Ethan was just returning from Professor Ward's lesson with Amy, Leona, and his two other classmates, Cho Chang and Marietta Edgecombe. Professor Ward had just forced them to spend a whole week together. It wasn’t that he particularly minded Cho or Marietta, but he would be unable to brew potions as usual, and his skill grinding in general would be hindered.

“You don’t need to go to Professor Quirrell, Ethan. He is ill, and I’m sure he would only send you away if he were still in the castle. You know, the position is cursed, and he wouldn’t be the first professor who got ill and wouldn’t come back from St. Mungo,” said Leona when Ethan said that he needed to go to Professor Quirrell.

Her argument did make sense, but he still had this feeling that he needed to go and see Quirrell. For the past half a year, he has visited him at least once a week. Quirrell had acknowledged his potential and not only offered him valuable insights into quite advanced magic, but he also became somewhat of a mentor for him. It had begun after the first lesson, where Quirrell had invited him for a quick talk about his future. At first, Ethan just wanted to entertain the man and tell him about his plans to change the world with his business, not expecting Quirrell to actually have some valuable advice. But as it turned out, Quirrell had studied muggles extensively in his youth and learned a few economic tricks from them. To add to that, he also knew how the wizard world handled things, especially on a political level.

Quirrell taught him that one needed to spend money to earn money, but more importantly, one needed to spend money to gain influence. At first, it all sounded like useless information to Ethan, but Quirrell was great at showing what he meant instead of simply explaining. The example he used was actually a little embarrassing to Ethan, as he showed him how Lucius Malfoy, despite being a far weaker wizard than Dumbledore, still managed to make the latter’s life difficult by using his money and influence to control the media. Even small weaknesses like a basilisk that didn’t even manage to harm anyone became a big problem for Dumbledore as people started to stop believing in his ability to manage the school and, with that, his ability to influence national or even international politics. A problem that could have been swept under the rug if Dumbledore had used his resources more carefully.

Quirrell also showed him how Lucius used his money to outcompete others in politics in general and how he used his money to stop other people from gaining money just to stop potential enemies. He also taught him how to stop that from happening to him.

With Quirrell’s help, he managed to gain access to several businesses as a shareholder. To stop the influential people from ruining the businesses he invested in, he invested in some businesses they had invested in too. Within the past five months, he had become big enough that people were unable to easily destroy his business and would be more aligned to ally themselves with him. Something that would become important if he really was ready to change the world in a few years. To compensate for his lack of experience in these areas and to also learn even more magic, he had met with Quirrell, and not doing so now felt strange to him. It reminded him that the time he had with Quirrell would be limited because Quirrell would be killed by Voldemort at the end of the year. He had thought multiple times of warning Quirrell, but he didn’t know how he should be able to explain it to Quirrell, so he planned to stop him on the evening it was supposed to happen. The problem was that he didn’t know exactly when it would happen, especially now that so many things had changed from what he had expected to happen. The butterfly effect he had caused with his presence had affected the whole school year. Even the golden trio hadn’t formed, and he was sure that it wasn’t entirely his fault. Hermione didn’t even spend that much time with him and instead spent time with Atlas. A guy who didn’t even appear in the movies because he was so unimportant, which was a little strange as he was in the same year and house as Harry Potter, but Amy and Leona also weren’t shown in the movies while Cho Chang was shown, so he was sure that the movies weren't as detailed as the books or the real universe.

At first, he thought it was a little regrettable, but he realized that what he had planned to do wouldn’t really be fair to Amy. He had realized how much she disliked the young witch, and if it weren’t for their friend dates, he was sure she would have done something worse than trying to get Atlas and her together. In retrospect, he couldn’t even say that he disliked Amy’s jealousy. It somehow made him feel special. A feeling he never had in his past life. That didn’t mean that it was pleasant to sit between Amy, Cho, and Marietta, as he could almost literally feel the tension between them. The only one that was seemingly unaffected by everything was Leona. She had recently started to push him into deciding whether he wanted to be Amy’s boyfriend or not, but despite that, she was just fangirling Professor Ward. Apparently, he was a great war legend and was a friend of her grandfather. While Ward had never been an auror, his prestige in the department was great. At least if one asked the older Aurors. The reason for that wasn’t that he was a powerful wizard on Dumbledore’s level, but because when you worked with him in a team, you were almost guaranteed to return alive. That didn’t mean he was incompetent as a wizard; he was still as powerful as Alister Modey, the most successful Auror in recent decades, maybe even more powerful, but when the War against Grindelwald ended, he made sure that the veterans under him were well taken care of, and in the rare case that someone died under him, he took care of their family.

