[{"data":1,"prerenderedAt":-1},["ShallowReactive",2],{"origin-wizard-war-at-hogwarts":3,"chapter-wizard-war-at-hogwarts-wizard-war-at-hogwarts-chapter-26":6},{"origin":4,"title":5},"chinese","Wizard War at Hogwarts",{"chapter":7,"nextChapterSlug":19,"prevChapterSlug":20,"totalChapters":21,"novelImage":22},{"id":8,"novel_id":9,"title":10,"slug":11,"index":12,"content":13,"wordcount":14,"created_at":15,"updated_at":15,"volume":16,"translator":17,"content_hash":18},2357999,4612,"Chapter 26: Blood Curse and the Jumping Cauldron","wizard-war-at-hogwarts-chapter-26",26,"\u003Cp>Blood curse is a highly advanced curse; once imposed on someone, its effects often pass down through generations, afflicting all descendants. Currently, there is no suitable method to lift a blood curse.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Blood-cursed beastfolk are one common manifestation of the blood curse: victims can freely shift between human and animal forms, but eventually become permanently locked in animal form. This occurs because the curse gradually erodes the victim’s sense of human identity, causing them to no longer perceive themselves as human, but rather as naturally born animals.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Zhang Qiu finished reading the letter, then frowned and said, “If that’s the case, based on your description, Pei Xu’s condition is already extremely severe.”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“I read elsewhere that the blood curse is an expression of exceptionally high talent in Transfiguration,” Harry said hesitantly. “Which version is correct?”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Perhaps both are right,” Zhang Qiu said. “Perhaps the blood curse wasn’t originally called that—it might have been called a blood blessing. A wizard with exceptional talent wished to pass down his gift like an inheritance, but his children could not bear it, so the blessing became a curse.”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Harry felt this made sense—if there were no side effects, he too would gladly be born able to master Animagus transformation, something others could never learn.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Poor child. His parents must have been cursed with a blood curse by some evil wizard,” Ron said, sighing. “He bears what he should never have had to bear...”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>He seemed unable to find the right words for a moment.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Fate,” Harry said, deeply moved by the word. “Fate forced upon him.”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The three walked in silence for a long stretch. Harry’s thoughts drifted far away, strangely: isn’t everything parents leave their children simply fate imposed upon them? Take himself—he would never have chosen to be an orphaned Savior, but he had no choice.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Even Malfoy, with his nose stuck on his forehead, had a father—and the two were strikingly alike, even down to the placement of their noses.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>What kind of man was his own father? Harry had seen his face in the Mirror of Erised, but knew little of his character. He could only imagine him as a blend of Lin Fred and Ignotus Peverell—a humble, quiet Potions master who generously helped Muggles.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Huh?” Harry suddenly stopped walking. He remembered something he had overlooked earlier.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“What is it?” Ron asked.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>“Nothing. Let’s go to the library—I want to look something up,” Harry said.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Hadwin Potter and Eolans Peverell were Harry’s two direct ancestors. Eolans, his grandmother, inherited the Invisibility Cloak—the Deathly Hallow held by the youngest brother in the Tale of the Three Brothers. From this logic, if Lin Fred was indeed the old wizard in the tale of the Jumping Cauldron, he should have passed down that cauldron as well.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Harry did not for a moment believe the Jumping Cauldron had been lost or stolen or destroyed, because the story clearly stated that the son, who despised Muggles, exhausted every means possible yet could not escape the cauldron. It was meant to be passed down generation after generation, reminding every Potter to treat Muggles kindly.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>But it wasn’t.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Harry wondered: had some descendant, unable to bear it, put on the Invisibility Cloak and evaded the cauldron’s pursuit, finally escaping it? If, from the perspective of fate, the Jumping Cauldron—a relic forcing wizards to aid Muggles—was itself a form of blood curse, then did the Invisibility Cloak offer a way to evade blood curses? Did the Three Brothers create the Deathly Hallows precisely to solve the problem of blood curses?\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Could it be that if Harry uncovered the secrets of the Invisibility Cloak, he could cure Pei Xu?\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Harry spent the entire afternoon in the library researching these matters, hastily finished his homework that night, and spent the whole of Sunday on it. When Ron came to the library to find him, he was astonished to see that Harry had apparently made real progress.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Instead of endlessly rereading later generations’ speculations about the Deathly Hallows, Harry shifted his approach—he began investigating what had actually happened back then.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>First, it was certain that Lin Fred lived in the twelfth century. His eldest son, Hadwin Potter, married Ignotus Peverell—a fact recorded on Ignotus’s tombstone in Godric’s Hollow and confirmed in multiple texts. Harry had cross-verified these details and considered them firmly true.