Shaping of the Mind
Xiao had indeed done his best to analyze their situation with a clear head. And he had come to the conclusion that he could do nothing more than attempting to explore the world and continuously attempt to test the barriers of this world, which was like a stretchable veil that felt thin but was impenetrable, it was that which continuously blocked Xiao from returning back to his duties.
Xiao came to a consensus with the mortal soul that resided in the body along with him. Most of the time, he was the one who took up interactions with the other humans (someone neglected to tell him how bad he was at it) and Harry Potter was given his personal time in the protection and safety of the room, of course, Xiao was always lingering on the edges, eyes sharpened and alert for any dangers.
Harry leaned over his desk as he peered into a piece of paper, the piece of pencil held in his small stubby fingers dangled loosely.
“Illiteracy is not something that can be tolerated, even an elite warrior must be literate to decipher the commands given to them by one’s own superior. And beyond war, the most common luxurious lifestyle is given to the scholars. It will do you well to learn literature.” Xiao crossed his metaphysical arms (since the one currently in control of the body was Harry) and said stoically.
Harry Potter couldn’t exactly be called illiterate, he had gone to school and was capable of reading simple literature, but compared to the bountiful of knowledge held by Xiao who had traversed the world of thousands of years, it was but a miniscule drop in the open sea. Xiao had taken to teaching Harry literature personally, once he realized how lacking he was in this aspect. But what he neglected to consider was that his own proficiency on the language was entirely in level with Harry’s own proficiency, given that it was gained by the child’s memories. In other words, Xiao’s understanding of the language was poor.
Thus the Adeptus had taken to furiously studying for the last few weeks, and impart the knowledge he gained to the child, who hadn’t been as studious or as fast to catch up as Xiao was.
Xiao memorized lessons given by the teachers word for word, he flipped through dictionaries and could recall the stains on the pages to the exact detail. In other words, he had the extreme advantage of perfect memory. Meanwhile, Harry was without, and the discrepancies in learning abilities was causing Xiao great frustration.
Xiao had trained warriors, but even Ganyu, the most inefficient of them, being half-human, had been a half-Adeptus whose capabilities far exceeded that of humans. Not to mention the fact that he only ever taught others how to fight, never had he been so out of his comfort zone as he was now, teaching civil human subjects.
“Now, you will recall and write down the fifty words we had memorized yesterday, and I expect them to be recalled in perfect clarity, understood?” Xiao spoke in their mind, voice like the frozen surface of a lake, perfectly smooth, but bitingly cold. Harry flinched.
Xiao could always allow Harry’s consciousness into his own mind to access the treasury of knowledge, but he cannot allow the child to become reliant on him. The boy must be able to develop his own mental facilities, for Xiao’s stay wouldn’t be permanent.
Harry whimpered and slammed his face into the table. Nails bit into the wooden body of the pencil.
Xiao waited patiently. Eventually, left with no choice, Harry dragged his face up, and started writing down whatever he could remember from the fast-paced personal lesson Xiao had given him yesterday. In all honesty, the moment he got onto the fifth word, he could confidently say that he had nothing else to write, but still had to put up a pretense.
Harry didn’t necessarily hate studying. Back at the Dursley household, to study was a luxury that wasn’t permitted to him. And even so, whenever his grades came back, they were still somehow higher than Dudleys, and that earned him the severe wrath of the Dursley household. So in addition with no opportunities for self improvement, he still had to degrade himself too.
It was why Harry treasure the chance of studying with Xiao. It was simply the impossible expectations that Xiao pushed the boy with, who was no genius of any kind, but was held to thrice the expectations.
When Harry started doodling when he could finally squeeze nothing of worth from his mind, that was when Xiao decided to come in. Gently pushed out from his position of control, Xiao slotted into the body, and Harry felt his skin stretch and bones creak, as though Xiao was too much in a vessel too small.
Xiao whipped out a red pen, and started circling all of the illegible words written on two pages. Many were circled and crossed out, and by the end, Harry only got five words perfectly done. It earned him Xiao’s ire, which was quite often, because of how often he couldn’t fulfill expectation, but Xiao’s ire was nothing like the hate from the Dursley household. The most the other had done so far was withhold him from dinner for five minutes in order to give a long-winded rant about learning, and when the matron came in and reminded the two of them to eat, Xiao would pause and go: I forgot that you humans required sustenance, apologies for holding up your time .
…
It was during the night of winter that the first episode, which detonated the rest, came to him. It lurked around on the peripherals like a predator stalking through the night, crouching under high grass, once it saw that its prey was completely relaxed, guard finally sunken into the earth, it pounced, ripping into the boy.
