I, the Final Boss of the Beta Server!

Chapter 126: Dean Silver: This Old Man Fights Dirty!

In the present world, beside the Monument of the Era in the Arcane Tower.

Suddenly, an incredibly dazzling brilliance burst forth from the water-like curtain of light, as radiant as the blazing sun.

The originally dim and silent Arcane Tower was instantly illuminated as if it were broad daylight.

“Damn!”

“My eyes!”

“That old man’s fighting dirty! He actually threw a flashbang!”

Dean Silver let out a wail, covering their eyes with their fluffy, snow-white tail, rolling around on the floor in pain.

Just moments before, on the live broadcast in the projection curtain—

Rast, corrupted and fallen into darkness on the cliffside, had just made his traitorous declaration, “Come with me, and everything will be fine,” followed by a signature villainous “kekekeke” laugh, while violently beating the little girl named Grey.

Dean Silver had been watching with great interest.

They hadn’t expected a scruffy, white-haired old man to suddenly appear.

At first, Dean Silver had been quite curious about the identity and role of this new character.

But unexpectedly, that old man rubbed a flashbang into being and blinded Dean Silver like a dog.

On the other side, Ophelia, who was also attentively watching the live broadcast, showed far more composure.

Dark, liquid particles surged around her and gathered into an object resembling sunglasses, which she wore to block the blinding light from the curtain.

Even so, a trace of solemnity appeared on Ophelia’s porcelain-doll-like face.

“How strange.”

“That shouldn’t be possible.”

After rolling on the floor several times with her tail still over her eyes—incidentally taking care of Professor Barbalossa’s floor cleaning duty for the day—Dean Silver finally recovered.

She revealed one gem-like beast eye from behind her tail: “Just this bit of light… and it blinded me, the dean of the Institute of Magical Creatures?”

Although Dean Silver usually looked like a homebody—lazy and a bit useless—

That didn’t mean she was made of mud.

Not to mention some light reflected from a curtain, even a life-risking strike from a Transcendent wouldn’t harm her in the slightest.

Yet that light which burst forth earlier, though brief and mild, had undeniably affected her.

Even a typical fourth or fifth-tier Transcendent couldn’t do that.

“No, this isn’t merely strong light—”

“It’s some sort of irrational property.”

Ophelia’s clear voice now carried a hint of gravity.

She tapped her fingers lightly through the air, and one after another, illusory analytic arrays and deduction runes were drawn in midair and began to operate.

The complex flow of information turned into tiny arcs of electricity, flashing continuously in her wine-red eyes.

Moments later, the black arcs in her eyes and the runes in the air all vanished.

And at the center of the hall, the searing brilliance gradually faded, revealing the true image of the projection curtain.

On that screen, countless fine cracks had unexpectedly appeared.

Then—

Crack, crack—

Those cracks expanded rapidly, spreading across the entire crystal curtain.

And then, it shattered.

Fragments of sparkling crystal flew and scattered across the floor.

In Ophelia’s eyes, a tiny spinning control rune quietly broke apart.

“The sub-crystal of the projection I left on the cliff has gone dark. Most likely, it was affected by that burst of brilliance.”

“Based on the data relayed back by the sensing rune right before the crystal went offline—”

“After analysis, the conclusion is… the force that destroyed the projection sub-crystal is a unique sequence ability, different from any known long-tier sequences in my database.”

“And the level of that force also exceeds the highest tier ever recorded in my database…”

“Preliminary estimation suggests that its tier might be—”

“‘Legendary.’”

Ophelia’s cold voice echoed, tinged with slight astonishment.

All this time, the Night Travelers of the present world had always viewed everything in the Nightworld with a sense of superiority.

After all, everything in the Nightworld was already past—history’s remnants that had already perished… In a way, they were destined to be failures.

Night Travelers could foresee the trajectories of Nightworld remnants, could traverse different historical echoes, and current technological levels were far beyond the medieval or steampunk eras that most remnants were still in…

If the Nightworld were a game, the Night Travelers would be the players—carrying an innate superiority over the in-game NPCs.

