Chapter 179: A Powerful Leader
An interesting phenomenon.
In any social model, people tend to seek a powerful leader, not just out of an instinct to admire strength, but also due to historical and real-world influences.
Even from the simplest perspective, a strong leader can more effectively unite power and concentrate resources internally, while also protecting the interests of the entire group externally.
So, is Vaughn a strong leader?
Clint, Melody, and Zack reviewed his rise to power and the process of him founding the WAC. Even from the harshest perspective, one cannot say he is not!
Before him, who cared about werewolves?
A marginalized group not considered human.
A plague that everyone avoided!
It was Vaughn Weasley who, from nothing, gathered these “savages” to form a force that the wizarding world in England could no longer ignore, even effectively challenging the Ministry of Magic’s authority.
Especially the international trade system for Wolfsbane Potion, which he proposed at the WAC’s founding conference half a month ago. With just this single agreement, the WAC’s influence has spread internationally.
Recalling the deeds of Vaughn Weasley seen in the newspapers over the past few days, the three of them felt very complicated.
“Captain…” Melody’s voice was a little dry, “Has your Greenwell family decided to support him?”
Under their expectant gazes, Oliver nodded with a serious expression, “Full support. And not just Greenwell, Travers too!”
“Those fence-sitters?”
“Yes, Phil Travers joined the WAC long ago and is working as a frontline staff member.”
The three looked surprised.
Oliver understood their astonishment; in fact, he thought the Travers family had gone mad when he first heard about it.
Because he heard about it at a Travers family banquet, a small gathering limited to very close “associates,” and the content of the banquet was – Phil Travers being established as the next Patriarch!
This was also one of the reasons his uncle, George Greenwell, felt urgent. Clearly, Travers saw great potential in Vaughn Weasley!
Looking at the three of them, Oliver said, “I don’t know what considerations your families have. I’m only saying this from the standpoint of a friend and colleague, hoping you will carefully consider whether your families’ attitudes are correct, or what your own views are.”
Seeing Clint open his mouth to speak.
Oliver waved his hand, interrupting him, “You don’t need to answer me immediately. Think about it. Of course, I’m saying this to make you understand that I don’t want any mistakes in assisting Mr. Weasley this time. We must work together, understand?”
After years of cooperation, Oliver had gained a certain authority within the team.
Coupled with the fact that his words were genuinely for their benefit, Clint and the other two, although still wavering between their families’ stances and Vaughn, didn’t mind supporting their captain.
“We understand, Captain.”
Seeing the three agree, Oliver nodded and then looked towards Boston in the distance under the night sky.
“Clint, send a message to Ghost Ship, tell them to hide well. We’ll deliver the Fire Dragon to Mr. Weasley first, and by the way, scout for any blind spots or loopholes in the Dreamcatcher.”
The four of them didn’t need to worry about being detected by the Dreamcatcher, as they all had legitimate identities as Mr. Vaughn Weasley’s Fire Dragon suppliers.
“Understood, Captain.”
Before long, a subtle magical fluctuation was transmitted from the sea surface to the seabed in the deep water area behind.
In the dark seabed, a massive shadow slowly sank to the ocean floor.
At the same time, the four-person team also rushed into the city on their brooms.
The sky full of “ribbons” was slightly disturbed by their entry, and some ribbons floated over, brushing past their bodies.
But even these all-pervading “ribbons” failed to detect a misty white humanoid figure drifting deep within Oliver’s mindscape, wandering among countless fragmented images.
Those fragments were stray thoughts, “impulses,” sparks of thought at the moment of eruption.
They were byproducts of conscious activity, originally meant to flash and disappear, then be discarded into the collective subconscious’s trash heap.
But for a master of Memory Magic, even the most useless thing possessed potential value.
The misty white humanoid passed through a fragment, leaving a hazy shadow on it, and then moved on to the next.
It was “contaminating” them, in a clumsy but undetectable way to the main consciousness and individual subconsciousness – most of those stray thoughts and impulses were indeed trash.
But in the vast chaotic system of the mindscape, even with a minuscule probability, there was always a chance that a momentary stray thought or impulse could influence the main consciousness’s decision…
…
As Oliver and the others flew into Boston.
In the Suitcase Space, Vaughn, who was writing something on a blackboard, suddenly paused. He turned his head and looked towards the entrance by the large oak tree behind him.
“Woof?”
Beside him, the Tree Bee, which had been lying obediently, raised its head slightly and looked at the entrance with him.
But there was nothing there, and it looked curiously at its master.
“It’s nothing, just that new experimental material is about to arrive.” Vaughn said, patting the Tree Bee’s head.
