The Admiral of Hogwarts

After a good day of rest, Hugo and his companion ate breakfast early the next morning and took the subway to Grimmauld Place.

When they arrived at Grimmauld Place, walked up the steps to number 12, and knocked, Mrs. Weasley quickly opened the door for them.

"Oh, dears, you should be enjoying yourselves in warm Luzon. There's no need to rush back at this time. Arthur's injury isn't life-threatening, and the healers say they've found a solution to the snake venom."

"Thanks to your reminder last time, he was carrying a slate that combined invisibility and defense capabilities. You have to thank that slate, because it allowed Arthur to react in time and prevented the snake from biting a vital spot. Thank you so much for saving him."

"It's nothing; it's a collaborative project between the Mutual Aid Society and the Order of the Phoenix. We didn't contribute much. Besides, these first batch of magic array discs are still a bit lacking. Otherwise, they would have been able to create a barrier that could buy Mr. Weasley some defense time."

"It's not your fault. Magical items that can provide both invisibility and magical protection for only 20 Galleons... it's already very good to be able to make them to this level."

As a woman from the Proudfoot family, one of the so-called Sacred Twenty-Eight, who later married into the Weasley family, which specialized in making all sorts of magical items, Mrs. Weasley naturally knew the specifics of these magical items.

At least for her, although this magical item could only be used in a fixed location and couldn't achieve infrared invisibility, the simple optical invisibility, mild magical shielding, and emergency magical barrier combined into one item was already very impressive.

More importantly, this thing only sold for 20 Galleons. Considering that an Invisibility Cloak made from Demiguise hide would sell for 100-120 Galleons, this thing at 20 Galleons was definitely a super bargain.

After entering the room, Hugo stated that he needed to recover the now-destroyed alchemical plate to examine the cause of the destruction, because he was curious about how the snake had destroyed that magical barrier.

Because according to the known information, the snake only bit it once, causing the magical item to completely overload and become scrap, but if Hugo remembered correctly, this set of defensive array discs was enough to withstand the impact of a bear. A single snake bite shouldn't have caused it to fail so quickly.

"You came all this way and haven't even rested before going straight to work. It's really—" Mrs. Weasley seemed a little embarrassed, but at Hugo's insistence, she took out the metal disc, about the size of an adult male's palm, and several pieces of bloodstained clothing from the cabinet in the living room.

Unlike the first batch of samples, when making this batch of metal discs, Hugo and his team had already successfully established an industrial system on the moon and discovered many superior magical metals that didn't exist on Earth.

Therefore, considering the Order of the Phoenix as an ally, the ship girls added a lot of extraterrestrial metals to these array discs while maintaining the cost, greatly improving the performance of these defensive items.

The most important of these was the magical barrier that could pop up in an emergency, created using redundancy in addition to concealment, and this small change saved Mr. Weasley's life.

However, although this magical item was manufactured using excellent materials and redundancy to add a defensive function, it didn't mean that the defensive function was cut corners.

At least according to Hugo's previous tests, this defense was equivalent to a relatively powerful Protego cast by an adult wizard, even stronger than the level of Protego cast by most Ministry of Magic employees.

"If I remember correctly, although Runespoors have venom, they shouldn't have such a strong attack on magical barriers, and according to the size of the snake Mr. Weasley described, its bite force shouldn't be that strong either."

Hugo disassembled the array disc piece by piece while thinking. When he opened the array disc, he was surprised to find a large number of melted marks inside.

Previously, Hugo had always thought that even if it overloaded, it would at most simply melt the magical metals used for magic circuits or the magical gems used as nodes, but now, after opening it, he discovered that multiple circuits were completely melted.

Obviously, this situation would only occur if it was subjected to an excessive attack all at once, which would cause such serious damage to the entire array disc's magic circuits.

"Fortunately, this crystal used for recording wasn't destroyed along with it." After quickly cleaning up the debris with tweezers, Hugo picked up a colorless crystal the size of a corn kernel from the base.

Then, he placed the crystal on a magical item that Hermione had taken out from the ship equipment space and waved his wand, chanting a spell at the crystal.

As syllables emerged from Hugo's mouth, one Rune after another landed on the crystal, and then the crystal began to emit streams of white mist.

Through these mists, Hugo quickly figured out how the magic array disc was destroyed, and then deduced a lot of data.

"It seems that this time, the Runespoor venom is not just a simple biochemical weapon; it actually contains powerful magical damage. That is to say, this thing is most likely already one of Voldemort's Horcruxes," Hugo pondered after seeing the experimental results.

The reason for making such a judgment was because genuine Runespoors didn't possess the ability to cause magical attacks with their venom, and this change was most likely related to the snake's Horcruxification.

Now, this information was very valuable to Hugo, because previously, because Nagini was under Hugo's control, they couldn't confirm whether Voldemort had remade a Horcrux and what the new Horcrux was.

But now, the appearance of this snake proved Voldemort's direction of action. Although Voldemort no longer had Nagini, he still made a new Horcrux.

In addition, the most important discovery for Hugo was that he extracted the residual venom from this array disc and a robe that Mrs. Weasley had additionally brought over.

From this venom, he was pleasantly surprised to discover a new idea for resisting magical defenses, which was to use the soul to change matter.

Previously, Hugo and the ship girls had also discovered many kinds of items that could target magic, but the problem was that the way these items interfered with the composition of magic was through the magic they possessed themselves, which was equivalent to a head-on collision.

Therefore, the anti-magic protection magical items made in this way were either expensive disposable items or required an external powerful energy source to maintain operation.

But this venom obviously adopted another principle, similar to some kind of necromantic spell, using the more readily available thing of the soul as an energy source to produce a powerful magical effect.

If we consider that as long as it's not consumed too much at once, the soul can gradually recover, it's obviously more energy-efficient than the other two methods.

Unfortunately, after connecting to the Admiral Network and completing a half-hour analysis, Hugo and his team also discovered that this power was actually formed by the gradual radiation and penetration of those fragmented souls.

That is to say, this thing can be regarded as a byproduct of that fragment of soul from the Horcrux. If it was a complete soul, this kind of venom simply couldn't be produced.

"It seems there's really no free lunch after all." After understanding the nature of the venom, Hugo could only reluctantly give up this idea.