Chapter 468 - 19: Instinct (Bonus - for 100 Power Stones)

Chapter 468: Chapter 19: Instinct (Bonus Chapter for 100 Power Stones)

"I don’t know where you stole that from, Miss Yimi..."

"I don’t steal things. I traded something for it." The little kitty planted her hands on her hips unhappily to make herself look more imposing.

Snape glared at her. "Traded with whom?"

"A cabinet." Yimi pointed toward the classroom.

"A cabinet?" The corner of Snape’s mouth pulled into a mocking smile. "And what did you trade to a cabinet?"

"Lockhart’s Magical Me," Yimi answered.

Snape could no longer smile. He felt personally insulted.

Yimi tugged on Snape’s robes again and pointed at the textbook. "Prince..."

"Miss Yimi, it appears you are still three or four years short of school age. I might as well give you a piece of advice now." Snape bent down and continued glaring at her. "I am not likely to die in the meantime. If you still intend to attend Hogwarts when the time comes, remember that your first lesson will be learning to respect your future professor."

"Professor Prince." The little kitty obediently added the respectful title.

"..."

Harry laughed from below, successfully costing Gryffindor ten points.

Snape was a half-blood. His father was a Muggle, while his mother was a witch whose surname was Prince.

Still, when he wrote "Half-Blood Prince" as a student, there really was a pun on being a half-blood "prince" in the phrase. That was also one of the main reasons Yimi calling him that annoyed him so much.

"Fine, don’t tell me. Why get so angry?"

Yimi was chased out again. The textbook was almost confiscated too, but fortunately she ran fast enough and put it back into her Storage Space in time to prevent a Summoning Charm from taking it.

Professor Prince seemed very unhappy that the little kitty had traded only one of Lockhart’s books for his own. Lockhart was a fraud, after all. Next time she came by, she would bring Professor Prince a bottle of shampoo instead.

She unwrapped a piece of toffee and popped it into her mouth to calm herself down.

Looking out through an upstairs window, she could see Hagrid still working below. Unfortunately, there was not much Yimi could do to help him. Tying the giant snake into a bow with her powers had already been the limit of her precision. If she tried to skin it that way, she might damage the meat, and doing it by hand wasn’t practical with her tiny arms and legs.

As she rounded a corner in the corridor, Yimi saw the reporter who had arrived earlier making muffled noises like a madwoman while desperately gesturing at her mouth to the photographer accompanying her.

Yimi had no idea what had happened, nor whether even mute people could work as reporters in the wizarding world. Chewing her toffee, she detoured around the woman and headed toward the stairs.

She still had not taught the flying cats how to speak cat today. Teaching them every single day—how was a kitty who did that not a teacher? She simply did not teach Defence Against the Dark Arts.

But her luck today did not seem quite as good as usual. Normally, she could step onto almost any staircase and somehow arrive where she wanted. Today, when she reached the top, she found only a portrait of a fat woman standing there, motionless and staring at her.

Yimi stared back without moving either.

"Ahem." The Fat Lady moved first. She coughed twice. "Password?"

"Password?"

The Fat Lady rolled her eyes. "Without the password, you can’t go inside. You don’t look like a student either."

"Inside where?" Yimi froze for a moment.

She had already explored the Chamber of Secrets. How could there still be parts of this school she had never discovered?

"The Gryffindor common room. I imagine you’re lost. You know, I’m not especially kindhearted, but you look barely half-grown. Stay right here and don’t move." The Fat Lady rolled her eyes at Yimi again, then left her frame, apparently intending to find someone elsewhere who could take Yimi away.

It was class time right now, after all. Normally, nobody would return to the common room at this hour.

Yimi thought back over what the Fat Lady had said and finally realized the biggest strange thing about this world—or rather, this school. The students seemed to spawn on schedule every morning. Yimi had never seen them leave school at the end of the day, yet she had no idea where they went after classes.

Gryffindor and Slytherin both required passwords to enter their common rooms, and the passwords changed periodically. Ravenclaw instead required answering a question, while Hufflepuff required tapping certain barrels in a particular sequence.

Strictly speaking, even a familiar seventh-year student could not be admitted without the password, while someone with the password might be allowed in even if they were a murderer, simply because the portrait followed the rules. The Fat Lady herself could also get grumpy if students returned too late and disturbed her sleep. Sometimes she even pretended their passwords were wrong to scare them, though she would eventually let them in.

Just as when she had discovered the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets, Yimi simply had The World punch the empty portrait. It opened automatically, exposing the passage behind it, and she saw the Gryffindor common room for the first time.

It was a fairly spacious round room filled with soft armchairs and tables, along with a noticeboard and an enormous fireplace occupying an entire wall.

Nothing particularly special, apparently.

Yimi sniffed the air and faintly caught a familiar scent, making her unconsciously purse her mouth into three little points.

