"Snape..." Quirrell rubbed his hands as he replied, "He said he wanted to help the Dark Lord get the Philosopher's Stone..."
Cohen put on a puzzled expression, pretending not to know, even though he was fully aware that Snape had no intention of helping Voldemort obtain the Philosopher's Stone.
"Then you're not working with him?"
"Because... the Dark Lord doesn't quite trust him..." Quirrell said hesitantly. "He used to be one of the Dark Lord's followers, but now he's with Dumbledore. Last time we tried to kill Harry Potter, he was even casting counter-spells."
In fact, Cohen had done the same.
But Cohen didn't mention it—Quirrell wouldn't have been able to figure out which of the jumbled spells on the broom was a disruption charm and which was a counter-spell anyway.
Cohen feigned anger and joined Quirrell in criticizing Snape. "A servant with two masters, a fence-sitter!"
"What does 'Two-five Boy' mean?" Quirrell asked.
"It's a dialect from somewhere else, a term for a backstabber."
Cohen explained, "Don't worry, I hate spineless traitors the most in my life. I'd never betray you guys."
Quirrell felt reassured about Cohen—after all, this school year, Cohen had first brought a troll into the school to cause chaos and then helped them stab a unicorn in the back to harvest its blood.
If he didn't truly admire the Dark Lord, how could a newly enrolled little wizard dare to do such things?
Not to mention, this kid played with dark magic in Quirrell's office like it was nothing, tossing around Avada Kedavra curses like they were free. Quirrell even wondered if the boy had suffered some kind of childhood abuse, making him harbor such intense murderous intent toward everything in the world that every casual Avada Kedavra he cast could deal devastating damage.
In reality, it was just because the "teaching aids" Quirrell provided Cohen were corpses and small animals. If they'd given him an innocent living person, Cohen might not have been able to cast the killing curse.
After all, Cohen felt he still had some conscience. The system had even acknowledged that he'd regained a bit of it—not much, but enough.
After spending half an hour cursing Snape alongside Quirrell and Voldemort, Cohen left the place in high spirits.
Who could blame him when Snape deducted points from Cohen every time he saw him this school year?
The rest of the first-year term passed quickly, and Cohen found himself slipping into a lazy routine of three things: classes, eating, and sleeping. He rarely even went to the Forbidden Forest anymore.
The spiders in the Forbidden Forest had all retreated into their burrows, and their numbers had dwindled. It seemed they'd figured out that the more they bred, the more Cohen ate, so they'd stopped reproducing.
Cohen didn't dare go back to check on the unicorn herd because he could smell a strong stench of alcohol whenever he got close.
He asked Hagrid about it, and Hagrid said that Arly often came by asking for booze, but he hadn't seen the other unicorns. Cohen suspected the real situation was that the other unicorns were passed out drunk, and only Arly—this not-so-unicorn-like "nightmare"—was immune to the alcohol's numbing effects.
Hagrid's crate-building project was also nearing completion. Since his magic wasn't very stable, he preferred using his hands over the flowery umbrella that concealed his broken wand.
With one month left until the Philosopher's Stone heist plan kicked off, Harry and his friends had become unusually quiet. Hermione had successfully spread her anxiety to Harry and Ron.
Now they were stuck in a horrible cycle of "Exams are coming, we haven't reviewed, we're panicking" → "But studying is so tiring, let's play a little longer" → "Exams are coming, we haven't reviewed, we're panicking."
As a result, they neither studied properly nor enjoyed their playtime.
"I take back what I said before—homework isn't the most evil invention in the world; exams are."
Cohen escaped to the Room of Requirement to avoid Hermione passing her anxiety on to him in the common room.
"The students are being driven crazy—they'd never be able to self-study a whole year's worth of material in a month. Probably only Hermione and those Ravenclaw kids actually preview and review every day."
"I've noticed you're not worried about exams," the Earl said in a snarky tone. "Have you already reviewed? Or are you planning to get expelled and work at Azkaban?"
"I've noticed that egg you were incubating is gone," Cohen shot back in the same tone. "Did it fail to hatch? Or did you realize the little owl inside was poop-yellow?"
"You!" The Earl gritted its teeth—or would have, if it had any.
Fuming, the Earl turned away and curled up in its owl bed. It had been frustrated about this for a while, acting like a jilted lover.
The egg wasn't the Earl's—or rather, in the end, Hedwig had chosen to shack up with that little yellow-feathered owl because the Earl was too clingy.
Cohen, meanwhile, turned back to playing with the Dungeons & Dragons sandbox Edward had given him.
It clearly wasn't just some ordinary decorative item. Cohen didn't realize until April, when he took it out of the cupboard, that Edward had gifted him a magical gaming console.
By pointing his wand at the display case's interface, he could control the little clay figures inside.
He could set the protagonist's race and class, then embark on an adventure with the sandbox's NPC figures, fighting monsters, leveling up, and progressing through a storyline.
Edward must have spent a lot of time making it. Since he didn't have a job, he might have started tinkering with it after Cohen went to school, finishing it before Christmas and sending it as a gift.
Good people deserve to have 108 kids.
残念, Edward didn't seem to have any biological children. Rose and Cohen were somewhat related by blood, but Edward seemed to be pure deerfolk or something.
Actually, if Edward and Rose had a few kids now, Cohen wouldn't mind—though he didn't understand why, after all this time, they hadn't accidentally sparked anything like a little brother or sister.
A lone man and woman living together for ten years with no action—could it be that Edward wasn't up to it?
Considering his soul strength of ten points, Cohen speculated he might have suffered some dark magic injury or something—not from Cohen, though. Cohen had no memory of actually eating Edward's soul.
While the sandbox was entertaining enough to keep Cohen occupied for a long time, even a single-player game gets fully completed after a few hundred hours. By May, Cohen finally slew the dragon in the cave, dying and reloading countless times along the way. The bumpy journey paid off with the treasure in the cave.
Cohen decided to freeze his progress there, proof that he'd beaten it.
By now, it was late at night, rain tapping against the window. A drenched, soggy bird crashed through the window and stumbled inside.
"Goddamn, did God wet himself or something?!"
The Earl burst in, full of hostility toward the heavens.
"Rain this heavy out of nowhere—I almost fell into the lake!"
"Don't make the rain sound so gross..." Cohen noticed a letter clutched in the Earl's talons, soaked through. "A letter?"
"It's from Quirrell."
The Earl tossed the dripping letter to Cohen, then hiked up its "feather pants" and strutted toward the fireplace like a free-range chicken, ready to dry off.
Cohen opened the envelope. The writing inside was blurred from the rain, but he could still make out the message.
[Tomorrow night, 11 p.m., meet at the entrance.]