Harry Potter and the Secret Treasures

Harry climbed the steep stairs, passing through the dim corridor, the light growing brighter before him.

“Nox!” he whispered, extinguishing the light from his wand.

Pressing himself to the corner, Harry poked his head out to look. Beyond was a spacious and magnificent hall.

Directly opposite the end of the hallway stood an ornate marble fireplace. The flames inside leapt merrily, but having burned for too long, the light they cast was not very bright. A crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling, and countless portraits adorned the dark purple walls, along with lavish decorations and magical objects whose use Harry couldn’t guess.

Even at Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place, Harry had never seen so much.

The hall was deserted; even the portraits on the walls were empty, only the frames remained.

An eerie, deathly silence and emptiness filled the hall, creating an exceptionally sinister atmosphere.

It was as if everyone had vanished in an instant; this place didn’t feel like a wizard’s manor, but rather a terrifying, suddenly abandoned place.

This scene was perfectly predictable.

It was exactly as Harry remembered; this was the very place where Voldemort had committed a massacre the night before.

Although the corpses piled on the floor had been cleared away, the air still reeked of blood.

Thinking of those bodies, Harry suddenly felt a strong urge to vomit, which he forcefully suppressed.

He had witnessed the massacre with his own eyes last night — he knew all too well what horrors had occurred here. But being here again in person was still terrifying.

Even the Death Eaters themselves would probably avoid this hall for quite some time!

Having realized this, Harry entered the hall almost without hesitation, quickly heading towards the shelf beside the fireplace.

According to Dobby, that was the location of the secret room in Malfoy Manor, containing many important items.

At the far end of this room was a dungeon where Ron was being held.

But Harry quickly stopped; something on the enormous table in the center of the hall caught his attention.

As if guided by fate, he walked over. On the table lay a huge blueprint.

The blueprint was large, showing the structure of a door.

This was the archway of the Death Chamber in the Department of Mysteries at the Ministry of Magic!

Almost instantly, Harry recognized it, though the door depicted on the drawing wasn’t quite the same as the one he’d seen at the Ministry.

The archway Harry had seen at the Ministry, standing on a stone platform, was incredibly ancient and dilapidated.

He’d once wondered how it could still stand.

A tattered black veil or curtain hung over the arch.

Though there had been no wind, it had swayed faintly, as if someone had just brushed past it.

But the door depicted on the vast blueprint before Harry was nothing like that. It was far more intact than the one he had seen at the Ministry — this seemed to be the door’s original form. The archway was adorned with elaborate carvings, and the hanging veil was intact, painted with a strange pattern Harry could not decipher.

The pattern was difficult to describe; it seemed to be some kind of creature, some deformed and terrifying monster.

Harry judged that the creature’s head, roughly where it should be, resembled a giant octopus, but with far more tentacles. Below the head appeared to be a body — a bloated, obese body with a vaguely human outline, though its curves weren’t human-like.

Soon, its form extended outward on both sides, as though a pair of strange wings were spreading from it.

At the very bottom, where legs ought to be, were enormous monstrous claws.

What on earth was this thing?!

If it was a living creature, Harry had never encountered anything like it. Then he suddenly remembered: Evan had said earlier that this door seemed to be connected to an evil god, which was why Voldemort and the Dark Witch wanted to open it. Could this creature depicted on the veil be that very evil god?!

Harry had seen a part of the evil god in Azkaban, supposedly the brain of the evil god transformed by Herpo the Foul.

But that thing looked nothing like the monster he saw now; he couldn’t make any further judgment.

He stared at the monster on the parchment for a while, then a gust of cold wind blew by, and he couldn’t help but shiver. Suddenly, as if affected by the eerie wind, the veil on the drawing swayed gently, exactly like the one hanging on the archway at the Ministry. Harry blinked hard; it wasn’t the wind at all. He clearly saw that it was the tentacles of the monster in the drawing moving, causing the veil to sway.

It was horrifying beyond words!

Staring at the monster’s image, Harry felt a moment of disorientation.

The monster was smiling at him, though he couldn’t even make out where its mouth was, but he had that feeling.

Harry quickly looked away, took two steps back, and broke out in a cold sweat.

Then, he noticed a passage marked in bright red ink next to the veil on the drawing — a very complex and difficult-to-pronounce incantation.

Slowly, softly, Harry read it aloud:

“For death is no boundary, nor do the fallen sleep eternally;

Turn, everlasting cycle, beyond the grasp of mortal endings!”

The incantation wasn’t finished, but it seemed to possess magic.

No sooner had Harry spoken the last word than there was a low hum, and in the center of the drawn archway a white glow suddenly appeared.

The archway had opened!

Harry heard someone speaking to him inside his head, the voice seemingly coming from within the archway, just like the one he’d heard at the Ministry of Magic. Although he couldn’t make out the exact words, Harry was captivated.

He moved closer to the table and slowly extended his right hand towards the glow at the center of the archway on the drawing.

His right hand touched the white glow, which began to slowly rotate around the center of the archway.

The glow gradually turned pale green, shimmering like starlight, with a scene at its center resembling an endless universe.

It was as if the door on the blueprint were connected to another dimension entirely, and a wondrous power was surging out from within the archway.

For a moment, Harry thought something would emerge from it — something creepy, something unspeakably dreadful, and a profound fear gripped him, but he quickly regained his senses. In the end, nothing happened. The archway on the blueprint wasn’t real and possessed no true magic; it was only something someone had drawn.

Perhaps the Dark Witch was using this method to show Voldemort the archway.

And the words Harry had just spoken were likely the very incantation the Dark Witch had been searching for to open the archway.