The sun had not yet risen when Louis finally set down his quill. The Room of Requirement was quiet, lit only by a few flickering candles and the pale blue hue of dawn seeping through the enchanted windows. He had spent the entire night immersed in his breakthrough, piecing together the final elements of what now felt like a revolutionary understanding of magic.
With his notes carefully organized and his parchment rolled into his satchel, Louis left the Room and headed straight to the Great Hall. His eyes were a bit red, and a subtle weariness lingered on his face, but he was invigorated. The scent of toast and pumpkin juice greeted him as he entered, and he spotted his friends already gathered at the Ravenclaw table.
"You look like you haven't slept," said Evangeline, raising an eyebrow as he sat down.
"That's because I haven't," Louis replied, unable to contain his grin. "But it was worth it."
Cho leaned in. "What happened?"
With a gleam in his eye, Louis launched into the explanation. He detailed the framework he had developed: the resonance of magic, the link between emotional purity and spellcasting, and the classification of magical rank not by brute strength but by harmony of mana—his new term for refined magical energy.
As he spoke, the others listened in stunned silence. Even Charles, despite being used to Louis' brilliance, blinked in awe.
"You're saying… emotions can shape the quality of our magic?" Cho asked.
"Not just shape it," Louis said. "They can purify it. Temporarily—even permanently, if we learn to master them. It explains bursts of extraordinary power in duels or moments of deep need. It's not chaos—it's resonance."
They barely had time to finish their breakfast before the bell rang. Charles waved them off and headed to his third-year class alone, while Louis, Evangeline, and Cho hurried toward History of Magic. But even as Professor Binns droned on about Goblin rebellions, Louis' mind was elsewhere. His thoughts were looping through possibilities—methods, disciplines, perhaps even meditations—that could allow a sorcerer to train their emotional control and refine their mana consciously.
By the time the school day ended—after a long session of Transfiguration and a dull Arithmancy review—Louis was already scribbling in his notebook, working out theories during breaks and free periods.
That evening, the group reconvened in the Room of Requirement, where Louis explained everything in more detail than he had at breakfast. He proposed possible methods to induce mana purification: emotional reliving, magical meditation, focused memory recall, even certain potion-aided trances.
"It's like cleaning a mirror," he said, drawing diagrams in the air with his wand. "Our core is always producing mana, but it's clouded by conflict—doubt, confusion, fear. If we can filter those out, we refine the energy at the source."
Each night of the week that followed, they met again in the Room of Requirement. They tested his methods one by one, sometimes in silence, sometimes in bursts of laughter and frustration. Each attempt was carefully logged in their growing manuscript.
Then came Saturday.
It was Cho who finally triggered the spark. During an emotionally charged recollection of a memory with her mother, she cast a Lumos charm—and the light from her wand shone brighter than they had ever seen. Not just in intensity, but in clarity. Louis immediately noticed it.
"Wait. Do it again," he said. "Focus on that emotion. Hold it."
They repeated the experiment with variations—love, hope, sorrow, even fury—each time recording the effects. By the end of the evening, Louis had refined the technique and named it: Manual Mana Purification.
They had discovered a way to purify mana through guided emotional recall and mental clarity. It required focus, sincerity, and deep honesty, and while it worked for everyone, it didn't work equally well.
For Louis, the effect was the greatest. His mana became lighter, faster, more fluid. Evangeline and Cho managed smaller breakthroughs, but the process took longer, and Charles struggled the most—his emotions were more restrained, harder to access deeply.
They spent the rest of the evening studying this discrepancy. Using scanning spells and enchanted readings, they began to observe each other's magical signatures—what Louis now called mana cores.
That night, Louis wrote in his notebook, ink flowing with purpose:
"We are all born with a different mana threshold—a natural limit of how much refined magic we can channel. This limit can be stretched with training, temporarily bypassed with emotion… but it is intrinsic. Each sorcerer's path is unique."
He paused and added:
"Emotion, when pure, acts as a purifier—but it can also be a surge, a temporary surpassing of the core's limit. Sustained growth, however, comes through balance, not just intensity."
Looking up, he saw his friends—tired, intrigued, each caught in their own thoughts. Despite the uneven results, there was no frustration. Only fascination. Louis closed his notebook with care and smiled.