Volume 5: The Burning Golden Flame Chapter 337 The Secret Room That Cannot Be Opened
Hermione came to the girls' bathroom for the second time.
She had searched all the suspicious places on the first floor, but still found nothing. This made her wonder if she had missed something.
So she started her second search from the beginning, now in the public girls' bathroom.
Hermione was actually no stranger to this place.
When she was a "slave" in this castle, her main job was to clean the place. So when she conducted the first inspection, the bathroom was undoubtedly very familiar to her compared to the meeting room and storage room which she had never been to before.
But even so, she did not slack off during her first inspection and carefully checked every corner of the bathroom.
This second time, Hermione was even more careful than before. She didn't even miss the details in the brick joints and the patterns on the faucets.
Finally, this time she gained something she had never gained before.
On the side of a copper faucet that never flows water, a tiny snake is uniquely carved.
After seeing this, Hermione's face suddenly showed a happy expression . She excitedly hugged Fawkes tighter in her arms, then tightened her invisibility cloak, opened the Marauder's Map and observed the people nearby again.
There are less than ten minutes left before the last class ends, and some students on the first floor who do not have classes in the afternoon have already come down early to go to the auditorium for dinner.
If the faucet she found was really the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets that Dumbledore asked her to find, then if a student came to the bathroom to use the toilet after it was opened, Hermione would definitely be exposed.
So Hermione did not take the next step, but slowly retreated from the bathroom, then found a storage room where the castle manager discarded debris and hid in it.
Since she had roughly determined the specific target, there was no need to take the risk of searching room by room. The public use of the girls' bathroom also provided her with a lot of cover.
She just had to wait patiently until dark and curfew began, and then pay attention to the Aurors patrolling the castle and try to open the Chamber of Secrets.
In this way, Hermione waited . When it was dinner time, the footsteps outside began to become noticeably more frequent. She lowered her head even more carefully, and was even afraid that the invisibility cloak would accidentally slip off her body, causing Fawkes standing on her shoulder to expose his colorful feathers, thus attracting the attention of the students outside through the window. She deliberately held it in her arms.
Perhaps because his breathing became difficult, Fawkes pecked the back of Hermione's hand with his sharp beak in dissatisfaction, but did not make any resistance.
She waited quietly until it was completely dark and the curfew began at nine o'clock in the evening.
Fawkes nestled in her arms, as if he had fallen asleep. Hermione herself was probably too nervous, so even though she hadn't eaten dinner, she didn't feel very hungry.
During this time, her eyes did not leave the Marauder's Map for more than three minutes.
She watched as fewer and fewer students wandered around the castle until they all returned to their respective lounges after curfew. She also saw that the puffball students were locked up in the basement early after dinner, just like her previous life here.
Similarly, after the students were placed under curfew, more Aurors began to pour into Hogwarts.
They came in through the main gate together at around eight o'clock in the evening, and it seemed that they first Apparated to Hogsmeade together, and then walked to the school.
Including the personnel who had been staying in the castle before, the number of Aurors on guard reached seventeen.
This was not much different from when Hermione first got the Marauder's Map and observed the number of curfew patrols in the castle.
Among the seventeen Aurors, two were mainly responsible for guarding the gate of Hogwarts, two were responsible for guarding the gate of the castle, one was specifically in the astronomy tower, keeping an eye on the direction of the Hogwarts carriage from a high altitude, and the remaining twelve were all patrolling around the castle.
They were divided into teams of two and six in total, each responsible for a different area. The team responsible for the area where the girls' bathroom was located on the first floor would take at least twenty minutes to patrol back and forth from that place, which was enough time for Hermione to try to open the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets.
As long as the patrolling Aurors are not disturbed during the time when the chamber of secrets is opened, which may make some noise, it will be much safer to enter the chamber of secrets afterwards.
Of course, these Aurors would not search every room, even the women's restroom.
Hermione did not choose to wait too long. She stared at the Marauder's Map and after making sure that the two Aurors who were patrolling the first floor had reached the other side of the castle, she prepared to take action.
However, just as she grabbed the Marauder's Map and left the storage room with Fox, a name suddenly left the place where he was supposed to be in a place where a lot of names were gathered.
Hermione was stunned by the action of the name.
She really didn't expect that under the strict curfew control of Hogwarts Castle, there are still people who dare to violate school rules!
The man seemed to be familiar with the Auror's patrol rules at night. He easily found a suitable empty space and walked to the fourth floor of the castle.
Hermione watched him come to a secluded corner of the corridor on the fourth floor, and then crawl into a secret passage.
That secret passage was once one of her reference targets for sneaking into Hogwarts Castle, but it was abandoned because it was too dangerous. Now it has been discovered by someone and is being used.
Hermione watched him crawling forward in the secret passage little by little, until he had completely crawled out of the edge of the Marauder's Map and disappeared from the entire Hogwarts school, then she looked up from the map again.
This discovery made Hermione feel a little strange.
Before, she had always thought that as long as these people in this castle had good food and drink and were treated as superiors, there was no need to take risks to break the rules. Unexpectedly, she found an outlier tonight.
But this matter was just a small episode for her, and she had not forgotten that she had a mission.
