Chapter 80: Chapter 80: Apprentice Wandmaker (Edited)
Ollivander stared at the rune for a long time and let out a sigh, "Good, your runes are now qualified."
By "qualified" Ollivander meant that they were ready to be carved into the wood of a wand. He stood up and made way for Tom to sit at his workbench.
"Come, you can start making your first wand ever." Ollivander gave a gentle smile, like an old farmer watching his fruit tree bear beautiful fruit. At the same time, he brought a large chest full of all kinds of wood he had collected, Tom even saw in it some bamboo sticks.
"Take your pick, it's on the house." Ollivander was very generous, a wandmaker's first wand was not to be taken for granted, although he knew that a novice's first wand was going to be a real eyesore, but it was not to be taken for granted.
After a moment's thought, Tom picked up a piece of wood, not one of the stranger woods like bamboo or golden bamboo, but ebony.
Ebony is black in color, but since it is a dense material, it feels great to carve, and since it is heavy in the hand, it gives it a great texture. Tom likes this denser material best.
Mr. Ollivander has trimmed each of the woods and they are no more than 20 inches at the most. Tom took this ebony, trimmed it slightly, cut it to fifteen inches long and split it. The wood had been selected, and the core had to be chosen.
Tom ignored Ollivander's box of core materials and pulled out a bright blue feather.
Ollivander was slightly surprised, "Is that an Occamy quill?". He took it from Tom's hand gently and looked at it seriously for a moment.
"I can't believe it's a feather from the wing of an Occamy..." Ollivander looked at Tom, but didn't question the feather's origin, "Remember, son, we wandmakers have a basic rule of trying not to kill: we only buy fire dragon hearts from the merchants who sell them."
Naturally, Tom had to "borrow" the feather from "Naughty", the Occamy, and had to persuade him for a long time until he convinced him to give him a feather that was about to fall out.
The Occamy that Tom had was named "Travieso," a Spanish word meaning naughty and fitting the character of a baby Occamy.
Tom carefully inserted the quill into the wand, then began to carefully carve the runes on the inside of the wand. He made no changes: the basic runes had been carefully outlined by generations of wand makers and were like a basic formula that was difficult to change. Naturally, Tom didn't want to add anything else. Like calculating the potential energy of an object by applying the formula E=m.g.h, Tom wasn't going to go overboard.
There were a total of seven runes. Tom carved them very slowly and it took him an hour and a half to complete the carving. At the last step, Mr. Ollivander pulled out a thin piece of paper and stuck it on the wand. It took him a minute to remove it.
"Ministry of Magic regulations state that all wands must have a trace attached."
Once the trace was added, Tom combined the two pieces of wood into one, and a rough wand was made.
The rest of the work consisted of sanding, polishing, waxing, adding the base and other finishing touches.
When Tom finished the last step, a plain, unadorned wand was sitting on the workbench, super plain in fact, with no decoration on the wand at all. As soon as he finished, the system sent a notification.
[First wand successfully made! Varitology talent unlocked, varitology test completed]
[Talent: Varitology: 8 (Gifted)]
[Advancement task completed, varitology advancement completed! Wand upgrade completed, the stick you made can now be called a wand].
[Varitology Level 1 (0/200)]
Tom took the wand, pointed it at the carving knife on the table, which immediately increased several times in size, then Tom put the wand away, and the knife returned to its original size.
"When using an Occamy feather as the core of a wand, the wand prefers Transfiguration." commented Ollivander, taking the wand from Tom and looking at it carefully, "Your wand is qualified. You can call yourself an apprentice wandmaker."
He complimented Tom. It was normal for a wandmaker to teach his disciple the advanced runes he had mastered after this step, but Tom was only a part-time apprentice, and not even his master, and that connection was not enough for Ollivander to hand over to him the runes that had been passed down through the family for thousands of years. He knew there would always be an heir in the family.
What he had taught Tom before was the basics, something any wandmaker in the world would know, and he didn't mind teaching it to him.
But Tom really had talent, so Ollivander thought about it for a moment and handed Tom a pamphlet: "I have nothing else I can teach you next. These are some of the runes I have learned over the years in my exchanges around the world, including some that are not commonly used by wand makers, they are all there, you will have to learn them yourself, I hope you learn something."
Tom thanked Ollivander, took the booklet from him and ran off to study it for himself. After Tom left, Ollivander thought to give Tom a new task.
Tom's task was to keep an inventory of the wands left in Ollivander's store, indicating wood, core, length, and position, so that Ollivander could explore new combinations of wands. It's not a very technical job, but it's a lot of work.
Tom looked at the rune booklet for a while and discovered that the runes it contained did not fit the standard set of runes, many of them meaning "expansion", "enhancement", "life stealing", etc. I suppose it's true that the wand makers were looking for soft, neutral runes of stability, guidance, concentration, etc., and these runes and their ideas are simply the opposite.
But Tom thought otherwise. Since this was about carving runes into magical materials and making changes in the flow of magic, can he carve runes into other mediums without using all kinds of wood?
So he asked Mr. Ollivander this question, and Ollivander was stunned for a moment before bursting out laughing, "You think exactly like I did when I was young! I also had the same whimsical idea, and to be honest, whoever came up with such an idea should be more of an alchemist than a wandmaker."
Chapter 81: Chapter 81: Tom's Little Toy (Edited)
Tom's idea was by no means fanciful. He just wanted to fix the runes and so forth on some kind of support, to solidify the magic. It was not an innovative exercise; on the contrary, it was already widely used in the magical world.
