Who let this Dementor into Hogwarts!

Chapter 134: Knockturn Alley Adventure (Part )
"It's an illusion."

Borgin said, pointing to a dirty crystal ball on a nearby shelf.

"The goods just arrived a few days ago. Do you want to buy them? No returns or exchanges."

"Still no." Lupin sniffed, his face red with cold. "I want to buy wolfsbane potion, but other shops don't have it - I remember a werewolf said you still have a few bottles..."

"Greyback told you?" Borgin said, as if he knew some inside information. "He sold it to me. Some foolish idiot thought they could stop it biting with wolfsbane potion—ha."

Bojin uttered a hideous laugh.

Greyback insisted on biting people even in human form. He was a madman - of course, as a werewolf he could be said to be very "self-disciplined".

"No, a friend of mine." Lupin was obviously disgusted with the name Greyback.

"Let me look..." Borgin went into the store's shelves.

Lupin looked around in his place and sniffed again. Cohen thought he smelled something - werewolf wizards tend to have a more sensitive sense of smell, and Cohen did have some "smell that didn't belong to this place" because there was still the smell of icing on Christmas donuts on Cohen.

"Thirty Galleons." Borgin returned and placed a sealed, dirty bottle of potion on the front desk.

"Can I have it on credit?" said Lupin. "I need it for my new job next month—"

"No money, no talk." Borgin's face turned cold.

"Only werewolves would buy wolfsbane potions," said Lupin sensibly. "Aren't they almost past their expiration date?"

"Mortgage." Borgin narrowed his eyes. "I don't believe a werewolf's empty words."

Lupin dug out an old photo and a worn pocket watch from his pocket - it had strong traces of magic on it, and someone had been charging it regularly.

He took the photo back and kept the pocket watch.

Cohen saw the Black family emblem, which should be something like a Christmas gift that Sirius gave to Lupin.

"It belongs to the Black family." Lupin said, "Don't sell it. I will come back to redeem it."

"Two years." Borgin accepted the watch and agreed to the deal.

Lupin disappeared out of the house with the potion, and Coin reappeared.

"I never like selling to werewolves." Borgin spat on the ground. "You never know if they'll end up in the gutter one day, starving to death, being killed by wizards, being bitten by their own kind..."

"He'll find a job," Cohen said, raising an eyebrow. "For example, as the Defense Against the Dark Arts professor at Hogwarts next year. But that doesn't concern me much. Let's continue with the Silver Key. Are they still at 77 Knockturn Alley?"

"This address is from seven years ago," Bogin said. "They moved away seven years ago, so they're selling it."

As he spoke, Bock pointed to a pile of objects in the southeast corner of the store.

"The cabinets, the tables and chairs, and the potion ingredients on them," Borgin said. "You can take them if you want. It will be deducted from the Burkes' half share."

Cohen walked over to the miscellaneous items left by Silver Key.

The most eye-catching thing is the old wooden cabinet. It is square and can accommodate several adults. The paint on it has long since fallen off, revealing the dark wooden interior.

Why does this cabinet look so familiar?

"The Vanishing Cabinet," said Borgin. "Anything put in it disappears, and from time to time rotten food and old student books appear inside."

"Interesting." Cohen didn't say what it did.

The Vanishing Cabinet has a silver key?

So why was the other one at Hogwarts? Had they infiltrated Hogwarts?
However, Cohen still planned to take this thing away later. A portal that could cross the protection mechanism of Hogwarts was not an ordinary thing.

Cohen's eyes moved to the table.

The table was covered with fine knife marks, and the exposed wood core was permeated with dark red marks. Someone had filled the table with blood, making it look extremely uncomfortable.

But the strange thing was that the table didn't have a strong smell of blood, but instead it was filled with...

"Sweet?"

Cohen smelled a sweet smell, like the frosted donuts he had eaten today.

Unicorn hair? Love potion?
Compared to the Vanishing Cabinet and the table that seemed to be soaked in human blood and aphrodisiacs, the bottles and jars on the table seemed much more "normal". Most of them contained soaked magical animal organs, and perhaps some human ones, but nothing particularly unusual.

"So I'll take it all?" Cohen said.

Bo Jin did not object, but just kept a record of the accounts silently.

Today, all of Cohen's spending is charged to his great-great-grandfather, Caractacus Burke.

Although he learned that the Silver Key had moved away, Cohen still had no plans to stop his activities tonight.