But—

That faint sense of superiority was shattered after witnessing the appearance of a Legendary figure within a historical remnant.

Even as the second princess of the Granwell Kingdom, Ophelia had never before witnessed a Legendary take action with her own eyes.

The Western Continent had produced Legendaries in the past.

Without them, it would have been impossible to conquer the final echoes of the first five epochs in the Nightworld—those which necessarily involved Legendary-tier combat strength.

However, those were ancient times.

Rune and alchemy technology had been underdeveloped back then, and only fragmented records remained, with no complete data.

And in today’s modern age, no one could say for certain if any Legendary still existed… If they did, none had shown themselves for a long time.

Therefore, this was the first time Ophelia’s database had ever recorded precise parameters and data of a Legendary in action.

Even though it was only one step apart by tier, the numerical gap between the peak of Tier Six and Legendary was of multiple orders of magnitude.

It was as if this power could crush everything—unreasonable, overwhelming, completely overturning Ophelia’s prior understanding of Transcendent combat metrics and systems.

Yet—

Even with a Legendary on its side, the civilization of the Sixth Epoch still met destruction in the end, becoming nothing more than a fleeting echo in the Nightworld.

So, what of the present?

What about this era we live in—the Seventh Epoch by chronological order?

Will it, too, end up like the six vanished epochs of the Nightworld, heading toward the same fate—

Epoch collapse, civilization obliteration.

Centuries or millennia later, in some newborn epoch, in a freshly risen civilization… another generation of Night Travelers would look at the traces we left behind in the Nightworld, pointing fingers, making judgments.

Just as we do now.

In Ophelia’s wine-red eyes, a rare flicker of doubt passed.

“Hmm?”

“You’re saying that scruffy-looking old man with white hair just now… was actually a Legendary? And he walks a sequence path completely unknown to us?”

“Is this what you humans mean by ‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’?”

Dean Silver widened her eyes in surprise.

Clearly more thick-skinned, she had no philosophical thoughts like Ophelia’s… and thus couldn’t understand the princess’s inner confusion.

Ophelia could only sigh helplessly at the sight.

So, all her profound musings had been wasted on a ferret.

“Yes, a completely new sequence path outside our current knowledge.”

She nodded, the black arcs once again flashing in her wine-red eyes, searching the database stored within her as a Machinist.

A moment later, Ophelia spoke again: “From the characteristics shown, the long-tier sequence possessed by that Legendary…”

“Very likely matches the theoretical ‘Sun’ sequence hypothesized by the Institute of Ruins.”

“According to its rarity, the ‘Sun’ sequence should also possess a trait of ‘uniqueness.’”

The Nightworld’s historical remnants spanned six entire epochs of human civilization.

And through the Night Travelers’ long explorations, Starfall University and the Granwell Kingdom had steadily deepened their understanding of sequence tiers.

Just like how chemists once predicted the existence of certain elements before they were ever discovered…

As the department at Starfall University specializing in Nightworld intelligence and the study of Transcendent systems from various epochs, the "Institute of Ruins" had previously made predictions, conjectures, and hypotheses about unknown long-tier sequences that had never been recorded.

But conjectures were ultimately just conjectures—only when a Transcendent was actually discovered to walk such a sequence path could the hypothesis be validated and the sequence confirmed to exist.

“The thing that nearly blinded your little ferret eyes just now should be an ability usable by a Transcendent of the ‘Sun’ sequence—it was the radiance of a true blazing sun.”

“‘Do not look directly at the sun, or you’ll burn your eyes’—this rule, which normally applies only to ordinary people, was elevated into a concrete law when wielded by a Legendary of the Sun sequence.”

Ophelia explained, “Even though it crossed the boundary between the Nightworld and the present world, even though it passed through the information transmission channel of the projection crystal and manifested on the projection screen… that Legendary law still existed and affected us.”

“Damn it, that old geezer’s a real bastard!”

Dean Silver cursed, “So what if you’ve got some one-of-a-kind sequence? You think you’re all that? You just like tossing flashbangs around, huh?”

