed.

"Although the Aurors learned how the Scourers were hiding, by then they had already vanished into the Muggle world. So even knowing their methods did little to help. The Aurors still had no way to track them down."

Grindelwald nodded. "Exactly. Although the Scourers appeared to have been eliminated, their descendants inherited their beliefs and caused quite a few incidents afterward. In America, the ban on marriage between Muggles and wizards exists because a descendant of the Scourers once became acquainted with a witch named Dorcus Twelvetrees. He coaxed a great deal of information about the magical world out of her and made it public, seriously violating the International Statute of Secrecy. That was why MACUSA later prohibited marriage between wizards and Muggles."

Wade immediately seized on the key problem.

"Then how could these Scourers suddenly reappear? If every descendant born with magical ability was abandoned, shouldn't the Scourers have completely disappeared into history by now? Even if a few were still hiding, they shouldn't have been capable of causing much trouble.

"But I remember the wizards who attacked the Hogwarts Express. They were hardly incompetent amateurs."

"People are never all the same, Wade," Grindelwald said. "Most of the Scourers fled, but that doesn't mean every one of them was willing to surrender. There are always people unwilling to give up what they considered an exciting and glorious way of life.

"Some Scourers did not abandon their magically gifted descendants. Instead, they passed their beliefs down to them as well. So although those descendants could use magic, they were raised to hate everything connected to it. Eventually, these people gathered together again.

"It's somewhat similar to what Muggles call antisocial personalities. A group of antisocial people gathered together and formed an antisocial organisation."

"How do you know all this?" Wade asked. "And that still doesn't make much sense. I was facing more than a hundred people that day. If the Scourers had grown to that size, how could they possibly have remained hidden until now?

"And why did you only manage to capture one instead of all of them? Couldn't that person have been deliberately left for you to catch, so someone could use the Scourers as a scapegoat and clear themselves of suspicion?

"Besides, given the Scourers' hatred of the magical world, why would they work with pure-blood families? And if they had already built up that much power, why would they wait until now to reappear?"

Wade felt there were still far too many suspicious points in the whole affair. He did not believe Grindelwald had failed to notice them.

Grindelwald snapped his fingers.

"Exactly. That's why I didn't believe the claims in those anonymous reports at first. But since so many of them mentioned the Scourers, I secretly set a trap myself without telling anyone.

"And I successfully caught one.

"He wasn't a core member, but I still learned quite a lot from his mind."

"That trap of yours sounds awfully convenient," Wade said, still sceptical. "You just happened to capture one relatively unimportant member, and the information you got from him somehow didn't allow you to catch anyone else. That's quite a coincidence, isn't it?"

There was still a very real possibility that this supposed Scourer had been deliberately allowed to fall into Grindelwald's hands after one of the pure-blood families had altered his memories.

After being tormented by Grindelwald for more than a month, if Wade had been one of those pure-blood families, he would have done the same thing.

All they needed to do was sacrifice a single attacker and have him deliberately walk into Grindelwald's trap.

"Do you really think I wouldn't be able to tell whether someone's memories had been altered?" Grindelwald asked.

Dumbledore frowned. "You mean his memories were completely genuine? There wasn't even the slightest sign of tampering?"

"But there's still the possibility that someone altered his memories in a way you can't detect," Wade said.

The magical world was neither especially large nor especially small. Even someone as powerful as Grindelwald could not possibly know every kind of magic that existed.

Who was to say that among the inherited secrets of those pure-blood families, there wasn't some method of altering memories without leaving any trace behind?

Grindelwald frowned and shifted in his seat.

Even Grindelwald had been rendered speechless by Wade's relentless barrage of doubts.

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