Chapter 171: The Most Brutal Method

Klein stood up.

The entire hall’s attention instantly shifted from Laurent on the stage to this silent but upright man.

The air seemed to freeze.

Klein just stood there quietly, his deep blue eyes calmly watching the intricate instrument on the stage that was flaunting its victory.

His silence was, in itself, a form of unspoken pressure.

“Lord Klein.”

The smile on Laurent’s face faded slightly. “Do you have any objections to my experimental results?”

Klein slowly walked onto the stage, step by step up the stairs, until he stood before Laurent.

“Objections?”

A very faint, almost icy curve appeared on Klein’s lips.

“No, I have no objections.”

Laurent was taken aback.

The crowd below was also stunned.

No objections? What did that mean? Was he admitting defeat?

“On the contrary.”

Klein’s voice wasn’t loud, but in the absolute silence, it was clearly heard throughout the hall. “I very much admire your performance.”

Performance?

The word made Laurent’s face instantly darken.

“Lord Klein, please mind your words. This is a rigorous scientific experiment.”

“Rigorous?”

Klein looked as if he had heard the world’s greatest joke. He walked a circle around the massive interferometer, his fingers lightly brushing across the cold metal casing. “It is indeed very rigorous, especially the method of cheating.”

Cheating!

Those two words exploded in the hall like a bomb.

“Nonsense!”

An academician behind Laurent couldn’t help but jump out. “Klein! You are slandering a Ninth Circle Archmage! You are slandering the entire Royal Academy of Sciences!”

Klein ignored the fuming academician, his gaze still locked on Laurent.

“Master Laurent, you shouldn’t have used thermal magic.”

Laurent’s pupils contracted sharply.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he forced himself to remain calm.

“Is that so?”

Klein walked to one of the ten-meter-long metal arms of the interferometer.

“To ensure the accuracy of the experiment, the lengths of these two optical path arms must be absolutely equal. I believe everyone present understands this point.”

The crowd below nodded in agreement.

“And just now, you very cleverly applied an extremely weak and concealed heating spell to one of the metal arms.”

Klein’s palm rested on that metal arm.

He felt a barely perceptible fluctuation of magic, like an undercurrent beneath the water.

“Thermal expansion and contraction, even an alchemy apprentice understands this principle.”

Klein’s voice was as cold as the winter wind. “This ten-meter-long metal arm, even if it’s heated by just one-hundredth of a degree, its elongation is enough to create an optical path difference of several wavelengths.”

“And this optical path difference perfectly fabricated the illusion of the shifting interference fringes that you desired.”

“A physical phenomenon caused by a change in temperature, packaged by you as evidence for the existence of the aether wind.”

Klein raised his head, looking directly at Laurent’s face, which was slightly twisted with shock.

“Master Laurent, you are indeed an authority specializing in optics. Your understanding of light has truly reached a state of perfection.”

“After all, most masters of optics only use light to conduct experiments.”

“But you, you have already learned to use light to deceive people.”

Dead silence.

A silence so profound you could hear a pin drop.

Everyone, including the particle and wave camps, looked at Klein as if he were a madman.

This accusation was beyond shocking.

To accuse a respected Ninth Circle Archmage of cheating on his most proud experiment in front of over a thousand people?

This was not an academic debate; this was a declaration of war to the death.

Laurent quickly reacted, his voice trembling violently with anger. “What proof do you have? I did not use any thermal magic at all!”

“Is that so?” Klein smiled faintly.

He raised his other hand and snapped his fingers.

An ice-blue light instantly enveloped the entire stage.

Eighth Circle Spatial Magic—Absolute Zero Field.

The water vapor in the air instantly condensed into ice crystals, falling softly.

The temperature on the stage plummeted.

However, on the metal arm covered by Klein’s palm, a thin layer of white frost was melting at a visible rate, emitting wisps of white steam.

But on the other metal arm, which served as a control, the frost was growing thicker.

A temperature difference.

An irrefutable temperature difference.

Laurent’s face, which had been flushed with anger, instantly turned deathly pale.

A trace of chaos appeared in his magic fluctuations, clearly the spiritual power maintaining that miniature heating spell had been forcibly interrupted.

The crowd below gasped.

Cheating.

It really was cheating.

The wave camp had cheated!

The mages who had just been cheering wildly now looked as if they had swallowed a hundred flies.

Their god, the cornerstone of their faith, turned out to be a fraud built on a lie.

Samuel slumped back into his chair, covering his face with his hands.

He had considered ten thousand possibilities, but he had never expected it to be in this ugliest, most不堪 way.

“Why…”

Henry muttered to himself. He looked at the tottering old man on the stage, his eyes filled with a mixture of bewilderment and sorrow.

“Why?”

Klein asked the question for him, his voice devoid of mockery, only an icy indifference. “Master Laurent, is your ‘aether’ theory really so fragile that it needs to be defended with such despicable means?”

“What do you know!”

Laurent suddenly erupted in a roar, his murky old eyes burning with a mad fire. “What do you young people, who only know how to destroy, know!”

“‘The aether theory’ is the cornerstone of the classical magic edifice! It is perfect, harmonious, elegant! It explains the propagation of light, the resonance of elements, the order of the world!”

“And you?”

He pointed at Lia below the stage, his voice sharp and piercing. “What have you brought? Discontinuous energy? Jumping electrons? A ghost particle that doesn’t even know where it is?”

“What you have brought is not truth, but chaos! Nihilism! Destruction!”

He panted heavily, as if trying to roar out all the air in his lungs.

“Everything I have done is to defend order! To defend the stability of our world! Even if it means using some… small tricks!”

“‘Small tricks?'”

Klein scoffed. “An order defended with lies is, in itself, the greatest chaos.”

He no longer looked at Laurent, but turned to face everyone below the stage.

“Everyone, I believe we have reached a conclusion today.”

“And that is, there is no such thing as aether.”

“Light can propagate in a vacuum. Its speed does not depend on any medium; it is an absolute constant.”

“And a fraud built on a lie does not deserve to be called an experiment.”

With that, he walked off the stage and returned to his seat.

From beginning to end, he had not given Laurent a single glance.

It was the ultimate contempt from a victor.

On the stage, Laurent stood there, his body swaying, as if a gust of wind could blow him over.

He looked at the scornful, disappointed, horrified gazes from below, listened to the whispers, and felt the whole world spinning.

Liar.

The word was like a red-hot iron, deeply branded onto his soul.

His lifelong glory, his authority, his dignity, had been torn to shreds in the most brutal way by that young man in black at this very moment.

No.

It wasn’t over yet.

He hadn’t lost yet.

Laurent shot his head up, his bloodshot eyes fixed on Klein.

“Klein!”

He roared. “You have destroyed the aether, then what will you use to explain your spatial magic?”

“You say that light does not need a medium, then in what does your ‘spatial ripple’ propagate? Is it also a vacuum?”

“Don’t forget! Your own theory faces the same dilemma!”

This was his killer move.

He would use Klein’s own theory to attack Klein.

The hall fell silent again.

All eyes focused on Klein.

That’s right, the aether was gone. Then what was the essence of high-circle spatial magic?

Lia clenched Klein’s hand, her palm slick with cold sweat.

This trap, in the end, had been sprung.

Klein looked calmly at the madman-like old man on the stage.

He picked up a chestnut, slowly peeled it, and put it in Lia’s mouth.

Then, he finally spoke slowly.

“Master Laurent, you seem to have misunderstood one thing.”

“I have never said that my spatial ripple needs a medium.”