The most technically demanding were flying brooms, most of the higher end brooms had healing magic on them, and the least technically demanding were wizard robes. Many of the robes were cured with self-cleansing magic, and some were kept warm in winter and cool in summer.
Tom did not know the principles of this magic, but he had developed an idea of his own.
Ollivander went to the inner room and used the levitation spell to retrieve a long, thin package from the corner of the room. Tom had a vague idea, but he wasn't sure, until Ollivander opened the package.
Inside the package was a metal staff two fingers wide and two meters long.
Tom gaped: The staff is so long that it doesn't take magic, but getting close to the enemy to knock him out, right?
Looking at the staff, Ollivander sighed: "I was young and ignorant, and I always wanted to make my own way, so I made this staff after an ancient legendary staff. Then I thought: why does a staff have to be made of wood? So I used metal..."
Seeing Tom's astonished expression, Ollivander blushed in an uncharacteristic way, as if he were a middle-aged man whose children had discovered the embarrassing stories of when he was young.
Ollivander coughed twice, "Basically, every wandmaker has a moment of whimsy."
He picked up the wand with great effort and rested it on the ground, "This wand is too heavy, so you can't use it to cast magic spells, so ordinary wizards can't use it to cast spells. Then I thought about it, and it's more suitable for wizards who can cast spells without a wand, like Dumbledore."
Tom shuddered as he imagined Dumbledore wielding the staff.
"Why would he wield a wand if he could cast spells without it?"
The image of the staff gradually began to change to that of a torch of sunlight.
Ollivander said nothing, just stuck the staff into the ground and a bright light appeared at the top of the staff.
"It's really weird..."
Ollivander agreed, saying that the wand he had made on a whim was odd: it wasn't very useful as a wand. However, Tom had heard from Ollivander that the metal used to make the wand was an alchemical product that could store a certain amount of magic.
Tom thought the metal looked interesting, so he asked Ollivander for some.
Ollivander was kind enough to give Tom all the metal he had left over from casting the wand.
[You got 3 kg of magic silver: pure silver that has been refined by an alchemist and can store a certain amount of magic].
"Have you ever thought of making the wand smaller?" Tom thought that by making the wand smaller and less heavy, it could still be used.
Ollivander gave a sheepish grin, "I made one, but it didn't work as well as a wooden wand..."
Tom was speechless as he put the silver away. When he returned to the bedroom in the evening, he chose a piece of magic silver, cut the block of metal into coin-sized pieces with a carving knife and other items until the piece of silver obtained the size of a coin, smoothed and polished it. Fortunately for Tom, the metal was not very hard and could be carved with a carving knife.
Tom was playing with a magic silver coin the size of a gold galleon in his hand, he thought for a moment, picked out some runes and carved them slowly.
"Initiate, invoke, stabilize, transmit, float, ignite: end rune."
These runes were the result of the experience of generations of alchemists and wand makers who had found that if magic ran along these paths, they could achieve a particular effect.
Thanks to them, Tom was able to stand directly on the shoulders of his predecessors and conduct his own research.
By the time he finished carving the seven runes into a specific formation, it was too late. Tom turned off the lights in the bedroom and the room went dark.
Tom poured a magic power into his magic silver coin, and then, the coin glowed faintly, Tom released his hand and the coin floated in the air, even if Tom cut off the supply of magic power, it was still there. Glowing silently.
"Is it done?"
Tom had worked all night, in effect, making a floating night light. But this light was created by magic. What's more, Tom had disconnected the magic supply and it still worked for five minutes.
A seemingly trivial toy. With a magic spell, it would have taken Tom five seconds to achieve the same effect, floating and glowing, no less, and it took two hours to carve the coin.
But Tom was still satisfied.
The next day, when Tom arrived at the bookstore, which was not open, Lawrence, the bookstore manager, was standing outside. In front of him were four wizards, three men and one woman, an older employee with three newcomers. All four wizards wore a badge with the letter M on the front of their robes, the symbol of the Ministry of Magic.
When he saw Tom, Lawrence smiled at him, "We're not open today, so you'll have the day off."
This pleased Tom, but he didn't hurry and stood to the side, waiting to see what would happen.
When Lawrence finished speaking, the short-haired wizard at the head of the group smiled, "Sorry to keep you from doing your business."
"No problem, do you want to start the inspection now?" with that, Lawrence opened the door to his tent to invite the Ministry of Magic inspectors inside.
The short-haired wizard entered with a broad smile, looked at the neatly arranged books on the shelves and, instead of rushing to start the search, chatted with Lawrence, "How's business?"
"It's not too good, it won't be busy for a couple of days" Lawrence said.
"You don't have any black magic items in this store, do you?" Said the short haired magician.
"See what you said, if I open a bookstore, can I sell black magic items? The ones selling forbidden items are everywhere" Lawrence pointed in the direction of Knockturn Alley.
The short-haired wizard didn't answer, of course he knew that Knockturn Alley always sold unorthodox, even illegal things, and he knew that Diagon Alley was full of decent stores. That was why he had used his connections to inspect the stores in Diagon Alley, wasn't it? As for Knockturn Alley, it was left to the rogues of the ministry, like Arthur Weasley....
"So... How about we start inspecting?" he finally ordered. The team then pulled out some oddly shaped sticks and began probing.
"Captain, there are fluctuations!" surprisingly, they actually detected the black magic fluctuations on a shelf.
The captain's expression turned serious, and he took out a mirror, but it did not react at all, gave no warning.
The captain rolled his eyes, "I told you the damn device was unreliable, probably a false alarm." He told the crew to put the sticks away. The four gave a cursory inspection and left. Of course, he took the bag of money Lawrence had quietly and unceremoniously handed him.
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