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As November arrived, the weather in the Scottish Highlands began to turn nasty.

To be precise, this winter was not a comfortable or pleasant one for people around the globe. Sudden monsoons coupled with unexpected snowfall quickly extinguished the enthusiasm of the young wizards for the start of the Quidditch season.

Outside Hogwarts Castle, the once-busy scenes of vegetable garden cultivation had become much rarer these days.

Only during the rotations for maintaining the vegetable garden would you see several young wizards, wrapped up tightly, rushing out of the castle, hurriedly waving their wands to slightly remove the frost and snow from the ground, and coaxing the plants that were withering in the cold wind, before scurrying back to the warm castle as if fleeing.

And the overall yield of the Hogwarts vegetable garden inevitably experienced a significant decline.

However, aside from the minor setbacks at Hogwarts, the Soviet Union strategy was progressing very smoothly.

Since the previous conversation in the Headmaster's office, Hermione had successfully donned the identity of a "seer."

In this way, she no longer had to spend as much effort as before thinking about rhetoric and reasons, trying to convince Dumbledore and others to help advance the "Soviet Union strategy" related matters.

After several weeks of planning, and the Saints running back and forth, now in most of the densely populated cities within the Soviet Union, there were already properties belonging to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Perhaps, using the word "properties" to describe them was not yet entirely accurate.

Because these shops were still just empty shells, not conducting any commercial activities yet, but had only just completed the land purchase procedures, and had just begun unified storefront renovations.

According to Hermione and others' ideas, the real time to start these shops would have to wait until the red hammer and sickle flag permanently fell from above the Kremlin Palace, and the behemoth that was the Soviet Union completely vanished into history.

Opening them ahead of time would too easily cause unnecessary disturbances.

On the other hand, for many reasons, the names of the owners of these properties could certainly not be Hogwarts.

Therefore, at Hermione's strong suggestion, a multinational corporation called "Schicksal" quietly appeared in the world – the corporation's original place of registration was in Salzburg, Austria.

And the members of the board of directors were currently only two: Otto Apokalypse, a native, good neighbor, childless widower… and his little granddaughter, Theresa Apokalypse.

By the way, "Schicksal" means "destiny" in German.

However, Hermione preferred to call it – "Destiny."

And at this moment, the two actual helmsmen of [Destiny] were engaging in a serious discussion.

"At this rate, the potato reserves may not be enough…"

Hermione looked over the recent inventory list in the kitchen warehouse, tapping the clipboard in her hand with some distress.

The Hogwarts students were, after all, not farmers who depended on the land for their livelihoods. In the face of the cold weather, the vast majority of students chose to simply cope with things, since everyone was doing the same, and this could be considered a drawback of eating from the big pot.

Therefore, the most direct impact of the severe weather was that Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry could no longer maintain its previous high agricultural production capacity – being able to barely maintain the supply of vegetables and fruits for the entire school was already a remarkable achievement.

Even the Hufflepuff's Herbology department, which loved plants the most, had many plants frozen to death or injured in this snowstorm.

As for the Gryffindor's potato field, which was already in a semi-free-range state, it had been reduced to a quarter of its original level in one go. The plight of the Ravenclaw, which had more girls and pampered lives, and the Slytherin, which had planted a large number of tropical and subtropical plants, was even worse.

"That's normal. Wizards aren't farmers. You can't expect them to use magic to grow potatoes in the snow for a bunch of unrelated people—even Albus can't make such harsh demands on the students."

Grindelwald shrugged, saying with a calm face.

"Less is less. Anyway, you only really need a little bit of those Muggles."

Compared to Hermione's distress, Otto, as the chairman of [Destiny], was obviously much more indifferent.

Although he also knew that the reduction in potato production would affect the execution of many subsequent plans, to Grindelwald, this kind of behavior of saving Muggles with wizarding power was not something to be happy about in the first place.

