The first day of the Month of Fresh Flowers, inside the Alinsol branch of the Silver Moon Song Alliance.
Yurisian walked slowly into the great hall dressed as a battle mage, a silver-starred Archanist badge with six stars pinned to his chest, alongside a Magic badge bearing five black rings, and a badge inlaid with a silver-white crescent moon.
"Good morning, Master Yurisian." Several mid-rank Archanists descending from the staircase greeted him respectfully upon seeing him.
Although it was no longer unusual for Archanist ranks to exceed Magic ranks after the impact factors had been published, high-rank Archanists remained rare. The gap from the fifth to the sixth rank seemed to be an obstacle many could never overcome in their entire lives. Yurisian had finally earned his six silver stars four months ago by discovering the splitting of spectral lines under strong magnetic fields and providing a theoretical explanation, confirming the predictions of New Alchemy. If not for the fact that his half-materialized cognitive world was still some distance away, he could have advanced to the sixth circle and become a high-rank mage long ago.
When Yurisian was not on mission, he was always quite affable. He smiled and said: "Good morning. Are you here to wait for today's issue of Arcane as well?"
"That's right. The debate over Lord Oliver's transformation equations has been fierce lately. We can't wait to see the latest explanations, the latest applications — perhaps some gentleman will have confirmed them through experiment?" The leading mid-rank Archanist, Bobby, was a burly man with slightly narrow eyes.
Yurisian chuckled: "Same here. But I'm more worried about the day I see a paper by Evans on this subject."
The moment these words left his lips, quite a few Archanists in the hall suddenly fell silent. That name clung to them like a nightmare. As long as he didn't express his views on the transformation equations, they didn't dare place too much faith in Lord Oliver's papers or those of the many other gentlemen. Waiting and dreading had become a kind of habit.
After a dozen or so seconds, Bobby snapped out of his daze and was about to reply to Yurisian when he suddenly spotted several Magic Apprentices assigned to reception carrying out issues of Arcane, Magic, and other journals, placing them on the reception counter. He changed his tune: "Master Yurisian, the papers are here. Please go ahead."
Seeing that Bobby was standing right in front of the counter, Yurisian shook his head and said jokingly: "Let's follow proper order. You go first and check whether there's a paper by Evans — give everyone a heads-up."
He had intended to politely and humorously decline Bobby's offer, but the moment the words came out, all the Archanists who had been crowding forward to purchase the journals froze in place.
Their eyes converged on Bobby's face, as though endorsing Yurisian's suggestion — you flip through it first to see if there's a paper by Lucian Evans. And if there is, what area does it cover?
Bobby, who hadn't thought that far ahead, found himself stared at by so many pairs of eyes, and his mind instantly flashed to the "Head Exploder" and the "Skull Crusher" and their "records." Cold sweat rapidly beaded on his forehead. But the pressure from the Archanists behind him was so overwhelming that, after a difficult inner struggle, he still reached out and picked up a copy of Arcane.
Yurisian saw that his joke seemed to have been amplified by the peculiar circumstances, so he stepped forward to stop Bobby — he would do the "screening" himself.
Suddenly, he heard Bobby blurt out: "There's a paper by Mr. Evans!"
His voice rose involuntarily, and a visible tremor ran through it. The last traces of whispered conversation in the hall vanished entirely, as though time itself had frozen.
"What paper?" Yurisian asked instinctively.
Bobby exhaled: "『Electrodynamics of Moving Objects.』 Mass-energy equation. It sounds like research into the theory of electromagnetic motion — not a subversive result."
Relieved, his curiosity piqued, Yurisian began reading the paper, which appeared as the very first article in the journal, right there at the reception counter. The other Archanists, each harboring their own thoughts, surprisingly did not interrupt him. Their gazes fixed intently on his head. Yurisian, meanwhile, sank into thought, the implications of the title too ambiguous to immediately grasp.
After a while, Bobby's facial muscles began to twist. Beads of sweat formed on his forehead one after another and slid down his cheeks. Then his left hand rose to press against his head, as though he were in extreme pain, his eyes unfocused and glazed.
The hall sank once more into an eerie silence. Bobby suddenly began muttering to himself and turned around, only to discover with astonishment that every Archanist around him — mid-rank and low-rank alike, Yurisian included — had retreated from him to a distance of at least ten meters. He stood in an empty space, as though a demon had carved out a chunk of the room around him.
"What — what are you all doing?" Bobby asked, utterly bewildered.
The Archanists all regarded him with odd expressions. Yurisian coughed and said: "We noticed you were in great pain, so we thought we'd give you a quiet environment to recover. What exactly does this paper discuss?"
"Oh, you were worried my cognitive world would collapse and my head would explode?" Bobby suddenly realized, then laughed. "How could it? Mr. Evans's paper derives Lord Oliver's transformation equations naturally from two postulates. There's nothing subversive about it."
If anything, that made it worse — Yurisian and the others took three more hurried steps back. "What? It's a paper explaining Oliver's transformation?"
"Then why did you look so pained, clutching your head like that?"
Bobby sheepishly looked down at his feet: "I can more or less follow the derivations of the formulas inside. But the descriptions of time, space, mass, and energy — I just can't wrap my head around them, no matter how hard I think. I wanted nothing more than to knock myself on the head to see if it might shake loose some inspiration."
A collective exhale, almost simultaneous, merged into a faint breeze. So it was just that he couldn't understand it and had been racking his brain — enough to give them all a fright.
Once they realized it was the "Evans explanation" they had been "awaiting" for so long, the mid- and low-rank Archanists of the Silver Moon Song Alliance finally felt the enormous weight lift from their hearts. But none of them dared step forward to read it carefully.
After a while, reasoning that Bobby was fine, Yurisian steeled his courage and walked up to the reception counter to read Lucian's paper.
Time trickled by. The expression on Yurisian's face grew progressively more severe. His muscles tensed. He gritted his teeth. His smooth forehead was drenched in a dense layer of cold sweat. His eyes filled with confusion and bewilderment, and he kept murmuring under his breath — it seemed he was continuously muttering about space and time, mass and energy.
And most strangely of all, there appeared to be some imperceptible, inexplicable change around him — as if the light had grown just a fraction brighter.
The moment Bobby saw Yurisian's reaction, he instantly understood their earlier terror. A surge of magic flared as he layered an acceleration spell on himself, and he darted into the crowd in two enormous strides. The other Archanists, one by one, clenched their fists and stared in alarm at Yurisian's head.