For some time, this made him a politically invulnerable man, as he had more friends in high positions than even Dumbledore, who had earned a massive amount of goodwill after defeating Grindelwald. He also could have asked many of these people for favors, but the only thing the man had ever asked for was to have a peaceful life as a researcher. When the man had called in favors, it was only when one of the people that fought with him needed something, which only earned him even more goodwill.

If one believed everything Leona told about him, the man would have deserved to be called a saint. Quite a militaristic and commanding saint, but still a saint. At least that was until the next generation took over, and some of his research and the resulting view that came with it dissatisfied a few important families. And while those families couldn’t really do something against him, his influence didn’t carry over to the next generation like Dumbledore’s.

Stuck in between Leona’s endless praise for the man and Amy’s silent quarrel with the other girls, led him to be happy when Atlas and Hermione came over. This immediately led Leona to change the topic, as she wanted to become an animagus too. That Atlas had been able to become one in his first year still baffled him, but he had heard that he had taken Professor McGonagall's offer for private lessons. An offer, which he had received too and still didn’t regret not accepting. He had already studied the procedure and was sure he could become an animagus any time he wanted, but he had grander plans than to become a random animal or beast. He wanted to become a phoenix. not because it was an incredibly powerful animal but because it had the ability to revive and was practically immortal. While it didn’t have the offensive abilities of a dragon or a basilisk, he was sure that with his system he could easily substitute for them. But reviving yourself wasn’t an ability he could typically hope to get. Even his reincarnation hadn’t given him a skill related to that, but that might change with the phoenix form. The other abilities, like control over fire, the ability to teleport, or healing tears, weren’t that attractive to him. With his healing potion skill, he would be able to create potions that would overshadow any other healing agent on the planet.

The problem was that there was no known method to control what one would become, which meant that if he wanted to influence it, he needed to develop his own method. The problem with that was that you couldn’t really do any trial-and-error experiments with the transformation, as it was usually permanent. He thought that perhaps his system would offer him a solution, but he didn’t want to use up a skill slot for the animagus transformation if he could avoid it, and he was sure that he could come up with a solution or at least come up with a way to test his idea without actually doing it. Things like that were the reason he had initially taken the experimenting skill. While he almost exclusively used the skill for little experiments with potions or social experiments that were almost worthless to him, like testing if someone was happier if they found a knut or a sickle on the ground or if they were friendlier to other random people if he did little things like giving them a compliment or holding the door open for them, the skill had failed to give him any real tangible benefits until now.

He hoped that the skill gave him something like a prediction ability that gave him information without doing the experiment.

After a tiring day with the girls, he was happy to sleep. As usual, he drank a memory potion before going through his memories. He was absolutely sure that his memory skill would give him eidetic memory at some point, so he did his best to level the skill regularly, and the potion helped with that.

While he went through his memories as usual and tried to remember a few useless details, like the smell of food or the sound of his heartbeat in completely random situations, he realized that some of his memories were strange. He remembered how he ate with his grandma after he returned from visiting Amy last summer but noticed that he drank black tea even though he remembered that he needed to buy new tea the day before. He also realized that after he went out to the apothecary to get some medicine for his headache, he couldn’t feel his heartbeat at regular intervals, or he was unable to remember the smell of a big smog cloud from a bus that accelerated too fast after the traffic light turned green.

The more he went through his memories, the more of these types he found. It annoyed him to no end, and he was unable to explain it to himself, as with the help of the memory potion and his memory skills, he should be able to remember these things.

This caused him to have difficulties falling asleep, even with the comfort his sleeping skill offered.

The next day, he was in a bad mood because he didn’t find an explanation. As usual, when he didn’t know something, he wanted to talk with Quirrell about it. He hadn’t told the man about his system, but it wouldn’t hurt to ask the man if he had a way to detect if his memories were tempered. To his great annoyance, his group once again prevented him from going to Quirrell, which only increased his annoyance.

When he lied in bed the next day, still unable to find answers, he cursed at his status.

