This was the end of Sherrin and Hermione's first long conversation alone.
After separation, both Sherrin and Hermione returned to their respective dormitories safe and sound, but poor Harry was not so lucky.
When he went out to look for Hermione, instead of finding her, he was caught by Filch. He spent most of the night copying the school rules in Filch's office, and his hands almost folded before letting him go.
After a while, Harry, who was deeply tired, just lay down on the bed and felt as if he fell asleep immediately... He had a very strange dream. He was walking in a forest with a firebolt on his shoulder, followed by a silvery-white thing. The thing was weaving through the trees ahead, and he could only see it flickering in and out among the leaves.
"Ahhhhhhhhh-! No no no no no no no-!"
Harry woke suddenly as if he had been hit in the face. At this moment, he heard movement around him, and Seamus Finnigan's voice came from across the room. "what happened?"
Harry thought he heard the dormitory door slam shut. He finally found the openings in the curtains and pulled them open, just as Dean Thomas turned on the lamp.
Ron sat up on the bed, the curtain pulled aside, a look of extreme fear on his face, "Black! Sirius Black! He has a knife!"
"Right here! What happened just now! He cut the bed curtain! He woke me up!" Ron continued to yell.
Dean questioned whether Ron was dreaming, but Ron's cut bed curtains showed that this was not a ridiculous dream. The five boys ran downstairs at full speed. Behind them, the dormitory doors opened one by one, and many sleepy voices asked them questions.
"Who was yelling just now?"
"What are you doing?"
Embers in the fireplace lit up the common room, which was littered with trash from the party and empty. At this time, several girls came down the stairs, wearing pajamas and yawning. Then, the boys also appeared one after another.
"Everyone, get back upstairs!" shouted Percy, pinning his Head Boy badge to his pajamas as he hurried to the common room.
"Percy - Sirius Black!" said Ron weakly. "In our dormitory! With a knife! Woke me up!"
There was a sudden silence in the common room. Not long after, Professor McGonagall appeared. Once she entered the common room, she slammed the hole in the portrait behind her and looked around furiously. "I'm happy that Gryffindor won the game, but it's so ridiculous for you to be like this! Percy, I was expecting you to perform better!"
"I definitely didn't ask them to do that, Professor!" Percy tried to look more serious, although he looked a little funny in his pajamas and a Head Boy badge. "I'm telling them all to go back to bed! My brother Ron had a nightmare-"
"It's not a nightmare!" Ron yelled, "Professor, I woke up and Sirius Black was standing in front of me, holding a knife!"
Professor McGonagall stared at him, not believing Ron's words. However, at Ron's request, she still asked Sir Cadogan, who was guarding the entrance to the lounge, "Sir Cadogan, did you just let a man enter Gryffindor Tower?"
"Of course, ma'am!" cried Sir Cadogan.
Professor McGonagall couldn't believe it. She quickly asked Sir Cadogan about the password, but got an even more surprising answer - Black had the password for the entire week, which was read from a small piece of paper.
Professor McGonagall walked back from the portrait hole. Her face was as white as chalk, and her voice was trembling, showing uncontrollable anger. "What fool has written down all the passwords for this week, and left them everywhere?" Putting it around?"
There was silence, and then a tiny, frightened voice broke the silence.
Neville Longbottom slowly raised his hand.
That night, no one in Gryffindor Tower slept. Everyone knew that the castle had been raided again, and the entire Gryffindor house was waiting in the common room to hear if Black had been caught. At dawn, Professor McGonagall returned and told everyone that Black had escaped again.
The next day, wherever they went, they saw increased security.
Professor Flitwick was holding a large picture of Black and teaching everyone who was guarding the front door how to identify it; Filch was suddenly running up and down the corridor, blocking everything from small cracks in the wall to rat holes. And Sir Cadogan, whose brain was full of oil and glue, was sacked - his portrait was returned to the deserted landing on the eighth floor.
Then, the Fat Lady came back. The school board invited a professional magic painter to professionally restore the Fat Lady's portrait, but she was still extremely nervous. Her return to work was conditional - she demanded that she be given extra protection. A gang of rough troll security guards are hired to protect her. They patrolled the corridors fiercely in small groups, making loud noises and comparing the size of the sticks in their hands.
The troll security guard is not the kind of mountain troll that Sherrin knocked down in the first grade. They are a new species that has been cultivated by wizards from generation to generation. Apart from having no horrible smell, they also have more humanity and intelligence, although their IQ is still not enough to reach human levels. In the wizarding world, there is a profession that specializes in training such giant monsters and training them into qualified troll security guards. This profession is called "Troll Trainer".
In the British wizarding world, there are several companies responsible for training troll security guards, but behind them all, without exception, there is the shadow of the Ministry of Magic. The Ministry of Magic will not allow private companies to freely produce weapons that can be used for military purposes. Although ordinary people are ignorant of these things, Schelling clearly knows that the largest shareholder of these monster security companies is the Ministry of Magic itself.
