When Professor Dorothea Clarkson, Professor Barnes and Glenda Grimes rushed to the common building, they found that it was Professor Atkinson and his research assistant Dolores Brooke.
"Professor Atkinson, what brought you back? " Professor Dorothea Clarkson immediately walked up to the two who just walked out of the room with a portal inside: "I already approved your application for emergency leave - and you still have time."
"Thank you Headmistress, but we have already stayed in the elemental realm for longer than we expected." Dolores shook her head: "And we will just need some time to process some information - what happened here anyway? Anything we can help you with?"
"You probably missed it while you were taking shelter. But some giant shape shifting monster emerged from an unknown underground passageway, and started just wreaking havoc in the campus." Professor Barnes sighed: "We had some casualties as well. And when we finally drove it away, the body parts and blood it left behind turned corrosive. We're still trying to clean everything up. Maybe you can help us a bit with that at your convenience."
"Yeah, that part I think I indeed missed. I just knew you were fighting a monster and there were toxic fumes everywhere." Professor Atkinson looked confused, and a little lost, and his eyes were shining in some unusual colors: "Have you caught Lauren Biggins?"
"No, unfortunately. She's gone for now, along with the information on the whereabouts of almost half of our energy stone reserve." Glenda Grimes sighed with Professor Barnes: "We had to ask Josephine Wong for help on that, but we lost track of her and no one has any clear leads on where she might have gone to..."
"Hold on, hold on." Dolores and Professor Atkinson tried to ask some more questions about the circumstances in the academy, but Professor Dorothea Clarkson cut them off: "Did you just say the elemental realm? I would like a full debrief or report on what you know."
"Understood, Headmistress, but I think we're going to take some time to rest first." Professor Atkinson nodded and said: "Even with the badge from an Elemental Lord, the effect of the elemental realm on us has been quite … unpleasant."
And go to their respective living quarters to rest they did - the effect of the elemental realm struck them the moment they came out of the portal, like some kind of acute infection. The feelings of fatigue, dry mouth, body aches and dizziness gradually grew stronger and stronger as time went by, and eventually Dolores fell into a coma-like slumber when she barely got to her bed, while Professor Atkinson just fell passed out on his desk because he tried to write down something that just came to his mind.
Taking notes was one of the things they indeed planned to do before they came back, because of all of the information they gained from the Spring of Knowledge as well as the vision passed to them by the black scythe given to them by Xyn as a token of their contract. The information and knowledge they gained was not without cost, however. In fact, the cost was quite high, it was just that they were not the ones who paid, it was the elementals and the pool that held the liquid from the Spring of Knowledge. After the black scythe sank below the bottom of the pool and they saw the visions that were very likely the metaphorical representations of the root cause and the effect of the rupture, all of the Spring of Knowledge started boiling, rumbling and eventually built up to a violent eruption at the sky.
According to Bethemox, the guardian of the Temple of Knowledge and the keeper of the pool, if it was ages before, the eruption would mean that the knowledge contained in the pool be dispersed out into the elemental realms and be gradually revealed to the voidborns who seek the knowledge. But much had changed since those days and now the knowledge practically just became letters written on metal plates and sent into space to float randomly across the vast universe, with a close to nil chance of being received and decoded. Bethemox was perfectly calm and patient and even a bit curious as to what really happened when he explained this to them, but the other elementals who viewed the Temple of Knowledge as a sacred site immediately became concerned, then shocked, then furious. Eventually Lin'Er had to send them back while she and Bethemox tried to calm the crowd down.
There was one thing they decided that they would like to investigate if given the chance right after they were ejected from inside the pool, of which they didn't have to take note, was the information provided to them by Lun Wang, one of Jianmen's avatars. In the envelope Lun Wang gave them before they departed from the academy to find Paulo Chang in Hong Kong, was but a simple letter, written on a piece of enchanted parchment in some kind of special red ink that read: "Professor, Dolores, this could probably help you with your search for the descendant the one who gave you the contract so desperately wants to find. According to the intel I gathered, the void, or what's left of it, is about to give birth to a new voidborn for the first time since millennia ago. The timing is a bit too convenient to ignore or treat as coincidence, so I would suggest you do some checking on your end if you feel like you are having trouble finding any leads. Hope this information did not give you too much trouble."
When both of them opened their eyes, they found that they were no longer at the Grant Academy, but were on the stairs behind the stone gates under the temple, in which they met Xyn with the company of Lun Wang. A strange feeling filled their senses - they felt like, almost out of nowhere, they had a special connection to the mist and fog on this flight of stairs and in the air. What was more, was that they were able to see Xyn's real appearance - a giant shadowy and somewhat humanoid figure, with four eyes on his head, several arms connected to his shoulders and his back, with a huge pale white scythe in two of his hands and broken armors and clothing on his body. Under the broken armor, they could see some gruesome looking wounds, some of the more grievous of which seemed to be temporarily stitched up by some red threads.