Ancient Wizards Return to Hogwarts...

Chapter 444 Salazar Slytherin in Serious Form

At the start of the game, you are teleported to a dragon's lair, and the dragon's lair itself is actually the nostril of a giant monster.

The nostrils are one thing, but how come no one ever noticed that this mountain was a living thing before? It woke up as soon as I arrived?

Rice wouldn't believe it wasn't targeted.

"If you don't run now, it will be too late." After saying this to the four people who had fallen to the ground due to the earthquake, Rice used flight magic to fly out of the cave at high speed, floating in mid-air to prepare for battle.

He could already foresee a fierce battle ahead, because as far as the eye could see, the surrounding mountains stretching for kilometers were trembling.

"Hey, you—" Elise tried to call out to Rice, but he had already flown away and disappeared.

"It's too late, come here quickly!" Alexandra shouted, urging Elise to stand beside her as the teleportation spell was about to be activated.

After planting their staffs in the ground and tearing open a magic scroll, a magic circle appeared beneath their feet. A flash of blue light appeared, and the four disappeared.

"Oh?" Rice noticed the way the four people escaped and couldn't help but marvel at it.

The magic that allowed them to escape wasn't a spatial spell like Apparition, but rather wind magic. In other words, they were blown away by a strong gust of wind rather than "teleported" from this place.

Rice could see it clearly from the sky. The four of them didn't go too far. They ran a few miles and then stopped, standing in what they considered a safe area to watch the spectacle.

"It's good to have an audience; today's opening ceremony will be more spectacular than ever before." A smile appeared on Rice's lips: he was determined to go all out.

Fine rain began to fall from the sky, and the trembling of the mountains on the ground grew stronger and stronger. Finally, an unimaginably huge dragon rose from the ground.

It wasn't until the dragon stood up that Elise and the others realized that the entire mountain range of Dragon Forest was actually the dragon's body. It had slumbered there for countless years, its body covered in soil and stones, with vegetation sprouting and forming a dense forest. Throughout this time, it had remained asleep until today, disturbed by a few visitors.

"I knew it! Something felt off walking through the forest. Now I know why." Rice had sensed something unusual ever since he entered this place, but at first he just thought it was a unique feature of the artificial world like the Alchemy World. Now he realized he had been overthinking it.

Rice's gaze fell upon the giant dragon at his feet, which was gradually shaking off the mud. Rather than a dragon, it was more like some kind of oversized lizard, because it didn't have the wings that dragons generally possessed, and judging from the thickness of its scales, it probably couldn't fly either.

As the rain intensified, the dragon quickly sensed the abundant magic contained within the rain. It raised its head and let out a long, drawn-out dragon roar.

The voice was deep and loud, clearly audible from over ten kilometers away.

Rice wasn't frightened by the dragon's roar. Instead, he noticed an interesting phenomenon: there were countless huge wounds between the dragon's neck and chest, and the wind elemental magic that Rice was familiar with was still emanating from these wounds.

"It was Rowena's doing. It seems this guy is the one who withstood Rowena's 'world-ending' species."

The more of these alchemical creatures you kill, the greater the damage to the core of the world.

Rice narrowed his eyes and continued to expand his territory. Now his territory covered the entire Dragon Forest, and the giant dragon beneath his feet was completely included.

Ripples spread across the soil beneath the dragon's body, indicating that the two domains had begun to intertwine and clash.

Both Rice and the dragon stood frozen in place, and the situation suddenly entered a tense stalemate. At this moment, a hint of triumphant excitement flashed in the dragon's eyes.

A shadow suddenly appeared in the sky, and it was growing larger at a visible speed.

Rice looked up and saw a meteorite hurtling towards him from the sky.

Rice: ? ? ?

Rowena, isn't your little world a bit too comprehensive? How come you even made a meteorite? Do you have that much leisure and ingenuity?

The water vapor in the air began to condense rapidly, leaving fine cracks on the surface of the meteorite.

Rice had considered using Apparition to escape and let the dragon suffer the consequences, but considering the dragon's masterful use of earth magic, Rice felt it would be foolish to expect the meteorite to harm it.

"That's about it." Feeling the turbulence of magic, Rhys murmured, took out his wand from his pocket, and said to the meteorite in the sky:

"Thunderous explosion!"