Because of this incident, Ron became quite a celebrity. Although he was still shaken by the events that happened that night, whenever anyone asked him, he would happily tell them about the events of that night, adding Lots of exaggerated details. This was the first time in Ron's life that he had been treated like this, and he obviously enjoyed the experience of being noticed.
The unlucky Neville was punished by the angry Professor McGonagall and was not allowed to go to Hogsmeade again. Not only that, she also put Neville in confinement, not allowing anyone to give him the password to enter the tower. Poor Neville had to wait in the common room every night to see who could take him in - and every time, the troll security guards would always tease him with unpleasant words.
However, none of these punishments came close to what his grandmother, Augusta Longbottom, was ready and waiting for him. Two days after Black broke into the Tower, she sent Neville the worst thing a Hogwarts student could receive at breakfast - a howler.
On that day, the school's owl flew into the auditorium and delivered the mail as usual. Just then, a huge barn owl stopped in front of him, holding a scarlet envelope in its mouth. Neville was dumbfounded. Harry and Ron were sitting opposite him and recognized immediately that it was a howler letter - one that Ron had gotten from his mother the previous year.
"Run, Neville!" Ron advised him hastily.
Neville didn't need him to say it a second time. He grabbed the envelope and ran out of the Great Hall like he was holding a bomb. The Slytherin students burst out laughing when they saw him. Soon, everyone heard the shouting letter blasting in the hall - it was the voice of Neville's grandmother, amplified a hundred times than the usual volume. She screamed that Neville had brought shame to the entire family.
On the long Slytherin table, Daphne cast an ear-blocking spell on the surroundings, and then whispered: "Shellin, you really guessed it right. Black has left and returned."
Meredith looked in Ron's direction with disdain: "Those Gryffindor idiots probably thought Black was scared away by them - I'm really not ashamed... If Black's goal is really Ha Lee, faced with five weak boys, four of whom were still sleeping, did not choose to kill them. This is inconsistent with the rumored cruelty. It seems that there may be more shady stories hidden behind Black's imprisonment. ah!"
She was used to Xie Lin's strategizing and insight, but now she saw Ron acting like a clown, and she felt very contemptuous.
Astoria blinked her cute big eyes and asked: "Brother Xie Lin, what do you think Black wants?"
Xie Lin replied confidently: "We can now narrow down the scope. What Black is after must be the things in Harry's dormitory. The most likely ones are Ron's things. After all, he chose to scratch the first one." Ron's bed curtain. Although the Weasley family is also an ancient pure-blood family, we all know that they are very poor - so things related to wealth can be excluded, so what else is worth Black taking such a big risk? Are you here to steal?"
The corners of Daphne's lips raised confidently, "Blake has no relatives and no worries. What can make him so persistent can only be one thing - hatred! Unforgettable hatred! What he is looking for must be related to revenge."
Sherrin shrugged, "Only he knows what he wants, and it is enough for us to infer it to this point. Regardless of whether Black's loyalty was to Dumbledore's Order of the Phoenix camp or the Dark Lord's death-eating camp. The disciple camp has nothing to do with us. Our family has no grievances or grudges against him. He just wants revenge, and the target is most likely not us. We just need to sit quietly and eat."
Daphne asked cautiously, "So - we don't do anything?"
Xie Lin showed an enigmatic look, "Who knows?"
That evening, Harry and Ron left Gryffindor House Tower, jogging past the troll security guards and heading straight to the foyer, where Hagrid was waiting for them.
"I have something to discuss with you two." Hagrid sat down between the two of them, his expression looking very serious, at least very different from his usual attitude. "It's about Hermione."
"What's wrong with her?" Ron asked.
"She's in normal condition. That's the problem... She has visited me many times since Christmas, and she often says she doesn't know what to say to you..." Hagrid suddenly shook his head again and said, "No, that's not it. …I want to say that she always said she was lonely because you first ignored her because of the Firebolt, and then you took the Firebolt back; and now you don’t talk to her anymore, just because of her cat…”
"It ate Scabbers!" Ron interrupted Hagrid angrily.
"Because her cat did what all cats do." Hagrid continued stubbornly, "She cried several times. You have to know that she is having a hard time now. She bit off more than she can chew... …There’s so much she wants to do, if you ask me…and yet she still finds time to help me prepare Buckbeak’s case.”
"Hagrid, we were supposed to help you, sorry..." Harry said awkwardly.
"I'm not blaming you!" Hagrid obviously didn't care about this. "You already have a lot of things to do. I saw you training on the Quidditch pitch day and night... But I must tell you that I think You two should value your friends more than broomsticks and rats, that's what I'm saying."
Harry and Ron both felt a little ashamed of Hagrid's sincere warning, but their thoughts were related to their respective personalities.
