章 111: Chapter 111: The Chamber of Secrets and the Basilisk (Edited)
Seeing that the only possible witness had also left, Tom assumed Occamy's form, wandered around the sink, and finally spotted a small, delicate snake on the side of a faucet.
"Open!" said Tom matter-of-factly, but the sound that came out of his mouth was no longer a human voice, but the characteristic hiss of a snake.
"Hiss!"
Instantly, there was the sound of a mechanism being activated under the sink, and the counter behind which the mirror had been placed gradually lifted to reveal a dark hole. Immediately afterwards, the sink extended in all directions. He watched as the sink slowly disappeared from view, revealing a deep water pipe, thick enough for a person to enter.
Tom grabbed the roosters and slid down the pipe.
The pipe twisted and turned, down a steep slope, and after sliding down for some time, Tom judged that he was in the deepest part of the school, deeper than the basement and the rooms where the Philosopher's Stone was hidden.
No one knew what lay beneath Hogwarts. Generations of brilliant wizards had left countless secrets here over the centuries.
Soon, the angle of the pipe became horizontal and Tom slipped through the opening, landing on the ground.
Outside the pipe was a wide tunnel, and when Tom pulled the cart a couple of steps, there was a crunching sound beneath his feet: the ground was littered with the bones of small animals. However, these small rodents were most likely not the food the basilisk had been feeding on all these years.
The basilisk can grow up to fifteen meters long, and being a giant of over ten meters, anything it ate like a rat would be digested with its bones, and no skeletons would remain. Snakes have an extremely strong digestion capacity and can often digest their prey from scales to bones in a matter of days, and all that may be left is the hair and feathers.
However, it is not surprising to find carcasses of small animals in the sewers.
"Lumos!"
Tom took a better look at his surroundings. The tunnel had been carefully constructed, judging by the traces left behind, but it had deteriorated, and being underground and extremely damp, making it look very dilapidated.
Tom passed through several circular arches and rounded a bend before a large object appeared before his eyes.
It was the basilisk's molt, curled up on the ground and dry and decaying, and it looked like it had been there for some years.
Looking at the basilisk's skin, which was full of scales, made Tom's stomach turn.
The basilisk's skin is green and shiny, although it had dried out, and the color of the basilisk's skin was still vivid. Based on the length of the basilisk's skin, Tom roughly calculated the length of the basilisk. The basilisk was at least thirty feet long, and he didn't know how big the basilisk had grown by eating what they had eaten all these years.
Tom rounded the skin and continued on, turning corner after corner, before finally coming upon a wall at the end of the tunnel with two intertwined snakes, whose eyes were four huge emeralds.
It was clear that Slytherin had put a lot of care and invested a lot of resources into the construction of the Chamber of Secrets.
Tom proceeded to open the door with the Parseltongue.
The entangled snakes parted, along with the wall behind them, and a huge room appeared before Tom's eyes.
The room was filled with snake statues, lined up in two rows on either side of the room. The room was very dimly lit, the only source of light being the statues' eyes, which glowed green. The ceiling was so high that Tom could not see the ceiling when he looked up.
An eerie greenish haze pervaded the room, and the various statues and pillars cast a treacherous shadow over the room.
"Lumos!"
A beam of light from the tip of Tom's wand dispersed the darkness a few steps ahead of him, making the atmosphere less eerie.
Tom used the glow from his wand to walk a little toward the end of the room,
There was a statue about the height of the room, blending in with the wall behind it, or perhaps the statue itself was carved into the wall behind it.
The statue showed an old, monkey-like face, with a long, thin beard that reached almost to the hem of the statue's robes: this is what Salazar Slytherin looks like.
The founder of Hogwarts was ugly. Tom thought it likely that he had abused the dark arts, which distort the mind, the soul, and ultimately the face.
Tom looked again at the Chamber of Secrets, which was magnificently constructed, and although it was poorly lit at the time, Tom was sure that there must have been some sort of mechanism to illuminate it.
The Chamber of Secrets was originally built to have a place to teach their students magic that the other three founders did not approve of. Slytherin and the other three founders had long been at odds, the other three were reluctant to teach dark magic to their students, but Slytherin was willing to do so.
