HPxLOTM: A Wizard's Path to Divinity-Chapter 721: So Then—What Is the Price?

Snap!

With the second snap of his fingers, all the Outer Deities rapidly shrank in size. In less than half a minute, they had been reduced to the scale of ordinary humans. Immediately afterwards, Edward cast Petrification on all of them at once, freezing them in place, then enveloped them inside a spherical barrier.

Yes—the apocalyptic threat that had plunged the Lord of the Mysteries world into dread for thousands of years had been resolved so easily...

As if.

At that moment, a series of faint crackling sounds—like glass splintering—rang in Edward’s ears. At the same time, he keenly sensed that the Harry Potter world was slowly beginning to collapse.

Accommodating so many Outer Deities at once had directly exceeded the world’s tolerance limit. As a result, even Edward’s control over them—as the "Creator"—was steadily weakening.

There were only two possible outcomes:

Either he maintained the current situation, in which case the entire world might completely collapse in the very next second;

Or he expelled the Outer Deities back to where they came from, restoring everything to its original state—after exhausting himself to the brink of death and accomplishing nothing but a futile struggle.

"...Huh?"

Just as he was trapped in this dilemma, Edward suddenly sensed something, and his heart jolted—

The dimensional ascension progress of the Harry Potter world had begun moving again.

And not only that—it was advancing at a speed countless times faster than before!

This was—

He quickly recalled what the "Creator" had once told him upon his advancement to Sequence 1: there were two theoretical paths for Dimensional Ascension.

The first was to have large numbers of people in the Harry Potter world consume potions and become Beyonders, triggering an effect similar to a mass spiritual revival to complete ascension.

The second was to open a passage between the two worlds and fuse them together, thereby completing ascension through convergence.

The first plan had been discarded due to excessive uncertainty—and because it might instead give the Oldest One an opportunity to awaken.

Thus, the second path had been chosen.

But now—

With eight or nine Great Old One–level "Beyonders" forcibly stuffed into the Harry Potter world at once, and with the Outer Deities continuously emitting highly polluting and corrosive auras, this was no longer a mere spiritual revival.

This was an instantaneous remoulding of the world itself.

As a result, dimensional ascension became unavoidable.

And once the world completed its ascension, the existence of the Outer Deities would no longer be able to destroy the ascended world. Edward could also use this to complete the ritual and ascend to Sequence 0, truly obtaining the power to confront the apocalypse.

The problem was—

Edward had no way of knowing whether the Harry Potter world would complete its ascension first or collapse under the pressure of the Outer Deities beforehand.

Everything—absolutely everything—was impossible to predict.

Crack...crack...

The peeling sounds in his ears had already turned into full-on shattering.

When he looked up, the boundless starry sky was now riddled with dense fractures. From time to time, fragments of the "firmament" peeled away and vanished into nothingness, revealing a vast expanse of stark, void-like white beneath.

Edward knew—

Once the world shattered completely, everything would return to nothingness.

All existence would cease.

Sending the Outer Deities away was a dead end.

Keeping them offered no visible hope either.

At this point, Edward could think of only one solution.

Standing alone in the pitch-black, boundless universe, he silently flicked a gold coin into the air, caught it lightly, then spread his fingers.

As expected—

The number faced upward, signifying negative.

He closed his fingers again, gripping the coin tightly, once more separating out the Uniqueness of the Door Pathway. As he opened an illusory door and cast it back toward the junction between the two worlds, he spoke with unwavering resolve:

"Madman to the Right—Reverse!"

In an instant, the gold coin in Edward’s hand erupted with blinding radiance, bright enough to nearly illuminate the entire universe.

Immediately after, the Door of Light connecting the worlds burst open within the vast starry sky, releasing a deep, thunderous sound as though space-time itself were being torn apart.

Countless mysterious symbols flowed and flickered across the door’s frame. They were like lively spirits—or like whispers from the dawn of the universe itself. Each symbol contained the silhouette of a world within it, as innumerable worlds overlapped and collided inside the gate, blooming into a dazzling, vertigo-inducing brilliance.

Time itself seemed to be halted by an invisible hand.

Everything fell into absolute stillness.

All things—whether the surging stars in the cosmos or the dust-like particles in the microscopic realm—collapsed inward in a single instant.

Then, at a terrifying speed several times faster than light, they began to reverse.

The visual impact was like watching the evolution of the universe played backwards.

The Harry Potter world rapidly receded and shrank. What had once been vast and boundless, filled with magical wonder, was compressed by an overwhelming force—until it finally became an unimaginably tiny point.

But this was not the end.

In no more than a fleeting instant, that "point" seemed to be imbued with life, giving birth to countless "lines." These lines were like the veins of the universe itself, interweaving, outlining, and combining with one another, quickly transforming into "planes."

As the number of these planes continued to grow, they assembled themselves with neat precision, like carefully bound pages of a book, until they ultimately condensed into a single volume—

A book called Harry Potter.

In the blink of an eye, the book was rapidly drawn upward and stretched across different dimensions. Part of its pages, like seeds that had been activated, began to elevate and transform their own world. The scenes within those pages continuously broke through their original dimensional limits, evolving toward higher levels of existence.

