While Fudge and the Ministry of Magic were in a state of chaos, the pure-blood families were in an even more contradictory, divided, and complicated situation.
Faced with the overwhelming public opinion campaign orchestrated by Victor, the pure-blood families of the wizarding world had split into three factions.
The first group consisted of some of the smarter pure-blood families. They chose to remain silent, but some also tried to use all of their family's resources to mitigate the impact of the public opinion on their families, at the very least to prevent their families from becoming the target of public criticism.
The heads of these pure-blood families thought that as long as their core interests weren't affected, they would simply ignore the public opinion. If they couldn't, they would just let it cool down. After all, it was just a loss of reputation and wouldn't shake their foundations.
That's right, for these pure-blood families that had a stable foothold in the wizarding world, the pure-blood ideology was just a tool.
They had always used their surnames and family trees to determine who was a pure-blood. In their eyes, it was an extremely foolish act to consider oneself noble just because of one's bloodline.
This showed that the families that were able to avoid inbreeding and continue their bloodline at least had a normal brain…
The second group was composed of the pure-blood families who had been "forced" to become Death Eaters. Their reactions were mostly fear and helplessness.
They desperately tried to eliminate the impact of the Tom Marvolo Riddle's Diary comic, even spending a large sum of Galleons to buy and destroy the copies of the Quibbler in circulation.
They were buying every single one, which also made Luna's family a lot of money.
These people were terrified because the Dark Mark on their arms meant that the Dark Lord was not dead.
They were afraid that one day, Voldemort would really return, point his wand at them, and say, "You pledged your loyalty to me, but you did nothing?!"
Then they would all be hit with the Killing Curse and become history!
And the last faction was made up of the Death Eaters who were filled with "pure-blood" fanaticism. They were acting incredibly insane.
Voldemort, their master, was a so-called Mudblood.
This fact, on any level, was completely unacceptable to these pure-blood supremacist Death Eaters.
In the streets and alleys, people were saying that the pure-blood families who had followed Voldemort were fools and idiots, as they had served a man they considered the lowest of the low.
It was like a cat who swore allegiance to a dog, only to find out later that the dog was just a wolf in disguise.
This was simply repulsive!
So, in recent times, there had been a series of bloody incidents in places where idle people gathered to chat, like pubs.
Many insane Death Eaters came out of the shadows. They couldn't stand people slandering and mocking Voldemort, so they intended to kill anyone who did to protect their master's dignity.
As a result, the Ministry of Magic's Aurors were working themselves to the bone. Fudge sat in his office every day, his face ashen, restlessly pacing back and forth, smashing things and cursing from time to time.
Because every time a Death Eater was caught, it meant that the Ministry of Magic was incompetent, not to mention a certain little beetle who kept fanning the flames.
And while the entire wizarding world was in a state of chaos.
At this moment, Victor, the instigator of it all, was at home, looking through the unknown history of Voldemort before he entered Hogwarts and after he graduated, which Rita Skeeter had investigated over the past six months.
Humans are extremely forgetful creatures, so to completely overthrow the pure-blood ideology, the current public opinion was not enough. Victor planned to use Voldemort as a typical negative example to add more fuel to the fire of the public opinion war.
To be honest, he never really believed in the theory of good or evil nature. He had always believed that a person was born a blank slate, and their environment painted the picture of whether they were good or evil.
However, from the information that Rita Skeeter had investigated, it seemed that Voldemort was truly evil by nature.
Voldemort was born into the Gaunt family, one of the branches of Salazar Slytherin's pure-blood descendants.
To maintain their pure blood, the Gaunt family had been inbreeding for generations, so their family members became more and more violent, cruel, secretive, and arrogant with each generation.
This negative personality was naturally passed down to the young Voldemort, even though his parents weren't inbred.
From Skeeter's investigation at the Wool's Orphanage, it was clear that the infant Voldemort already showed his strangeness. He was cold and extreme, and he almost never cried. He often did things that were horrifying.
For example, hanging a child's rabbit, taking other people's things, and luring two children into a seaside cave.
And for some reason, anyone who offended him would suddenly feel pain, which made him feared, hated, and alienated by the people around him.
Therefore, Voldemort's innate evil had a lot to do with the Gaunt family.
Victor could use the history of the Gaunt family, which was buried under the dust of time, as a typical negative example to publicize. And Voldemort's birth was the result of it.
No one wanted a pure-blood family to produce another Dark Lord!
Flipping to the next page, Rita Skeeter was unable to touch Voldemort's history during his time at Hogwarts.
But she did find out that for some unknown reason, after Voldemort graduated from Hogwarts, he suddenly went on a journey. It wasn't until several years later that he returned to Britain and chose to work at Borgin and Burkes in Knockturn Alley.
After learning of this unknown information, Skeeter used various methods to successfully coax some history from Caractacus Burke about Voldemort's time working at Borgin and Burkes.
While working at Borgin and Burkes, Voldemort met a wealthy client named Hepzibah Smith. Not long after they met, Hepzibah suddenly died, and the killer was her house-elf, Hokey.
Seeing this, Victor narrowed his eyes. This matter was clearly not as simple as it seemed!
It was too much of a coincidence that this house-elf named Hokey would have poor eyesight at that specific time. The fact that it happened shortly after her master met Voldemort was too suspicious to Victor.
"Did you find any information on Hepzibah Smith and her house-elf?" Victor asked, turning to the extremely nervous Skeeter beside him.
"Oh, yes!" Skeeter immediately replied, then fumbled in her bag and took out a piece of parchment. "Hepzibah Smith was very wealthy. During her lifetime, she was a fervent collector of magical antiques, and she also claimed to be a descendant of Helga Hufflepuff."
"Antique collector… a descendant of Hufflepuff…" Victor took the parchment and looked at it briefly, a slight smile on his face as he nodded. "I see. So that's how Hufflepuff's Cup was obtained."
"Hepzibah Smith's house-elf was not imprisoned in Azkaban after its trial at the Ministry. It seems to have been staying at Hepzibah's old mansion all these years, and no one knows what its situation is." Skeeter continued, then handed him a note. "The address is on this. Because the house seems to be enchanted, I couldn't go in to investigate."
"Alright. I understand." Victor took the note, then pulled out an Undetectable Extension Charm bag from his pocket and threw it to Skeeter. "Here are 2,000 Galleons. You've worked hard."
"Oh! Oh my! Thank you so much!" Skeeter was a little flustered by the sudden reward.
But a moment later, her face immediately turned to excitement.
To get information from Caractacus Burke earlier, she had painfully spent hundreds of Galleons to buy a lot of impractical and potentially troublesome items from his shop.
But Victor's 2,000 Galleons not only made up for her losses but also earned her more than a thousand Galleons.
After seeing the little beetle off, Victor began to think about his next plan.
The current public opinion was already strong enough. There was no need to publish the history of Voldemort and the Gaunt family, lest it force the Ministry of Magic and the pure-blood families to take desperate measures.
After all, the foundation of the pure-blood ideology was already on shaky ground after his series of actions.
All he had to do now was to keep a low profile with his titles as Ravenclaw's and Slytherin's heir and proceed gradually.
In a few years, no matter how deeply rooted the pure-blood ideology was, it wouldn't be able to withstand the public outcry…
The seeds he had sown a year ago were now taking root and sprouting. From now on, it was up to him, the gardener, to protect the new seedlings from being eaten by aphids…
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