The fire raged and devoured everything it touched.
The fiery monsters billowed in the flames, their claws and horns and tails lashing, and the spider eggs of the Acromantula were all burned to ashes, and even the water gushing out of the springs was all evaporated.
Evan rushed to the entrance of the passage and looked back to see a shocking scene.
The whole place was full of red light, smoke and heat waves were suffocating, and the fierce fire monsters rushed to him.
Evan turned and continued to run, as he ran, with his wand, he smashed the rock walls behind him, blocking the passage by the falling boulders.
Through the cracks in the rocks, he could still feel the rolling heat wave. In the rugged and winding cave, he didn’t know how far he ran forward. By the time the blazing heat disappeared and the cave was cool again, Evan was soaking in cold sweat.
He sat on the ground leaning against the wall, panting heavily.
After a few minutes of rest, he noticed the anomalies around him. With dim fluorescence, Evan saw what was on the wall opposite to him.
The ancient murals were very abstract, and many places had been weathered off. In the mottled and shattered image, there was a magnificent altar rising from the ground, a masked wizard standing on it. He held up his wand as if to cast a spell.
In front of the altar was a deep pit, which was densely filled.
Evan got up and leaned forward, then took a breath of air. In sight were all the human beings crowded in the deep pit. They were lying there with painful expressions, looking at the sky in despair and drawing a dashed line above their heads.
Evan knew that these dotted lines were their souls!
Their souls were being stripped from their bodies, sucked away by the Dark wizard on the altar, who was gathering to complete an unknown evil spell.
Evan couldn’t help but shudder. This was too horrible. He couldn't imagine what kind of black magic would use so many people’s souls.
Even when making a Horcrux, you only need to kill one person.
There was no gust of warm wind from hot springs in the dark passage, and the temperature was much lower than that of the cave outside, he could even see the mist that he breathed out. Evan realized that he was hundreds of feet deep underground.
He raised his wand forward. The light dispelled the darkness and illuminated the passage that no one had traveled for centuries.
The ground was covered with heavy dust, with cracked marble walls on both sides.
Like the one in front of Evan, the marble was carved with murals of cruelty and evil. After years of erosion, most of the murals had become incomplete, and several marble slabs had even been completely shattered to the ground, leaving only traces of destruction by the Acromantulas.
Looking at these ancient murals, Evan had an illusion.
He was not in the Lair of Aragog, the Acromantula, but in an ancient mysterious temple.
Fear pervaded the darkness, as if something bad was going to happen at any time.
Evan raised his vigilance and walked forward along the passage with his wand. Watching the surrounding rock walls while walking, of which contents were getting more cruel and evil.
Death was not the end, it was only the beginning. Before the same altar, a Dark wizard with hood performed different kinds of witchcraft. He tortured the living in different ways, splitting their souls, instilling them back, and splitting them up again.
Besides, his experiments included a variety of non-human magical creatures.
There were powerful fire dragons, unicorns, chimaeras, goblins, house elves, Centaurs, but more of them were ancient species that Evan had never seen.
The style of the painting was abstract and distorted. The content of each mural was exceptionally weird. The Dark wizard took different parts from them, the heart of the dragon, the blood of the unicorn…
Evan didn't know how many murals he saw, but he suddenly realized that these patterns depicted a complex process of casting black magic including the casting material to be prepared.
He quickened his pace and wanted to see what kind of magic it was.
At the end of the passage, the most critical few murals were destroyed, the broken stones were scattered all over the place. The blue marble had only the traces of the Acromantulas' big pincers. It was impossible to see what magic the Dark wizard had created.
Evan was close to the rock wall he touched with his hand, and could vaguely recognize that within the magnificent altar just now, all the souls collected by the black wizard slowly rotated in mid-air, forming a circular whirlpool with strange silver light.
On the murals, these souls howled, roared, twisted and screamed.
They were infused into a strange object from top to bottom.
He didn’t know what it was. He could only see a blurred ball, with countless thin lines spinning around it as if something was going to come out of it.
In his impression, no magical creature would like this.
Besides, another strange thing was that the Dark wizard who had been appearing all the time had not been seen, and he didn't know from where he was presiding over the magic.
Evan didn’t think much about it. He might be in a mural that he couldn’t recognize.
The question now was, what exactly did the Dark wizard on the mural want to do, and did his evil black magic succeed in the end?
Also, why did these murals appear in the Forbidden Forest of Hogwarts?!
Evan took two steps forward and remembered the owner of the muffled voice who was hiding here, and what he had to do with these murals.
A gust of wind blew and interrupted Evan's thinking. At the end of the passage, the ancient murals and relics disappeared again. There was a huge deep pit in front of Evan.
He hurried to stop and saw Aragog floating in the center of the deep pit.
Hold on, how could he float in mid air?!
No matter how strong the power of black magic, it couldn't make his transformation go so far.
Evan increased the brightness of his wand to illuminate the whole space, which made it clear that there was a huge spider web ahead. Fine spider silk threads stuck firmly to the rough rock walls, coiled around and converged into a huge hemispherical cobweb. Aragog, like a small elephant, was lying in the center of the huge domed web.
Beneath the huge spider web, gusts of wind blew up from the bottomless pit, but the cobweb did not even shake.
Evan held his wand, and when he hesitated to go, he heard the aging and weak voice of Aragog.
"You are here at last, Hagrid’s friend!” he said slyly. “I have been waiting for you for a long time, ever since I last met you.”
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