Chapter 338: Chapter 337 The Secret Chamber That Cannot Be Opened (2 in 1)
Hermione made her way to the girls' lavatory for the second time.
She had searched the entire ground floor for all the suspicious places but had never found anything, which made her wonder if she had missed something.
So she started a second search from the beginning and now came to this common girls' lavatory.
Hermione was no stranger to this place.
When she had been a slave in this castle, her main job had been to clean it, so on her first inspection, the lavatory was more familiar to her than the abandoned rooms or storerooms she had never been in before.
But even so, she hadn't been sloppy in her first inspection, going through the entire lavatory.
This second time, Hermione was even more careful than before, not even missing the details in the cracks of the tiles or the patterns on the faucets.
Finally, this time she noticed something she had never observed before.
On one side of a brass faucet, which had never flowed out with water for hundreds of years, there was a unique carving of a tiny snake.
Upon seeing it, Hermione's face took on a look of delight, and she hugged Fawkes in her arms a little tighter with some excitement, then tugged the cloak of invisibility tighter and opened the Marauder's Map to once again observe the people nearby.
It was now less than ten minutes before the end of the last class, and there were already some students near the ground floor who had no classes in the afternoon coming down early to get their dinner in the great hall.
If the faucet she had found was indeed the entrance to the secret chamber that Dumbledore had asked her to help find, then opening it would certainly expose Hermione to the students if they came to this lavatory for their personal convenience later on.
So instead of making her next move, Hermione slowly retreated from the lavatory and then found a storage room that the castle caretakers used to discard miscellaneous items and took refuge in it.
Since she had already identified her exact target, she didn't need to risk going from room to room, as the common girls' lavatory would be more than enough for her to cover.
All she had to do was wait patiently until darkness fell and curfew began, keeping an eye out for the Aurors making their rounds in the castle, and then she could try to open the secret chamber.
And so Hermione waited patiently in the corner of the storeroom. By dinner time, the sound of footsteps outside had clearly begun to intensify, and she shrank back even more carefully, fearing that the invisibility cloak might accidentally slip off her and thus expose the Brightly Coloured Feathers of Fawkes standing on her shoulder, thus drawing the attention of the students outside through the window, to which she purposely held him in her arms.
Probably because her breathing had become erratic, this caused Fawkes to peck the back of Hermione's hand with his pointed beak somewhat discontentedly, but he didn't make any defiant move.
She waited in silence until it was completely dark until curfew began at nine o'clock in the night.
Fawkes was nestled in her arms, as if asleep, and Hermione was probably so stressed out that she didn't feel much hunger even though she hadn't eaten dinner.
And during all this time, she hadn't taken her eyes off the Marauder's Map for more than three minutes.
She watched as fewer and fewer students wandered out of the castle until they were all headed back to their respective common rooms after curfew had begun, and saw the muggle students being confined down into the underground chambers early after dinner, just as she had been here before.
Likewise, more Aurors began to flock to Hogwarts after the students had all been sent back to their respective rooms with curfews enforced.
They had all come in through the main gates together just after eight in the night, seemingly arriving at Hogsmeade first in a unified Apparition, and then made their way to the school on foot.
Adding the men who had already been staying in the castle before, the number of Aurors on guard reached seventeen.
This wasn't much different from earlier when Hermione had just been given the Marauder's Map and observed the number of people patrolling the castle during curfew.
Of the seventeen Aurors, two were primarily responsible for guarding the Hogwarts gates, two guarded the castle doors, one was dedicated to keeping an eye on the direction of the Hogwarts wagon from a high position at the Astronomy Tower, and the remaining twelve were all patrolling all around the castle.
They were divided into teams of two and six squads, each responsible for a different area, and the squad responsible for the area on the ground floor where the girls' lavatory was located would spend at least twenty minutes on a round-trip patrol from this area, which would be more than enough time for Hermione to try and open the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets.
As long as she didn't disturb the patrolling Aurors during the time it would take to open the chamber, it would be much safer and easier for her after she entered the chamber.
These Aurors certainly wouldn't be searching each and every room, not to mention the girls' lavatory.
Hermione didn't choose to wait too long as she stared at the Marauder's Map and once she was sure that the two Aurors on patrol on the ground floor had made their way to the other side of the castle, she was ready to make her move.
However, before she could barely grab the Marauder's Map in her hands and lead Fawkes out of this storage room, a name suddenly moved away from where he was supposed to be in a bunch of people's names piled up.
Hermione froze as she watched the name move.
She hadn't really thought that anyone would dare to break school rules under such a strict curfew control at Hogwarts Castle today!
The person looked familiar with the rules of Aurors patrolling in the middle of the night as well, and easily found a reasonably suitable empty space and walked all the way to the fourth floor of the castle.
Hermione watched as he made his way to the fourth-floor corridor, to a remote corner, and proceeded to sneak into a secret passage.
That secret passage had also been one of her selected target points to sneak into Hogwarts Castle, but it had been abandoned because it seemed too risky, and now it was indeed being found and used by a person.
Hermione watched him sneak a little further down the secret passage until he had completely sneaked off the edge of the Marauder's Map and disappeared out of the confines of the entire Hogwarts school, before looking up from the map again.
Such a discovery flooded Hermione's mind with some oddity.
Previously, she had always assumed that all these people in this castle would just eat and drink and act like human beings, and would never bother to risk breaking the rules, but she had never expected to find an anomaly this night.
Nevertheless, this incident could only be a minor hiccup for her, and she had not forgotten that she had a task to carry out.