Harry was looking out through the window, moonlight grazed the concrete ground, and illuminated everything in white. The quietness the night held made everything appear so beautiful to Harry. It was a scenery that Harry had never seen before, he spent his nights in his cupboard, and his cupboard held no moonlight.
A jolt of something uncomfortable rippled through Harry’s body, all of a sudden. The boy stiffened, but nothing more came to him. A few more moments later, he dismissed the feeling as his misinterpretation and continued looking through the window.
But then it came again, this time, it persisted for a few seconds, Harry was just preparing to curl in on himself and go into a fetal position, when it disappeared again. This time, when it left, Harry didn’t relax his guard.
He didn’t relax for two hours, and his patience paid off when two hours later, something foreboding and ominous crawled up his spine, and Harry could all of a sudden hear the crying and screams of so many . Like nightmares breaking through dimensions and tearing themselves into reality, they caged in on him.
The boy knelt on his bed and wrapped his arms around himself. He could never quite trust anyone, but this time, he needed someone .
“Mister Adeptus Xiao?” He whispered hoarsely into the night. And when no one replied, Harry’s eyes dimmed and he wondered why he was hoping for anything. The Dursley family didn’t care about Harry, they were his own flesh and blood, and when compared with a sudden stranger who was forcefully burdened with Harry, what made him think that the boy who came to him during his hardest times was any different?
Cold frost of winter, Xiao came to Harry. Except this winter embodiment carried with him the gentleness of summer, soothing the frostbites on his skin with his cold hands but warm heart. With a mouth and demeanor sharper and harder than a blade, but with innards softer than the soft flurries of snow that gathered on the ground and had yet to harden into ice.
…
The first time Harry saw Xiao was when he had thought he was dead, he woke up feeling like he didn’t have a physical body, in an ethereal place that scared him to hell and back. Harry woke up, with the ground made of water, and the sky dotted with so many colorful stars. It was beautiful, but the novelty scared Harry. And he had wondered, was this beautiful scenery only graced upon those dead.
And then the scattering of stars gathered together, though some were still left hanging in the sky. The ground beneath Harry’s soles trembled, as though the earth was welcoming some other being. Harry had backtracked into the dark, and when shadows brushed against him, welcoming him, he pushed himself further back, hiding himself in the sheet of darkness.
“Who are you?” Harry asked the boy who came from the stars, the boy was taller than Harry, but was still much shorter than most adults that Harry had met. He was also beautiful, breathtakingly beautiful in a way Harry had never seen before. Golden eyes underlined in red that dispersed the darkness, on his forehead was a pale purple diamond, black hair streaked with teal that glowed subtly, only visible from the shadows, but his beauty made him look inhuman, it was as if someone had taken a human and wiped out all the flaws that made them human. Paired with illogical features (because Harry was sure that such a color and glowing wasn’t possible in any natural way - at least for a human), Harry wondered what he was, some part of him denied the fact that the boy could be human.
The clothes he was wearing were also confusing, a tight white top, with many ornaments from top to bottom, and paired with loose purple pants and black boots with fancy patterns, Harry didn’t recognize the style. Then there was the turquoise tattoo on the boy’s right arm that either somehow reflected the starlight, or was literally glowing. Hanging on his left arm was a wide billowing sleeve. And on both of his hands were gloves rimmed in gold. The boy - or whatever he is - is something that Harry had never seen before.
He made Harry want to curl at his feet to seek comfort, but also to tuck tail between his legs and run far far away.
Harry squeaked and shrunk his head between his shoulders when suddenly, the darkness that lingered around him scattered as dust would in the wind. Revealing him bare to the person before him.
“I am Adeptus Xiao.” The boy stared at Harry, and Harry stared back.
Looking into the otherworldly eyes of the other, Harry thought he could see something in its depths. He looked harder, as though there was some sort of secret buried within the pupils.
And there was. Memories invaded Harry’s mind, broke open his skull, and seeped in to taint his own thoughts. Harry saw everything the boy did that day, experienced hours in the matter of seconds, how he got him kicked out by his family, how he got thrown into an orphanage. And terror seized the whimpering child.
Harry remembers all the threats handed to him by his Uncle, and amongst them, singing about how lucky he was to not be abandoned to the orphanage was amongst them. Harry didn’t know much about orphanages, only that it was for children like him who didn’t have parents, and that it was a grace of God for Harry to be taken in by the Dursley family.
Drowning in his pain and grief and fear, Harry abandoned all politeness beaten into him by Aunt Petunia. He questioned the boy accusingly, though it came out more watery and strained and stutteringly than he wanted it to, “Why, why, why did you get us kicked into an orphanage?”
The answer that came was short and curt in a way that Harry hated, even more than the long rants by Uncle Vernon saying how pathetic Harry was, how much of an ungrateful brat he was. “You’re better off here.”
