Professor Vampire.

Chapter 228: Mystery Services Division, Death Chamber

"After a trial in the court of Wisengamo, Peter Pediru has violated thirteen statutes, including the Regulations for the Strict Restriction of the Use of Black Magic, the Criminal Code of the British Magical Community, and the International Law of Secrecy, and has been sentenced to life imprisonment in Azkaban!"

The verdict of Amelia Bones, the head of the Division of Magical Law Enforcement, was actually quite fair, and theoretically no one should have any doubts about it.

Yet Sirius was still uneasy.

Because he knew that Animagus could easily escape from the many Dementors in Azkaban.

The big black dog he had transformed into at the time was not really a critter anymore without attracting anyone's attention, and a much more stealthy rat would surely have made it easier to break out of the prison.

After Sirius brought this up in court, Amelia Bones promised to use a tighter cell to hold Peter in order to prevent him from escaping Azkaban by using the Animagus transformation.

Without waiting for Sirius to raise any further objections, she callously announced the end of the trial.

"Bones doesn't even realize that this isn't going to be solved by a different cell!" Leaving the courtroom, Sirius said with a depressed look on his face, "Creatures like rats are the most annoying, and the slightest inattention will set it free."

"Even if we keep Peter inside a fully enclosed cell, won't we have to bring him food? That dead rat could have gotten out of the window while the food was being delivered, and there's no way the person delivering the food would want to get up and keep an eye on that window every day!"

Sirius clenched his fists, "If you ask me, a coward like that who betrays his friends should just be killed to prevent him from doing anything bad again."

"It's okay, he's not in a position to shape-shift anymore." Dracula waved his hand with care.

"What?" Sirius looked at him in shock.

"I snuffed out the source of magic power in his bloodline by hand before I left, in this life, he'll be a good mute." Dracula smiled tantalizingly, but his smile was extraordinarily cold.

"That rat, if he does escape, will definitely go looking for Voldemort to be his backer, and then it will be a bit of a pain in the ass to deal with. Thinking about it that way, it might as well be settled once and for all."

"Well done, Professor Dracula!" Sirius waved his fist in ecstasy, "Hahahahaha, Peter the traitor, this is what he deserves!"

"Professor, could a wizard who was able to cast spells ever turn back into a dud again?" Harry asked curiously, blinking.

"Of course." Dracula said, "There are actually magical pacts or black magic that can accomplish this, it's just a bit brutal so very few people would go through with it."

"So ... Professor are you using magical contracts or black magic?" Ron asked as he probed over as well.

"The time for a magic contract to take effect will be slow and the conditions are more demanding." Dracula slowly hooked up the corner of his mouth.

"What do you say?"

...

Dumbledore led Harry and Ron back to Hogwarts through the fireplace in the main hall of the Ministry of Magic, while Sirius did the same back to 12 Grimmauld Place through the fireplace.

Dracula ostensibly stepped into the fireplace with Dumbledore and the others back and forth, but he had no thoughts of returning to Hogwarts so soon.

He threw down a handful of Flyway Powder inside the fireplace but said nothing about his destination, allowing the green flames to consume him directly.

Flyway powder trips that didn't call out their location tended to connect to a random fireplace.

For example, there was a witch named Violet Diliman who got into a fireplace without pronouncing any location after a fight with her husband in the middle of the last century, and then escaped her original husband by falling in love at first sight with the man who randomly teleported to the location ...

Dracula's trip to this flyway powder was different, however.

Before the fireplace could pick a random destination, Dracula forcibly reversed the orientation of space so that the fireplace was instantly connected to an all-too-common torch.

The next moment, accompanied by a shower of green sparks, Dracula's figure leapt out of the flames of one of the torches before landing lightly on the ground.

"Whew, this should be about the right spot." Dracula patted the slight amount of hearth ash that had gotten on his body and surveyed his surroundings with interest.

