Capítulo 395: Chapter 394 Spotting Wild Draco (2 in 1)
When it came to formulating what the task would be, Dumbledore clearly didn't put much thought into this one
His goal was clear, as long as he could get the students who would represent his camp in the Triwizard Tournament to enter the Black Lake Fair and Square when the time came, it would be okay, as to whether they would get an advantage in this tournament task, it was out of his consideration.
The lake had a very special meaning to the thousand-year-old Hogwarts school, not only because the four creators had crossed it first before building Hogwarts Castle, but there were also some hidden secrets in the lake.
Dumbledore thought that when Voldemort became Headmaster of Hogwarts, he must have known the importance of the Black Lake and guarded it as closely as the Hogwarts castle.
But after actually arriving here, things didn't seem to quite turn out as he had expected.
Jon had been snooping around the lake for many days and had found no sign of any kind of tampering being done to the water, as if Dumbledore's suspicions were completely wrong and Voldemort didn't actually care about the lake at all, or what they might be planning to do to the inner parts of it.
But it was true that they hadn't done anything and didn't bother to make any direct snooping inside the Black Lake, the problem was that after all these days at the lake, Jon hadn't found what Dumbledore wanted him to look for.
This left Jon with a not-so-good guess, and he told his guess to Dumbledore, who was silent for a while then and eventually told him to head down to the water on the day of the tournament and see what had happened.
And now, he was going to take a look to confirm whether his guess was right or not.
The ground beneath the Black Lake was uneven, but Jon didn't have to walk along the ground like he had to on land, he could just keep floating in the water as long as he could see the bottom of the lake in his vision.
His time was precious, not to mention the tournament task, the bubble spell that was being maintained on him wouldn't last too long, at most Jon was able to stay underwater for an hour and a half during his daily practice sessions.
So now he could only spare up to half an hour of that time to search for the merpeople in the Black Lake.
But it didn't actually take him that long to find them at all, and soon he made a discovery in the southwest corner of the Black Lake as a whole.
Only what he found was not a sign of merpeople, but a crumbling expanse of underwater buildings.
It was a number of stone buildings, but they had obviously suffered damage a long time ago, with broken walls everywhere and green algae crawling over the surface of the pillars, which were swaying with the icy current.
Jon frowned; this was certain to be the once-underwater dwelling of the merpeople.
Dumbledore, after all, had been a professor and headmaster at Hogwarts Castle for fifty or sixty years before, and he certainly had interacted with this tribe of merpeople living in the Black Lake and had a general idea of where their territory had been.
It was based on his guidance that Jon had found this place, but now there were only a few schools of fish wandering around.
This made his heart sink slowly.
But he didn't stop there, he went deeper into the merpeople's territory to try and see if there was any chance of finding any surviving creatures like the Centaurs in the Forbidden Forest.
But all the way through he found nothing, not even a common steel fork used by the merpeople.
Just as Jon was disappointed and planning to leave from there, at the end of this broken wall he suddenly spotted a vast ditch at the bottom of the lake.
The large ditch was clearly not the product of nature, and from the neatly crumbled stones around it and the fish bones half buried in the soil, he could tell that it must have been the result of magic like Invisible Sword Curse.
Such a discovery could not help but make his mind sink; he did not know if such a feat was possible for Dumbledore, but there was certainly no way he could have done it, even if he had cast a spell with both hands.
He slowly approached the line of the ditch in the lake and eventually froze at the edge of it.
The vast black ditch that was as deep as a gateway to hell was filled with ghastly white skeletons!
The upper half of these bones were basically the shape of a human being, except that the lower half did not have leg bones, but skeletons like fish bones!
Looking at those dense skeletons, Jon now finally understood where all these vanished merpeople had gone, just by seeing the number of bones in this lake trench, he could generally determine what might have happened.
This entire tribe of merpeople in the Black Lake had been completely exterminated.
If Voldemort really wanted to kill them, it would be less of a psychological burden than even killing centaurs, after all, a creature like merpeople had less contact with a wizard normally, and was closer to the beast category than a human. But in all likelihood, whether it was about killing all the Centaurs or all the merpeople, this demon would have no psychological burden.
Jon's heart was a little heavy.
It wasn't that he was mourning for these never-before-seen merpeople in some way, it was just that once again he was distressed by the sight of the bloodshed under Voldemort's rule.
The man's bloodline policy was not just about gaining power for himself; he really did not treat any beings other than pureblood wizards as human beings.
Centaurs, merpeople, may be defined in the magical world as a class of beasts rather than human beings, but even so, these species are still intelligent, emotional and civilised beings, like the age-old question, if pigs could speak and think and feel like humans, would you still eat pork?
If you look at it this way, it is not surprising that under his rule the muggle wizards became a slave.
But what would Voldemort think of the muggles if, in the future, he had fulfilled his long-cherished dream of becoming master of the world?
Jon took one last look at the white bones in the lake ditch, presumably just as what he had thought of the merpeople.
It was with such a heavy heart that Jon left the merpeople's territory. He had only been looking for the merpeople to confirm his suspicions and try to see if he could find any clues, but now that the merpeople were all gone, he naturally wouldn't stay here for long.
It was just that now that the clues were gone, Jon didn't have too much clarity on what he would be doing next.
The biggest goal that Dumbledore had asked him to do after entering the Black Lake was to look for the giant squid that lived in the Black Lake other than the second task, and Jon had spent so many days at the lake without finding any signs of the squid's presence, and later he even learned from Cedric that he had never seen the legendary behemoth that lived in the lake with his own eyes since he started attending school.
