The Max-Level Muggle-Born: Hogwarts Isekai

The Room of Requirement once again became her sanctuary. This time, she didn't ask for a workshop. She focused her will, her need, on something different.

I need a master artisan's studio, she thought, pacing before the wall. A place of quiet beauty and perfect creation.

The door that appeared was lighter than before, carved with elegant, swirling patterns like waves on a shore. Inside, the room was not a forge, but a jeweler's studio. Velvet cloths lay across polished tables, and delicate, precise tools for carving and engraving lay gleaming under a soft, enchanted light. The air was cool and smelled faintly of sea salt and ozone.

Her raw material was simple: a smooth, grey stone she'd picked up from the shore of the lake. Her goal was anything but. She would transfigure it into a music box, a perfect, intricate creation of silver and pearl.

For days, she worked in secret. The initial Transfiguration, turning the rough stone into a polished silver shell, was the easy part. The real challenge was the detail, a test of her patience and fine motor control. Using the enchanted tools, she spent hours carving impossibly fine filigree into the silver casing, shaping the metal into swirling patterns that mimicked the flow of water and the spiral of a nautilus shell. She painstakingly created slivers of mother-of-pearl, transfiguring grains of sand into shimmering, iridescent plates that she inlaid into the silver.

The most difficult part was the mechanism. She shaped tiny, enchanted gears from silver, each one smaller than her fingernail. She then charmed them to play a haunting, wordless melody, a tune she composed to echo the sound of wind over water and the lonely, melancholic songs of whales she remembered from documentaries in her old life. It was a sound of the surface world, a gift of air and sky to a people of the deep.

It was the most complex piece of artistry she had ever attempted, a test not of her power, but of her patience and precision. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, it was done.

Lying on the velvet cloth was a small, silver music box, shaped like a seashell. Its surface was covered in swirling patterns that seemed to move like waves, and when opened, it played a melody that was both beautiful and deeply melancholic. It was perfect.

This was her offering. Her tribute. Her key to the Black Lake.