Sensing its master’s happy mood, the Tree Bee wagged its large tail, and like a small dog, stuck out its tongue to lick its master’s hand.
Vaughn played with it for a while.
Compared to people, he was very lenient with pets.
Because animals had simple minds, while humans were much more complex.
Deep down, he actually disliked dealing with people and politics. If possible, he would have preferred to dedicate all his energy to magic.
But in this world, there were always too many things that had to be done, as long as you still had ideals and unfinished goals!
The nascent WAC, other concepts based on the WAC, and the ultimate, distant vision of unifying the wizarding world.
For these, he had to strengthen his power, not just his magical strength, but also his influence and manpower.
That’s why, when Dumbledore decided to hand over leadership of the Wizard Families Alliance to him, even though he wasn’t interested in Dumbledore’s influence, and even though he knew the drawbacks of taking over an established power, he still tacitly agreed to that outcome.
Within the Wizard Families Alliance, did those who resented and ostracized him truly represent the opinions of all their family members?
Vaughn felt it was a question mark.
This was another interesting phenomenon: in all social models, for the choice of a leader, the lower strata desired a strong leader, but the closer one got to the upper echelons, the weaker this tendency became.
Until the level directly below the leader, their choices would become the complete opposite of the lower strata.
A family was also a small social model, with its own class structure. Where there was a class, there was exploitation. It was impossible for an entire family to consist of exploiters.
As long as exploitation existed, then conflict would exist!
So, the last time they met, he had used a gap while casting the Mist Charm to implant a Persona Embodiment onto Oliver.
Because it was hastily manufactured without extracting the target’s memories and emotions as raw materials, its function was simple: it could only amplify some of Oliver’s stray thoughts and emotions.
His goal was also simple – to use Oliver as a springboard, gradually instigating conflict between the lower and upper echelons, planting the seeds of conflict for those families!
Although George Greenwell supported him, there was no other way. George was destined not to be absolutely loyal, and he didn’t want remnants of the old era, centered around families, to board his ship sailing towards the future!
“I hope Oliver brings me some good news this time…”
Vaughn was lost in thought for a moment, then dismissed these ideas.
He refocused his attention on the blackboard in front of him.
Some time passed, and at one point, the entrance to the Suitcase Space opened, and Matthew tiptoed down.
Lupin was on a mission, wearing a mask of pain daily and mingling with those peculiar Muggles, so the duty of serving Vaughn fell to Matthew.
Only the two of them in the entire delegation could serve others.
The other committee members and executive committee members were doing well if they caused fewer jokes!
“Sir, Mr. Oliver Greenwell has arrived.” Matthew walked to Vaughn’s side and said softly, “They’ve brought a new batch of Fire Dragons, and people from the Magical Congress are accompanying them, seemingly a chance encounter on the way.”
Vaughn, who was thinking about something in front of the blackboard, smiled upon hearing this.
A chance encounter? Not a soul would believe it.
Most likely, the Magical Congress discovered Oliver and the others through the Dreamcatcher and deliberately followed to make their presence known.
“Proceed according to the normal process.” Vaughn instructed, holding chalk and writing on the blackboard, “Our relationship with Oliver is a simple Fire Dragon transaction, involving nothing else.”
“Yes.”
Matthew agreed.
Before leaving, he curiously glanced at what Vaughn was writing on the blackboard.
Those complex symbols, if a wizard born and raised in the wizarding world saw them, they would likely not understand anything.
Coincidentally, Matthew was Muggle-born. If not for his magical awakening, he would have almost been admitted to Eton College.
He could tell that what Vaughn was writing on the blackboard should be Muggle advanced mathematical symbols.
“Wasn’t Mr. Weasley researching his Dissolution Spell? Why is he suddenly playing with mathematics?”
Matthew shook his head in confusion, unable to comprehend the thinking of the great man, and then went out.
In fact, his understanding was not wrong.
What Vaughn was writing on the blackboard was indeed mathematical symbols!
Although he had been waiting for the Spell Development Module reward from Side Quest ③, it didn’t mean his future spell development plans would completely rely on the module and abandon self-effort.
That was not the attitude of researching magic!
The current Vaughn could not condense an entire Dissolution Ritual into a Dissolution Spell because it involved two important parts of spell composition.
The incantation, and the wand movement （ or rather, the structural diagram drawn with the wand ）.
Excluding the techniques of silent and wandless casting achieved through practice, a true spell must include the two parts mentioned above.
The incantation represents the effect the spell aims to achieve, and the wand movement represents the physical manifestation of achieving that effect!
