An adult human skeleton had 206 bones, 639 muscles throughout the body, five major organs, and the most complex central nervous organ of all: the brain.
No matter how one looked at it, the person on the table was thoroughly dead.
He had suffered severe injuries before his death. The number of bones in his body had nearly increased tenfold, the kind of increase caused by being shattered by external force.
His blood had drained away, his brain was missing, and all his internal organs had vanished. It looked like a magical accident.
Though such things would not happen at Kamar-Taj, all manner of occult accidents were common enough among independent Mages without formal inheritances.
Sometimes they had promised a price they could not pay. Sometimes they chose the wrong spellcasting materials. Other times, their own magical creations turned on them.
Magic was powerful, but it had never been safe. If one wanted to enjoy the conveniences it brought, one inevitably had to pay a price.
But this man had definitely not died in a magical accident.
The dead old man wore magnificent mage robes, and the various Magic Items on him were all exceptional. His nails were neatly trimmed, which meant he should not have been a novice. He should not have died in a magical accident.
"Looks like today isn't a good day for drinking, meow. I can't think of anything more of a buzzkill than a corpse landing on the dining table."
Professor Xu sighed. She set down her bottle, lifted the corpse's sleeve with two fingers and gave it a shake, as if checking the time of death. Her large eyes turned toward the Sorcerer Supreme.
"Doesn't seem like a magical accident? The odds of a Mage that old having an accident are minuscule, and the