Hogwarts: I graduated before the system came

Chapter 435: The person erased by history, the non-existent wizard!

"How did you sleep?"

Bill didn't look back, and without stopping his hands, he carefully stuffed a roll of ancient-looking parchment into a special waterproof tube in his bag.

"Like being hit by a petrification spell."

Douglas went to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water.

"That's good. You need to be in good spirits today."

Bill zipped up his tool bag and turned around, his face showing an expression of uncontrollable excitement.

"Are you ready for your surprise?"

"Just don't be another mummified cat baring its teeth at me."

Douglas leaned against the door frame, drinking water.

Bill laughed and took a cowhide water bag from the shelf in the corner and threw it over.

"Here, there's iced lemonade in it. I cast a temperature-control and a cleansing spell on it."

Douglas caught the water bag and felt it was cool in his hands, which was particularly comfortable in this dry morning.

"Where are we going? Do we need a flying carpet?"

"No, it's too conspicuous." Bill picked up an ordinary-looking Muggle car key and twirled it around his fingertips. "Those tracking spells cast by the Ministry of Magic are like fireworks in the dark sky over Egypt. Let's go by land and keep a low profile."

He pointed downstairs:

"I got a muggle buggy. It works great, but it's a bit old. Sometimes muggle stuff works better than magic."

Douglas strongly agrees with this.

The chilled lemon water slid down my throat, washing away the dryness from waking up.

Douglas swung the water bag's leather strap over his shoulder and followed Bill out the door.

An army green Land Rover was parked in the yard. The paint was faded in many places and there was a long scratch on the door. It looked like a beetle that had rolled in the desert for too long.

Douglas sat in the passenger seat. The leather of the seat was so hot from the sun that he shivered.

Bill started the engine, and the car coughed a few times like an old camel before moving reluctantly.

The Land Rover drove away from Cairo, and the city turned into a swaying heat wave in the rearview mirror.

An endless sea of ​​sand spreads out before your eyes.

"So, where is my surprise hidden under the sand?"

Douglas squinted his eyes and looked at the monotonous yet magnificent scenery outside the window.

“Surprises require preparation.”

Bill grinned, and with his free hand, he fished the thin volume made of papyrus fragments from a well-protected suitcase in the back seat and tossed it into Douglas's lap.

"Take a look at this first."

Douglas took the booklet, and his fingertips felt the dry and fragile touch of ancient paper.

The cover is a time-lapse disaster scene.

The papyrus dates back to the Fourth Dynasty BC, but the adhesive is nineteenth-century beeswax. The handwriting imitates hieratic script, but a few Hellenistic symbols are clumsily mixed in.

"A fake fairy tale book?"

He turned a page and a distinct smell of dust and Nile silt filled his nose.

"SB, I didn't know you had a habit of collecting high-quality fakes."

“I felt that way at first.”

Bill drummed his knuckles on the steering wheel, his voice filled with irrepressible pride.

"But the forger made an interesting mistake: he was too particular about the materials he used."

He glanced at Douglas and said, "Touch the paint."

Douglas followed his instructions, twisting the gray-green pigment between his fingertips. He closed his eyes and felt it for a moment, then raised his eyebrows. "This is the sedimentary layer of the Giza Plateau, and it's silt collected around the twelfth day of the flood season."

Bill slammed the steering wheel so hard that the car jolted. "I knew I couldn't fool you! A con man went to so much trouble to obtain magical materials from a specific time period, just to forge a worthless fairy tale book? Don't you think that's a clue in itself?"

He spoke almost boastfully about his five-month obsession.

"I first saw it in Khan el-Khalili market, on a stall selling ancient Egyptian souvenirs to Muggles, tucked away among a pile of gilded scarabs and cheap alabaster statues."

"You paid for a fake, and then spent five months proving it was a special fake."

Douglas chuckled.

"Is Gringotts paying too much?"

"The point isn't what's real, it's what the forger wants to hide!"

Bill yanked the steering wheel, and the car lurched around a huge, wind-eroded rock.

"This fairy tale book is a code book, old man. Look at 'Whisper of the Nile'. The girl wearing the lotus crown is the daughter of the river god Hapi in ancient Egyptian mythology. The mud she spread was not ordinary mud, but 'Kebet', the soil of life."

Douglas opened his notebook.

It was densely written with words, interspersed with scribbled sketches and symbolic analyses.

There are labels of different colors on the edges of the pages, which read "Physical Evidence", "Mythology" and "Geography" respectively.

He saw a page where Bill had sketched seven clay pots from a fairy tale book in ink. Next to them, he had drawn four authentic ancient Egyptian canopic altars in red pen, and written heavily below: "Seven vs. Four? A variation on folk belief? Or another purpose?"

On another page, he compares the description of "Silent Balm" with the recipe for a sealing potion in "Powerful Potion," with the following notation: "Silt (base?), Stardust (magic amplification?), Alligator Tears (emotional medium?)."

"Seven pots," Douglas said, pointing to the sketch. "That's odd, since Horus only has four sons."

"I knew you'd notice this!"

Bill's excitement practically overflowed from the car window.

"The Pot-Hungerer and the Green Lizard mentions seven pottery urns, which is strange. Ancient Egypt had only four ritual burial urns, or canopic altars, guarded by the four sons of Horus. The number seven wasn't common in official theology at the time; it more closely resembled the folk concept of soul containers from the Middle Kingdom."

