Chapter 49: This tastes wrong Professor Snape hurried in.
He nodded at Hagrid, who was guarding the door, and quickly stepped into the hut. His pupils dilated as he saw Amycus's familiar face, and he silently handed a vial of Veritaserum to Dumbledore.
Dumbledore took it and walked over to the chair, looking down with a grave expression at the Death Eater.
Amycus was now tightly bound to Hagrid's large wooden chair. His twisted face contorted as he let out a strange, muffled laugh at Snape, unable to speak clearly.
His earlier insults had been so vile that Professor McGonagall hadn't been able to resist casting a Tongue-Tying Curse on him, limiting his ability to speak.
Dumbledore removed the curse, pinched his jaw, and poured the Veritaserum into his mouth.
Then, he slowly stepped back, waiting with a solemn expression for the potion to take effect.
In the corner, Lockhart nudged Snape with his elbow and whispered, "Professor, why do we need Veritaserum?"
Perhaps realizing the question was too foolish, he added, "If we want to know something, can't we just extract his memory and throw it into the Pensieve to look?"
Snape, looking lost in thought with a gloomy face, didn't seem to be paying attention. Hearing his question, the corner of his mouth twitched slightly.
He turned his head and, seeing Lockhart's inquisitive look, could only explain, "Human thoughts are constantly erupting and mixing together, making it difficult to distinguish truth from falsehood. Memories of the past can even become multiple memories after being recalled under different mental states. It's all too complex. Memory is as chaotic and vast as the sea. We can't accurately find the part of the memory we need unless he willingly offers it."
Lockhart was taken aback. "No, is it really that difficult?"
Snape chuckled. For him, a master who could effortlessly use Occlumency in front of Voldemort without being detected, the answer he gave was the standard, irrefutable one.
He had that confidence.
Lockhart also had that confidence.
He looked at Dumbledore with some doubt, wondering if the great wizard who often used the Pensieve to sort through memories would have other insights. Perhaps Snape was just too weak?
Unexpectedly, Dumbledore heard their conversation, turned back, and looked at him with some astonishment, asking incredulously, "You mean to say, you can do it?"
He knew Lockhart's secret, that he had stolen the wisdom of so many people, but he hadn't expected him to be able to do this.
The magical world was like this; we never knew where some amazing things would pop up, and we should never underestimate others.
Professor McGonagall and Professor Snape both looked at him with surprise.
Lockhart blinked and shrank back somewhat innocently. "Maybe... can I try?"
It was a good suggestion.
But Dumbledore gestured to the empty vial in his hand, indicating that with the strength of Snape's potion, it should already be working.
He now only wanted to know one answer: "Tell me, Amycus, where exactly is Tom now!"
Amycus's condition was strange. He swayed slightly in the chair, a look of intoxicated infatuation on his face, just murmuring, "Tom? Who?"
Only then did Dumbledore realize that he had been too hasty and hadn't considered that many people might not know that Tom was Voldemort.
He asked in a deep voice, "Voldemort! Where is Voldemort?"
"Master..." Amycus murmured, "Master's condition is very bad. He needs someone to take care of him. My sister, Alecto, took him to the safe ancestral home..."
Alecto Carrow, Amycus Carrow's sister, became the Muggle Studies professor and Deputy Headmistress at Hogwarts after Voldemort's return.
A staunch pure-blood supremacist, she often used the Cruciatus Curse to punish students during her time at school.
"The Carrow family's ancestral home..." Dumbledore murmured.
Snape looked somewhat agitated and strode forward. "Dumbledore, this is an opportunity! They definitely haven't realized Amycus has been exposed yet. We should launch an attack immediately, while he's at his weakest!"
If anyone had revered the Dark Lord the most in the past, it was definitely Snape.
If anyone now hated the Dark Lord the most, it was definitely Snape.
At least for Snape himself, there was no 'one of' in that degree.
The world-changer he had determined to follow had killed the woman he loved most—Dumbledore had experienced such pain once as well.