This, combined with what had happened to these merpeople, had given Jon a very bad feeling in his mind, but in the end, he still had to go and check it out for himself.
Originally he had intended to ask for some information about the squid from the merpeople, but now it was clear that it would not work.
Just as he was circling the black lake to try his luck around the perimeter, a cowering figure hiding in a pile of water plants suddenly caught Jon's attention.
He looked with interest at Draco who was surrounded by water plants and didn't dare look over in his direction.
"What are you doing here? Taking a shit?"
Draco instantly turned red, reasonably after he had followed Lucius and witnessed his father make that deal with Jon, he didn't have to be afraid of seeing Jon, but that night in the French Ministry of Magic Ballroom always lingered in the back of Draco's mind.
But while the fish gills allowed him to move freely underwater, there was no way he could still speak as Jon did; all he had to do was open his mouth, and he could be drinking water from the Black Lake non-stop.
It was a good thing that Jon had thoughtfully cast a bubble-head charm on him, which brought a deadly look of despair to Draco's face when he saw Jon cast the spell, but the next second he realised he hadn't been knocked unconscious, paralysed or killed, but could speak instead.
"No, I'm not."
"Then what are you doing? Planning to ambush me here and catch me by surprise? Knocking me out as a form of revenge for the first task, um?"
In the face of his words, Draco simply gritted his teeth and eventually pulled two pearls out of his own pocket.
"Here you go! All for you! Let me go, don't make me leave in disgrace like before again! They've been talking a lot about me behind my back! Saying I'm a rubbish wretch among purebloods!"
The sight of his actions and the words that came out of his mouth caused Jon to raise an eyebrow.
He came over to Draco's side with his wand in his hand with considerable interest and glanced at the two pearls he was holding.
"Quite a haul, it's only been a while for you to find two out of a total of ten, just one more, and you will be stable enough not to be at the bottom. You're not actually hiding another one, are you?"
"This is all I have!"
Draco acted a little exasperated, that was in anger at his own cowardice and Jon's getting ahead of himself.
Jon reached out and took the two pearls from Draco's hands, the young Malfoy obviously feeling considerable pain in his heart in the process.
It was only by luck that he had found two so quickly; he had just descended into the Black Lake when he spotted a fish with a pearl in its mouth, and he was wise enough not to strike at the fish immediately, but trailed far behind it, and eventually did find another pearl where it lived.
Draco didn't wait any longer and knocked the fish unconscious and took the one it was holding in its mouth.
As it turned out, before he could even get excited about the fact that he could be able to come first in this task and clear his name of the previous defeat, and be back to flaunting his might among the purebloods, he saw Jon float by.
Draco, in a panic, had no choice but to choose a patch of water plants close by, and didn't have time to think about whether he would get tangled up in it, and ducked in immediately.
Even so, however, he still did not escape from Jon's clutches.
Not only Jon wasn't angry at his sudden tantrum, but he also looked at him with a smirk.
"How about we make a deal? Young Lord Malfoy."
Draco became instantly wary, and his body, which had emerged from the water plants, retracted again as if that would give him some sense of security.
"What do you want?"
Jon shrugged.
"Don't be so wary of me, your father and I can barely call ourselves business partners no matter what, right? I have a very nice offer, how about I give you a pearl, and you give me the location of Emil Lestrange?"
Draco's eyes widened at the suggestion Jon made.
"The pearls would have been mine!"
"But you just gave them to me, so of course they're mine now."
"I would never tell you that!"
"You're that righteous?"
" Emil was required by Mr Headmaster to get first place in the Triwizard Tournament, and if I help you to deal with him, I'm going against Mr Headmaster, and if you reveal this later, my family will be in danger!"
Jon looked at Draco and tsked.
"I'm surprised you're not stupid."
Instead of Jon's praise making Draco feel half proud, it filled him with humiliation.
"Alright then, but we can also talk about another deal." Jon looked at him with an honest smile, "Again a pearl as payment, as long as you can reveal something of value to me, how about that rumour you heard at school about this stretch of the lake?"
Draco was showing some hesitation at this point.
Of course, he wanted to get the pearls back from Jon, but he knew he couldn't beat Jon, even his own father was cautious enough when dealing with him, let alone him.
"What do you want to know about this?" Draco asked cautiously.
"Don't worry, it's certainly not to screw you over, if I really wanted to do something to you, wouldn't it be much better to just use the Imperius Curse on you now than to waste my time here?"
On this point, Draco was convinced, even of the fact that Jon knew the Imperius Curse.
Did that need to be questioned? For other fourth years, it might need to be, but Jon Green was certainly the exception to the rule.
If it was said that he didn't know the Imperius Curse, it would be the matter that needed to be questioned properly.
Such words made Draco drop some of his guards a little, and he thought about it incredibly carefully.
"I've heard, from the seventh years, that there used to be a giant squid living in the Black Lake, but now it's gone."
"And do you know when was the last time anyone saw that giant squid?"
"I don't know."
Jon shook his head in disappointment at that.
"So this one doesn't count, are there any others?"
"That's not fair! No matter what I would say you wouldn't count it, you're not going to fool me!"
"Do you have a choice? But if you try you might even get a pearl out of my hand, if you don't, you'll get nothing."
Draco gritted his teeth and continued to think for a few more moments before he said with a sense of hesitation.
"There's another one which I'm not sure counts as a rumour. I've heard of this from my father that once upon a time when Hogwarts was still divided, the Slytherin House common room was located underground, deep down in the Black Lake."
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Happy Reading!!!
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