Two years later!
News that the Frost Sorcerer, one of the Academy Alliance's Cornerstone Guardians of Order, had gone missing had spread throughout the upper echelons of the Academic World.
Of the three Cornerstone Guardians, the Guardian of Order held the authority to uphold the Academic World's laws, punish scholars and organizations that violated the Alliance's foundational rules, and exercise the Alliance's supreme unified command during wartime.
But now—
The Frost Sorcerer had vanished in the Cloudburst Thunder Sea on Annihilation Island.
No one had seen him alive, and no one had found his corpse.
Reilo and Xixi Li, the other two Cornerstone Guardians, had also disappeared from public view within the Academy Alliance at different times for historical reasons. But unlike the Frost Sorcerer, both had vast forces and influence behind them.
As long as those forces and influential figures believed the two were still alive, their standing in the Academic World would remain secure, and no turmoil would arise.
But the Frost Sorcerer was different.
He stood alone. Aside from a disciple who had gradually made a name for himself amid the recent upheavals, and a handful of academies that had openly befriended him, his backing was negligible compared to that of the other major powers.
As a result, all kinds of rumors about the ancient ruins in the Cloudburst Thunder Sea began to spread.
On one hand were the stories of a perilous forbidden zone where even the Frost Sorcerer had vanished, a place where anyone who entered faced almost certain death. On the other were the rumors of the ancient ruins' wealth.
That day,
a visitor arrived at the Grand Natural Sciences Academy, far away in the heart of the Academic World, in the mainland's wastelands.
Wearing a wide-brimmed hat and loose robes, he followed Dean