Chapter 309 The Malevolent Magic In The Rock Walls
The fire roared and devoured everything it touched.
The fire beasts clashed in the flames, waving their claws, horns, and tails, and even the spider eggs of the Acromantula were reduced to ashes, as the water springing from the springs evaporated completely.
Evan ran towards the entrance of the passage and looked back to witness a striking scene.
The entire place was filled with a red light, the smoke and waves of heat were suffocating, and the fierce fire beasts charged towards him.
Evan turned around and continued running, as he progressed, using his wand, he struck the rock walls behind him, blocking the passage with falling rocks.
Through the cracks in the rocks, he could still feel the waves of heat spreading. In the rough and winding cave, he didn't know how far he had run. When the scorching heat wave vanished, and the cave returned to coolness, Evan was drenched in cold sweat.
He sat on the ground leaning against the wall, breathing heavily.
After a few minutes of rest, he noticed anomalies around him. With a faint luminescence, Evan saw what was on the wall opposite him.
The ancient murals were highly abstract, with many places eroded. In the mottled and fragmented image, there was a magnificent altar rising from the ground, a masked wizard standing upon it. He held his wand as if about to cast a spell.
In front of the altar was a deep abyss, densely filled.
Evan stood up and leaned forward, then took a deep breath. In sight were all the humans crowded in the deep abyss. They lay there with pained expressions, gazing at the sky with despair, and drawing a dashed line above their heads.
Evan knew those dashed lines were their souls.
Their souls were being ripped from their bodies, sucked by the dark wizard on the altar, gathering them to complete an unknown malevolent spell!
Evan couldn't help but shudder. This was too horrific. He couldn't fathom what kind of dark magic would use the souls of so many people.
Even when making a Horcrux, you only need to kill one person.
No gust of warm air blew from the hot water springs in the dark passage, and the temperature was much lower than the outer cave, he could even see the mist exhaling. Evan realized he was hundreds of feet underground.
He extended his wand forward. The light dispersed the darkness and illuminated the passage that no one had traversed in centuries.
The floor was covered in thick dust, with cracked marble walls on both sides.
Like the one in front of Evan, the marble was carved with murals of cruelty and malevolence. After years of erosion, most of the murals were incomplete, and even several marble slabs had completely crumbled to the ground, leaving only traces of destruction caused by the Acromantulas.
Looking at these ancient murals, Evan had an illusion.
He wasn't in the Lair of Aragog, the Acromantula, but in an ancient mysterious temple.
Fear permeated the darkness, as if something bad was about to happen at any moment.
Evan heightened his vigilance and proceeded through the passage with his wand in hand. Observing the surrounding rock walls as he walked, whose content grew increasingly cruel and wicked.
Death was not the end, it was only the beginning. Before the same altar, a hooded dark wizard performed various types of witchcraft. He tortured the living in various ways, splitting their souls, infusing them again, and splitting them once more.
In addition, his experiments included a variety of non-human magical creatures.
There were mighty fire-breathing dragons, unicorns, chimeras, goblins, house-elves, centaurs, but most were ancient species that Evan had never seen before.
The style of the painting was abstract and distorted. The content of each mural was exceptionally strange. The dark wizard took different parts from them, the dragon's heart, the unicorn's blood...
Evan didn't know how many murals he had seen, but suddenly he realized that these patterns represented a complex process of dark magic casting, including the casting materials that needed to be prepared.
He quickened his pace and wished to see what kind of magic it was.
At the end of the passage, the most critical murals were destroyed, broken stones were scattered everywhere. The blue marble only bore traces of the giant pincers of the Acromantulas. It was impossible to see what magic the dark wizard had created.
Evan stood near the rock wall, which he touched with his hand, and could vaguely recognize that inside the magnificent altar he had seen before, all the souls collected by the dark wizard were slowly swirling in the air, forming a circular whirl with a strange silver light.
In the murals, those souls howled, roared, twisted, and screamed.
They merged into a strange object from top to bottom.
He didn't know what it was. He could only see a blurry sphere, with countless thin lines swirling around it as if something was about to emerge from it.
In his impression, no magical creature would resemble this.
Furthermore, another strange thing was that the dark wizard who had been appearing all along was nowhere to be seen, and he didn't know from where he oversaw the magic.
Evan didn't dwell on it much. Perhaps he was in a mural he couldn't recognize.
The question now was, what exactly did the dark wizard want to achieve in the mural, and did his evil dark magic succeed in the end?
Moreover, why did these murals appear in the Forbidden Forest of Hogwarts?
Evan took two steps forward and recalled the owner of the muted voice hiding here, and what he had to do with these murals.
A gust of wind blew and interrupted Evan's thoughts. At the end of the passage, the ancient murals and relics disappeared again. There was a huge deep pit in front of Evan.
He hurried to stop and saw Aragog floating in the center of the deep pit.
Wait, how could he be floating in the air?
No matter how powerful dark magic was, it couldn't make his transformation go that far.
Evan increased the brightness of his wand to illuminate the entire space, revealing a massive spider web ahead. Fine threads of spider silk clung tightly to the rough rock walls, winding and joining into a huge hemispherical web. Aragog, like a small elephant, lay in the center of the immense vaulted web.
Below the huge web, gusts of wind rose from the bottomless pit, yet the web didn't even sway.
Evan held his wand, and as he hesitated to advance, he heard the aged and weak voice of Aragog.
"Finally, you're here, Hagrid's friend!" he said cunningly. "I've been waiting for you for a long time, since the last time we met."