The following day, Ben went back to Diagon Alley with Thea and Nigel for Christmas shopping. Ben started browsing through the bookstore while Thea and Nigel went to Gringotts to withdraw some gold. Ben brought a few complete collections of Adventures of Martin Miggs, the Mad Muggle to gift his friends. It was a comic book that showed how little wizards actually knew about Muggles, Ben found it an amusing read.

He bought a few revised editions of the books he'd read in the Library and went looking for Sugarplum's Sweet Shop after sneakily putting the books in his enchanted bag. In the shop, Ben bought a large number of Chocolate Frogs boxes, Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans and Drooble's Best Blowing Gum. He was going to send three of each to all his friends and one of each to all the acquaintances. It was mainly because Ben was in a good mood.

In Twilfitt and Tattings, Ben bought pointed hats for his parents and professors, even Snape. He bought a pair of woollen socks for the old goat Dumbledore.

'I wonder what Dumbledore will see in the mirror this time.'

Ben remembered that Dumbledore lied to Harry about seeing a pair of woollen socks in the mirror of erised, he wondered what he would say this time.

Ben met Terry and Michael outside the Eeylops Owl Emporium after buying treats for Aquila and he headed towards Florean Fortescue's Ice Cream Parlour with them. He also met a few other first-year students shopping in the alley, sadly he did not come across Malfoy.

***

At midnight, Ben tip-toed towards the basement, it felt a lot less cramped now. The basement was more like a dumpster, all the useless stuff was dumped there. His parents had still not noticed all the stuff that he got rid of before. This time he was not here to clean the place up, he was here to make his very own supervillain lair.

After removing a few stones from the wall facing towards the barn, Ben removed the bedrock in small chunks and slowly transfigured it into stone blocks. Since he could only transfigure a small amount at a time, the progress was quite slow. Ben reinforced the dugout space using stone blocks, he used the mending charm to turn the loosely stacked blocks into sturdy walls and vertical support beams.

After working for the whole night, Ben was mentally exhausted. He walked out of the newly created room and covered the entrance with the original stones. The wall looked no different than it did before.

Ben was mentally spent by the morning, he went upstairs for breakfast and decided to take a break. He could use [Healing], but he decided to take a proper rest since he was on a holiday.

Magic seemed to heavily rely on mental prowess, concentration and Intent seemed to play a major part in successfully performing any spell. On the other hand, Skyrim's magic seemed to be heavily reliant on the strength of one's spirit and not as much on mental strength. One exception was Illusion magic which demanded a lot of concentration as well. Ben could relieve mental and physical fatigue to a large extent using [Healing], but spiritual exhaustion could only be recovered naturally.

***

Early morning on Christmas, in the Room of Hidden Things, a large cabinet shook a little and its door creaked open. A pair of footprints appeared on dust ridden floor leading out of the room and then disappearing into the seventh-floor corridor.

Snoring noises could be heard from the portraits hanging in the moonlit corridors of the castle as an invisible figure passed by them.

"Yule Lads," said a voice waking up the Fat Lady.

"Huh- who is it?" she said looking around as the portrait swung open.

The invisible figure entered the portrait hole without answering, how this invisible figure knew the password was a mystery. Perhaps he had spent hours hiding, waiting to catch a student using the password.

Inside the common room, he climbed the stairs to the boys' dormitory and made his way towards the first-year dorm room. A floating wand appeared outside the door and a quiet whisper was heard.

'Alohomora'

The door opened without making any sound, inside were two sleeping figures. Two floating hands appeared out of nowhere and picked up an unnamed parcel from the ground. The packing was then carefully unwrapped and a silvery grey cloth fell slithering to the ground.

Ben pulled off his Invisibility cloak, which had a little more shine than the one on the floor and folded it nicely before placing it in the wrapping paper. He placed the note, which had fallen with the original cloak, under the Demiguise hair cloak and rewrapped the package and placed it back at the foot of the bed.

Looking at the two sleeping figures, Ben could not help but feel weird.

'Oh, God. I have turned into a creepy thief.'

Now covered by a deathly hallow, Ben made a slow and agonizing journey, back to the Room of Hidden Things while casting [Muffle] on himself.

In the Room of Hidden Things, Ben had conflicted feeling as he stared at the watery fabric.

"I can't take this home, not until I can make sure that Dumbledore can't track me through it."

He remembered that Dumbledore had somehow found the Cloak after Harry had forgotten it on top of the Astronomy tower. Even though Ben had checked for any tracking charms, he couldn't be sure as his knowledge was very lacking at the moment.

The cloak did not look much different from the Demiguise cloak which confused Ben as he was sure of the existence of the Deathly Hallows. How could he not, he was brought to this world through a swirling death spiral that came out of the deathly hallows symbol.

It had been four months since he came to this world and he still had no clue as to why, the Hallows were his only clue and that was the reason he had taken such a big risk tonight. He wanted to swap the Invisibility cloak before Harry got familiar with Hallow since he didn't know if there were any visual differences between invisibility cloaks.

Since his eyes could not find anything special about the cloak, he decided to try something else.

"Maybe-"

With a sudden flash of inspiration, he called out his system. A dense dark fog full of bright flashes of light came out of his chest. it looked like a mini thundercloud. Ben was shocked by the scene, there was so much lightning flashing through the fog that the whole room lit up.