Whether it was saving a hundred thousand Muggles, or killing a hundred thousand Muggles, there wasn't much difference in Grindelwald's eyes. What he was pursuing was what these things could bring to the magical world, or rather, the future of wizards.

Even, Grindelwald was vaguely gloating at the predicament Hermione was facing—magic shouldn't exist for the benefit of Muggles. If it weren't for facing this little devil, he would have mocked her long ago.

Hermione glanced at the somewhat gleeful Grindelwald, not feeling too annoyed in her heart.

The young wizards of Hogwarts were originally a group of greenhouse flowers who had had smooth sailing since childhood. The output ratio of the previous two months had already surprised her greatly. Now, it was just returning to the original capitalist plan.

"Summon all available house-elves… reduce the routine maintenance of the castle, and invest them in managing the vegetable garden… expand the Gryffindor's potato field area… I hope that by the end of December, the potato stockpiles at Hogwarts will reach 3 million tons…"

House-elves were pitiful, but now was not the time to sympathize with them.

As a graduate with a degree in quantitative economics, Hermione was very clear about the importance of food in the upcoming catastrophe. Since learning about the magical world's huge advantages in agricultural planting, she had been calculating the numbers in this area.

Potatoes were the most common staple food for Europeans, and also the cheapest and easiest crop to grow.

Half a pound of potatoes was enough to supply an adult with the energy they needed for a day and night. As long as they were stored properly, potatoes could even be preserved for up to fifteen years without deteriorating, making them a veritable first-class strategic food reserve.

The fertile Scottish black soil, combined with the use of dragon dung as fertilizer regardless of cost, allowed the potato yield per unit area at Hogwarts to easily reach the range of about 1.5 tons per acre – slightly lower than the standard yield of high-quality potato fields in later generations (2 tons/acre).

At the same time, with the blessing of spells, the entire cycle from planting to maturity for potatoes only took less than a week.

Knowing that the area of one acre converted into international standard units was roughly 666.66 square meters.

Roughly equal to one-tenth the size of a Quidditch pitch (or a standard football field), the Gryffindor's potato field area was about ten acres or so. In addition, the other three houses also planted some potatoes.

Just by linking all the known conditions above, any junior high school student who could pass math could estimate the total potato yield of the Hogwarts vegetable garden in an ideal state during the four months from September to December in half a minute.

And what did a potato reserve of three million tons mean?

It meant that under the minimum living guarantee, Hogwarts could bear the daily consumption of sixty million people… You had to know that the total population of the former Soviet Union at this time was only less than 300 million, which was already a considerable proportion.

You had to know that this part of the food was not allocated from the existing total food supply in the non-magical world. For ordinary people, it was like a gift bestowed by heaven out of thin air, and the impact and reversing power it could cause was conceivable.

However, for Hermione, before everything had settled, these were just imaginations of a beautiful and happy future. Whether it was war or a happy ending for everyone, it was an unknown.

She and Hogwarts still needed to patiently wait for the arrival of the last bit of time…

"...What are the recent developments at Gringotts?"

After deciding on the future work content of the house-elves in a few words, Hermione turned to look at Grindelwald again, and proactively asked about the latest developments of the greedy goblins.

In this unclear twilight of the situation, any small change could cause the size of the entire wave to be determined.

Although she had never paid too much attention to the Gringotts goblins, considering their important role as tools for rebuilding the financial system in the future, and for the redistribution of benefits after this wave of turmoil, Hermione still needed to pay a little attention to them.

At least…

Don't let them court death too quickly, lest they be picked off by third-party onlookers in advance.

Regarding the grasp of the financial market, and the grasp and control of macro monetary warfare and exchange rate games, the professional ability that Hermione possessed in this era could be said to be a stellar-level existence that crushed an era alone—this had nothing to do with intelligence, it was purely from the perspective brought about by countless black swan events thereafter, and lessons learned.

Of course, the more important point was that as long as you could foresee the future in advance, in the financial market, it was equivalent to being invincible.

Simply put, as a time traveler, Hermione was invincible in this field.