Well, I got my answer — they are different. Minds of wizards, I mean.

  If I were to use an analogy, diving into human minds was like diving and swimming in clear, open water — rather intuitive and barely any resistance. But for wizards — or at least for these two — it felt more like swimming through diluted honey. Every thought, every memory seemed to drag and resist in slow motion, as if even their subconscious minds carried the weight of magic itself.

  If course, neither of them knew any form of Occlumency, so a wizard with practice will most likely feel entirely different. The thing I noticed, however, was that the one who had more magic, possessed a more viscous mind, thicker and more resistant to my intrusion. It leads me to believe that stronger wizards are naturally more resistant to mind magics, even without formal training in mental defense.

  Now, onto these two themselves. I had wanted to get rid of them at first but they... well, they weren’t bad people. Not like the traffickers — not even close, actually. I just don’t have any other personal experiences to compare them to. They were thieves, plain and simple. Both needed money, so they stole. They weren’t secretly murderers or sadists; there wasn’t some dark trauma driving them, no noble cause or dying relative to justify their crimes.

  One had a gambling problem, while the other was just plain irresponsible with money. So they stole.

  The two were part of a small gang but hadn’t told anyone where they were going that night. So I suppose that worked in my favor. They were also pretty young — barely nineteen. They’d been fourth years when the Hogwarts reforms took place. Back then, all the students who had already passed their third year were given a choice: continue their previous curriculum until graduation, or start over from the first year and accelerate through the grades based on how quickly they could progress.

  Every single Muggle-born chose to start over, wanting to experience the new system from scratch. Most wizard-borns, though — half-bloods and pure-bloods alike — decided to keep to the old structure, continuing as they were. Only the Ravenclaws, and a few odd ones from the other houses, decided to start again. These two fell into the more traditional group.

  Because of that, they didn’t know any of the new advanced material Hogwarts now taught, but they did have a fairly wide selection of spells and charms under their belts. To my advantage, I found that I could learn any charm they knew to about the same level of mastery. Another big haul.

  The real treasure, however, was in their memories — flashes of other dark wizards performing spells and illegal charms. Unfortunately, I couldn’t replicate those from memory alone. Unlike me, they couldn’t sense the spell’s impression on the Mana-field, and I couldn't replicate the spell from the incantation alone. For me to deduce those, I’d need a far deeper understanding of the underlying magical system from which those spells were created.

  In the end, I took everything they had on them: two invisibility cloaks, self-cleaning clothes, a few Galleons, and other trinkets that hummed faintly with enchantment. Anything mundane, I reduced to liquid nitrogen to dispose of. When I left them, the pair were unconscious in their underwear — one wand snapped in half, the other I'm taking with me.

  Interestingly, my first assumption had been wrong. They hadn’t come from the goblins at all — they’d just spotted me buying the huge number of newspaper and decided that anyone who could “waste” money on that must be rich enough to rob. Brilliant logic, really. After wiping their memories of me —or rather, scrambling them into meaningless fragments— I finally headed home.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  It was already later than I’d wanted, thanks to playing cat and mouse with those two idiots, so I took the Knight Bus for part of the journey.

  On my way home, I hid everything magical that I’d stolen in an abandoned place near the bus stop before the one near my destination. I hadn’t sensed any tracking magic in their belongings nor had I seen anything related to it in their memories, but given how careless these two were, who could say what tricks their boss or the Aurors might have up their sleeves? Better cautious than stupid.

  The rest of that night, and the several days that followed, were spent in near isolation. I dedicated myself entirely to reading and practice — not just skimming through the dozens of books I’d collected, but understanding them. The reading itself took less than an hour; I could remember every page at about five pages out second. Comprehension and experimentation, though, took far longer.

  Using the wand I’d taken,—frustratingly, as I'd learned the charm magic system works in a way that is impossible to use without an implement—I began testing everything I’d learned, refining every assumption. Slowly, I started piecing together how the magic of this world truly worked.

  First, the nature of magic itself. Aside from my personal observations about its duality of existence — none of the books mentioned that, by the way — I discovered several key principles. If I were to compare it to the magic systems of other fictional worlds — I mean if this one exists, who’s to say the others don’t? — I’d say that the Mana-field here has an incredibly high affinity for transformation, and a rather strong one for space as well.

  Almost all wizarding magic revolves around transformation in some way.

  Take the simplest example: the Levitation Charm. It doesn’t actually “lift” objects with invisible force — it transforms the object’s gravitational constant.

  Or Diffindo, the severing charm. People imagine it as a blade of energy slicing through matter, but that’s only an illusion created by the caster's visualization. In my own experiments, I managed to cut a wooden block into perfect cubes — even though half of it was behind a wall — without so much as scratching the wall itself.

  Even , which appears to create a magical blaze, is — or so I suspect — actually a parasitic disintegration charm, with the fire merely being a symbolic visualization chosen by its creator.

  Basically, if I were trapped in a void with nothing to interact with, my magic would be almost useless.—well, I can still target my own body, though, so not entirely uselessAny spell that generates something out of nothing is considered high-level magic — a charm or hex that manipulates the Mana-field to an extreme degree. The , for instance, is a high-level defensive construct.

  Then there’s the aspect of space. In most stories, manipulating space is impossibly complex — but here, it’s surprisingly accessible. Wizards can not only teleport; they can stretch, compress, or fold space, even create stable pocket dimensions.

  In the end, I had to laugh at my conclusions. In this world, I can manipulate space liked I wouldn't dream of in my past life but I can’t throw even a proper fireball. I can just set things on fire — the boring, literal way.

  Okay, sure, it’s still cool, but it’s definitely not as satisfying as shouting Fireball! and watching something explode in cinematic glory.

  As for the magic system itself, well again using an incomplete analogy I would say, if the charms were like programming for reality–it's unfortunately not exactly that strait forward– then the wands would be the compilers allowing wizards to use Python or C instead of Assembly.

  Due to this simple fact, it's impossible to cast normally available charms without the wand as it would need the wand to translate your spell for the Mana-field. Even those who learn wand-less casting do it by memorizing the feel of the magic after casting it themselves for many years, kind of like I did too learn transfiguration from Hermione, except worse.

  Nearly a week after my trip to Diagon alley, I broke the wand I had been using burning it afterwards, as I had basically figured out the wand part of the magic pair that makes a charm, in simpler terms, I was the compiler now.

  With my current conditions I have reached a bottleneck in my magical studies and experiments, so it's finally time to start putting some of my plans in motion.