“Perhaps it’s just a coincidence!”
Mrs. Lupin gently soothed the anxious, burly Hagrid with a light smile.
Weilan walked behind them, but his inner turmoil was not calmed by Mrs. Lupin’s soothing voice.
He believed Mrs. Lupin was wrong.
Those House-elves died from magic powder poisoning, and the Ministry of Magic’s current ambiguous attitude towards magic powder was due to some reason.
Mr. Crouch, as a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Magic, and the deaths of the House-elves, must have some connection in the unseen.
Along the way, as they tracked the footprints, they also encountered beasts lurking in the Forbidden Forest. However, when faced with two Aurors, these ferocious beasts could only flee in disarray, scared away by various offensive spells.
After chasing away another pack of vicious dogs, Carson wiped the sweat from his forehead and asked Weilan:
“I saw you carrying Potion, right?”
“Yes!” Weilan thought Carson was asking him for Potion. “If you need it, I can…”
“No, I don’t need it.” Carson waved his hand in refusal. “My point is, this Forbidden Forest is very dangerous. You should keep your Potion safe.”
“If anything goes wrong, take the Potion and run immediately.”
“Okay.” Weilan verbally agreed, continuing to follow the footprints on the ground.
At another fork in the road, after walking straight for half a mile and squeezing through bare-branched bushes, a large open clearing came into view.
Thin snow seemed to cover this clearing like a blanket. In the center of the clearing was a towering tree, and surrounding it were about a hundred excavated pits.
“Someone dug up the House-elves’ graves!”
“These are clearly the graves of those House-elves; I buried them here!”
Hagrid looked at these pits, his deep voice filled with intense indignation:
“Hogwarts was the only home these House-elves had in life. Hogwarts is the most suitable place to bury them.”
“But I couldn’t bury them in areas frequently visited by students, so according to Dumbledore’s wishes, I buried them here.”
“Who? Who could be so malicious as to even… their graves?”
Amidst Hagrid’s half-angry, half-sad voice, Weilan walked through the undulating mounds, curiously observing the pits in the ground.
“Look closely,” Weilan reminded them. “The soil in these pits is evenly distributed around the edges of the pits.”
“It’s as if…” Weilan felt a bit uneasy, unsure whether he should voice this conclusion.
“It’s not that someone dug up their graves; rather, their bodies broke out of the ground themselves.”
In the clearing, all four people fell silent simultaneously.
This conclusion Weilan had drawn was not good news.
“There’s definitely something wrong here,” Carson broke the silence first. “If there wasn’t, Mr. Crouch wouldn’t have come here.”
He walked straight through the large and small pits to the center of the clearing, looking up at the towering tree.
“Hagrid, perhaps the answer we need is hidden within this tree.”
The tree trunk was extremely thick; it would take about ten adult men holding hands to encircle it.
The most magical thing about this large tree was that its trunk was hollowed out. Someone had installed a locked wooden door on the trunk, carved out windows, and turned the trunk itself into a large treehouse.
Mr. Crouch’s footprints finally disappeared at the treehouse door.
“Did you make this large treehouse?”
Weilan turned to ask Hagrid.
“No,” Hagrid denied flatly. “This large treehouse was already here when I was studying at Hogwarts. Dumbledore said this treehouse existed when he was young.”
“No one knows how long this abandoned treehouse has been here.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Lupin said. “I also heard about it when I was studying at Hogwarts.”
Weilan silently turned his head, no longer speaking.
“Why don’t I know? Oh… because for the first three school years, I wasn’t interested in the dangerous Forbidden Forest at all!”
With 49 remaining magic points, Weilan was considering whether to first use 【Subtle Observation】 to assess the situation inside the treehouse when he heard Mrs. Lupin ask Hagrid:
“Excuse me, does anyone live in this treehouse?”
“No, it’s been abandoned for a long time.”
“Then is this treehouse still useful for anything?”
“I sometimes use it as a temporary supply point for deep forays into the Forbidden Forest, but it’s not strictly necessary…”
“Okay, Weilan, quickly move aside—”
Amidst Mrs. Lupin’s shout, Weilan retreated in terror behind Hagrid, followed by a spell shooting towards the treehouse’s wooden door.
