"Cedric?!"
The moment Rhys saw Cedric, his eyes widened in shock.
Cedric now looked far too much like someone who had completely settled into local life.
He was not wearing wizarding robes. Instead, he had on a white undershirt, a pair of loose oversized shorts, and a straw hat on his head. At that moment, he was sitting on a small stool, eating half a watermelon.
A talisman had been pasted to the bottom of the watermelon, seemingly with a cooling effect. Even in the height of summer, faint wisps of cold air were still rising from it.
Looking at Cedric eating watermelon, and Yang Qingyue sitting opposite him doing the same, Rhys could not help feeling that Cedric had truly adapted to local customs.
When Yang Qingyue saw Rhys approaching, he enthusiastically brought over a small stool for him and even handed him a slice of watermelon.
"Uh..."
Rhys had originally intended to refuse, but seeing how happily the two were eating, he joined them.
After taking a bite, he had to admit that the watermelon really was crisp and sweet.
The three quickly devoured the watermelon in their hands before finally starting to talk.
"Finished talking with Grandpa?" Yang Qingyue asked curiously.
Rhys nodded and told him that he had already obtained what he wanted.
Cedric immediately sensed from Rhys's words that he was probably preparing to return to Britain.
Sure enough, after only a little more conversation, Rhys said that he intended to leave.
Afterward, Rhys looked Cedric over and asked whether he wanted to travel back together.
Cedric thought about it for a moment, but ultimately declined Rhys's offer.
The scenery of Penglai and the mainland opposite had captivated him over the past few days, and he wanted to stay here a little longer during the summer holidays.
As for the so-called invasion from the Underworld, Cedric felt he could handle it.
Rhys had been right.
For ordinary people, an invasion from the realm of the dead was a catastrophe.
But for people like them, they were the catastrophe the Underworld had to worry about.
...
While Rhys and Cedric were staying on the island of Penglai, the outside world underwent earth-shattering changes.
News that the boundary had been broken had already spread to every corner of the Underworld.
Countless dead spirits began stirring, harbouring thoughts they should never have had.
They longed to return to the world of the living.
After a brief period of calm, the first spirit avoided the patrols of the Underworld guards and crossed the barrier.
Then came the second.
The third.
Before long, countless spirits had broken through the defenses and entered the living world, just as they had thousands of years ago.
The guards of the Underworld wanted to stop them, but there were simply too many spirits crossing over, including some extraordinarily powerful beings.
Worse still, some of the guards themselves chose to join the escaping spirits.
For all these reasons, the hastily reorganized boundary defenses of the Underworld became practically meaningless.
Muggles suddenly discovered that the times seemed to have changed overnight.
People around them either underwent drastic personality changes overnight or vanished together with their entire families.
Public security deteriorated rapidly as well, and murders in broad daylight became increasingly common.
Rumors even began spreading among the public that the criminals had been possessed by monsters.
Panic spread rapidly.
Faced with such changes, most Muggle governments displayed astonishing sluggishness and hypocrisy.
They all adopted more or less the same explanation.
There were no such things as supernatural incidents.
The current chaos had been caused by Albanian criminal gangs.
The upheavals in Eastern Europe and the later collapse of the Soviet Union had caused public security across Eastern Europe to deteriorate rapidly, with Albania, the land of bunkers, suffering particularly serious problems.
After the economy collapsed, Albanians turned their attention toward the military equipment once gifted to them by their former brother nations.
As a result, Albanian gangs swept through Europe's criminal underworld.
Other gangs might at most pull out a few Thompson submachine guns.
The Albanians had armored vehicles and rocket launchers.
Their firepower was simply on a completely different level.
The Muggle governments dumped all the blame onto Albanian gangs, and quite a few people actually believed them.
But only a few days later, those politicians were slapped hard by reality.
Mount Olympus was engulfed in lightning.
Then a voice that covered the entire Balkan Peninsula completely shattered the last layer of denial.
Zeus and the Olympian gods had returned.
Seven hours later, the Greek government publicly announced that it was changing its national faith and returning to the Greek pantheon.
The entire world was shaken.
Ancient legends had returned to reality, tearing apart the peace of the past within only a few hours.
Now everyone knew the source of the chaos.
The seal on the Underworld had been damaged, and the dead had returned once more.
As for why the seal had broken, the Muggles came up with their own explanation.
Wasn't the millennium approaching?
Wasn't it perfectly normal for a few unusual things to happen?
When the ancient Greek gods first returned, the Muggles were mostly shocked, with even a trace of curiosity.
After all, these were deities from myths and legends.
Supposedly, they could bring people countless benefits.
Ancient Greek myths were full of stories about mortals offering sacrifices to gods and receiving tremendous power in return.
But just as people were eagerly discussing the changes in Greece, refugees fleeing the country delivered a brutal blow to those fantasies.
The gods brought nothing but endless disaster.
To regain their power, they had begun blood sacrifices without the slightest hesitation.
All of Greece had already become a living hell.
The other countries of the Balkan Peninsula were no different.
The brutal gods forced huge numbers of Muggles to flee their homelands.
At the same time, large numbers of dead spirits began using the region as a base from which to invade the living world.
The Greek gods displayed astonishing tolerance toward them.
As long as the spirits verbally acknowledged the Greek pantheon as their faith, they were allowed to enter the gods' territory and restore their strength by harvesting human lives.
For a time, the entire Balkan Peninsula became a realm of ghosts and spirits, spreading at terrifying speed toward the surrounding Italian Peninsula and Asia Minor.
The returning dead had chosen the weakest link in the magical world as their point of breakthrough.
Strangely enough, Britain as a whole remained peaceful.
Even minor disturbances caused by spirits were extremely rare.
Whenever returning spirits realized that their point of arrival was Britain, they quietly slipped away and headed toward continental Europe instead.
The reason for their remarkable good manners was simple.
Those four people who had been famous even in the Underworld had not returned there.
Not a single one of them.
And don't even suggest that they had reincarnated.
That would truly be "lying to ghosts."
If even these spirits could withstand the erosion of the reincarnation mist, then with the strength of those four, there was no possibility that they could not.
If they had never appeared in the Underworld, there was only one explanation.
They were still alive.
That was terrifying.
They were the ruthless figures who had triggered Ragnarök and constructed the seal between the Underworld and the living world.
The spirits were not insane.
Naturally, they stayed as far away from the homeland of those four as possible, lest they be caught while committing evil deeds.
After leaving Penglai, Rhys quickly learned about the changes taking place across the world.
He had anticipated all of this long ago.
But none of it could slow his return to Hogwarts.
Ever since receiving the Spirit-Wandering Taixu Pills from the nameless old man, his heart had already flown ahead of him to the Scottish Highlands.
____
12 Chaps ahead at Patreon.com/HornyFBI