After all the apprentices had finalized their mentor selections, the academy distributed their official beginner supplies.
Each apprentice received:
• A gray-black wizard robe symbolizing their status as a Bone Spire apprentice
• An identity plaque
• A standard copy of the Basic Meditation Method
• Ten contribution points
And that was all.
The resources were pitifully inadequate barely enough to survive for a single month, let alone cultivate properly.
The meaning behind it was obvious.
The academy did not treat apprentices as valued students.
They were consumable assets.
By intentionally limiting resources, the academy forced apprentices to depend on their mentors, exchanging labor, loyalty, and often dangerous risks in return for support.
Of course, the academy did not completely abandon them.
Bone Spire regularly offered free public courses that taught foundational and universally applicable knowledge.
However, there was a catch.
Periodic examinations.
And failure carried consequences.
Like all the new apprentices, Slade soon received notice regarding the academy's infamous entrance assessments:
The Three Trials of Life and Death
First Trial -- Bone Plaza
"The Siege of the Living Dead"
Second Trial -- Eternal Tomb Echoes
"Whispers of the Dead"
Third Trial -- Ghost Market Game
"Proof of the Blood Pact"
The first trial eliminated the weak who lacked combat ability.
The second eliminated those whose minds collapsed under pressure.
The third eliminated fools incapable of surviving in the dark world of wizard society.
Only those who passed all three trials would prove they possessed the minimum qualifications necessary to survive within the cruel jungle of Bone Spire Academy.
The academy had no interest in wasting resources on worthless people.
Those who failed early could simply be recycled into "materials" for more promising students.
And these were merely the basic entrance examinations.
Three months later, every apprentice would be thrown into Bone Plaza to face a living corpse captured from the Forest of Ten Thousand Bones.
The objective was simple:
Kill it.
Or subdue it.
Failure meant becoming part of it.
Under normal circumstances, this test would not have been especially difficult.
The demi-plane's negative energy density was so high that three months should have been more than enough for apprentices to successfully meditate, condense a Mental Core, and officially step into the rank of First-Class Wizard Apprentice.
But there was one major problem.
This generation of recruits was abnormal.
Normally, Bone Spire only recruited once every five years, selecting carefully filtered talents.
But this time, due to lowered standards, many flawed candidates had been admitted through sheer luck.
To pass the first trial, apprentices not only needed to condense a Mental Core
They also needed to master at least one usable spell capable of dealing with a living corpse.
Without assistance from a mentor, most of them were doomed from the start.
And mentors, naturally, never provided help for free.
Every resource came with a corresponding price.
The truly terrifying part was that apprentices rarely knew whether that "price" concealed hidden traps or would eventually cost them their lives.
Time itself was merciless.
If an apprentice failed to condense a Mental Core within three months, then even without encountering the living corpse, the demi-plane's overwhelming negative energy would gradually erode and consume them alive.
Yet Slade felt absolutely no pressure.
Three months?
Who do you think I am?
Forget three months.
Throw ten undead at me right now, and I'll show you what a true chosen genius looks like.
After officially joining the academy, Gregor merely informed Slade of the location of his laboratory before immediately disappearing again.
If not for the faint hope that Slade might someday provide useful insight regarding the Death Metamorphosis project, the old wizard likely would not have bothered acknowledging him at all.
But Slade had no intention of heading to the laboratory or his assigned dormitory immediately.
Instead, he went directly to the true heart of Bone Spire Academy
The Bone Repository.
The academy's library.
Because he had a bold idea he desperately wanted to test.
The gigantic library had been constructed from the skulls of enormous ancient beasts.
Ghostly green soul flames burned within their empty eye sockets, casting dim, eerie light throughout the vast structure.
Just as Slade had expected, the first floor's outer region was completely open to all apprentices.
The shelves contained foundational knowledge:
Common language runes
Basic properties of negative energy particles
Illustrated guides to common magical materials
Introductory historical records of the continent
None of it was particularly valuable.
It was simply universal knowledge.
Still, when Slade looked across the seemingly endless sea of books, he could not help inhaling sharply.
If he relied on ordinary reading alone…
How many years would it take to finish all of this?
Immediately, his consciousness sank into the Memory Library within his mind.
Then he tested another newly unlocked function
Command issuance.
A command prompt instantly appeared within his awareness.
[Command: Scan and record all unprotected text and image information within visible range.]
This feature had only become available after he officially advanced to the level of wizard apprentice.
However, for now, it could issue only two categories of commands:
Scan.
And
Analyze.
The upgraded analysis function was no longer limited to books alone.
If the system continued evolving, Slade suspected it might eventually even dissect enemy spells in real time.
At that point, he would practically become a magical version of the "Sharingan."
Without a sound, the panel transformed into an invisible scanner.
As Slade walked through the library, the contents of thousands of books streamed into his Memory Library like a surging tidal wave.
The basic texts on the outer floors contained relatively simple knowledge, allowing the scanning speed to remain extremely fast.
He didn't even need to stop reading manually.
As long as a book entered his field of vision, its contents were automatically engraved into his soul.
This nearly predatory style of learning produced an overwhelming sense of exhilaration
One that surpassed even the pleasure of growing stronger.
Slade felt like a dried sponge cast into an endless sea of knowledge, desperately absorbing the foundational laws governing this world.
However, the deeper he ventured into the library, the more the situation changed.
Books and scrolls emitting intense magical fluctuations began appearing on the shelves.
Some knowledge was even sealed within crystalline structures.
Across the surfaces of these objects flowed intricate halos of light.
Those halos were not decorative.
They were locks
Restrictions constructed from highly complex spell models.
Slade immediately issued a new command.
[Command: Analyze restrictions on target texts.]
The panel responded almost instantly.
[High-level knowledge restriction detected…]
[Initiating analysis…]
[Estimated completion time: Unknown.]
[Dependent on target complexity and host mental strength.]
A progress bar appeared before him.
It moved so slowly that the change was nearly imperceptible.
Clearly, these restrictions were extraordinarily sophisticated.
With his current level of mental strength, fully deciphering them would likely require an absurd amount of time.
But Slade wasn't discouraged in the slightest.
His mental strength would continue increasing over time.
To him, these restrictions had simply become another long-term research project.
Every tiny increment of progress represented a deeper understanding of Bone Spire's magical system.
Fortunately, there was one advantage.
All the restricted texts on this floor appeared to share the same underlying restriction structure.
Which meant that once he completely cracked one of them, the others would likely become vastly easier to decipher.
As for the upper levels of the library
The passages leading upward were blocked by even more advanced magical arrays.
With his current apprentice credentials, he couldn't pass through at all.
There was another issue as well.
At present, Slade could not directly copy restricted texts into the Memory Library for passive background analysis.
To maintain the analysis process, he needed to remain physically near the restriction itself.
The moment he moved too far away, the analysis automatically paused.
And with his current apprentice badge, he lacked the authority to borrow advanced texts in the first place.
At minimum, only second-rank wizard apprentices could exchange contribution points for access to those materials.