Harry Potter and the Secret Treasures

“Tell me, Kreacher,” Sirius clenched his fist and snarled loudly. “How can I get through here?”

“Need blood, young Master,” said Kreacher intermittently, pointing to a large, smooth-faced rock in front of Dumbledore. “Kreacher saw the Dark Lord spread the blood on the rock, and Master Regulus did the same at the time. He cut his arm, and then…”

Sirius stared for a moment, and didn’t seem to understand exactly what Kreacher meant.

Behind him, the expressions on Harry and Hermione’s face were full of uneasiness, looking at the rock in horror, as if something was going to crawl out of it. They heard Kreacher mentioning the blood, and they couldn’t help but imagine all sorts of bad images.

Unlike them, Evan stepped forward.

He stood behind Dumbledore and carefully observed the rock that Kreacher pointed at.

In fact, from the moment he entered the cave, he felt that there was a difference in that side, although the rock did not look any different from the surrounding rock wall.

However, Evan could feel something wrong. This feeling was ethereal. He didn’t know how to describe it, not in the sense of sight or touch, but in the sense that magic was more abnormal there than anywhere else.

It was like a normal light that suddenly broke at a certain position.

“All magic will leave traces, and you should use your heart to sense.” Dumbledore whispered, and he stepped back a few steps, and watched to see if Evan had realized it.

“Use my heart…” Evan did not know what to do.

He just instinctively felt that the magical reaction on the rock in front of him was abnormal, but he couldn’t say what the abnormality was.

Dumbledore did not just keep on watching, he used his wand to point to the rock in front of him.

For a moment, an arched outline appeared there, blazing white as though there was a powerful light behind the crack.

“You’ve done it!” Harry shouted cheerfully.

He had just fallen into uneasiness because of Kreacher’s words, but Dumbledore’s deed immediately raised a glimmer of hope within his heart.

Dumbledore was there, they didn’t want to spill blood on the rock at all, and now they could get through it without that.

But before the words left his lips, the outline was gone, leaving the rock as bare and solid as ever, and there was nothing on it.

“Professor”

“Kreacher is right; we really need to give blood to get through here.” Dumbledore looked at him and said calmly, “He thought he was successful, but it is so crude.”

“I don’t understand why we need blood to get through here,” Harry said doubtfully. “And, so crude, what does it mean?”

“Accurately, Riddle’s magic is asking us to make a payment; we must weaken ourselves to enter, so I said it was so crude.”

Dumbledore sounded disdainful, even disappointed, as though Voldemort had fallen short of higher standards Dumbledore expected. “Once again, Lord Voldemort fails to grasp that there are much more terrible things than physical injury.”

“Yeah, but still, if you can avoid it…”

“Sometimes, however, it is unavoidable; we have to deal with the rules of magic,” said Dumbledore, putting his uninjured hand inside his robes and drawing out a short silver knife of the kind used to chop potion ingredients.

“No, Professor”

Seeing Dumbledore raising his short knife, Evan, Harry, and Hermione rushed to stop him.

Everyone knew what Dumbledore wanted to do, but they didn’t know what to say. If someone had to bleed, they should choose one of them instead of letting Dumbledore do it.

“I’ll do it, I’m …” Harry rushed.

But someone was quicker than he was. Just as they blocked Dumbledore, Sirius had made up his mind. He quickly rushed to the side of the rock. The end of the wand flashed through, his arm erupted red, and the rock face was peppered with dark, glistening drops.

“Sirius” Harry turned his head slowly and couldn’t believe it. His face turned pale, and he rushed to Sirius in panic.

Dumbledore, Evan, and Hermione also hurried up. They saw that the wound on Sirius’s arm was very large, and a lot of blood was flowing out of control.

“You should let me do it, Sirius; your blood is worth more than mine.”

Dumbledore passed the tip of his wand over the deep cut Sirius had made in his arm, and the wound healed instantly.

“No, it must be done by me. This is for Regulus…” Sirius looked up and replied weakly. “Don’t worry about me, I’m fine. Is this blood enough? If you want, I can do it again.”

“I believe that’s enough.” Dumbledore looked at the changing wall and said softly, “The effect is very obvious.”

The blazing silver outline of an arch had appeared in the wall once more, and this time it did not fade away.

The blood-spattered rock within it simply vanished, leaving an opening into what seemed total darkness.

“Let’s go in, you’d better follow me and take out your wands,” Dumbledore said, passing the door.

Sirius, Evan, Harry, Hermione, and Kreacher followed him and walked in, hurriedly lighting up their wands.

In front of them, it was an eerie sight.

Although they heard about it before from Kreacher, the real scene they saw was more shocking than any words or imagination.

At that moment, they were standing on the edge of a great black lake.

The lake was so vast and endless that they could not make out the distant banks.

The cavern was so high that the ceiling too was out of sight.

A misty greenish light shone far away in what looked like the middle of the lake; it was reflected in the completely still water below.

The greenish glow and the light from the five wands were the only things that broke the otherwise velvety blackness, though their rays did not penetrate as far as they would have expected. The darkness was somehow denser than normal darkness.

It was hard to imagine that they were in the cavern inside the cliff.

Through that arch, Evan thought that they had come to a different space. He didn’t know how Voldemort did it. He couldn’t imagine how powerful it would be to transform an ordinary cave into what this looked like.

“Kreacher, Regulus’s corpse…” Sirius suddenly said, in a strange voice, not the usual shouting, but rather with a hint of sadness, “Tell me where his body is.”

“There is an island in the middle of the lake, young Master.” The tears flowed out of Kreacher’s big eyes uncontrollably. He whimpered as he wiped his tears. “Kreacher was there back then; Kreacher saw Master Regulus being dragged into the lake by the hands of the Inferi.”