As for how to achieve these two… because magic itself is a relatively idealistic thing, past writings by wizards on spell development described the process in an abstract and stream-of-consciousness manner.
Phrases like “intense will,” “emotion, always emotion” that were utterly bewildering.
Therefore, History of Magic usually recorded such events – on a certain date, in a certain occasion, a wizard （ witch ） unconsciously cast a certain spell, and thus the spell was passed down.
Very metaphysical!
This so-called spell development method, like a lottery, honestly had no aesthetic appeal to Vaughn!
In his view, anything that objectively exists should follow patterns, just as the macroscopic moon orbits the Earth and the Earth orbits the Sun, and microscopic particles complete 360° or 720° spins.
Finding no answers in the wizarding world, he naturally turned his gaze to Muggle studies.
Then, he actually thought of a discipline similar to magic – mathematics!
Yes, unlike natural sciences like physics, biology, and chemistry that describe objective phenomena, mathematics, also a science, is an abstract and formal science.
Simply put, elementary mathematics does describe the world our eyes can see, but advanced mathematics, especially when dimensions are introduced, describes a world that is difficult for normal people to understand.
“…Mathematics is a science of imagination, but it differs from magic in that it requires logic, defining concepts, and proving theorems. This process is built up layer by layer, like building a framework with a clear path. Taking geometry as an example, a set with addition and scalar multiplication is a vector space; defining an inner product on this basis creates an inner product space; a complete inner product space is a Hilbert space… essentially, it’s a stacking of specific elements and objects, but this process is not a complete release of imagination, but a necessity shaped by rigorous axioms and logic!”
“If magic is the wizard’s materialized expression of reality and higher dimensions, then mathematics is the Muggle’s abstract expression of reality and higher dimensions… Compared to wizards, Muggles only lack the power to transform the abstract into the real.”
…….
“…The Greenwell family’s business is doing very well. Even in the current situation, I can still see your active presence.”
“You flatter me, I’m just getting by. As you said, the situation is not good now, and a major client like Mr. Weasley deserves our utmost attention.”
Leaving the Suitcase Space and exiting the bedroom, Matthew heard the conversation from the living room of the suite outside, filled with a peculiar undertone.
He pushed open the door and entered.
The small living room, packed with six people, felt somewhat crowded.
On the left were Oliver Greenwell and his three teammates. Among them, the burly wizard named Zack Beld was holding a bag.
Opposite them were two wizards in suits, looking much like Muggles.
These two were the Aurors from the Magical Congress who had “coincidentally” met Oliver and the others.
Hearing the door open, everyone looked over. Matthew said, “Apologies, Mr. Weasley is pondering some academic matters and cannot personally receive you. Mr. Greenwell, I’m afraid I’ll have to trouble you and your team to complete the transaction inside the Suitcase.”
Oliver Greenwell nodded, with a friendly demeanor, “It’s no problem. Serving our clients is our motto. Shall we go now?”
“Yes.”
As he stood up, about to lead his team away with Matthew, the two Aurors from the Magical Congress opposite them also stood up and asked Matthew, “May we observe the transaction process from the side?”
Matthew did not speak, only stared at them with a pair of lifeless, vacant eyes.
The two Aurors felt a bit unnerved by his gaze but did not back down, “It’s fine if you don’t cooperate, but I think you wouldn’t want a full-scale investigation by Minister of Magical Security Michael Graves again, would you?”
The air became momentarily tense.
Oliver, like a genuine small-time merchant, pulled his teammates into a corner, looking at Matthew, then at the Congress Aurors, appearing bewildered and afraid they would fight.
Of course, everyone knew they wouldn’t fight.
In every sense of the word.
After staring expressionlessly at the two Congress Aurors for a moment, Matthew let out a cold snort, “Follow me!”
Hearing this, Oliver quickly led his team behind him.
The two Congress Aurors also breathed a slight sigh of relief.
If possible, they wouldn’t have wanted to be so forceful, but the current political climate in the Congress was strange. Meetings had been ongoing for days, and no clear stance on the WAC had been decided.
Without directives from above, how to deal with people from the WAC became a difficult issue for frontline Aurors like them.
Being too severe was clearly inappropriate, as the WAC was a legitimate foreign delegation with envoy status in England.
But being too lenient was also not an option. Their direct superior, Minister of Magical Security Michael Graves, had ordered them to conduct strict surveillance of the WAC, monitoring and recording all their external activities.
It was a difficult position…
Sighing inwardly, the two Congress Aurors followed Matthew to the bedroom and then into the open Suitcase. They had been present when Graves came for registration last time, so they were not surprised by the existence of the Suitcase Space.