 

Name:	Ethan Brown
Age:	12
Health	100%
Mana	100%
Stamina	100%
Tier 1 Skills:	Level
Thinking	92à 102
Sleeping (in bed)	52 à 57
Harvesting (Magical plants in a greenhouse)	106 à 169
Experimenting	76 à 85
Spellcasting (With a wand and an incantation)	104 à 149
Brewing (Memory Potion)	57 à 113
Potion Making	41 à 123
Potion Making (Healing Potions)	New à 131
Spellcasting (Petrificus Totalus)	93 à 142
Herbology (Magical plants in a greenhouse)	154 à 203
Tier 1 Skillpoints:	385 à 884
Tier 1 Skills (Stagnant)	Level
Breathing	122
Walking	121
Reading	200
Talking	138
Calculating	104
Studying	179
Writing	106
Memorize	100
Teaching	100
Punching	80
Headstart	201
Spellcasting (Protego)	113
Tier 2 Skills	Level
Collaborative Learning	68 à 76
Pleasing Voice	107 à 109
Jab	112 à 127
Sensory Memory	72 à 95
Marathon	81 à 88
Precise Calculation	71 à 82
Elaborate Writing	36 à 41
Enduring Respiration	97 à 108
Contextual Perception	109 à 126
Spellcasting II (Protego)	New à 97
Tier 2 Skillpoints	454 à650
Tier 2 Skills (Stagnant)
Headstart II	201
Tier 3 Skills (Locked)	Level (Locked)
Headstart III	6 à 14
…	…
Tier 3 Skillpoints	6 à 0à1à0
Tier 4 Skills (Locked)	Level (Locked)
Requirements to Unlock	Collect 50 Tier 3 Skillpoints

 

One hundred levels in the general memorize skill and 95 in the sensual memory skill, which should boost his ability to memorize these things by 195% with the added effect of a memory potion with 246% additional potency. It was practically impossible for him to remember something wrong in that situation.

He thought about upgrading his memory potion skill that enabled him to brew a memory potion in 21 seconds now instead of 135 seconds in the hope that it would increase its potency further, but he realized that he had no T2 skillslot open. The other option, increasing his memory skill to T3, was a bit more expensive as he had barely made up the skill points for increasing the headstart II skill. Originally, he had planned to wait for a few more skill levels in his Protego skill and Collaborative Learning skill before he would upgrade all skills with the cheaper random upgrade, but if someone played with his memories, he needed to know them, so he decided that a few levels more or less didn’t matter. So he invested the first 50 T2 skillpoints.

 

While he was unlucky with his first skill upgrade, the skill itself was quite interesting, to say the least. He didn’t even know how that was supposed to work. Would his arm stretch unnaturally to increase the length, or would some kind of ghost fist punch his enemies? He was sure that the unnatural side of the effect decreased the boost from the expected 3% to 0.3%, which would still become a lot in the future but not as much as he had hoped. Especially if one didn’t expect to get hit. The other thing that amazed him was the additional effect. He had already suspected that T3 added an additional effect to a skill, as his headstart III skill had something similar, but headstart wasn’t really a normal skill, so he wasn’t sure. The other thing he noticed was the level-up requirements. The fact that the skill needed 1000 punches to increase from level 2 to level 3 meant that the requirement would increase by 500 per punch. Twice the amount of his t2 skill. If that trend continued, he could understand why there was an option to delete skills. Higher-tier skills would need years to reach a satisfactory level to be upgraded, while lower-level skills would be grinded to infinity because there were no open skill slots.

Still, he invested the next 50 Skillpoints.

 

Ethan had to read that skill twice before believing it. He knew that his previous fused skill would be special, but he didn’t expect that. He could transfer knowledge by touching someone and even had a chance to randomly gain other people’s understanding. That was absolutely broken if used with the right people. If he were to “study” with Dumbledore and he understood some increadibly rare or powerful magic, he could gain that understanding without even knowing about the topic beforehand. The only downside of that skill was that if the people he studied with were less educated than him, he would gain far less than they would. The other problem was that he needed permission to directly transfer knowledge to himself. Something he could only get if he explained his system to someone. Luckily, the skill would still be able to be leveled by normal studying or teaching.

Not wanting to linger too long over the skill, he invested the next 50 points.