“You better hope I never catch you in real life. If I do, I swear I’ll rip off that white beard of yours.”

Ophelia: …

Too many retorts—she had no idea where to start.

Was it possible that Dean Silver herself was actually a one-of-a-kind long-tier sequence of the “Moon”?

Besides, if they really did meet that Legendary of the Sun sequence in the real world—and he found out she’d been bad-mouthing him—Dean Silver would most likely need to run for her life.

Never mind the tier gap… Just from the sequence names alone, the Moon going up against the Sun already sounded like a losing battle.

Spending too much time around this snow-white ferret of a dean, Ophelia felt like even her most prized intelligence was starting to get corrupted.

“Oh no, crap!”

Dean Silver suddenly stomped her foot mid-sentence.

“If that old geezer really is a Legendary, doesn’t that mean Rast is totally screwed?”

“Judging by what we saw earlier, the old man was clearly attacking that kid.”

From Dean Silver and Ophelia’s point of view, they didn’t particularly care about the ideological debate between Grey and Rast—that conflict of beliefs between Shoreguards.

After all, Rast’s identity was that of a Night Traveler, and the Nightworld Remnant was nothing more than a historical illusion that had already taken place…

As long as he completed the mission and gained profit or benefits from it, there were plenty of other Night Travelers who’d done way worse than Rast in the remnants… You could find all sorts of war criminal behavior.

But now the projection crystal had shattered, and the screen had disappeared.

Dean Silver and Ophelia could no longer see what happened next… They could only guess based on the last captured image.

“It should be fine… Right before the projection crystal fully broke, the energy fluctuation data that got transmitted back seemed to include another Legendary-tier aura—and it was in conflict with that earlier Sun-sequence Legendary.”

“But this other Legendary’s sequence didn’t seem as rare. It appeared to be of the ‘Abundance’ long-tier.”

“Also, if I’m not mistaken, all of this might actually be part of my brother-in-law’s… Rast’s plan.”

The electric arcs faded from Ophelia’s eyes as she spoke.

“Besides, more than all that…”

“What really caught my attention was what they were talking about earlier.”

“The ‘Shoreguards,’ and… the ‘Gravekeepers.’”

“The Gravekeepers—that secret organization—seems to have had terrifying influence back in the Sixth Epoch, perhaps even directly interfering with the final outcome of that era’s human civilization.”

“And yet, they didn’t vanish along with the end of the Sixth Epoch…”

“They actually survived into the modern age.”

Just as her murmured thoughts ended—

The door to the side of the hall, which had been tightly shut, suddenly opened.

“Little Princess.”

“One of your subordinates seems to have an urgent report. I told her about your current status, but she insisted on coming in.”

Professor Barbalossa’s rough voice came from outside.

Immediately after, accompanied by the clash of metal, a woman clad in splendid heavy armor walked into the Hall of the Epoch.

She didn’t spare a glance at Dean Silver to the side but strode straight to Ophelia and dropped to one knee.

Her armored knee struck the floor with a cold, resonant boom.

“Kate, what is it?”

“Didn’t I send you to track the secret organization behind the Bronze Rose—the one called the ‘Gravekeepers’—using their leftover clues?”

Ophelia looked at the heavily-armored woman before her and suddenly paused slightly: “You’re injured?”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

Kate remained kneeling on one knee and replied respectfully, “As per Your Highness’s command, I followed the traces left behind by the Bronze Rose, pursuing their connection to the ‘Gravekeepers.’”

“At first, everything went smoothly.”

“But just as I was about to make a breakthrough and close in on a key individual, I was intercepted by a mysterious person.”

She pointed to the deep, blood-stained puncture wound on her chestplate.

“This wound was inflicted during my battle with that person.”

“Mysterious person? Do you have any leads?” Ophelia furrowed her delicate brows.

“I can’t be certain, but…”

Kate hesitated for a moment, but ultimately chose to speak.

“Based on their combat style, Nightblade abilities, and the strength to injure me in a single blow… I suspect—”

“That person might be the military’s new Director of the Inspectorate—”

“Ingrid.”