A spell that couldn't even break the walls of Hogwarts in the hands of other young wizards unleashed terrifying power in Rice's hands.

The free-floating magic in the air continuously attached itself to the spell that Rice had released, making the light of the spell gradually become dazzling, and even swelled to more than ten feet long.

However, even an explosion curse that expands a thousand times in size is still as small as a needle in front of a meteorite.

But at the very moment the curse struck the meteorite, a miracle occurred. The meteorite, like a balloon pricked with a needle, burst into pieces with a loud bang. The large fragments that broke off continued to explode a second time, turning the meteorite, which was originally several kilometers in diameter, into tens of thousands of small fragments, forming a vast meteorite shower.

"Hey, you lizard on the ground, do you have any other tricks up your sleeve?" Ignoring the thousands of meteorite fragments falling behind him, Rice turned to the dragon on the ground and asked.

"If that's all the tricks you have, that's not enough!"

As he spoke, Rice suppressed the dragon's domain while condensing the water vapor in the air to form a hundred-meter-long water spear.

He's going to end this battle.

At this moment, the dragon raised its head again, and a meteorite much larger than the one from before appeared in the sky.

"A second one?" Rice laughed, this time he wasn't going to destroy the meteorite.

The dragon's behavior reminded him of the stories that Muggles had unearthed through archaeology.

"It seems that the extinction of dinosaurs on Earth was caused by a meteorite impact, right? So, can I try to simulate it in this little world?" Rice suddenly became very curious.

With that thought, the water spear he conjured fell from the sky like a meteor and pierced the dragon's neck in the dragon's shocked gaze.

The dragon had assumed that the powerful creature in the sky would use the water spear it had conjured to fight the newly appeared meteorite, but Kles did not do as it expected. Instead, it attacked the dragon directly with the water spear.

The dragon's hard, thick hide, along with the earth element attached to it, successfully blocked the water spear, allowing it to penetrate only a dozen meters—a depth that, for the dragon, didn't even pierce its skin.

Just as the dragon breathed a sigh of relief, it discovered that the water spear was spinning at an extremely fast speed.

Normally gentle water becomes exceptionally sharp under the influence of supersonic speed, cutting through the dragon's tough skin bit by bit.

Sensing something was wrong, the dragon was preparing to divert the earth elemental used to fight Rhys to eliminate the deadly water spear, but at that moment Rhys completely detonated the contingency plan he had laid out at the start of the war.

The dragon's blood began to boil.

The restlessness that would normally be easily suppressed became the dragon's death knell in this situation. The dragon's body stiffened for a moment, and it failed to mobilize its magic to counter the water spear's attack.

In that very brief instant, the water spear successfully sliced ​​through the dragon's skin and embedded itself in its neck.

After combining with blood, a large amount of blood flowed into the water spear, staining it with a blood-red color and accelerating the cutting speed.

The next moment, the spear pierced the dragon's neck, pinning it to the ground.

Rice spread his hands outwards, and the water spear smoothly split in two, cutting horizontally to both sides of the wound.

The dragon began to struggle violently, smashing one crater after another, nearly a hundred meters deep, into the ground, sending dust soaring into the sky, and the tremors could be felt hundreds of kilometers away.

But its struggles were in vain. The crimson spear slowly and steadily sliced ​​open its neck, eventually beheading the mountain-sized dragon.

When its head was severed, the dragon's life also vanished.

"It seems this guy hasn't mastered the core applications of the domain." Rice shook his head. "Having a huge physique is useless; in a battle between top-tier combatants, size doesn't offer that much of an advantage."

As the dragon died, Rice noticed that a large number of yellowish-brown light spots began to emerge from its body.

Rice understood that this was probably the authority that Rowena had mentioned.

After the light spots detached from the dragon's body, they tried to escape at an extremely high speed, but the surrounding area was already filled with Rice's domain, so how could Rice let them escape?

So Rice manipulated the power of the domain, seized all the authority within the dragon's body, and instantly refined them into a solid yellow sphere.

"Interesting, a manifestation of a domain?" Rice examined the small yellow ball in front of him, wanting to study it carefully, but he also noticed the meteorite rapidly approaching overhead.

