A/N: Thank you for those who had read my prologue, hope you enjoy this one also. I had debated with myself while developing this story for months about when to send Harry back, as the chapter below indicates, I have settled on just before the end of the second year.

Please let me know what you think about the story, I am happy receive criticism and suggestions. Thank you.

Again, I would like to thank texan-muggle for diligently correcting my mistakes and educating me on how to avoid the same mistakes in the future.

Legends

"Speech"

Thoughts

"Mind Communication"

§Parseltongue§

[Speech in Foreign Language]

Incantations

Scene 1 – Rebirth

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry,
10th May, 1993

Death's last words to him echoed in his mind; he decided not to make much of it. Harry found himself in a black void. Time seemed to be irrelevant here; it could be a millisecond, or it could be an eternity, before he could see again. He found himself to be incorporeal, as a soul without a body, standing next to a four poster bed.

He immediately recognized the room to be a Gryffindor's dormitory; judging by a book lying on the floor, Harry concluded it was the dormitory for second-year boys. And from Neville's and the traitor Weasley's snoring, Harry concluded it was well after curfew. Harry could tell his younger self was in the bed right in front of him, behind the curtain. As he was incorporeal, he walked right past the curtain and saw his younger self. He looked so young and so fragile. He seemed to be troubled even when asleep, and it was time for him to put a stop to that.

The moment the incorporeal Harry Potter contacted his younger self, his older soul was sucked into the younger body.

Centuries of hunting dark wizards led Harry to become very cautious of his surroundings; the first thing he did after returning to his twelve-year-old body was familiarising himself with where he was and checking what was around him and if there were any threats. Harry kept his eyes closed and sent out a pulse of his magic. His magical pulse acted like a sonar, and was reflected back to inform him of his surroundings. The sonar didn't work as well as it used to; despite retaining the vast amount of knowledge he gathered during his four centuries of past life, Harry seemed to need to train his younger body to relearn how to command magic like he used to. Nevertheless, he got enough information to confirm that he was lying in his bed in the Gryffindor's second-year boys' dormitory, and six magical people were sleeping in the room, including himself and the rat form of Peter Pettigrew.

Harry started to check himself over; his eyes remained closed. First, Harry checked his Occlumency; damn, alarms were going off all over the place. All that was left of his Mind World was the shell of his memory palace and a mostly destroyed control centre. All his defences and contingencies were gone; he would have to rebuild all that again.

Harry then found a series of complex charms used to stunt his mental capacity; normally, he would have to see a Healer about it, but with his advanced Mind Magic capabilities, even with a mostly destroyed Mind World, the blocks were already dissolving slowly. Harry decided to deal with the charms later if they were still not fully dissolved; first he needed to check the rest of himself. For now, Harry disillusioned his memory palace, threw a massive invisibility cloak over his mind and added a beater bat for active defence.

Harry dived in further to find his magical core, or should he say, cores. He found both his younger self's very powerful but bound core and his older, even more powerful unbound core. Unlike in physics, where opposites attract, in magic, it was the other way round. Given the two cores were essentially the same core from different time periods, they were in the process of fusing as one. It really didn't make much difference to Harry's older more powerful core, for it was about a hundred times more powerful than his younger core without the bindings.

Once the two magical cores were fused together, Harry found the bindings that used to surround the younger core, now surrounded the much more powerful fused core. Of the thirteen layers of bindings Harry found around his core, only one was placed by his parents; the rest were all placed by the manipulative old bastard. Clearly, he needed to fix that. This time, he would choose carefully how to make use of all that magical backlash; Lady Hogwarts could definitely make good use of some.

Harry carried on checking his magical core; all the different colours represented the seven elements he now could manipulate. An area of grey patch represented his parselmagic, and the bright white remainder showed off his untainted core.

Harry then found the branches leading off from his magical core, draining power from it. With just over 0.012% of his magical core available, a third was draining to keep his parents and unborn sisters alive in stasis, a quarter was draining to power the wards in 4 Privet Drive as well as all the monitoring charms on him and a quarter was draining to sustain the Horcrux in his scar. This left him with only 0.002% of his magical core to use; even then he was still above the average British wizarding population without the boost from his older magical core. Harry was fully aware of how powerful he would become once he dissolved the bindings and shook off all these burdens. Hell, he lived with that much power for nearly four centuries. This was why he desperately needed to get his advanced Mind Magic capabilities back to what they used to be, so he could control his magic.

There were other branches indicating the oaths and contracts he was linked with, including those made by his godfather and godmother, but that was for another day.

However, Harry discovered something else literally made his blood boil. He found some branches indicating the use of blood magic. Upon further exploring, Harry found each of these branches was used to monitor a particular aspect of him: his location, his health, his magical core, his mental state and the Horcrux that was in his scar. It was then Harry made the connection to all the silver trinkets in Dumbledore's office; he would have to find a way to destroy these monitoring devices.

Harry then let himself become one with his magic and looked outwards to find his soul; he had learnt how to do this during one of his travels in North America, where a Native American tribe leader taught him this to help him keep himself in check. As the saying went, 'Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.' Harry wanted to make sure he didn't become another Dumbledore. A bonus of this was, Harry could now find all of his animagus forms, as all their spirits lived in his soul, but that was a story for another day.

Harry first found his younger soul; he felt the characteristics of it: innocent, lonely, brave, pure and filled with hope. He then switched his attention to his older soul; again, he felt its loneliness, its bravery. But, its innocence was replaced by experience and cunning; its purity was largely retained, but tainted with a vengeful fire fuelled by his loss; and instead of being filled with hope, his older soul was immersed with lost and sorrow.

