The Mystery of the Confession Effect

Chapter 68 The Mystery of the Confession Effect

Developing magic for flight shouldn't be difficult—after all, Voldemort and Snape both accomplished it in the original stories, so it's even less unlikely that Avada Kedavra, with his magical senses, couldn't do it. Putting everything else aside, he already has quite a few related ideas, he just hasn't tested their feasibility yet.

Moreover, this brought an additional benefit: he no longer needed to painstakingly develop magic for complete invisibility—since the spell of "Close to the Ends of the Earth" could make him disappear into thin air, what was the point of simple optical invisibility?

Even if you intend to do something to real-world objects while invisible, the Invisibility Spell doesn't make a sound like Apparition, and a skilled Illusion Spell is sufficient.

"Speaking of which, Harry's invisibility cloak should be arriving soon, right? We can analyze it then and see what this so-called 'Deathly Hallows' really is..."

He couldn't move freely in the spatial interlayer for the time being, so he couldn't play around. After testing a few spells and confirming that he could cast spells normally in the spatial interlayer, he returned to reality and then headed to the Room of Requirement on the eighth floor. He had only come to the empty classroom temporarily to test the effect of breaking the Apparition restriction; the real research had to be done in the Room of Requirement's private room.

However, his recent research tasks have been relatively singular. Apart from the most important task of cracking Voldemort's mental powers, he has only studied spatial magic and tried to understand the contents of Professor Baker's big book.

With Voldemort out of the picture and his spatial magic having just achieved a landmark breakthrough, he could now focus his energy on that large book that made him rather uncomfortable—

"Sixth article, Research Notes on the 'Confession Effect' of the Soul."

"The repentance effect?"

Avada raised an eyebrow: Is this related to the "Confession" spell that Professor Baker left behind last year?

So he began to read it word by word, sentence by sentence, with great concentration.

"Through my previous research on Horcruxes, I have confirmed that the soul has volume, but whether it has mass is still unknown... However, this is not the topic I will be researching today."

The author of this notebook seems to be the same person as the second and third notebooks; while the fourth and fifth notebooks record detailed data on a certain dark wizard's research on vitality and mental power, respectively. The research on mental power highly overlaps with the knowledge that Avada currently possesses, while he has gained quite a bit from the research on vitality.

"In the process of collecting a lot of information about Horcruxes, I found that a lot of the information mentioned the same thing, namely the so-called 'confession effect'."

"According to them, if a Horcrux maker sincerely repents for the evil act of killing someone because of making the Horcrux, and it has to be from the bottom of his heart, then his soul fragments can be returned, and his whole soul can be made whole again."

"To be honest, I initially scoffed at this, because I already knew that what split the soul wasn't some evil murder, but rather the sudden arrival of the 'power of death' that could drain the soul... If someone uses the effects of the power of death to create a Horcrux in what they consider righteous killings like 'self-protection' or 'revenge,' then if they want their soul to be restored to its wholeness, should they repent for their 'righteous act'?"

"Besides, Horcruxes can be destroyed, and the soul fragments left unprotected after a Horcrux is destroyed will be taken away by the power of Death. Repentance? Can repentance really earn Death's mercy and make Him return the soul fragments that have already been taken away?"

"However, because so many materials about Horcruxes mention this point, and some Horcrux creators have even tried it themselves and proven it to be effective, I have no choice but to take this absurd matter seriously."

"However, the first step of the experiment has already encountered difficulties: How can I find a powerful dark wizard capable of creating Horcruxes, and then force him to sincerely repent for his sins?!"

"..."

"After two years of research, I have finally succeeded in improving the method of making Horcruxes, greatly simplifying their precision and complexity... In this way, any dark wizard with a bit of strength can meet the threshold for making Horcruxes, and who would refuse immortality? However, I deliberately did not remove the restriction of 'evil murder' for the sake of my next research."

"..."

"And so, I spent another year traveling the world, finding those lousy dark wizards, gaining their trust, and teaching them how to make Horcruxes. In this way, I obtained a total of thirty-five samples with Horcruxes. To be honest, that's a bit few, but I couldn't wait to explore the mysteries of the soul."

"..."

"Although I read through a lot of methods of priests guiding confession, as well as those convoluted philosophies of good and evil... I still couldn't get a guy who had already made a Horcrux to confess his 'sins.' I doubted that even if I brought the Pope over, he still couldn't do it... So I simply burned those books that had tormented me for months and started experimenting with my own methods."

"I altered the memories of the first sample, making him believe that he created the Horcrux in order to survive when he was terminally ill and near death—but it was all in vain, because his personality hadn't changed. He believed that his pursuit of life was a matter of course, and told me that even if he were healthy, he would still create Horcruxes in order to achieve immortality..."

"...This is the first time in my life that I have killed someone out of anger at the evil in another person."

"If this gets out, I'll probably be laughed at by black wizards all over the world for centuries."

"But there was no other way; the experiment had to continue. So I used a forgetting spell to give the second sample a bath, making him forget everything about himself, turning him into a blank slate. Then I sent him to a small village that seemed to have a nice atmosphere for a while, so that he would at least think that murder was a crime..."

"Then I fabricated some evidence to make him the perpetrator of a 'very heinous' Muggle murder case from a few years ago, and led the police and detectives to him. When he learned the 'truth,' he reacted with shock and disbelief, and still showed no remorse..."

"Thinking about it, it makes sense. He doesn't even remember killing anyone, so why would he feel remorse?"

"I really want to send those damned guys away with a thunderbolt, but to avoid getting entangled with the Ministry of Magic, I'll pass."

"..."

"By Merlin, the thirty-second sample has finally made a confession... To be honest, if this doesn't work, I'd like to try confessing myself—confessing why I created the Horcrux of Immortality and then got tortured by these damned bastards."

"Getting back to the point, during his confession of his sins, I was monitoring his soul and Horcruxes using the method I devised. Then, the most shocking thing was presented to me through numbers and symbols—"

"His soul has truly been restored to its full potential, and the soul fragments within the Horcrux have correspondingly disappeared!"

"And as the next experiment proceeded, I felt my worldview being turned upside down—I destroyed the Horcrux of the next sample, and then successfully guided him to repent in the same way...and then his soul was restored to its wholeness!!"

"Why?!"

(End of this chapter)