Rice could still blast it to pieces if he attacked now, but out of a desire to conduct an experiment, he didn't do so. Instead, he Apparated away from the scene.

A few dozen seconds later, the meteorite crashed into the ground with unstoppable force.

A violent explosion occurred, and the high temperature released by the explosion melted the remains of the dead dragon, then released its energy freely on the earth's surface.

The entire Alchemy World felt the shockwave from the meteorite.

"What's wrong?"

"What's going on?"

The contestants looked up in confusion, not understanding what was going on.

Most of them had just figured out where they were, and a few had just solved the difficulties and troubles they encountered after landing, when they were suddenly met with such a shocking turn of events.

This left them somewhat at a loss for what to do.

Soon, a mushroom cloud appeared where the meteorite landed, and the dust it kicked up quickly filled the sky and spread out at a storm-like speed.

Rice, who had already retreated to a safe distance, looked at his "masterpiece" and smiled.

According to Muggle accounts, dust will spread across the sky at an alarming rate, blocking out the sunlight and causing a mass extinction.

It's unknown how the "meteorite impact" event would fare in a plane with magic.

A few minutes later, Rice raised an eyebrow: the alchemical world's response had appeared.

One figure after another appeared at the meteorite impact site. If the natives of the small world could see their faces clearly, they would probably be so horrified that their muscles would twitch: each and every one of them was a renowned powerhouse, a legendary alchemist, a hero, a high priest, the chief court mage...

They stared solemnly at the marks left by the meteorite.

"The Fallen Star Dragon King is dead," someone said.

Unlike the four who knew nothing about the Dragon Forest, those who arrived here all knew that the Dragon Forest was actually the place where the ancient dragon king "Fallen Star" recuperated and slept.

"Who did this? It's an ancient, immortal species that has lived for three eras..."

"How would I know?" The person who spoke first shrugged, indicating that he was also completely baffled.

"Although the meteorite has caused a complete mess, we can still sense a very strong presence of water elements." Another person began to analyze, "I wonder which powerful being skilled in water control did this. Of course, I'm more concerned about where the authority left behind by the Dragon King went after his death."

Upon hearing this, everyone realized something was amiss: the Dragon King's earth elemental authority had not been preserved at all, which was rather unusual.

If it was done by that mysterious powerful figure, then his strength is even more terrifying.

Does such a powerful being truly exist in the world, capable of killing the Fallen Star Dragon King and stripping him of all his authority? The Dragon King survived three cataclysmic events and is considered an invincible and ruthless figure!

"Regardless, we should first help that guy clean up the mess he left behind." A man in knight's armor pointed to the mushroom cloud of smoke and dust overhead. "If left unchecked, it will cause a terrible disaster."

"really."

"Agreed."

That makes sense.

This statement won the agreement of the crowd.

"Excuse me, can we not do this?" A voice suddenly rang out, breaking the atmosphere of unity and solidarity.

Everyone: ?

They looked toward the source of the sound and found that the speaker was a completely unfamiliar face.

"You are—" The armored knight prepared to ask the other party about their background and, incidentally, why they opposed his proposal.

Before he could finish speaking, his blood began to boil, and the next second, a cloud of blood mist erupted from his body. Those around him suffered the same fate.

More than ten plumes of blood mist bloomed in the air like fireworks, followed by one withered corpse after another falling from the sky and disappearing into the sea of ​​fire below, leaving no trace of their remains.

With a wave of his hand, Rice collected more than a dozen small, differently colored dots of light.

He addressed the three men, still struggling to stay afloat in mid-air and who had been instantly killed by him, saying, "Those who were not qualified to speak to me have left. Now, do you have any questions?"

Sigrún has taught at the Iceland University of the Arts as a part-time lecturer since and was Dean of the Department of Fine Art from -. In – she held a research position at Reykjavík Art Museum focusing on the role of women in Icelandic art. She studied fine art at the Icelandic College of Arts and Crafts and at Pratt Institute, New York, and holds BA and MA degrees in art history and philosophy from the University of Iceland. Sigrún lives and works in Iceland.

Update delivered, goodnight everyone~

Happy Qixi Festival everyone!

(End of this chapter)