Chapter 322 — Calamity, the Council of Dawn
An invisible shockwave drove people all over the world out of their homes, where they stood and stared up at the sky.
Against the pitch-black curtain of night, the once-bright full moon had changed beyond recognition.
It was like an overdriven lightbulb, pouring out an unnaturally dazzling and eerie radiance.
The explosion of its core had transformed it from an unchanging reflector into a brief-lived source of light.
That brilliance did not last long.
The moon soon dimmed.
It shattered at a speed visible to the naked eye, breaking into an uncountable belt of meteorites.
Humanity across the globe let out wails of terror.
Only a tiny fraction of the lunar fragments fell to Earth, causing "small-scale" fires and "negligible" earthquakes.
At least, in the eyes of Hermione and Tom Riddle, this was an acceptable outcome.
It was also the limit of what the two techno-mages could achieve with the technology currently at their command.
Perfection?
No such thing existed.
The unfortunate victims wanted to send out distress signals, yet had no idea whom to send them to.
This spectacular fireworks display in the atmosphere lasted longer than anyone had expected.
...
The next day, St. Mungo's Hospital was packed with patients.
Only about one in ten of the unlucky souls were genuinely suffering physical injuries; the vast majority had been psychologically traumatized by the moon's explosion.
It seemed the people of the magical world were, compared with the so-called "Muggles" they spoke of, even less mentally stable and more easily affected by external forces.
The Ministry of Magic was likewise run off its feet.
And every newspaper of note—and of no note—across magical Britain was straining to report on what had happened the day before.
At this moment, at Hogwarts.
Neither students nor professors had any heart for lessons, and old Headmaster Dumbledore had no choice but to announce a week's holiday for everyone.
In the Ravenclaw boys' dormitory.
Rustle, rustle, rustle...
Harry Potter rapidly flipped through the Daily Prophet, the Seer's Daily, the Witch's Eye, and other papers on the table, and heaved a faint sigh.
"'A Calamity Once in a Hundred Million Years—Is This God's Punishment, or the Work of Demons?'"
"Shocking, shocking, and more shocking."
"Do none of these idiots know how to report anything useful?"
He read the papers to draw inferences and absorb useful information, intelligence, and knowledge.
This was the study method Harry had devised for himself.
After all, a person's energy and experience were limited; this fragmented style of learning broadened his horizons and enriched his experience.
Smack!
Several newspapers bound together with dark green threads of magical energy were flung into Harry's face.
"Take a look at these."
Draco Matthew's voice came from the window.
Harry pursed his lips and examined them closely.
The Scottish Times, the Longicrus Daily, the English Current Affairs...
Clearly, these were "Muggle" newspapers.
"...with the moon destroyed, the Earth's axial tilt could exceed 45 degrees, and ice ages will take turns playing out in every corner of the globe..."
"What does the moon's destruction mean? Every day on Earth will become as long as the one before it, and this will continue until the end of time, until the sun goes out."
"Please remain emotionally stable, everyone, and do not do anything in the heat of the moment that you will regret for the rest of your lives. According to calculations by astronomers, the Earth tides triggered by this disaster are very weak and will not disrupt your daily lives."
The Muggles' newspapers, at least, seemed far more "professional."
...
The blazing sun sank below the horizon, yet the bright moon did not rise as it usually did.
Only at this moment did the people of the Western Hemisphere notice...
A beautiful, magnificent planetary ring had formed around the Earth.
Whenever night fell, they would reflect the light of the stars—a true cosmic wonder.
With the moon gone, the Earth-Moon gravitational pull vanished.
A pack of do-nothing officials had never imagined what terrifying consequences this would bring.
Their heads were full of how to seize power from this affair, deceive the public into trusting them, and climb to higher status.
Only when the calamity arrived did they finally remember those "non-essential scientific documents" they had tossed into the wastebasket.
After the Earth-Moon gravitational pull vanished, the great oceans of the world rapidly shifted laterally.
A tsunami was about to sweep across the entire world!
Seawater surged from east to west, pounding without pause, bearing down on all low-lying land.
The calm first day had given people a false sense of security.
On the second day, the Earth's population was cut in half in an instant.
Beneath the calamity of the flood, humanity seemed utterly fragile.
Fortunately, this kind of natural disaster did not give people much opportunity to display the baser side of human nature.
Wang Huai'an's spiritual power enveloped the entire globe.
He found that people everywhere, in the critical moment between life and death, mostly revealed the shining points of their lives.
A husband gave the only survival raft to his wife.
A mother left the little food she had to her children...
There were evil and twisted beings, but they were only a minority.
"A very fine performance."
The important new data he had collected would be of tremendous help to Yanqiu's growth in the future.
He tilted his head in thought, then reached out and lightly pinched the void.
Crack!
Boundless air condensed in his palm, as if crystallizing into solid air.
The crystal gradually began to emit a creaking sound, as though unable to bear its own weight.
"Creating a realm from the void..."
"Condense!"
A fist-sized, eighteen-faced pitch-black crystal appeared in Wang Xu's hand.
It seemed capable of absorbing all light, heat, and sound.
The region where this pitch-black crystal lay was cold and desolate.
"Then... continue to exist in the form of souls."
"This is a chance you earned for yourselves."
As Wang Xu spoke, he cast hundreds of millions of souls on the verge of dissipating into this crystal.
It was a world where only souls could survive.
The wrongfully dead would form the entire spectral society system of Linchuan, and would enjoy lifespans far longer than ordinary humans.
Free from the shackles of fleshly aging, and protected by the pitch-black crystal, they could survive at least five hundred years.
However, Wang Xu had his standards for choosing people.
Only those who displayed the shining points of human nature, and the extremely twisted and violent villains, were qualified to receive a second life.
The mediocre, the ordinary...
If they died, they simply died.
...
In 1692, the International Confederation of Wizards passed the Statute of Secrecy, deciding to completely isolate the Muggle world from the magical world.
The magical governments of every nation also bore the responsibility of magical secrecy, and had to do their utmost to prevent non-magical communities from learning of the magical world's existence.
Now, the entire human race had reached a critical moment of life and death, and these secrecy clauses had become utterly meaningless.
All over the world, mages, cultivators, and onmyoji—beings that should have existed only in legend—had appeared.
Driven by the looming threat of genocide, the surviving masters of mystic power from across the nations gathered in one place and convened a council.
Later generations would call it the "Dawn Council."