Elden: Ring of Calamity

Chapter 300 Boiling
The Hall of Night located in the center of Selia Town is the highest-standard hall in the entire magic town. From the appointment and oath of the three elders and other important positions in the town to the admission and graduation ceremonies of all previous Night Mages, all are held here.

In the original plan for the Magic Conference, the Hall of Night will serve as the opening venue for the second half of the Magic Expo. After enjoying the grand opening ceremony, celebrities from the magic world from all over the continent will enter the exhibition area prepared by Ceria for forty-nine magic organizations to visit the latest magic achievements from all over the world.

However, at this moment, all the previous plans were forced to be temporarily suspended. Almost all the bigwigs in the entire Selia came to the top floor of the Night Hall to hold an emergency meeting. The content of the meeting was the falling star turning into a beast incident an hour ago.

At the head of the round table with a diameter of more than 20 meters, Lani sat on Lucia's left, and Michaela, who had just recovered from her weak state, sat on her right.

Directly opposite him, Master Lusert lowered his head, his face stained by dark blue pyroxene and shrouded in thick clouds, like a sad statue.

Lucia was in a very upset mood at this time. A falling star beast was nothing. The real serious problem was the magician Caleros who was deformed the moment the star beast fell.

If the previous Yog incident only provoked the wizards' sensitive nerves about alien life, then this time another Origin wizard polluted and alienated in public, and killed three of his colleagues, which was dancing in the death zone of the entire magical world.

Everyone knows that as the research on origin magic deepens, origin magicians will gradually approach star creatures in life form. The highly pyroxenized body can provide purer star power, and the increasingly powerful star power will also reversely infect the magician's body, prompting him to irreversibly transform into the form of "Star Child".

Everyone can understand this. After all, the two masters, Azrael and Luther, are the most typical examples. The degree of pyroximation of their bodies exceeds 60%, and they have thus gained terrifying magic power that is difficult for other wizards to achieve.

But! The premise of understanding is that the origin magic is truly safe and controllable!

What the magic world - or rather, the rest of the magic world except the Origin Faction - cannot accept now is that, during just one Magic Conference, the core members of the Origin Faction have mutated one after another, and their forms are so close to that mysterious evil god!
Although Latan was still outside presiding over the autopsy of the monster's remains, the people in the hall looked at Lusert with strange eyes.

Fear is always the most effective poison, and the confusion brought by the unknown is the catalyst that promotes the spread of toxins.

Even though the three demigods had not spoken yet, the high-level mages and leaders of the major organizations could not hold back and began whispering.

The Origin Faction had lost control - this was the consensus they had reached before the meeting. The only disagreement was whether it was some Origin magicians or the Origin School itself that had lost control.

The former means that careful investigation, strict screening and rather brutal local elimination are required.

The latter is much simpler. If the School of Origin is proven "guilty", then what awaits them will be the trial of the entire magical world and even the three major dynasties.

Lucia looked at the surging crowd. The whole of Ceria was now like a cauldron about to boil. The tightly closed lid temporarily suppressed the expanding water vapor, but in the face of the trend that had already taken shape, any effort that could not get to the core of the problem would only delay the pace of people's collapse.

What annoyed him was not that the Origin Faction was reluctant to surrender and dragged him into the current passive situation, but that compared to their opponents, these Origin magicians might have been full of pyroxene in their brains to be so incompetent when it came to the sensitivity of factional struggles!
As for the problem with Topps alone, it can be said that he almost missed a talent due to a momentary oversight. That's fine. After all, it was Serlian, a high-ranking member of the Origin Faction, who personally brought the person back in the end. This is truly an example of admitting one's mistakes and correcting them.

Adding the issue of Evan Dana, it can be said that there are deep-seated problems within the academy over the past hundreds of years. Some of the old wizards, mainly from the Origin School, are arrogant and stubborn, conservative and xenophobic. In the end, the worst that can happen is that after the conference, Azrael or Luther will come out to publicly apologize, punish a group of relevant personnel, and promise that the academy will carry out an effective internal reform in the future, and no one will hold on to it.

But when two consecutive origin magicians were "contaminated and mutated", outsiders didn't know whether there was a problem with the origin magic itself, but Lucia knew it. If there was a problem, would the memory battlefield not be able to analyze it? Then there was only one possibility left - both Yug and the Caleros magician had been tampered with long ago, but it just happened to be controlled at this time.

Then the problem arises. They have done it right under your noses, turning a large number of core members of the Origin Faction into time bombs that could mutate at any time, and you, the Origin Faction, are totally unaware of this!
Assuming that the Shuangxian Sect planned this series of events entirely with its own resources and means, it is obviously not something that can be done overnight. The other party has been preparing for this for several years or even decades, just to kill you, the Origin Sect, but what about you, what are you doing?
His internal academy management and talent recruitment were a mess, but he went along with other people's wishes externally, using the reputation of the two masters to guarantee this magic conference, taking all the risks on his own head, and in the end he was even unaware of the pollution that was right in front of him!
It only took three months for the Origin School to go from being the top school in the magic world with great reputation and strength to being a potential public enemy that everyone was afraid of. Lucia felt as if her chest was suffocating for a while.

No wonder Queen Reinara was able to suppress the entire Origin Faction with her own strength back then, and no wonder they were completely squeezed out of the academy's upper echelons in the original timeline, with even Azrael and Luther themselves exiled - now it seems that the Origin Faction is not only lacking in strength, but also in political skills!

"Master Lusert!" The vice president of the Morning Star Society knocked on the table and issued a public inquiry.

"We need a reasonable explanation. Why did another origin magician have an accident just two months after Professor Yug's accident? What went wrong with your school's origin magic? Is there a possibility that more magicians will mutate next?"

"Yes, if this continues, who can guarantee that the Origin Mage around us won't turn into a monster at any time? You all have seen the tragic scene, and I must give an explanation today!"

"What else do you want to say? Her Majesty Reinara publicly denounced the high risk of origin magic. When Her Majesty Reinara was the dean of the academy, when did such a vicious incident occur?"

"Yog is your Lusert's direct disciple. If you can't even spot something wrong with him, how can you expect everyone to trust the academy?"

"The academy is not the only school of origin! Besides, I don't believe that the two masters didn't find the problem with their abilities. It's obvious that they wanted to conceal the problem of origin magic and the risk of the mage losing control!"

"Perhaps the recent frequent falling stars are also caused by them."

As expected, after the first person mustered up the courage to launch the attack, the last remaining authority of the Origin Faction was instantly wiped out, and the irrational group of mages, fueled by a few promoters, launched an all-out attack on the Origin Faction.

In the chaos, the sound of heavy footsteps coming from outside the guild hall temporarily interrupted the crowd's condemnation.

Latan pushed open the oak door, walked in dragging a blood-soaked bag, and threw it in the hall.

"The identification results are out—"

He looked around coldly, his gaze lingering briefly on Selvis at the corner, then swept across the mages with anger still on their faces, and finally fell back on Luther.

"After multiple determinations, including from the School of Origin, the composition and structure of this corpse are 87.5% similar to the Fallen Star Beast, and 96.6% similar to Professor Yug's remains."

"Professor Luther, no matter what, we do need a reasonable explanation - who secretly murdered the two origin magicians, and what means were used to achieve the current pollution symptoms. If you can't give a convincing enough inference, I'm sure everyone here will be as uneasy as I am."

(End of this chapter)