Another portion, meanwhile, transformed—through the Uniqueness of the Door Pathway—into mysterious passages. Like enormous, winding serpents, they slowly extended toward the world of the Lord of the Mysteries.

At this moment, the Uniqueness of the Door Pathway traced the pattern of a Möbius loop in the void, tightly linking two utterly different worlds, turning them into a wondrous state of infinite circulation and infinite fusion. The magical elements of the Harry Potter world and the extraordinary powers of the Lord of the Mysteries world began to permeate and influence one another through this invisible bond.

Edward stood at the junction between the two worlds, his hair drifting in the wind. Every single strand was wrapped in the authority of "Imagination" from the Harry Potter world—the crystallised imagination woven by countless wizards and humans over a millennium of time.

Immediately afterwards, the surging waves of the Chaos Sea, intertwined with the waters of the River of Eternal Darkness, erupted and intertwined across the starry sky.

Reflected in Edward’s pupils were two overlapping universes:

Hogwarts Castle manifested within the starry heavens of the world of mysteries; magical oil paintings blinked open and shut across the Astral World’s sky; Gryffindor’s Sword pierced the Chaos Sea; Ravenclaw’s Diadem shrouded Sefirah Castle; Hufflepuff’s Cup brimmed with the River of Eternal Darkness; Slytherin’s Locket sealed the City of Calamity; the Outer Deities became illustrations from Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them; Beyonders walked into the classrooms of the magical academy; Backlund’s long bridge twisted into the steel framework of Tower Bridge; Intis’s grand cathedral transformed into Notre-Dame Cathedral—

Everything was suffused with fantasy and distortion, filled with illogical oddities and bizarre transformations, like a child’s casual doodles—overflowing with fairy-tale colour.

But just as quickly as these phenomena appeared, they vanished.

When all the strangeness, absurdity, and distortion settled and returned to normal, the Harry Potter world completed its full transition, successfully ascending into an entirely new dimension.

Edward watched all of this unfold. He felt the completion of the Sequence 0 ascension ritual, knew that he could at any moment manually condense a Sequence 1 Beyonder characteristic and ascend to godhood—

Yet his expression remained utterly calm.

At this moment, only a single thought lingered in his heart:

So then...what is the price?

———

The ’divine abode’ of the Harry Potter world.

The train bound for death departed once again.

It swiftly left the station, racing across the dark river below. The entire carriage was empty—save for a single figure resting her chin against the window, leaning to one side, allowing the oncoming wind to scatter her long black hair and obscure her vision.

Lilith raised a hand and gently brushed her hair aside. Her lake-blue eyes were utterly still, betraying not the slightest ripple of emotion as she stared at the scenery rushing past outside.

At that moment, the train once again passed by the colossal Reaper. Just as he had when facing Edward before, the towering figure paused his actions, loosened his jaw into a smile, and gave Lilith a slight bow.

But Lilith withdrew her gaze and looked toward the seat opposite her.

At some point unknown, a girl of about twenty had already taken her seat there—black-haired, with delicate features and an unassuming, gentle appearance.

She looked at Lilith and smiled faintly.

"So we finally meet, Lilith."

"..."

Lilith stared fixedly at her. Only after a long while did she shake her head and sigh softly.

"I always thought that deep within the mirror, the ’Mirrored Original Creator’ had constructed nothing more than a woven false memory. I never imagined..."

She paused.

"...that you truly existed." 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

After another brief silence, Lilith continued, "I’m not happy to see you, Li Li."

The black-haired girl sitting across from her was precisely the one Lilith had seen countless times within the multiple "dreams" of the mirror world of the past—the girl named Li Li.

And she was also the one spoken of by the Ancient Sun God, by Adam, and by the Evernight Goddess as "that person"—

The creator of the Harry Potter world, who called herself the "Creator."

Lilith smacked her lips and said,

"So Dumbledore’s line—’God is a girl’—actually turned out to be prophetic."

She looked at Li Li and asked, "So what exactly is the relationship between the two of us? What did you hide from Edward? Why did you use Adam to push me to come find you—and what exactly are you trying to do?"

Li Li smiled gently and replied, "Our relationship is probably...similar to that between the Ancient Sun God and Adam, or between Amon’s true body and his avatar."

"You are a clone I separated during my slumber. Originally, you were meant to help me accommodate the pathways and authorities I created myself—yes, the very ones Edward now controls. Unfortunately, before you could take any action, everything had already been aggregated by Edward."

Lilith nodded.

"So you’re the original, and I’m the clone?"

She propped her chin on her hand, frowning.

"Then why do I feel as though I’ve completely broken free from you and now exist independently?"

"That’s partly an accident," Li Li replied, "or perhaps the Oldest One interfered from the shadows."

She shifted into almost the same posture as Lilith and continued calmly, "The reason I separated you in the first place was to have you seize the Oldest One’s power and authorities on my behalf—while I remained behind to confront the Oldest One’s consciousness."

———

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