As the two souls merged to become a new soul, it recognized the second chance being given, and took the best of both souls. Harry immersed himself in his new soul, its bravery, its cunning, its experience and its purity. The vengeful fire was replaced by a sense of righteous justice, the loneliness was replaced by the potential bonds of love, and lastly, there was the struggle between hope and sorrow; it seemed that his new hope needed some help to completely drive off the centuries of hurt and regret.

Like his magical core, Harry's soul also branched out. The souls of his parents and unborn siblings, frozen but peaceful, were connected to his soul by bonds of love. Harry knew it would be foolish to rush out to the family manor to revive his parents, and he was no longer a foolhardy Gryffindor. Harry wasn't sure when he would get the chance to revive his family, so he decided to ward his soul, especially the part anchoring his family to this plane of existence, and set up an alert ward to warn him about anything that could threaten his family's survival. Harry then moved on to examine the rest of his soul.

To Harry's total surprise, there were seven shoots of new growth, all made out of love, each with its own uniqueness, waiting to be nurtured to become full bonds. This was something Harry was incapable of before his return; there was just too much hurt for his old soul to tether to anything new by love. Recognizing his second chance to live his life to the fullest, Harry made a decision then, to explore and nurture all these seven potential bonds. He already knew who each of these bonds would be connected to.

Harry then looked for the connection for the soul fragment of Tom Marvolo Riddle; he was worried about the possibility of corrupting and destroying the anchors keeping his family alive. Eventually, after thoroughly checking his soul, he concluded the fragment was not connected to his soul at all, at least for now.

Harry was delighted though, to find two new animal spirits, roaming around in his new soul. He would explore his new forms later; re-mastering his Royal Phoenix form was one of his first priorities.

Finally finished with his soul-searching, Harry decided to bite the bullet, and discover how pathetic his physical body was. Harry mentally grimaced. Merlin, his twelve-year-old body was really a pitiful thing. There were improperly healed bones everywhere with barely any muscle attached to said bones, and scars all over his skin, especially on his back. Harry could tell that whatever was left available of his magical core was working overtime to keep him alive, and he was already starting feeling better with the boost to his magical core, but there was simply not enough nutrient at the moment to do any significant repairing. He would have to fix that before he completely dissolved the bindings on his magic; his weak body would disintegrate otherwise.

Harry then focused on the scar on his forehead, and studied it carefully. It seemed that he had underestimated how literal it was, when it was said that his scar was a Horcrux. The soul fragment was literally wedged between the scar and his skull; it had tried and was still trying to reach out to connect his soul, but there was a magical protective barrier keeping it from corrupting his soul.

The only reason Harry and Voldemort were able to look into each other mind was the proximity between the Horcrux and Harry's eyes and brain. A master Legilimens could read people's surface thoughts via passive Legilimency without eye contact, and Voldemort was a master Legilimens. But, neither the Horcrux nor Harry from the previous timeline was master Legilimens, the passage of information was solely achieved through the Horcrux and the top of Harry's eyes.

Harry smiled with pride at his mother's ingenuity. He had recognized the protective barrier from a sacrificial ritual in the Therion Family Grimoire; the same barrier protected him from the killing curse. Using the combination of these two ancient rituals, and some simple switching runes, his mother had ensured the survival of her family, if only the old goat had not meddled.

Harry had wondered why his family left the protection behind the powerful wards of one of his family manors in the first place; he suspected meddling on Dumbledore's part again. Oh how he would draw out the destruction of Albus too-many-bloody-names Dumbledore, and enjoy every single moment of it.

Harry had wanted to exploit the soul fragment in his scar, gain all Voldemort's knowledge from before Tommy's body was destroyed by his mother, and maybe to use it to spy on the primary soul, of which there wasn't much left. It definitely wasn't much too far off to literally call Tommy boy a soulless bastard. However, Harry didn't want to risk corrupting his mother's ritual and losing the chance to revive his family, so he dived back into his magical core, found the branch draining to sustain the Horcrux, and cut off the supply.

Harry then redirected the cut branch, and dragged it to connect it to the magical protective barrier, massively strengthening it. Harry went back to check on the Horcrux; it was already weakened, and had given up reaching out to his soul. Harry doubted it would survive for long, but it might be able to from all the magic given off by him and the ambient magic in the Castle. In addition, the Horcrux might draw magic from other anchors to survive. As long as the fragment would not threaten the survival of his family, Harry would leave it be; he might get some use of it later after he revived his family.

Lastly, Harry checked the magical channels in his body. They didn't look good; in fact, they looked terrible. No wonder his magical sonar didn't work as it used to; the magical channels in his younger body were barely open. However, Harry was hopeful he would be able to dilate these channels to the maximum by the time he finished retraining his magic.

Harry opened his eyes after coming out of his meditation. It looked like he had quite a lot to do; this summer was definitely going to be busy. No longer the foolhardy Gryffindor, Harry needed a plan. First, Harry determined the exact date he came back to, as it would be a major factor during his planning. It was Monday, the 10th of May, 1993, 0245. Harry searched back through his memories, and remembered it was two days after his Hermione's petrification.

"Hermione." Harry whispered out her name.

A/N: This is a short one, hope you enjoyed that. I wanted to focus a bit on magical theory, and I guess the chapter above illustrated my view on it, especially the importance of meditation to magic practitioners.

I had just made some minor modifications to the two scenes I have posted so far according to plums' suggestions: I typed out most of the numbers for consistency, and plums was correct in saying it looks better that way; I also decided to call each posting a scene rather than a chapter, it is way too short to be a chapter, but I find it harder to name each chapter if it gets any longer.

Acknowledgement: T.E. Tanglebrooke's Harry Potter and the Children of Change (6764665) inspired a number of ideas regarding Harry's magical cores in this scene.