Entering the Suitcase Space from the bedroom, they didn’t say a word.
After all, their objective was only to carry out orders and monitor the contact between outsiders and the WAC, not to provoke.
Moreover, the owner of this space was a rather powerful wizard.
The space had likely been used for experiments recently. The bright moon hung overhead, and the immense magical residual energy heavily pressed on the two’s senses.
The two Congress Aurors exchanged glances, then looked towards the distant, empty grassland where Vaughn Weasley stood before a blackboard, continuously writing.
“…Should we go over?”
“Forget it, not worth it.”
“Yeah, yeah, if we get killed, no one will care about us…”
The relieved look of his companion made the Auror who had previously been responsible for communication speechless. He ignored the other and continued to look towards the grassland.
“Hey, what is he writing? Can you understand it?”
“No!”
The same conversation was also happening within Oliver’s team.
Looking at Vaughn furiously writing from afar, Melody subtly nudged Clint’s waist, “What is he doing?”
“…I don’t know.” Clint shook his head blankly, “It’s not alchemy symbols, anyway.”
“Not? Is there anything else in the wizarding world that requires such scribbles?”
“No…” Clint said.
In all the branches of magic, except for Divination which uses runes and Alchemy which uses alchemical symbols, there were almost no other symbol systems.
As they got closer to Vaughn, Clint hesitated for a moment and quietly said to Melody, “It looks like Muggle mathematical symbols.”
His voice was already very low.
But Matthew, who was leading them, seemed to have heard his words and glanced back at him.
“…”
Clint gave an awkward yet polite smile.
Fortunately, Matthew said nothing and led the group to Vaughn’s vicinity, signaling them to stop, then walked to Vaughn Weasley’s side and whispered something.
Vaughn, writing on the blackboard, seemed not to notice his words at all.
Only after he wrote another incomprehensible string of characters did Melody and Clint vaguely hear a somewhat muffled voice from over there:
“…You check it… don’t disturb me…”
Behind Oliver, Clint, Melody, and Zack exchanged glances. Zack made faces and mouthed to the other two, “Is our future leader a bookworm? Or a bookworm obsessed with Muggles!”
Melody looked a bit disappointed and shrugged.
Clint, however, didn’t have as many thoughts as them. He came from an alchemy family and had been accustomed to burying himself in old texts and various symbols with his elders since childhood.
He was just puzzled why Vaughn, a wizard, would study Muggle mathematics.
It did seem a bit of a dereliction of duty… although he understood it somewhat!
People with research minds, when encountering something interesting, often get engrossed in it.
“But it shouldn’t be now…”
Noticing Melody’s disappointment and Zack’s teasing expression, Clint sighed inwardly.
When Oliver had previously expressed his full support for Vaughn Weasley, Clint had already leaned more towards his stance.
Unlike Melody and Zack from the Beld family, Clint’s family, the McLean family, wasn’t as wealthy.
Alchemy was a technology where costs and profits were difficult to clearly define. On one hand, alchemical symbols required the alchemist to personally traverse the Aether, meaning to create an alchemical item, the alchemist had to be involved throughout, making it almost impossible to do anything else, resulting in low efficiency.
On the other hand, the materials needed for an alchemical item were not decided by the alchemist but by the “symbols.” This often led to situations where, after obtaining the symbols in the Aether according to the design, experimental results in reality showed that realizing the effect of the “symbols” might require very expensive and rare materials as a base. Expensive and rare meant a significant cost increase, meaning difficulty in selling it!
Due to this uncertainty, alchemists were generally quite… straitened!
Although Clint was a promising member of the McLean family, he was not from the direct line, and the family wouldn’t invest more in him. Coming to North America and joining Oliver’s team to manage the alliance’s business was, in his opinion, the ceiling of his status for life.
In the family hierarchy, he was better off than the bottom rung, but compared to the true rentier class, he was still in an exploited position.
How could a wizard in his early twenties, with his life just beginning, already see the end in sight?
Clint was certainly not resigned.
He had no choice before, until Oliver’s words!
However…
Looking at Vaughn in the distance, still scribbling Muggle mathematical symbols on the blackboard, Clint felt his emotions calm down a bit.
He felt he needed to consider it further.
A leader engrossed in Muggle knowledge might not be…
“Huh?”
As he was thinking, Clint suddenly heard his captain let out a surprised gasp.
Melody and Zack beside him, who were looking at Vaughn, also widened their mouths in shock.
What happened?
Clint pushed up his glasses and curiously turned his gaze back to Vaughn Weasley, and then, his expression also lost control.
He saw that Vaughn Weasley had stopped writing at some point.