It was a deep corridor plastered with dark tiles, and two rows of torches stuck in the dark tiles of the walls flickered with a blue-white light, adding a bit of mystery to the whole space.

At the end of the corridor was a lone, black door ...

This was the corridor of the ninth underground level of the Ministry of Magic.

The lone door of the Department of Mysteries had aroused Dracula's curiosity even before the start of today's trial, and the familiar power inside the door had also raised Dracula's idea of coming to have a look.

As for Fudge and other officials from the Ministry of Magic, they had only just finished Peter's trial and had not long passed through this corridor. They simply would not have thought that Dracula would go and return, blatantly appearing in the important place of the Ministry of Magic!

Dracula stood in the corridor and carefully surveyed the black doorway in front of him.

The door didn't have any knob or keyhole, only a completely flat panel, the probability was that it was powered by magic.

Dracula didn't have a clue after looking at it for half a day, so he shrugged and took a step straight forward, appearing behind the door in an instant.

Since he could phantom shift anyway, opening the door wasn't that necessary for him.

Behind the door was a circular enclosed room. The room was covered with dark marble floors, and the floors were scrubbed clean to the point of reflecting, making their color almost look like they were covered in a layer of empty bright standing water.

There were a number of candles in the room emitting a cold blue light, reflecting the twelve knobless doors on the circular wall.

From time to time the twelve doors would swap positions, and the walls would spin up so quickly with them that if it was without the correct magical key, nothing could determine exactly which door was the correct one they were looking for.

Not only that, the Department of Mysterious Affairs has only five research laboratories, respectively, "brain", "prophecy", "time", "death" and "love". "Death" and "Love".

Among the twelve portals, excluding the five research laboratories, the remaining seven doors are all extremely dangerous mechanisms.

However Dracula naturally would not be bothered by such means.

None of the mechanisms behind the doors posed much of a threat to him, and he had absolutely no intention of looking for a specific door -

What was behind every door he wanted to go in and have fun, finding that familiar power from before instead became a secondary matter ...

Dracula casually pushed one of the doors open.

The door opened noiselessly, and behind it was a long, narrow rectangular room filled with constantly dancing lights, the entire room glowing like a gem.

Watches of all kinds completely filled the room, with different pendulum clocks, quartz clocks, pocket watches, wristwatches, and other clocks on display everywhere. "The sound of ticking hands resounded in all directions.

There were several muted people wearing pure black wizard robes who were standing in front of various experimental equipment, working in silence, expressionless and without uttering a word.

When they saw Dracula suddenly walk in, they also just shrunk their child holes for a moment, and with hardly any sign of surprise, they raised their wands and aimed them at Dracula who was surveying the surrounding area with interest.

These mutes had been working here for who knows how long, and now seemed to have fallen completely into numbness, as if they had long since lost such luxuries as joy and sadness ... in the Division of Mystical Affairs, which had left them gradually devoid of their sanity, or even their humanity!

"Strange." Dracula frowned slightly, "What are you all working on every day? It's surprising that you've gotten yourselves into this whole state."

However, those muted people acted as if they hadn't heard what Dracula had said in the slightest, just casting attack magic spells with little lethality at him with expressionless faces.

"What a hindrance."

Dracula snorted and raised his hand to clutch all the incoming magic spells in his hand.

Immediately afterward, he recited an incantation-

"One forgets all (Obliviate)."

The movements of all the mutes suddenly froze, and their eyes became blank.

"Fainting (Supefy)." Followed by a second spell.

The mutes all fell to the ground in a stupor.

"No point, no fight at all." Dracula bristled and looked up at the furnishings of this room.

There was a huge, crystal jar shaped like a clock form, with bright light emanating from it from time to time.

This clock-form jar was constantly producing a dancing, bright light, and within its crystalline running water floated a small, jewel-bright egg.

And as this egg was held up by the bright stream of water inside the clock jar, it suddenly broke apart, and a tiny hummingbird then flew out from inside the egg shell.

