Meanwhile, on the other side, the dean had just finished the eighth floor.

After entering the tower, he had passed the first floor with ease. He did not need to stop on any floor until the sixth.

But the moment he stepped onto the sixth floor, strong restrictions locked his body in place. He could not move forward at all.

He checked every corner of the floor, but he could not find the trial.

Instead, all kinds of fierce beasts rushed at him from every side. They roared and attacked without stopping, trying to force him out of the sixth floor.

The dean refused to give up. He pushed forward with his overwhelming strength.

He fought hard through the waves of beasts and finally broke through the restrictions. In the end, he reached the eighth floor.

By then he was exhausted. His core felt completely drained of its compressed mana. He sat down and took some time to rest and recover his power.

Once his mana returned, he started the trial for the eighth floor right away. But there was a problem.

The trial needed a partner. So he created a lightning clone that carried part of his own soul and used it to complete the trial with him.

The trial was not too difficult. They had to defend a castle and keep the queen safe inside. He and his clone worked together and cleared it without much trouble.

After that, he went straight to the tenth floor.

"This tower is more complex than I thought," the dean muttered. His thoughts echoed loudly as he stepped into the tenth floor.

He slowly stroked his messy beard as he took a step forward.

The tenth floor felt completely different from the others. The first floor had been filled with a thick purple forest.

The sixth floor was chaotic and twisted, more like a deadly trap than its original self.

The eighth floor had been covered in fresh greenery. But this floor was dark and stretched on forever. It felt more like a cold prison cell, bland, empty, and heavy with shadows.

"Those two must be on the eleventh floor," the dean thought as he looked around.

The quiet of the floor settled over him like a thick blanket. Only they were missing, and the masked figures who had entered at the same time could only mean it was them. His eyes sharpened with clear suspicion.

He had suspected their true identities long before this, but he had no real proof. And even if he did, those two held such high status that he could not expose them easily.

Their clans would step in before he ever got the chance.

Still, he cut those thoughts short. His old, dim eyes suddenly shone with new light. This was the perfect chance. He had hurried over here, so the odds of them leaving the tower so quickly were low. He had already made up his mind.

"Once I see them, I will kill them instantly," he thought grimly.

It was the perfect chance to finish them off without facing any consequences. Once they were gone, the heavy weight on his chest would finally melt away.

He knew those two held no good plans for the future of humanity. On top of that, they were unrivaled talents. If he got rid of them now, the problem would be cut off at the root.

With those thoughts burning in his mind, he finally reached the main gate of the tenth floor, the entrance to the trial room.

He lightly stroked his beard again as he stared at the large gate. "Let’s see how you escape me..." he thought before taking a step.

Creak!

The door opened with a loud creak, even though he had not pushed it. The dean took another calm step and walked straight into the main trial room.

"What the..."

As soon as he entered, his eyes widened like dinner plates. His jaw dropped open as he stared at the scene in front of him.

The room was completely destroyed. Even though nothing remained inside, the damage was impossible to ignore.

And what shocked him even more, ’two rooms?’ The light in his eyes vanished in an instant. He shot up from the ground and began examining every part of the space.

Fire path aura.

As he drifted through the air, he could clearly sense a dense fire path aura still lingering. Traces of a fierce battle covered the area.

"There is another?" The dean’s face tightened even more. The auras felt thick and powerful.

Just from the remains of the fight, he could tell the spell casters who battled here were at least at the Void Core stage.

These discoveries made the dean frown deeply. Everything had grown far beyond what he had experienced or predicted.

He had gone through so much trouble to reach this place. Especially those harsh restrictions on the sixth floor, they had made every step feel like a brutal fight.

But these traces... they clearly belonged to spell casters at the Void Core stage. None of it matched what he had expected.

Those two—Julius and Rosalina—were only at the Arcane Core stage, right on the edge of breaking through to Spirit Core.

Even if they had somehow broken through to Spirit Core after the sixth floor, it was impossible for them to have done it before.

And even then, jumping all the way to Void Core in such a short time made no sense. Mastering spells this strong would normally take years of hard work.

The dean’s mind shook with the sheer absurdity of it all. Nothing lined up with what he had thought.

He slowly flew toward the place where the two rooms connected. The other room looked different, more like a ruined library, with empty shelves still standing in the wreckage.

He drifted carefully across the broken barrier between the rooms. The moment he crossed over, his eyes widened in pure horror.

This was not normal fear. It was a deep, instinctive terror that gripped his entire body.

The air turned heavy the instant he stepped in, thick enough to make his breathing slow and uneven. A cold, damp chill brushed against his skin, yet a strange heat prickled beneath it, raising goosebumps along his arms. His ears rang faintly, like a distant, endless hum pressing in from all sides, while his heartbeat grew louder, pounding hard against his chest as if trying to warn him.

"What the hell even is this?"