In the storage room, she re-waited for one more round of Aurors' repeat patrol to complete, then cloaked herself in the cloak of invisibility and led Fawkes inside the same girls' lavatory she had found during the day.
Pulling out her wand and using the Wand-Lighting Charm with the faintest brightness she could possibly command, she soon found the faucet with the snake mark carved on it.
"Ahem."
Hermione cleared her throat nervously, and then an unpleasant hissing sound came out of her mouth.
It was certainly not a sound she could have learned to make on her own, instead, she had spent the afternoon practising with the portrait in Headmaster Dumbledore's office and had only barely mastered a single password that could open the chamber.
But whether it was because her pronunciation wasn't quite up to scratch or due to something else, nothing unusual happened in the entire lavatory.
It was as if Hermione had just delivered a performance of sounding like a snake without an audience, and when it was over, the only response she got was silence.
This made Hermione frown, and she tried to adjust her voice and pronunciation and tried the parseltongue again at the faucet, but she still didn't get any response.
She tried many more times after that, but the result was always a failure.
Finally, Hermione decided that there was no problem with her pronunciation; so either she was simply in the wrong place, or the password to enter the chamber had been changed!
Having come to this conclusion, Hermione did not linger in the lavatory, despite a surge of frustration flaring up in her heart.
With carefully controlled steps, she watched the movements of the patrolling Aurors on the Marauder's Map, and soon reached the fourth floor of the castle as well, and then entered the secret passage behind the mirror, where, by using Fawkes the Apparition, she was able to make her way back to the wagon.
Once she had returned to her room, Hermione sat down on her bed and took a couple of big breaths before taking Fawkes with her and heading straight out of her dorm room to Dumbledore's Headmaster's office without a moment's pause.
***
The place seems like the graveyard of an entire colony of eight-eyed spider Acromantula, or perhaps a mass grave would be more appropriate.
The crater is littered with the bodies of spiders, with almost all of them dismembered, rather than whole.
The valuable internal organs and venom and silk sacs had all been ripped out of the spiders' bodies, and all that remained were their useless torsos and ugly bodies.
They had been dead for some time and Jon looked at the nearest spider's leg, which was already full of holes from tiny insects that had ravaged its surface, like a dead twig in the winter snow.
From the spider corpses on the ground, Jon could probably tell what had happened to the eight-eyed giant spiders that had lived here.
They are hardly magical creatures that would be considered beneficial to wizards, and with their venom and body parts being so valuable, Voldemort or someone high up in the castle had ordered a massacre of them here.
All the eight-eyed Acromantula had been killed, their useful parts taken, and their useless parts discarded, resulting in the mass grave that existed before them today.
After all, judging from what these eight-eyed giant spiders had done in the original story, it was only their own bad luck that they had become what they were at Hogwarts under Voldemort's control, even the muggle-born wizards were not considered human, let alone them.
Walking around the large crater full of spider corpses, Jon carefully identified and searched through it.
The others didn't matter, but even if Aragog was dead, he wanted to make sure his carcass was here so that he could go back and explain it to Hagrid.
Hoss just followed Jon restlessly, even when Jon didn't bother to pull the side of his neck skin again, he didn't run around like he was spilling his guts, he looked like he didn't like this place.
Even if Hoss could run as fast as he wanted to, if he got caught in a web made by a group, he would have no chance of survival and would probably become the food of thousands of spiders.
Jon looked around the large crater and finally spotted a spider's carcass that was much larger than the others.
It was obviously not a size that a normal eight-eyed giant spider could just grow into, and most of its body was still intact, except for the venom sac which had all been removed, apparently because the spider-killing wizard had decided it was too old and the organs in its body had all started to fail and deteriorate, leaving it with no more value.
Jon looked at Aragog's broken body from afar and could already imagine how sad Hagrid would be when he learned this news.
But after finding out that it was indeed dead, Jon had no intention of staying here for much longer, and he led Hoss out of the spider graveyard and made his way back into the dense woods, mounting Hoss on his back.
The sun was just now sinking in the west, and it looked like it would take a good while before it completely set, so Jon patted Hoss on his bald head.
"Do you know any of the other two besides Aragog? I remember Hagrid telling me that Parson is a Centaur, and you're a horse too. You, err, shouldn't be unfamiliar with each other, right?"
By the end of that sentence, even Jon himself was a little unsure of himself.
With the nature of this horny donkey, it might actually go and harass a young girl among the Centaur, and the Centaurs might want to beat it to death all the time.
After hearing Jon's question, Hoss became visibly excited, leaping up on his front hooves and neighing twice, as if to reassure Jon of something, and then he turned into the wind and began to zip through the forbidden forest.
Soon he crossed a great distance and led Jon to an abandoned settlement.
It was obvious from a glance that this was the former settlement where the Centaurs had lived, but now it had fallen into a state of dilapidation, with most of the wooden huts collapsing to the ground and some of the buildings showing signs of having been burnt, leaving only a charred blackness which had been almost hidden by the passage of time.
Upon seeing the sight of this place, Jon's heart finally began to grow heavy.
Unlike the eight-eyed giant spiders, although the Centaur had always been classified as magical beasts by the wizards, they are a group of race with the same intelligence as humans, and usually got along with the wizards in a more or less peaceful manner, for example, the Ministry of Magic had established a Centaur Liaison Office for many years previously.
But in the current situation, their situation is no better than that of the eight-eyed giant spiders, if not worse.
----
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