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Ignotus Peverell was the prototype of the youngest brother in the Tale of the Three Brothers. He possessed a powerful Invisibility Cloak and lived a very long life. While Dumbledore’s deduction alone could not prove this, the presence of Harry’s actual Invisibility Cloak as corroborating evidence made this highly reliable.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>If Dumbledore correctly identified the Peverell family as the family of the Three Brothers, then his speculation about the Jumping Cauldron was also correct—except for one possible detail: Lin Fred was indeed a Potions master who generously helped Muggles, but he corresponded not to the old wizard in the tale, but to the son who was educated. Because in the fairy tale, the old wizard had only one son, while Lin Fred had seven children.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>From these facts alone, combined with Professor Binns’s mention that Ignotus Peverell died in 1291 and Lin Fred lived in the twelfth century, Harry could roughly estimate their birth and death years. But as the tale said, Ignotus lived an extraordinarily long time. Even Dumbledore, now over a hundred years old, was merely called “an old man,” never “a very old man.” Harry boldly speculated that Ignotus may have lived over two hundred years.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Considering that Lin Fred’s father “died after reaching a ripe old age,” Harry found this description by Beedle strange. But after reading strange longevity magics in the Restricted Section—even learning that Nicolas Flamel, over six hundred years old, still corresponded with Dumbledore—he began to interpret the phrase as meaning: “Lin Fred’s father chose natural death rather than using magic to extend his life.”\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Thus, Lin Fred’s father likely lived to the average human lifespan. Considering wizards’ stronger physiques and the harsh living conditions of the Middle Ages, Harry believed he likely lived to around sixty. But according to the Jumping Cauldron tale, the son was still a reckless youth, unmarried and childless. So when Lin Fred inherited the cauldron, he was probably around twenty. His father would have been born about forty years earlier.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>That is, assuming Lin Fred lived between 1100 and 1200 (in the magical world, one hundred years was merely ordinary old age), he may have married and had children around 1125. His eldest son Hadwin Potter’s wife, Eolans Peverell, was likely born between 1120 and 1125.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Further, since Eolans Peverell was described as the “last surviving” heir of the Peverell family, note that in the Middle Ages, families desperately sought to bear children and passed major inheritances to the eldest son. Rather than believing the Peverell family had some unspoken genetic flaw, Harry believed Eolans was the youngest daughter, and all other heirs had died for various reasons (Harry even had a guess about the cause).\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Even if we assume she was the eldest daughter, her father’s birth year could not be later than 1100. More likely, she was the sole surviving youngest daughter, meaning her father was probably born between 1060 and 1080. By inheritance law, her father should have been Ignotus’s eldest son—otherwise, all male cousins would have had to die first before she inherited. Harry found this unlikely. So Ignotus was likely born in 1040. But since Eolans married while Ignotus was still alive, Harry believed that if given any choice, the old man would never have allowed the Invisibility Cloak to leave the family. Thus, her father was probably not the eldest son, and Eolans received the Cloak only because all her male cousins had died young. In that case, Ignotus’s birth year could range from 1010 to 1080, making his true age between 211 and 281—fitting the description of “very, very old,” and still within the limits of a powerful wizard.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Interestingly, while investigating the Resurrection Stone, Harry learned that the descendants of Cadmus Peverell, the second brother, also had no male heirs. The Stone passed through female heirs into the Gaunt family. The Gaunts repeatedly claimed descent from Slytherin and displayed traits resembling his. Rather than believing they were boasting about their bloodline, Harry leaned toward the idea that Cadmus Peverell’s wife was Salazar Slytherin’s daughter or granddaughter.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>If one considered only historical records, this startling conclusion had no basis. But the book Hogwarts: A History clearly stated that Hogwarts was founded in 990, at which time Slytherin was in his prime, ready to make his mark in education.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>In 990, Slytherin was likely between twenty-five and forty-five years old. His daughter could thus have been born between 990 and 1045; his granddaughter between 1015 and 1110. Cadmus Peverell, as Ignotus’s older brother, could have been born between 1000 and 1080. In other words, the mighty Salazar Slytherin and the mighty Peverell brothers were contemporaries, separated by only one or two generations.\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>Then, given Salazar Slytherin’s belief in wizarding supremacy and his obsession with pure-blood marriages, would he have preferred to marry his daughter to a hollow pure-blood family like the Malfoys—or to the Peverells, whose power was so great they could deceive Death itself?\u003C\u002Fp>\n\u003Cp>The answer was obvious.\u003C\u002Fp>",1550,"2026-06-21T04:54:27.874Z",1,"Qwen3-Next 80B","8986bd3a249ef7a3dd30905daca627adb9856d7dfd45f60a5009cb6ae7389035","wizard-war-at-hogwarts-chapter-27","wizard-war-at-hogwarts-chapter-25",528,"https:\u002F\u002Fnovelzhen.com\u002Fimages\u002Fcovers\u002Fwizard-war-at-hogwarts-cover.jpg"]