In the storage room, she waited for the time difference between the Aurors' repeated patrols, then put on an invisibility cloak and took Fawkes to the girls' bathroom that she had discovered during the day.
She drew her wand and cast the weakest wand lighting spell she could control, and 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.
Of course, she couldn't learn this voice on her own. She practiced for an afternoon following the portrait in Headmaster Dumbledore's office before she was able to master it.
But I don’t know if it was because her pronunciation was not standard enough or because of something else, but there was no abnormality in the entire bathroom.
It was as if Hermione had just performed a snake sound show without an audience, and after it was over, the only response to her was silence.
This made Hermione frown. She tried to adjust her tone and pronunciation, and tried the snake language again towards the faucet, but in the end there was still no response.
After that, she tried many times, but always failed.
Finally, Hermione was sure that it wasn't her pronunciation that was wrong. Either she had found the wrong place, or the password to enter the Chamber of Secrets had been changed!
After coming to this conclusion, although Hermione felt a surge of frustration, she did not linger in the bathroom any longer.
She carefully controlled her steps, observing the movements of the patrolling Aurors on the Marauder's Map, and soon arrived at the fourth floor of the castle. She then entered the entrance to the secret passage behind the mirror, used Apparition in the secret passage, and let Fawkes take her back to the carriage.
After returning to her room, Hermione sat on the bed, took two deep breaths, and then without stopping for a moment, she walked out of her dormitory with Fawkes and went to Dumbledore's office.
…
This place looks like the grave of an entire colony of eight-eyed giant spiders, or it would be more appropriate to call it a mass grave.
The pit was filled with spider corpses, and none of them were intact. Almost all of them had been dismembered.
The valuable internal organs, venom and silk sacs of these spiders have all been dug out, and now only the useless torsos and ugly skin are left abandoned here.
It was estimated that they had been dead for some time. Jon looked at the spider leg closest to his feet. There were many small holes on it caused by insects, and the surface was dried and crusted, just like a dead branch in the snow in winter.
From the spider corpses on the ground, Jon could probably tell what the eight-eyed giant spiders that originally lived here had experienced.
They were not magical animals that were beneficial to wizards, and their venom and some of their body tissues were very useful, so Voldemort or some high-ranking official in the castle gave the order to massacre them here.
All the eight-eyed giant spiders were killed, the useful parts were taken away, and the useless parts were discarded, and the place became the mass grave it is today.
Although Jon was shocked by the scene in front of him, he did not feel much pity for Hagrid. After all, judging from the actions of these seven-eyed giant spiders in the original book, they could only blame their bad luck for having encountered a ruthless wizard who did not even treat the Muggle-born wizards as human beings, let alone them.
Walking around the large pit full of spider corpses, Jon carefully identified and searched among them.
The rest didn't matter, but even if Aragog was dead, he made sure his body was here so that he could go back and explain to Hagrid.
Hoss followed Jon uneasily. Even though Jon stopped pulling the skin on the side of his neck, he didn't run around happily. He seemed to dislike this place.
Come to think of it, it should be so. As the nest of the eight-eyed giant spider, this place is full of huge spider webs. Even if Hoss's racial talent allows him to run fast, as long as he is trapped in the spider web, it will be difficult for him to survive. There is a high probability that he will become a meal for several spiders.
Jon walked around the pit for a long time and finally found a spider corpse among a group of spider corpses. The corpse was much larger than the others.
It was obvious that even a normal eight-eyed giant spider could not grow to this size casually, and most of its body parts were still intact, except for the venom, which had all been taken away. It was obvious that the wizard who killed the spider thought it was too old, and its organs had begun to fail and necrotize, and it had no value at all.
Jon looked at Aragog's broken body from afar, and he could already imagine how sad Hagrid would be when he learned the news.
But after learning that it was indeed dead, Jon had no intention of staying here for long. He took Hoss out of the spider cemetery, returned to the dense woods, and turned over to ride on it.
The sun was just setting and it looked like it would take a while for it to completely set. Jon patted Hoss's bald head.
"Besides Aragog, do you know the other two? I remember Hagrid told me that Parsons is a centaur, and you are also a horse... you, uh, should be familiar with each other, right?"
At the end of this, even Jon himself felt a little unconfident.
Based on the nature of this lecherous donkey, it might really harass the little girl among the centaurs, and the centaurs might even want to beat it to death.
But after hearing Jon's question, Hoss became obviously excited. He jumped up with his front hooves and shouted twice, as if to assure Jon something, and then turned into the wind and began to shuttle through the Forbidden Forest.
Soon, it crossed a long distance and brought Jon to an abandoned tribe.
You can tell at a glance that this was the camp where the horsemen lived in the past, but now it is already in ruins. Most of the wooden houses have collapsed to the ground, and some of the buildings have signs of being burned, leaving only a charred area that has been almost buried by time.
After seeing the scene here, Jon's mood finally began to become heavy.
Unlike the Acromantula, although the centaurs have always been classified as magical creatures by wizards, they are a race with the same intelligence as humans. They can basically get along well with wizards in normal times. For example, the Ministry of Magic used to have a centaur liaison office all year round.
But given the current situation, even if their situation is better than that of the eight-eyed giant spider, it will not be much better.