 

That skill was a little lackluster, to say the least. It wasn’t even able to be used as a skill to farm points. On the other hand, he practically needed to do nothing to level it, and the purification effect sounded mildly useful. But before he upgraded his next skill, he invested his skillpoints in his headstart skill, pushing it to level 20 and increasing the starting level of the next skill to 3.

 

That skill was also quite "magical,” for lack of a better term. Like the punching skill, he didn’t know if his legs would stretch or if he would magically teleport forward with each step, but he wouldn’t complain about it. The passive skill was amazing if he ever needed to dodge something, and an increased step distance would essentially increase his speed.

He just hoped that the next skill would finally be the memory skill he wanted.

 

Ethan liked the direction this skill took, but he had to lament the level cap. The other thing he noted was that the skill didn’t take his base level into account, but he guessed it made sense as he had no base level in calculating while focusing on something else. As much as he would like to argue that he could really multitask, he knows that it is impossible. At least it was until now. But what made this skill attractive wasn’t its ability to calculate. What made it attractive was the prospect of fusing it with his experimentation skill. If that was possible, he was sure his brain would become like a computer that was able to simulate experiments in the background, which would increase his chances of success for Project Phoenix.

While trying to test his skill by calculating how high the chances were that he would upgrade his memory skill as the last skill, he spent another 50 points.

“Shit.” Cursed Ethan. The spellcasting skill was one of the fastest to level and would have been an easy way to farm skill points. The only skill that was faster to level was his herbology skill, which he was sure was some kind of glitch. Still, the skill was good, and he could use the skill to level his headstart III skill. Besides the skill points, he regretted a little that he couldn’t make his skill impenetrable. Sure, a 485% more durable protego would almost block anything, but he wasn’t sure if there really was anything that could penetrate it. Luckily, the additional ability gave him a live-saving skill, and it was an actual impenetrable protection skill. The only thing that confused him was that the “offensive” part of his protego skill was strengthened at the third tier. While most wizards used protego to deflect an incoming spell to the ground or a wall behind, real duellists were masters at reflecting the spell back to the attacker. What surprised him was that the boost was actually quite small. He would need to reach level 200 to deflect any skill with 100 percent accuracy and precision. To his surprise, the skill had no cap. He could only speculate that the skill might gain auto-aiming properties after that, but he wasn’t sure.

With a bad premotion and the knowledge from his background calculating that his chance to not upgrade the memory skill until now was 40% and would drop to 30% after the next, he invested another 50. Points.

 

“Finally! Yes that’s it.” Said Ethan out loud as he read the skill. He immediately delved into the memories that looked fishy to him, eager to get to know who or what played with his mind.

To his frustration, his memories were unchanged. He quickly realized the issue. His memories were already tempered. He had two options now if he wanted to get his memories back. The first was upgrading his memory potion skill. Twice. The other was to get a spellcasting skill that focused on fixing his mind.

The first had the advantage that he wouldn’t lose an additional skillslot and would only need to get the skill a few levels before he could reasonably upgrade his skill from T2 to T3 in the hope that the potion would fix the issue. With the tiny hope that even the T2 skill would be able to fix the issue, he invested 100 T1 points into his memory potion skill. He had contemplated fusing it with his potion skill, but he wanted the skill to be T1 for as long as possible. The increase in potency for all potions was worth the wait.

The T2 version was as he had expected. He thought about leveling up a few different T1 spells now that he had the free T2 skillslots, but decided that he first wanted to get his memories back. So instead of sleeping, he spent the night brewing 1266 memory potions. A personal record and only possible because the T1 skill reduced the brewing time to around 20 seconds. With all three headstart skills taking effect, which equaled 2,75 times the progress, he managed to push the skill to level 25 in a single night, but even after doubling the potency, he was unable to get his memories back. The only side effect was that he started to remember some of his dreams, which was quite a weird experience.

The next morning, he did his usual routine with his group. Amy had immediately noticed that he hadn’t slept the night again and asked him multiple times if he was feeling ill or if he wanted to go to Madam Pomfrey for a check-up. He naturally declined, as he knew quite well what was wrong and didn’t believe that Madam Pomfrey would be able to do something that his buffed memory potion couldn’t. So instead of going there, he forced himself through the lessons of that day and went to sleep for a few hours. The next few days, until the weekend, he spent any moment he was free to do whatever he wanted brewing his potions. His goal was to at least push the potion to level 50. With an added 250% potency from this skill and 246% from the general skill, it should awaken all memories. If that didn’t work, another ten to twenty levels would probably do nothing either. The only thing he could imagine happening was that he could see more clearly that his memories were tempered.

