Harry Potter: The Ring Maker - Chapter 550: Back to the grind

After that things returned to normal as the champions continued to try and decipher the hint from the egg and Nick focused on copying the library and clearing the room of hidden things. The second task was to be held on the twenty fourth of February and that meant only about two more months to prepare. That might seem like a lot but the problem is that the champions had almost no idea what they should be preparing for so they could only focus on a bunch of half baked guesses that may or may not be true.-

For Nick though these next two months allowed him to make a great deal of progress in the two things he was focusing most of his attention on. For the room of hidden things he had managed to grow his realms size by a two percent while absolutely FLOODING it with mana from all the magic he fed to it. As it stood right now the mana in his realm was so dense that it rivaled his islands at this moment. This wasn’t stolen mana like before either but true generated mana from the leylines within the planet of the realm.-

Thanks to this Nick was finally confident in transferring the golden apple tree from the vault into his realm safely. Other than that though he had already removed everything from within the vault save the money needed to keep it open. Grimgrip was rather unhappy about this but couldn’t say anything about it due to the nature of the goblins contracts over the vault. Nick scoffed at the goblins indignation however as the greedy creatures thought that the contents of a vault would naturally pass to them eventually so all the unique things getting removed from a vault stung at them.-

It made no sense but that was just the way goblins saw things in general so Nick could only shrug at it. There was a bit of a downside to transferring the tree to the realm however as the thing immediately devoured the mana in the air greedily dropping the ambient levels to the current earth standard. Thankfully the leylines produced enough mana that the tree stabilized and started to recover from it’s mana deprived state. This drop in ambient mana however made Nick more focused than ever on emptying the room out.-

He was making good progress too as he was almost exactly seventy five percent done by the time the second task rolled around. Interestingly the room also shrank as it’s contents did so now Nick could see from one end to the other with a little bit of effort. The amount of knowledge Nick had gained from the room alone was staggering as well since he had recorded every curse and the knowledge written down that he found as well. He now had thousands of different curses recorded and his personal library was now nearly twice the size of the Hogwarts public one.-

Speaking of the library he had also gotten roughly seventy five percent done with copying that as well. The final twenty five percent though proved to be trickier since it consisted of the forbidden section and the ancient section. For the forbidden section the tomes and scrolls there were cursed or in other languages that Nick wasn’t the best at copying due to his autotranslating ability. He could copy the symbols of course but his mind kept trying to write down what he read in english which wasn’t what he was wanting. Half the value of the information was how hard it was to understand after all.-

For the ancient section that also held true as the vast majority of the tomes , scrolls and records there were in a lost or difficult to translate languages. Nick wanted his own library to be a faithful copy of the original so he was forced to slow down so as to not accidentally translate a book instead of copying it perfectly. There was a boon that came with him copying so much knowledge however as some of that knowledge stuck. It was a mere fraction of what he copied but it was still an improvement to his knowledge base. –

Finally the twenty fourth of February rolled around an it was time for the second task to commence. Once again the bleachers of the quidditch pitch had been used to house the crowds that came to watch the event. In the center of the field stood a huge cubical grey chamber with a single bronze looking door that was otherwise unimpressive looking. Everyone there looked at the thing in confusion as they simply couldn’t understand what they were looking at. Soon enough Ludo Bagman started announcing the nature of the task as well as what it’s main objective was in the form of a single “kidnapped person” that each champion needed to rescue.