Dumbledore knew Snape's feelings very well, but war couldn't rely solely on passion. He knew how cunning and dangerous Tom was.
He looked at Lockhart beside him and saw Lockhart stroking his wand with an eager expression.
Lockhart was also anxious.
Damn it, he had captured Amycus. Regardless of whether Voldemort would hold him accountable for this, Amycus, even if he wasn't executed, would inevitably face a life sentence in Azkaban.
Then Amycus's sister, Alecto, would definitely become the person in this world who most desperately wanted to kill him.
There was no point in constantly guarding against thieves.
He wished he could go back in time and kill Alecto right now.
"Let me examine his memory?" Lockhart proactively suggested.
Dumbledore nodded and stepped aside, watching him proceed with Snape and McGonagall.
Then they all gasped.
The scene before them was too horrifying.
As Professor Lockhart waved his wand, Amycus's entire body suddenly stiffened. Even his fingers curled straight upwards. His originally short and stout body seemed to have no neck, but now it was stretched out like a rooster being held up.
Strands of silver light continuously poured out of his head.
This bizarre scene looked as if Lockhart was forcibly pulling Amycus's soul out of his body.
Countless eerie silver threads extended from Amycus's head into the air, wriggling menacingly, like an indescribable monster.
And under this silver light, the glowing wand in Professor Lockhart's hand looked like a tentacle of an evil god descending, slowly sinking into this soul torn into thin strips.
Even Dumbledore, McGonagall, and Snape, who had experienced the long and cruel war, couldn't help but feel a chilling panic rising from their hearts.
It was a pity for the wanton manipulation of human life, a visceral fear of seeing one's own kind being wantonly played with before being killed, like a mouse instinctively terrified when it sees another mouse being played with by a cat before its death.
"No!"
"This isn't right!"
Lockhart murmured, as if an evil god was tasting the life of a creature, taking a bite and then spitting it out, cursing that the taste was wrong.
He turned his head urgently and saw the three top wizards of the current era all take a step back. He couldn't help but be taken aback, but he didn't think too much about it, just anxiously saying, "The memory of him and his sister taking Voldemort back to the ancestral home is wrong!"
"I don't have concrete evidence, but it looks so unnatural!"
"I suspect this memory might have been modified."
Modifying memories was very common in the wizarding world. The reason why a powerful potion like Veritaserum wasn't used as a direct means in court was because memory was really unreliable.
At least the law enforcement departments of various Ministries of Magic, the Aurors, knew this very well because they often casually modified Muggle memories. Sometimes, in order to hold a wizarding event and have Muggles come to sell them the goods they needed, it was very normal to modify a Muggle's memory dozens of times a day.
Voldemort was of course even more proficient in this. He had modified his own uncle's memory to make him take the blame for killing his own father and grandfather, and he had also modified the memory of the house-elf of the wealthy witch he killed to steal Hufflepuff's cup and Slytherin's locket, making the elf take the blame.
In both of these memory modifications, even though the Ministry of Magic was full of powerful wizards at the time, including Dumbledore in the Wizengamot, no one could find any problems.
"Can I take a look?"
Dumbledore drew his wand, which looked like a string of candied haws, and gestured. "If you allow it, I'd like to use a spell to assist you."
Lockhart nodded.
The spell had no light or shadow effects. Old Albus waved his wand at him, and he suddenly felt a blockage in his throat, quickly opening his mouth.
A thick smoke poured out of his mouth.
This smoke was so dense that it floated above the hall of the hut, as if it was about to cover the entire ceiling.
Within the smoke, a pair of siblings cautiously looked around, protecting a strange blood-stained swaddling cloth as they walked down a dark street. Not far away was their destination—the Carrow family's ancestral home.
[author]
I want to take a moment to express my gratitude to those who support me on this journey. Your contribution make a real difference!
As a patron, you unlock:
Exclusive Access: Get advanced chapters ahead of everyone else.
👉 Join now: patreon.com/Chaos_God
[/author]