When the weekend arrived and they were allowed to go separate ways again, he planned to delve completely into this project, but he was a little distracted as researchers from all over the world showed up. That in itself wouldn’t have been something that would have interested him too much, as Atlas had already told them about it. What surprised him was that Newt Scamander was among the researchers and that he would stay at school for the next few months.

Ethan had seen the first Fantastic Beast movie and knew that his mom was hyped for the second before he died, and he could understand her enthusiasm. The first film was really good, and Newt was a much more likeable character than Harry. Maybe he thought that way because he could understand that Newt liked spending time with his animals far more than spending it with other humans. If he had the possibility in his past life, he could have imagined himself doing the same. He also liked that Newt wasn’t the typical protagonist who had some prophecy he needed to fulfill or had some special power. He just had his passion, which filled a niche in a world that had abandoned him. It took some time until Ethan realized that he wouldn’t really be able to become friends with Newt. The man was over 80 years old by now and probably had better things to do than spend time with a student who had seen him in a movie he didn’t even know about. It also didn’t help that Ethan’s priority at the moment lay somewhere else.

Ethan spent so much time grinding the potion on the weekend that Amy became incredibly worried. She knew that he would spend each day brewing a few potions to sell, and she earned quite a buck from it too, but the money wasn’t really important to her. not if it was at the cost of his health. But once again, Ethan ignored her concerns and grinded the skill. At the end of the weekend, he had managed to grind the skill to level 46, even though after level 30, the headstart III skill was not buffing his growth anymore. He would probably reach his goal in two more days. One if he worked the night through, which he did, but in the end he still fell short by around 50 potions. He was so sleepy that even Atlas, who didn’t seem to like him since he had shown his displeasure for his relationship with Hermione, asked him if something had happened, as apparently he had just stared blankly on a page for ten minutes.

A healthy sleep and half an hour later, he finally got the skill to level 50. As he only had a single T3 skillslot open, he used 100 skillpoints to upgrade his skill.

 

 

It took Ethan just a split second to read the effects of the skill before he started to brew another memory potion. After twenty seconds, he gulped the potion down, and a massive headache hit him.

While the memories that were tempered were still there, there was an additional set of memories for the same timeframe. Memories that terrified him.

“What have I done?” said Ethan as he went over his memories.

He remembered how Quirrell or Voldemort had tortured him, fed him veritaserum, and used legilimency on him.

He remembered how Voldemort had tortured him for days before he implanted new memories into his mind and sent him home. He had even changed the memories of his grandma. He had also made him take the healing potion skill and led him to grind that particular skill with an almost single-minded focus.

And then, after the next school year started, he had met him regularly, but unlike his memories told him, he didn’t have pleasant talks with Quirrell. The sessions he had with Quirrell were almost entirely used to make sure that he hadn’t started to question his memories and, if he did, that the spells that made him go to Quirrell at the next opportunity were still intact. The few sessions where Voldemort didn’t focus on violating his mind were when he wanted him to brew potions. Most potions were used to help Quirrell recover from the side effects of hosting Voldemort, but some were different. Some were even incomplete, and he didn’t even know what they were for.

He also realized that Voldemort had actively prevented him from upgrading any skills before. While he couldn’t prevent him from grinding his skills, he had made it so that Ethan believed that he wanted all skills to reach level 200 before he upgraded them, as this would use the headstart skills to their full potential and would allow him in the distant future to gain more skillslots.

He was also the reason that he had attempted to create a harem. Or, to be more accurate, to separate Hermione from Harry and Ron. He was also responsible for his dislike of Ron. Apparently, Voldemort wanted to isolate Harry just in case. The next thing he realized was that the economical “tips” Quirrell had given him were strengthening a lot of death eater businesses. Sure, he made some profit too, but Voldemort had already told him that he would kill him after he got the stone and that everything he had invested would then belong to his followers. Voldemort seemed to have fun telling him what he planned to do with him just before he changed his memories. At first, Voldemort had done it to test if his memory skills could block the memory charms, but after testing it a few times and Ethan turning from enraged and scared to happy and content to have a chat with his “mentor” every time, these tests became pointless, and Ethan was sure Voldemort did it purely out of pleasure.