Right before the exams, something terrible happened—the Heir of Slytherin kidnapped a first-year Gryffindor girl, and the brave Harry Potter and Ron Weasley set off on a rescue operation. True, they had to drag along one of the most negligent Defense Against the Dark Arts teachers in the history of Hogwarts, Gilderoy Lockhart. In the Chamber of Secrets itself, the unsightly truth about him came to light. It turned out that the feats in his books were not performed by him at all but by other wizards, from whom he had stolen details and erased their memories.

  That same evening, Harry Potter, Ron, and Ginny Weasley found themselves in the hospital wing. Though battered and bruised, and despite the national hero having suffered a near-fatal blow, they looked pleased. However, none of them—nor anyone in the castle, not even Albus Dumbledore himself—knew that the phoenix Fawkes, while helping to blind the giant basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets, had not merely pecked out the monster's eyes but had torn them out and brought them to Hector Granger. Why? No one except the phoenix itself, who secretly visited the strange boy every week and always looked at him with curiosity, knew the answer to this question. Hector, still unconscious, squeezed the basilisk's eyes that Fawkes had retrieved, and they dissolved into a cloudy liquid in the boy's hands, immediately being absorbed into his skin.

  After the exams, when the happy students went home, Hector woke up in a separate room in the hospital wing of Hogwarts. But his gaze was no longer empty. It was meaningful, alive, and... dissatisfied.

  ***

  I woke up suddenly. Strange and forgotten sensations flooded my senses, every nerve alight. A heaviness pressed down on me, as if I had been floating in water for a week and was suddenly thrown onto the shore—nailed tightly to the surface. But this sensory shock was only for my consciousness, not for my organs or brain, and so I recovered extremely quickly. Immediately, I felt the absence of the familiar sensations of that strange space with particles of "everything." Staring at the unfamiliar ceiling, I decided to recall the dream. Yes, the life of this body had seemed like a dream—vague, blurry, and strange, retaining only a few details.

  Helpless, forever "absent" from the body, unable to even go to the toilet without outside help—that's how I had been. But even in such a vegetative state, those brief periods of clear consciousness had allowed the body to learn everything necessary to interact with the outside world and take care of itself. My current relatives had certainly suffered for it, I must say!

  With great difficulty and a cramp in muscles that shouldn't have been there, I lifted my head off the pillow and looked at myself. A simple light pajama suit covered my humanoid form—a man. A fountain of diverse and contradictory emotions immediately poured out in my head. The fragments of the elf's memory were indignant at their current belonging to the lower classes, the fragments of the dwarf at the weakness and puniness of this frail body. The memories of those accustomed to darkness complained about the light, and so on. The fragments of numerous animals emitted a desire to eat already, for Merlin's sake! The fragments of intelligent beings from developed worlds cursed the backwardness of everything around them, and the fragments of several magicians of different races and disciplines complained about the unfamiliarity of the energies surrounding me. Hell, there was even discontent from the fragments of the opposite gender! And only the largest fragment—the core around which the others lined up—was simply glad to breathe in the characteristic hospital smell mixed with something strange, to see daylight, to feel my body, and simply to live. It was a pity that I had lost so much, that my past life was full of holes, and that the other fragments were unable to patch them up. No, there were many of them, more than enough for hundreds of such holes, but they were different.

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  Each fragment now felt like a part of me, as if it had once been *me*. Having immediately thought this through, I came to a logical conclusion—perhaps that was how it was. Something like reincarnation. Each life ended with death and entering that strange space where you literally lose everything. Perhaps after that, you go to a new life, clean, without experience or memory, and everything starts all over again. By some coincidence, I had been able to absorb either someone else's memories or return my own, lost over many lives. It was a pity that it had not returned completely.

  Looking around the room, I noticed a small wardrobe with clothes next to the bed, a chalkboard covered with many symbols, a table with stacks of papers, and a chair. The room was small and looked more like a quarantine isolator—the walls were clearly not load-bearing.

  I tried to move my limbs. My mind quickly regained its skills. A couple of minutes later, I calmly got out of bed and changed into my regular clothes—they were folded in a pile on the bedside table. Sweatpants, a T-shirt, socks, and sneakers without laces, with elastic bands. To avoid untied laces in my previous state?

  The series of simultaneous contradictory sensations from different fragments of the soul caused a headache, and I sat back on the bed, massaging my temples. Something needed to be done about this.

  Memory... It shouldn't be perceived as a set of pictures or something like that. It's a much more complex, comprehensive system of associations and responses to external or internal stimuli. And these reactions—they were incredibly contradictory and concerned everything, from the body to the environment and smells. They brought out associative chains that generated images and thoughts, which only caused irritation with the situation. A rejection of everything, all at once! This problem needed to be solved, and solved immediately.

  Using an elven meditation technique, I fell into the void in a split second. As soon as I wished, a massive, multi-colored cloud appeared before my eyes. The problem was immediately apparent—the overlapping of fragments' memories. There were a huge number of such overlaps, and the reason for them was the lack of time markers. Simply put, each fragment was relevant right now, causing not only chaos in my mind but also overloading my brain due to the maximization of neural connections.

  Experience with mental techniques from fragments that belonged to wizards in some fantasy worlds suggested a method for creating an autonomous mental block to solve my problem. It wasn't easy to get to the necessary methods, as the required images were sometimes absent due to the incompleteness of the fragments, but I seemed to have managed it. The mental block itself would set markers according to the following principle: from a simple organism to a complex one, from less mentally developed to more. The last life as an ordinary person would serve as the foundation of my personality. Yes, much was lost there, but even so, it was the most integral—and simply the last. Everything else would become ordinary memory, like a firmly remembered dream.

  Opening my eyes, I saw the following scene: not far from my bed, on a chair, sat a suspicious gray-bearded old man in a purple robe, embodying the composite image of a fairy-tale wizard. Next to him stood a woman over fifty, dressed in the uniform of a nurse. Familiar... Something about them felt familiar, but I couldn't quite retrieve the information. Although, associations quickly began to lead me through the nooks and crannies of images from the memory fragments, filling in the gaps with other images. What a stupid mess in my head—I could hardly even think!

  My last name also seemed familiar to me... No, of course, I knew it—it was mine. But it was as if I should know something from past lives, but it had disappeared. Like links to empty pages on the Internet.

  ---

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