“No,” Harry shouted-whispered, he discreetly rubbed away the tears at his eyes, “Orphanages are bad, why, why —”
Harry turned his face downwards to stifle a sob, but it came out either way.
…
The pain wouldn’t go away, it was like his bones were a chalkboard, and the pain was the chalks grating loudly on his bones, except the chalkboard was white, while the chalk was black.
Harry turned on his side, stubby nails raking across his arms, nails too chipped and soft to draw any blood.
It hurt .
Harry squeezed his eyes shut. The pain was lances piercing through his body.
It was loud .
The echoing screams, the fire in the background, the squelching of blood (how did he know?”) splattering against the ground, and above it all, a howl full of grief broke through. The noise crushed Harry’s eardrums, and the way Harry held his ears only made it louder.
“Harry!” The door broke open, but Harry was in too much pain to do much to acknowledge the person coming in. Through his red tinted eyes, Harry thought he could make out the blurry figure of Ms. Benson.
Harry tucked his legs further into his chest, and turned his face further down onto the pillow, stained dark with his tears (when had he started crying?).
Ms. Benson was kneeling by Harry’s side, next to her was the bedstand, which held Harry’s glasses. Now that she was close enough, even with Harry’s poor eyesight, he could make out some identifying features of the lady, namely the numerous wrinkles of her sagging face.
“Oh, bloody hell, what is going on?!” Ms. Benson patted Harry’s stiff and frozen face. “I need to go call the ambulance! No, girl, you go call the ambulance!”
Someone shuffled out the door, Harry hadn’t noticed her.
Ms. Benson took Harry's face between her hands. “Oh, dear boy, tell me, what’s wrong, are you alright? What’s got you screaming in the middle of the night?”
That was when Harry realized that he was screaming.
And like a vacuum, the pain and the noise ripping into his ears were gone, in just the blink of an eye. Harry was cured from his curse.
Ms. Benson kept comforting Harry, since he had yet to register the fact that he was no longer in pain. But when his cries died down, he felt Ms. Benson stuck a finger under his nose, feeling for his breadth. It was there, and it reassured the old lady enough for her to place him back down on the bed.
Harry closed his eyes, and thought he saw a writhing mass of darkness with hints of teal through his dark lids.
…
He was here again. In the beautiful place with too many stars, and the surface of a lake for ground.
The first thing that captured his attention was the ball of blackness with teal smoke curling on the sides and disappearing high. Cautiously, Harry walked towards it, the treading of his feet sent ripples into the ground.
The closer Harry got, the more he could make out anguished cries coming from the ball of black mass. Whoever it was that was trapped in there, it seemed as though they were in great pain.
Harry knelt on the ground and squinted his eyes, attempting to see through the thick fog of black and teal that completely enveloped the screaming thing on the other end.
Like that, Harry sat there, and the cries sometimes spiked high, notes frill and distinctly sharp, shortly before dipping down into painful growls. It made Harry want to plug in his ears, but for some reason he didn’t.
Eventually, the fog thinned, revealing the bare figure of a child — Harry was surprised to find the other appearing even younger than he was.
The infant, who was pressed against the ground, cracked open a red lined eyelid, golden irises with slitted black pupils lazily scanned the boy sitting beside him. Before wearily drooping close again.
Long hair, teal at the ends with random streaks in between was plastered to the ground, scattered around the boy like a unique blanket of its own. It looked so silky and beautiful that Harry couldn’t help but reach out his hand to rub it, it was as soft and smooth as it looked.
“Adeptus Xiao, sir?” Harry couldn’t help but ask tentatively, finding the resemblance between the boy and the infant to be too uncanny for him to dismiss, however, even so, he didn’t know how the illogical notion of the infant being the intimidating boy came into his mind —
“Hmmm,” the boy hummed in reply, coldly, of course, just like Mr. Adeptus Xiao.
Harry jerked his hand back like he had been touching a very electric and poisonous jellyfish. “Sir?”
But this time the child didn’t reply, Harry scooted back and pressed his face to the ground to get a better angle at looking at their face.
It was exactly Mr. Adeptus Xiao’s face, just minus the sharper features, made him look younger, but otherwise the exact same, even the scowl that had been consistently resting on the other's face for all the short amount of time that Harry had known him was still there, exactly the same.
Harry scooted back further, suddenly feeling awkward. It couldn’t be Mr. Adeptus Xiao, since Mr. Adeptus Xiao certainly wasn’t that young, but the face there was already imprinted into Harry’s mind. Maybe the other was a child of Mr. Adeptus Xiao? But Mr. Adeptus Xiao was still a teenager, he couldn’t possibly have a child, right? Aunt Petunia said that it was only possible for adults to have children. Then maybe a brother?