This small group has a huge underground warehouse, and this warehouse will definitely not be disposed of easily. Either the current owner does not know the existence of such a warehouse, or the current owner is still using this warehouse.

Magic always leaves traces - especially the carvings on the wooden table that Cohen saw. They didn't look like alchemy, but more like some kind of superstitious sacrificial patterns.

The Silver Key might even have carved something similar on the floor of the underground area. The fanatical madman would not miss any place where he could leave a mark.

It was late at night, and there was really no one to be seen in Knockturn Alley.

Cohen walked a long way deeper and finally saw the magic candle shop.

[Ever Bright Candle Store] This store was also lit. The store manager was a shriveled old man with completely white hair. He was dozing on a makeshift rag bed in the corner, with the stove crackling next to him.

[Soul Strength: 22]

"Snoring..."

The old man's snoring was deafening, and the sound of Cohen pushing the door open was drowned out by his snoring.

It's strange that a store like this in Knockturn Alley wasn't looted, but Cohen was invisible the whole time, so it wasn't a big deal.

The shelves in the shop were filled with candles tied together with ropes, ten silver Sickles a bunch, but the quality was obviously much lower than those magical candles at Hogwarts, and some of them were even a little broken.

It is obviously not appropriate to call this store "Eternal Candle Store" because it not only sells eternal candles, but also some special candles with strange shapes that are deliberately hidden in the shelves in the corner.

Some of them looked like human finger bones, some looked like red pillars of coagulated blood, and Cohen saw some fragile souls among them, but most of them had a soul strength of only three or four points.

Knockturn Alley is indeed not a place where ordinary people can open a shop.

"Who?"

When Cohen walked around the old shop owner and was about to go to the back door of the store, the old man suddenly got up.

But he saw nothing, looked around, and lay back down again.

Cohen waited for a moment, then carefully opened the back door and walked in.

The back of the store was converted into a small warehouse—and it was more than just a warehouse.

This room, which was about the same size as a store, was filled with boxes of candles on one side, a stove on the other, and even a simple toilet made of wooden boards.

Although small, it has all the necessary facilities. However, Cohen did not see any obvious trapdoor, and the door leading to the underground warehouse was hidden.

Cohen followed the traces of magic on the ground and searched all the way. It wasn't under the pile of boxes on the left, nor under the kitchen cabinet...

"Toilet? Does magic really have to be so disgusting…"

Cohen thought to himself.

The only place with a faint trace of camouflage magic was in the toilet cubicle.

But the good news was that unlike some entrances to the Ministry of Magic, this one didn't require one to flush down the toilet. After Cohen tried, another door appeared in the masonry wall.

Behind the door was a winding staircase leading downwards, with green torches on both sides that looked like sensor lights, as if it led to a dungeon where monsters were killed.

Cohen made sure that the old man didn't follow him, then walked into the entrance of the underground warehouse.

The toilet was built right at the door. If the toilet was built by the old man, it means that he knew the location of the warehouse.

However, this old man didn't pile up the goods in the underground warehouse, but chose to pile them in the place where he cooked and went to the toilet...

Either this old man is simply a new resident who has not renovated anything, or this warehouse is not suitable for storing things.

Cohen walked down the stairs and came to a large, dark, empty basement.

"Fluorescence."

Cohen lit the tip of his wand.

He instantly understood why the old man didn't put the goods in this "warehouse".

There was blood, not only on the walls but also on the ground.

The dark red blood left numerous thick drag marks on the ground, as if something was dragging the body around in circles in the warehouse—no, it wasn't spinning, but there were just too many marks, making it look like it was going in circles...

Cohen carefully distinguished the direction of the bloodstains. They were pointing towards the empty walls around, and at first glance, there were no doors on them.

But when Cohen got closer, when the light shone on the wall, a series of chained doors emerged.

The drag marks left by the corpses led to the doors.

Cohen didn't see the soul's strength through the door, which meant that the thing that killed people should no longer be here.

It left here with the Silver Key, leaving behind a mess.

Mundungus also mentioned that he saw many locked doors, but the Silver Key members would not allow him to approach.

What's behind the door?
Cohen was outside a door, trying to open it.

"Araho Cave is open."

The spell had no effect, a magical barrier blocking it.

I didn't mean to be so rough.

Cohen sighed and had no choice but to use that trick.

"Avada Kedavra!"

There was a flash of green light, followed by the sound of the chain exploding, and now the chain had come to an end.

(End of this chapter)