She turned back into a cat so she could track the scent more precisely and began following it in one direction.

The little kitty found Harry and Ron’s dormitory. Nobody was there at the moment, so Yimi jumped directly onto Ron’s bed. One of his discarded shirts lay there, and a small bulge stuck out from its pocket.

Whatever was inside had clearly been startled by a vibration different from its owner’s usual movements when he climbed into bed. At first it tried to suppress its breathing as much as possible. Only after nothing else happened did a rat’s head cautiously peek out.

"Squeak squeak squeak squeak!"

It bolted, but how could it possibly outrun a cat—especially one that wasn’t an ordinary cat? Yimi brought down a paw and pinned it in place.

This rat was different from the others she had encountered. It gave off another kind of foul stench, one so unpleasant that the little kitty did not want to put it in her mouth at all.

She lifted her front paw and watched it sprint away. It did not even make it a meter before she caught up and gave the ugly rat another vicious smack.

Ever since she was born, Yimi had rarely shown the feline instinct to torment prey like this. Yet for some reason it emerged now, probably because she had no idea what else to do when she refused to pick the thing up in her mouth.

Keeping one paw pressed on it, Yimi said, "I don’t think you’d taste good, even stewed with red wine."

"Squeak squeak squeak squeak—" The rat frantically shook its head as though begging for mercy.

* * *

"Why did Snape react so strongly to being called ’Prince’? That expression of his... If the little kitty were already enrolled, he’d definitely have docked fifty points." After class, Ron was still discussing the matter with the other two.

Hermione noticed that at some point Ron had started calling Yimi "the little kitty," but she could not be bothered to comment anymore.

"You know," Harry said as an idea occurred to him, raising one finger, "could Snape have tampered with the Bludger? He’d love to see me make a fool of myself in a Quidditch match, wouldn’t he?"

"Harry, don’t forget that Snape was secretly protecting you when Quirrell was jinxing you last time," Hermione reminded him. "And didn’t you say yourself that the house-elf named Dobby was probably responsible?"

Quirrell had been the Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher before Lockhart. Unfortunately, he had been Voldemort’s puppet and was already dead.

The three stopped when they rounded a corridor corner, because they saw a deranged-looking woman clawing desperately at her own mouth while the potbellied man beside her tried to help without knowing how.

Ron waved frantically at the other two, signaling that they should take another route immediately. Unfortunately, Rita’s mouth finally recovered right then, and she noticed them too.

"Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived!" Rita instantly forgot about whichever damned student had put a nasty spell on her. One of the most newsworthy people imaginable was standing right in front of her.

"H-hello?" Harry did not really want to answer her greeting, but he could not help examining the woman.

Her hair looked like stiff curls. She wore jewel-studded glasses, and her fingernails were nearly two inches long and painted bright red.

Rita stepped closer and stared at him as though she had discovered buried treasure. "Would you like to have a little chat with me? You’ll look wonderful in the paper. Unfortunately, I’m afraid you won’t be the main subject of this issue."

"What do you want to talk about? Are you a reporter?" Harry stepped back, noticing the photographer behind her.

Rita pulled out a dark green quill. "Gilderoy Lockhart. As far as I know, he was dismissed after teaching at Hogwarts for less than half a year and has been accused of harming a student. What do you think of his qualifications as a professor?"

"He’s a fraud! He has none of the ability you’d expect from a teacher!" Hermione answered for Harry, becoming rather worked up at the subject.

Rita’s eyes visibly brightened. Her quill automatically recorded: Harry Potter believes Gilderoy Lockhart to be an incompetent charlatan unfit to teach, and even suspects that the deeds described in Lockhart’s previous books may have been fabricated...

"I didn’t say that!" Harry shouted angrily.

What was wrong with this woman? Though annoyingly, the quill had written something he basically agreed with.

"I hear he also hurt a student?" Rita continued asking.

"If you mean Malfoy, that was probably just an accident. I think what he tried to do to us was much worse, because he actually meant to hurt us," Hermione said more cautiously after realizing something was wrong with the interview.

The quill wrote: Harry Potter and his fellow students are deeply distressed. Their friend remains gravely injured due to Mr. Lockhart’s magical incompetence, and when they voiced their dissatisfaction, Lockhart attempted to harm them deliberately in order to conceal his mediocrity...

"You..."

Hermione wanted to object, but Rita looked at her with great satisfaction. "Yes, that expression. Quickly, get a picture, Bozo. This would make an excellent cover candidate."

The photographer behind her cooperated immediately, but at the crucial moment another object flew into the frame. A rat that had been tormented into utter despair was batted over by a cat paw.

"What is this ugly thing? Not photogenic at all." Rita looked at the photographer’s result with displeasure, walked over, and kicked the rat aside.

"Scabbers!" Ron hurriedly reached out to shield his pet rat and glared at Rita.