From their angle, they couldn’t see his facial expression, only that he slightly raised his head, seemingly looking at his calculation results on the blackboard.
What shocked Clint was that his hand, which had been holding the chalk a moment before, had disappeared!
No!
It hadn’t disappeared, but rather… it had gone through into space!
A distorted sphere in the air, like viscous, sinking gel, “swallowed” his arm.
Any adult wizard would be very familiar with the scene of spatial distortion.
Apparition!
But it was completely different!
Because since the Apparition spell was invented, it had always only allowed wizards as a whole to enter, and there had never been any successful examples showing that it could allow only “an arm” to pass through.
Clint was sure it wasn’t a separation, because the “disappeared” arm had no exposed cross-section of muscle and bone at the shoulder connection, nor was there any blood.
What was even more baffling to him was that Apparition should appear around a point, instantly generated, with the wizard using the spell being stretched into a “coil” by the high-speed movement of this “point,” and then both parties disappearing in an instant.
Instead of like this – an invisible, stable spherical vortex existed.
It was like…
It was like a channel had been carved out of space…
…
Vaughn was already immersed in his own world.
His thoughts were boiling.
“I should have realized this sooner… Mathematics has always been a discipline that attempts to describe matter, spacetime, and the universe. Numbers are sets, groups of various quantities, measurement tools; geometry is a framework built on tools… They discard the appearance of matter and reality we see, delve into the essence, and express it with abstract meanings like functions.”
“Isn’t magic also like this? Incantations condense physical phenomena into a few short syllables, wand movements construct its spatial coordinates. Combined, a physical phenomenon created by magic is born…”
“So, whether it’s magic or mathematics, it’s essentially a language. Mathematics uses numbers and geometry, magic uses incantations and wand movements, to describe a language completely detached from physical form. The world under these languages only contains abstract theorems and definitions. Those theorems and definitions can also be called… rules!”
Perhaps what they describe is not what truly exists in reality, but within the rigorous logic of mathematics, as long as a solution can be found, it has meaning.
Magic is the same; as long as the spell is effective, it also has meaning.
Sparks of thought were erupting, and Vaughn’s mindscape was in turmoil, but he had no time to pay attention to it. He didn’t even notice Matthew entering again.
Fueled by the collision of ideas, Vaughn picked up a marker pen and wrote a string of formulas on the blackboard:
This is a static spherically symmetric solution to Einstein’s field equations. Simply put, it describes a “pipe” connecting two spacetime regions, which can shorten the distance between two points in space when passed through.
Does it sound familiar?
In Muggle society, it’s called a wormhole, an astronomical phenomenon that exists only in theory and hypothesis.
And in the wizarding world, magic can already achieve its effect, and that spell is called “Apparition”!
Vaughn wrote this formula not to try and force a conceptual unification, because the scale described by Einstein’s field equations is based on astronomical units.
He wanted to borrow the idea, or rather, the logic.
“This set of equations describes a Lorentz wormhole. Mathematically, to maintain its existence, strict conditions are imposed: first, Φ（r） must be finite, and second, there must be a throat connecting the two spacetimes, so b(r) must also be finite…”
Vaughn continued to calculate while thinking.
The following were still strict definitions.
In the concept of a Lorentz wormhole, its entrance is called a Schwarzschild throat, a physically very, very narrow passage that can only allow a fundamental particle to pass through.
Therefore, if one wants this wormhole to allow a person to pass through, it is clearly necessary to “enlarge” its throat （ to avoid being torn apart by tidal forces）.
Embed the metric, derive the wormhole geometry, and then calculate the stress-energy tensor around the wormhole using Einstein’s field equations.
Vaughn gradually stopped the pen in his hand.
What was described on the blackboard was the universe from a Muggle perspective.
In their understanding, there was no such thing as magic!
Therefore, their calculation methods for wormholes would not introduce unknown quantities.
“Apparition is certainly not a Lorentz wormhole, but their methods of realization are very similar. They both begin from a singularity, the strong angular velocity deforms matter, stretching it into a ring, entering the spacetime curvature where ‘folds are smoothed out’ （ similar to having to go over mountains, but those mountains suddenly disappear, becoming flat ground, thus shortening the distance）, and sliding on a smooth spacetime membrane to reach the destination point in the other space.”
Sliding on a spacetime membrane is their most similar characteristic!
This indicates that even if their scales are different, the principles used are similar.
The biggest difference between the two is that a Lorentz wormhole can exist stably as long as there is energy. Then, by extension –
“Can the instantaneous opening and closing of Apparition evolve into a ‘channel’?”