The Land Rover's wheels creaked over the gravel, as if providing a rhythm for Bill's narration.

Douglas's mouth curled up slightly, as if he was thinking of someone, and he said softly:

"Despicable Herpo? They had frequent exchanges with ancient Greece during the Middle Kingdom."

Bill stared at the road ahead and nodded. "Yes! This is very interesting."

"So, a liar pursuing perfection and a seemingly plausible ancient fairy tale caught the attention of Gringotts' top curse breaker." Douglas took over.

"That's right!" Bill slapped the steering wheel. "I bought it for fun. But the more I look at it, the more I feel that there is a wizard behind it, whether it's ancient Greece or ancient Egypt..."

He glanced at Douglas and continued:

"So the first thing I did was to check our records. I looked through every archive I could find, the Gringotts files on the Curse of the Ancient Barrow, and every single copy of the history of magic in Africa and the Mediterranean."

"The results of it?"

"Not a single word."

Bill's tone dropped.

"In our world, he doesn't exist."

Chapter 436 The wizard who was erased from history, the shadowless priest!

"A wizard completely erased from history."

Douglas' tone was more interested.

"This is much more interesting than finding a famous wizard."

"That's exactly what I was thinking!"

Bill's voice rose again.

"I was stuck in a dead end, making no progress for a month. Then one night, I was looking at that fake fairy tale book and it suddenly occurred to me - if you want to hide a wizard's story from the wizarding world, what's the best way to do it?"

He didn't wait for Douglas to answer.

"Just write it as a Muggle story and throw it into Muggle history! No one would go through a pile of Muggle old papers to look for traces of a powerful wizard."

"And then you just dove into the basement of the Cairo Museum?"

"And the Library of Alexandria."

Bill shook his head, as if recalling those difficult days.

"Do you know how dull the records of Muggle archaeologists are? I almost thought I was crazy, chasing a hallucination caused by a forgery."

Douglas continued to flip through his notes and came across a page dedicated to summarizing key words.

"Morning dew, resin, blue lotus, astrology, Horus with his eyes closed..." he whispered. "You have unraveled all the clues in this story."

"Yes, I regard them as codes. I believe these recurring natural elements are the medium through which the wizard casts his spell."

"Then I found a copy of a Muggle archaeological document - the 'Archaeological Records of Dahshur'."

Bill's speech speed increased, as if he had finally reached the most exciting part.

"There's a map on it, drawn by a French expedition in 1898. Just west of the Bent Pyramid, there's a sand dune. Its outlines are exactly like the arrangement of the seven stars in the illustrations in this fairy tale book! There's also a line of Arabic written in pencil next to it: ?????????????"

"Melting Moon." Douglas whispered the translation.

"Yes, that's the ancient name the local Bedouins use for a total lunar eclipse."

Bill's tone was almost sing-song.

"At that moment, I knew that this fake fairy tale book pointed to a real place."

Douglas raised an eyebrow.

Bill slowed down a bit, and the desert wind blew in through the half-open window, blowing his long hair.

"This book is the key. It opened my eyes to the fragments of history that have been ignored. A name called Ankh Ka, Priestess of the Shadow Realm."

He began to tell stories that he had pieced together from papyrus fragments and folk traditions.

“He’s not in the official inscriptions, he’s like a ghost.

Legend has it that he was the Pharaoh's Silencer, specializing in dealing with spiritual disturbances that were not suitable to be recorded in official history.

He used no complicated spells, only the most primitive natural elements—Nile mud, morning dew, crocodile tears, and tree resin.”

"Sounds like a druid proficient in herbalism, not an Egyptian priest," Douglas commented.

"It's this unusualness that fascinates me," Bill said. "Legend has it that he has seven clay urns that contain the spirits of the desert. He can use them to guide people in sandstorms and purify polluted well water. He can even use a silencing ointment to silence the footsteps of an army."

The car stopped on a relatively flat piece of sand.

Bill turned off the engine, and the desert instantly returned to its eternal silence, with only the wind whispering in his ears.

"The craziest legend is 'The Stowaway of the Reed Plains'."

Bill turned his head and looked at Douglas seriously.

"The story goes that he infiltrated Osiris' underworld in order to resurrect a woman and made a deal with Anubis."

"What was the deal?"

"His shadow."

Bill lowered his voice, as if afraid of being heard by something in the desert.

"He used his own shadow as collateral in exchange for the temporary return of the woman's soul. Therefore, there are no carvings or murals of his shadow in Ankh Ka's tomb."

"Trading shadows for souls, this deal sounds like a big profit." Douglas touched his chin.

Bill laughed, knowing Douglas would always find the trickiest angle.

"So, our surprise today is to visit the home of this Shadowless Priest?"

Douglas shook the notebook in his hand.

"bingo."

Bill took out a piece of obsidian from the storage compartment. The stone was polished like a small black mirror. Next to it was a small glass bottle with a few drops of turbid liquid in it.

"The entrance to Ankh-Ka's tomb is a natural, wind-eroded rock with the closed-eye Horus symbol carved into it. Legend has it that the symbol's left eye can only be opened on a full-moon night by touching it with obsidian soaked in crocodile tears."