“Diffindo!”
This Severing Charm shattered the treehouse’s semicircular wooden door like an eggshell.
They stood two feet outside the treehouse, barely able to make out the dust-covered furnishings inside.
“For now, it seems there’s no danger inside,” Carson cautiously suggested. “But we should still send a living creature in to scout first.”
Carson pointed his wand at a stone on the ground and cast a spell, transforming it into a gray mouse.
The gray mouse squeaked a few times and scurried into the treehouse.
They waited patiently outside for a while, until the mouse reappeared squeaking at the treehouse entrance, before Carson reassured them:
“Let’s go inside and take a look.”
Even so, as Weilan was about to enter the treehouse, he still chose to expend 8 magic points to activate 【Minute Observation】, ensuring that no powerful or terrifying magic appeared in his vision.
Weilan looked back at the pits.
In the scene reproduced by 【Minute Observation】, House-elf corpses, like walking dead, crawled out from under the earthen graves.
Because the light snow concealed many traces, the scene reproduced by 【Minute Observation】 was fixed on these resurrected House-elf corpses.
His three companions had already entered the treehouse. Weilan frowned slightly, no longer hesitated, and followed them into the treehouse.
The treehouse was divided into three rooms; they had now entered the central living room. Two carved wooden staircases directly ahead seemed to lead to a second floor and an underground area.
The light was somewhat dim, but with the enhancement of 【Minute Observation】, Weilan saw bloodstains dripping onto the staircase.
There was also a faint, almost imperceptible smell of blood in the air, though far less intense than the night he discovered Bader’s body.
It was surprisingly warm inside, with only a few simple wooden tables connected to the tree itself, and a dusty mirror embedded in the wall.
Without needing to go to the second floor, Carson found an injured man in the empty room on the left.
The man’s eyes were bleeding; he was blind. Carson illuminated them with his wand, and everyone clearly saw the man’s face.
They all gasped in unison.
“He looks so much like Mr. Crouch!”
Mrs. Lupin exclaimed.
The reason she used the word “like” was because he looked much younger than Mr. Crouch.
Weilan glanced at the clothes he was wearing:
“But he is the Barty Crouch we’re looking for.”
Carson picked up a thermos next to him, brought it close to his nose, and sniffed gently:
“This contains Polyjuice Potion.”
“Then why does this person’s original appearance resemble Mr. Crouch so much?” Mrs. Lupin asked curiously.
Weilan answered her question almost before anyone else could react:
“Because this is Barty Crouch Jr.! The son of the Mr. Crouch we all know!”
The moment Weilan saw Barty, he understood—the first Mrs. Crouch had made the same choice as in the original story.
She took her son’s place in Azkaban, continuously drinking Polyjuice Potion until her death, in exchange for her son not having to suffer torment there.
But what Weilan hadn’t expected was that Barty had actually directly incapacitated his father this time, using Polyjuice Potion to become the high-ranking Ministry of Magic official, Mr. Crouch, clocking in and out of the Ministry every day.
Then, the mysteries surrounding the so-called second Mrs. Crouch and the young son, Bader, who appeared due to a “crisis of succession,” could also be solved.
It was likely that after Barty took over his father’s life, he found himself a wife and then had a child!
Barty was still alive; his fingers twitched, seemingly sensing someone approaching.
But he didn’t dodge. Instead, he covered his face with his hands and wailed sorrowfully:
“My father was not a good father, so I swore I would be a good father.”
“Bader, my son—”
As a transmigrator, Weilan could effortlessly guess that the person was Barty.
However, in the eyes of natives like Mrs. Lupin and Carson, Barty should still be in Azkaban.
“Who are you!” Carson demanded sharply. “Why are you disguised as Mr. Crouch?”
“Confess honestly, and we’ll consider rescuing you.”
The man’s face was filled with despair. He murmured, revealing his identity and his experiences completely to everyone.
He was Barty Crouch Jr.