As soon as it appeared the hummingbird was lifted to the very top of the jar so that it could spread its wings and fly high up where it was not covered with liquid.

But whenever it tries to land on the surface of the water to get a drink, its feathers get wet again, and then the whole bird is brought back to the bottom of the jar, enclosed in its egg once more, and the shell is made whole again.

This process repeats and cycles over and over again.

The hummingbird in the jar also keeps getting older and older until it falls into the water, then is reborn and gets older and goes on an endless cycle ...

Dracula had been looking around this room for half a day before he finally decided that this was the Time Chamber of the Division of Mysteries.

Not only because of the many clocks around, as well as the countless objects here are associated with "time", but also the clock-shaped jar there is a strong atmosphere of time energy.

Dracula had sensed this kind of aura in the time converter that he had brought from Hermione.

"That means ..." Dracula's eyes lit up.

His eyes scanned around the Time Chamber, and sure enough, he saw a whole cabinet of pendants neatly arranged in a glass cabinet with a golden circle and an hourglass that could be turned-

A cabinet of time changers!

Dracula suddenly remembered that at the time, after Dumbledore had discovered that he had taken Hermione's time-turner, he had told him that the Ministry of Magic didn't have an abundance of time-energy and only had enough for in-house research as well as a handful of samples for students to use.

"I really believed Dumbledore's evil ...," Dracula said through gritted teeth as he looked at the cabinet of time converters in front of him.

He took one of the time converters from the cabinet as a matter of course and then woke up the mutes and added a confusion spell.

Once that was done, Dracula left the Time Chamber and walked towards the next room door.

The time energy was not the familiar aura that Dracula had sensed before; he could sense that it was much closer and more mysterious to him.

...

In the next three rooms, Dracula successively saw a piece of brain soaked in green solution, rows of crystal balls filled with high shelves, and a fountain spraying a liquid similar to an ecstasy.

These three rooms represented "Brain", "Prophecy", and "Love" respectively.

Together with the first room Dracula entered, "Time", then the last room is the research room that represents "Death".

I don't know if it's because it's too empty, but the Hall of Death is a bit bigger than the previous rooms.

The room was dimly lit, square in shape, and recessed in the center, forming a huge stone pit, about twenty feet deep.

Stone steps encircled the entire room, like stone benches, gradually descending one by one, each step steep, like a step classroom, or a Wizengamot courtroom that had been visited only a short time before.

In the center of the pit was a raised stone platform, on top of which stood an arch of indeterminate material, accompanied by a sense of historical vicissitudes, but at the same time dilapidated, giving the impression as if it were about to fall at any moment, but in fact immovable as a mountain.

There was no wall support around the arch, a tattered black curtain or drapery hung on it, even though the air was cold and there was not a single breeze, it was gently swaying, as if there was a kind of unknown power fanning it.

Upon seeing this drapery, Dracula's heart, which hadn't beat in a thousand years, suddenly pumped.

"Is that the power of ... death?" Dracula muttered, but then he shook his head, "But this is death, not darkness ... Then how could this power bring about such a familiar feeling?"

He exhaled deeply and slowly raised one hand, crimson magic power pooled in his hand and gradually condensed into a blood-colored river.

Dracula then took one step at a time, following the stone steps around him, towards the archway in the very center of the room, towards the drapery that was constantly swaying without wind.

With each step, the familiar feeling grew stronger, and the crimson magic power gathered in Dracula's palm also produced more and more distinctive fluctuations, as if it wanted to meet the curtain at any time.

As if another thousand years had passed, finally, Dracula walked to the side of the archway, only one step away from the curtain.

He reached out his hand and slowly touched towards the curtain.

However, the crimson magic power in his hand came out first, meeting the curtain like a river flowing into the sea.

The curtain was black, while Dracula's magic power was crimson, but after the two intertwined with each other, it was hard to tell them apart, as if they came from the same source!