Hagrid was a simple and straightforward man. Since he had accepted Roger's commission, and he was genuinely interested in breeding new magical creatures, he naturally gave it his all.
For nearly two months after reaching a verbal agreement with Roger, he had been running around for this task.
At first, he conducted some experiments.
But they all failed.
Those failures made Hagrid realize that the magical creatures in the Forbidden Forest were not enough for his experiments.
He needed rarer magical creatures, but acquiring them was difficult, so his progress stalled.
Even though Roger continuously shared non-classified information about cellular transformation and modification with him, it didn't help. Breeding magical creatures required resources—one couldn't create something out of nothing.
Until Hagrid met two people.
The first was about two weeks before Halloween. As usual, he went to Hogsmeade, a wizarding settlement near Hogwarts, looking for new magical creature sellers in the tavern.
To his surprise, he found one. Though the person was wrapped up tightly and disguised their voice, acting all mysterious, Hagrid wasn't suspicious at all. The trade of magical creatures already operated on the fringes of legality.
Some highly dangerous magical creatures were outright illegal to trade, so such cautious behavior was normal.
That seller had the very creature Hagrid had been seeking— a Boggart. Unfortunately, they only had a Boggart. When Hagrid asked about smaller magical creatures, the seller claimed they had never seen any.
After the transaction, the seller insisted on drinking with Hagrid. Under the influence of alcohol and the seller's prompting, Hagrid boasted about how he had tamed a rare three-headed dog.
"You have to know how to make them calm down. For example... music."
"Music?"
The conversation ended, and they parted ways.
Then, Hagrid's luck turned again.
After asking around among those in the magical creature smuggling trade and still failing to find the small magical creatures he wanted, Hagrid decided to put out a reward notice in various newspapers at his own expense.
Not long after, someone came to him.
At first, Hagrid didn't believe her because she was far too young, and what she said seemed beyond his understanding.
But seeing how confident she was, and being naturally kind to children, Hagrid decided to give her a chance.
"Does such a creature really exist?"
"Of course, Wrackspurts exist. They're right there." The ten-year-old blonde girl, Luna Lovegood, answered with certainty.
Skeptical but curious, Hagrid followed Luna's instructions and placed the Boggart and the so-called "Wrackspurts" together.
When it came to breeding magical creatures, Hagrid was one of the rare experts in the world.
He had even managed to crossbreed an XXXXX-class dangerous creature—the Manticore—with another high-risk magical creature, the Fire Crab, to create an entirely new species—the Blast-Ended Skrewt.
His skill was unquestionable. And now, Hagrid was about to perform another experiment.
Boggarts were Dark creatures that lived in dark, confined spaces and could shapeshift into whatever their observer feared most. No one had ever seen a Boggart's true form.
Wrackspurts, according to Luna, were tiny, invisible creatures that floated into people's ears and scrambled their thoughts.
Hagrid intended to combine their traits to create a small magical creature that could sense human thoughts and change accordingly.
He planned to breed them over multiple generations until they became so small that they lacked independent thought, fully obeying a wizard's command.
Or, as Roger put it, a "parasitic beast" capable of self-restructuring at will under human control.
But as time passed, Hagrid's "parasite beast" experiment failed. Instead, he had created something terrifying…
—
After careful observation, Roger summarized the characteristics of this creature.
Under normal circumstances, it was transparent, about the size of a grain of sand, and emitted a faint yellow glow, resembling a floating firefly with no source.
At this stage, it was weak—fragile, even.
But once it came into contact with a person or other sentient being, everything changed.
Its lifeform would transform from a material state into a semi-spiritual state, attaching itself to the host's brain and soul, generating terrifying hallucinations.
It fed on fear. The more fear it consumed, the stronger it became.
As it grew stronger, it entered its next stage of evolution—transforming from a semi-spiritual entity into a "thought-form."
This concept might seem abstract, but in Chinese culture, it closely resembled a "Heart Demon."
Roger didn't allow the creature to fully evolve, but he had a strong suspicion that the "Heart Demon" form was not its final stage.
After finishing his final observation report, Roger casually named it the "Demon of Fear." Then, he turned to Hagrid with an unprecedentedly serious expression.
"Hagrid."
"Destroy it."
"I'll archive the experiment data, but every single creature you bred must be wiped out. Not a single one can remain." Roger's tone wasn't harsh, but it carried undeniable weight.
"Today, I will personally see to its destruction."
Hagrid was stunned. "What? But—"
"There is no 'but.'" Roger raised his wand and pressed it against his temple.
Legilimency and memory extraction were skills he had already mastered while researching brain modification and alchemical brain construction.
With ease, Roger pulled out a fragment of his thoughts.
The wizarding world didn't have subspace environments where thought-based creatures could endlessly expand, growing into a universe-level catastrophe.
However, there was a collective unconscious!
Why was it that when a spell was invented, all wizards could use it simply by reciting the incantation, rather than needing an in-depth understanding and intense willpower like the original creator?
The collective unconscious played a massive role in this process, as discussed in Ritual Magic Is More Than Just Blood Sacrifices.
If this "Demon of Fear" evolved to the point where it could infiltrate the collective unconscious through human thoughts and reproduce within it—what would happen?
Roger recalled something similar from his past life.
The "Dream Man."
A story in The World's Strange Tales described a memetic nightmare—an entity that spread through thought alone, causing widespread chaos.
And that was without magic.
In a world with magic, what if the Demon of Fear evolved further, becoming something like Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street, capable of killing in the dream realm?
The number of wizards proficient in soul and thought magic was already low, and most of them were Dark Wizards like Voldemort.
If such a catastrophe occurred, would they help? Or would they sit back and watch—or worse, take advantage of it?
There was no way to be sure.
Roger condensed all his projected catastrophic outcomes into the wisp of thought extracted by his wand, then implanted it into Hagrid's mind.
He believed this was far more persuasive than mere words.
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