Tom Stark-Malfoy

//A/N: Hello readers! Please don't mind when I spell Catalypsie or Catalipsie. I just can't make up my mind which spelling her name is.//

Draco P.O.V.

I opened my eyes to a bright new day… well… as bright as an isolated radioactive-proof surgical room was (the reason why I was in a radioactive surgical room. . . you will know soon). After the whole debacle last week with that barmy old man who should already be retired, I fell dead-asleep, was woken-up to eat dinner, researched what was the origin of the strange black-soul threads, and fell back dead-asleep.

Which is one of the two reasons I abhor sensing magic, it simply wipes me out even though I have roughly (probably) twice the amount of magic I did when I was an ȧduŀt in my 'previous' life. Nevertheless, there were two things I discovered yesterday.

One of them is... I noticed that the 'channels' my magic runs through were much larger and thicker than my last life causing me to have a swollen soul as well as diluted magic. I had a conjecture when I was 7 when I noticed my larger-than-average soul and my enlarged magic channels, but I didn't dare believe until I saw it today. It was the reason I started project 13.

To explain from the basics, the amount of magic a wizard produces is relative to the strength of their soul. As they age, their soul grows larger and produces more magic. The more magic they produced, the greater the pressure on their magic channels, hence; causing them to grow. But there is also a dual mechanism where the pressure created condenses the wizard's magic into a thick usable rope. At one point, their soul stop growing and the magic they produce stagnates at a certain rate. This is beneficial to the wizard as their channels become less flexible over time, and a continuous increase in magic power could overwhelm and even burst them.

The problem I found within myself is... All the scar tissue in my channels have been fully healed and replaced with flexible smooth tissue (thanks to Prof. Kocoum who helped me heal them when I was 7). How-e-ver. Their diameter is too large. Already much larger than they were when I was an ȧduŀt.

The conjecture I came up with but didn't dare believe when I was 7? When my channels burst (once again) though the magic I should have produce was not supposed to be capable of achieving that - I had a thought. What happened to the soul of my baby self if my ȧduŀt soul travelled back in time into this body? And now the answers are hitting me like a truck of cement.

I ate it. . .

My (shrunken) ȧduŀt soul (that shrunk itself to fit into the body of an infant) ate my younger soul. The soul of an infant is so small and fragile that I didn't notice I had taken it up, I thought it had dispersed. But it had integrated with my ȧduŀt soul. And so now I have an ȧduŀt soul that thinks it is still a child and is continuously growing.

THAT (the sheer amount of magic a growing ȧduŀt soul produces) was what caused my channels to burst in the first place.

However, returning back to my growing soul, there isn't enough wild magic in my environment for an ȧduŀt sized soul to feed off of and grow, hence; it is feeding off of it's own magic that it produces. This causes a magic deficit where my channels (that were widened by bursts of my ȧduŀt-amount magic) are telling my soul to produce more magic. Causing it to swell up

Once again returning to my problem of uncondensed magic - there isn't enough pressure to condense my magic into a 'rope'. Usually, condensed magic (through my arm) would have paved a single pathway through my hand by the time I hit 11 years old. However, I think my constant use of wandless magic as well as my large amounts of unconcentrated magic caused me to have a 'spongey' hand where magic leaks out of my entire hand. The consequences for the future… I have an idea which I would be able to confirm when I go shopping in diagon alley this tomorrow when my father comes back from America.

But to summarize: 1.) I have a positive feedback loop between my channels and my soul, and 2.) I have a spongey hand. Consequences for #2, TBD. Consequences for #1. . . I don't think it's possible to sustain an indefinitely growing soul. Hence. . . my ending (if I didn't slow it down) is. . . I don't want to know the answer to that question.

Every time I use 'magic sense', it always depletes my magic reserves. More than any other type of magic could. And I don't want to aggravate my system any more than it already is, hence, I refrain from using it. But now that I did. And now that I saw that-. . . my conjecture wasn't just a theory. To be honest.

. . .

I'm scared.

*breathe in* *breathe out* Which brings me to today! I was no longer allowed to leave our house without Tony by my side (which is just fine for me, it's nice being with my Dad). But today, I was alone in the house since my Dad was called to do another Avenger's thing. And I was taking this chance to install the Ni-E mAA+ cold-fusion reactor.

As soon as I found that Ni-E had an Ni escape rate 6 magnitudes lower than Ni (4 magnitudes lower than Ni-B and C), I took 1 week fully dedicating myself to completing that version without testing the other 4 Ni mutants.

The past week I did a test. I noticed that my magic soul had decreased in swelling once I strapped the beta Ni-C fusion reactor next to it. However, when I take it off, my magic core would swell up instantly and absorb wild magic at an exponential rate as though trying to catch up to the size it was supposed to have grown.

Hence, I need it on me at all times and thus, I will fix it onto myself. .

I cannot risk my soul and my magic growing any more than they already have. I was probably able to (kind of) sustain the abnormal growth until now because it was a slow one. But now that I've reached the age of puberty when the soul and body are supposed to rapidly grow… I need a fixed solution that would slow down the rate at which my soul grows permanently - until ȧduŀthood.

So. . . the easiest solution was. . . in front of me. Literally inspired my dad. I'm going to install it on my ċhėst (ideally I would install it near my soul which is in my head, but there isn't enough surface area around my head that is both easily accessible and can be covered up completely, hence --> on my ċhėst). Of course, I won't cut myself open, that would be stupid!

Right now, I just finished etching runes on the interior and exterior surfaces of the back-plate of my reactor. The interior rune was a pocket dimension (rune version of the Extension Charm "Capacious extremis") to "flatten" the reactor into a disk, and the exterior rune was of a really strong permanent sticking charm. Both would be magically powerd by the reactor itself.

Why was I doing this in our house's radioactive-proof surgical room? Because it was the only radioactive-containing room in our house, made specifically for when my dad would change or fix his arc reactor.

As expected. Wizards are still superior to muggles, we don't need to see any blood or anything to attach a reactor to ourselves.. Ah~ I really want to brag to dad but I don't want him to worry anymore this summer. I'll just tell him next summer!