Harry’s mind was a muddle mess from all the swirling thoughts and guesses. Previously, Mr. Adeptus Xiao had already explained to Harry that due to something (Mr. Adeptus Xiao had given a series of hypothesis that Harry had been incapable of understanding) Mr. Adeptus Xiao had become trapped in the boy’s body. So, was this another person that had become trapped in Harry’s body? Maybe their looks was just a side effect of being trapped in his body, that they can have only one type of face —
Harry groaned and stopped thinking, rubbing his face harshly in his hands, the same way that the complexities and absurd ideas were wiped from his mind.
His wrist was grabbed harshly, and Harry fell forward with a painful tug. Eye-to-eye, brilliant green stared into ethereal gold. Round pupils met pupils as sharp as the edge of a blade.
“Child.”
“Mr. Adeptus Xiao?”
“Yes, that is me.”
Harry sucked in a breadth as he took in the form of the now shorter than even him Mr. Adeptus Xiao. He tentatively asked, “Are you alright, sir?”
Mr. Adeptus Xiao winced as he sat up. “No incurable injury has been inflicted upon me. Though it may take a few days for my soul to recover from the karma. How about you? Had you felt any discomfort while I was occupied?”
And it was all flooding back in, the unbearable pain, the screams, the cries for slaughter. And Harry was trembling and on the floor, wishing for the memories to disappear, and hateful for remembering them once again.
A hand placed itself on top of his head, rubbing his hair placating. Harry couldn’t help but accuse, “You did that, it was you, you made it hurt.”
“I did.” It was only once the edge appeared back in the other’s voice that Harry noticed the relatively gentler way that Mr. Adeptus Xiao had been addressing him with. “Now, I advise you to tell me every detail that you can recount, for your own good.” Upon seeing the way that Harry flinched and clutched at his sides, he continued, “However, if you find yourself unable to relive those memories, I can also comb through your memories myself, if you would permit me to do so, if you do not, then there is nothing more I can do, just be aware that there will like be more of what had just happened to come.”
Harry didn’t talk as he sat up, tucking his knees to his chest as he rocked himself, it was his own personal form of comforting himself. He didn’t want the pain to happen again, and it was the singular thought on his mind when he told Mr. Adeptus Xiao. “I don’t want it, make it stop, please. Never again…” The rest of his incoherent words faded into rambles.
“I will do my best.”
And Harry felt something warm brush his forehead, confused, he looked up. But nothing was there, even the child-sized form of Mr. Adeptus Xiao had disappeared from his sight.
Harry looked around, but saw nothing.
He felt his heart clench in subtle terror.
…
Xiao raised his hand, power congregated in his palm. With crushing force, Xiao balled his hand into a fist, destroying the power gathering there, trickles of pure white light trickled from the seams of his fingers, it disappeared into the dry grounds of the child’s mindscape, his power soothing the mental scars engraved upon the child.
Satisfied with his deeds, Xiao raised himself into the air. The inner landscape of Harry Potter was relatively barren, with weeds growing everywhere, a single house stood a few miles away from Xiao, which he could see with perfect clarity. It was the Dursley household which he had left.
Xiao summoned his spear. The Primordial Jade-Winged Spear came to his hand, humming with its devotion for its wielder.
Xiao flew up higher, surveying the cracked land beneath him. Sometimes, one must utterly destroy something for that thing to regrow healthily. Xiao had watched some medics break a leg or arm, just to reset it back properly. His own master, Rex Lapis, back in the day, had trapped him within a cauldron holding pure destruction, just so the scars inflicted by a dead God could be melted, by melting his skin, his bones, his tendons, every single bit, so that Xiao could regrow an entirely new body, so that Xiao could rise from the ashes more powerful, and rid of all the things of horror his previous Master had done to him.
That was what Xiao intended to do with this poisoned mind. Break it, so that it could be molded back to health. If Xiao was back in Teyvat, he certainly wouldn’t be doing this, hesitant he would be to reap destruction on a mortal in any form, he would first consult Xianyun, then Mountain Shaper, then Moon Carver, and even then, he would probably leave the child in their hands to fix. But in this new place with no one to confront for the fixing of the human mind, Xiao had no choice but to rely on his own methods.
As a General, Alatus never lacked ruthlessness and the bravery to gamble. It was a quality that was in constant play in war.
Alatus angled his spear downwards.
This wasn’t quite so different as a gamble. All is fair in war and mind, Menogias once told him.
He plunged downwards, the air of the mindscape torn and warped from his sheer force before he even reached the ground.
Let’s see if we can shape your mind to accommodate me .