This was the original function of the Chamber of Secrets: a place to chat.
But it was a big project, hidden from the other founders, so it took a long time, so long that Slytherin himself changed his mind, and when the Chamber of Secrets was finished, he became more ambitious, and his differences with the other three became even greater.
This statue was a reflection of his mentality: none of the other founders had built a large statue of themselves in the school. This statue, instead, was a statue that everyone who wanted to see its face had to look up, otherwise they could only see the backs of its feet.
Tom approached the statue, turned to Occamy, then looked at the face of the stone statue of Slytherin, hidden in the darkness, and opened his mouth, emitting a hiss.
"Speak to me, Slytherin, the greatest of the Hogwarts four."
Tom decided to summon the basilisk here and kill it. Ryddle wants to open the Chamber of Secrets, right? I'll leave a chamber without the basilisk for you to open.
And Tom was going to search the library for a unique spell, one that would activate if someone entered the room, so if he placed such a spell in the Chamber of Secrets, he could expect it: And Ryddle would fall into his trap.
The Slytherin's stone face twitched, his mouth slowly opened to form a black hole.
Tom took the opportunity to release the roosters from their cages.
At that moment a cracking sound was heard coming from the statue's mouth and Tom transformed into the form of a phoenix. Tom remembered very well that seeing the eyes of the basilisk would bring death.
But such a sight must be direct, if one looked indirectly, one would only be petrified. Wearing glasses did not solve the problem: Myrtle was wearing them when she died, but the lenses did not keep her alive. The key to survival is to see it through another medium: water, a mirror, the lens of a camera... The lethality of the basilisk's gaze conducted through a medium is reduced by one level, from instant death to permanent petrification.
Of course, if you are a ghost, the basilisk's gaze will only petrify you; after all, a basilisk cannot kill a dead creature.
But magical creatures, like a phoenix, are immune to the basilisk's deadly gaze.
So Tom decided to face the Slytherin basilisk first in its Fawkes form.
A huge dark green snake came out of the statue's mouth, and Tom saw its yellow, lantern-like eyes. The moment it came out of the statue, Tom released the roosters from their bonds, but by accident, the roosters, attracted by the sound coming out of the statue, were looking in that direction, and the moment the snake came out, they died looking directly at the basilisk before they had a chance to make a sound.
"I should have blindfolded the rooster!" Tom's plan was flawed, an accident, but he had a backup: his phoenix form.
He flew toward the basilisk quickly. He saw that the basilisk was green and glowing. It looked like some kind of highly venomous snake. Its body was as thick as the trunk of an oak tree, and its body length was over ten meters, it had crawled completely out of the statue, coiling its body in a circle on the ground.
When it saw Tom flying towards it, the basilisk raised its upper body and its huge head swung rapidly as it flew. The difference in size between Tom and the basilisk was like the difference between a man and a raven, but the basilisk did not have the nimble hands of a man and could only bare its dagger-like fangs at Tom's attack as it emitted a horrible hissing sound in an attempt to deter the phoenix.
But in Tom's eyes, this was a complete show of weakness. Although this was a basilisk, it had none of the amazing reflexes of its companions, and instead had the slower reflexes of any snake. From Tom's perspective as a phoenix, every movement of the basilisk was in slow motion.
"Bang!" The basilisk's upper and lower fangs collided with such force that even the heavy armor of a medieval European knight would have been penetrated, but the bite only rent the air.
Tom dodged the basilisk's lunge, and now the basilisk's upper body had extended, but when it missed, it stiffened involuntarily, and Tom saw the moment to pounce, its long golden beak stabbing the basilisk in the eye. Despite the basilisk's instinct to close its eyes, the phoenix's beak pierced its eyelid, blinding one eye.
A torrent of black blood spilled out, splattering the floor, and for a moment it was as if it had rained in the Chamber of Secrets.
The basilisk went into a frenzy, its tail swung wildly, striking the ground with such force that it left a crack in the marble floor. At the same time, its head swung even faster, but only to create more cracks. So in ten seconds or so, its second eye was pecked out.
The basilisk's black blood splattered on the floor, giving off a foul smell, and its once glowing yellow eyes had disappeared, leaving only two black, bloody holes.
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