Sovereign of the Ashes

Good news was often followed by bad news.

Before Dark Flame even sat long enough to warm his seat, both Sein and Keith extended their palms toward him together.

“The public funds have been completely depleted over the past three years. To ensure the divine tower’s continued operation, we’ll need you to replenish the coffers, Tower Master,” Keith said without beating the bush.

As a senior member of the divine tower, Keith was nominally responsible for managing its public funds alongside Sein.

In reality, however, the older dean held the primary responsibility for the financial matters of the tower.

Sein’s recruitment initiatives over the years, including rewards for the efforts of Bousse and the others from the Alveroth Empire, had often ended up on Keith’s desk as reimbursement requests.

“Run out already? I remember leaving behind a hundred thousand magicoins when I left,” Dark Flame said, his brow furrowed in surprise.

Instead of explaining everything in detail, Sein and Keith handed over two crystal balls to the tower master.

Every expense from the past three years was meticulously documented, down to the last digit.

With their status and reputation, neither Sein nor Keith had any need or desire to embezzle from the divine tower’s funds.

Dark Flame, though not keen to manage the daily operations of his divine tower, was far from ignorant.

All Rank Five mages were highly intelligent individuals, unlikely to be easily fooled by two Rank Three mages.

Taking the crystal balls, Dark Flame scrutinized the records closely.

The expenditures, as reported, were legitimate, and the numbers left no room for doubt.

Of the one hundred thousand magicoins, only about thirty thousand remained.

At this rate, it would not take long before the tower’s funds were entirely exhausted.

The divine tower might have been short on money, but not Dark Flame himself.

At the end of the Gumo Plane War, his war gains were worth several million if converted to magicoins.

On top of that, he controlled a number of enslaved planes and still had some life savings accumulated over the years.

In terms of personal wealth, Dark Flame was considered wealthy even among Rank Five mages.

However, his character left him unpopular, with little to no friends.

In the crystal balls, the two largest expenses recorded in the flow of funds were the “training of initiates at divine tower academy” and “upgrading of the tower’s facilities and equipment”.

The first major expense was primarily due to Sein’s efforts.

Why was it so difficult for commoner initiates to succeed?

The answer was simple: a lack of resources!

Although Sein had managed to recruit a substantial number of initiates to the Divine Tower of Dark Flame Academy in recent years, he could not create the required resources to nurture them out of thin air.

The missions assigned to initiates by the academy could not even cover the cost of their training.

In truth, “education” was a losing venture not just for the Divine Tower of Dark Flame but for all divine towers across the Magus World.

Could a few intermediate or junior initiates offset the immense investment required for their training just by completing missions that required them to eliminate magic beasts or bandits every few months?

Of course not!

The so-called mandatory quests for initiates were merely a way to provide practical experience and assess their growth.

The goal of divine tower academies was never to produce scholarly mages.

The true purpose of the system was to create battle-ready mages, the fresh blood that the Magus Civilization desperately needed.

Education, in this sense, was a “public service”. Without it, the Magus Civilization would not provide substantial loans and incentives to mages who established new divine towers.

During his tenure as dean, Sein had once calculated the minimum cost of training an initiate to become a Rank One mage.

The figure was staggering: nearly a hundred magicoins per initiate!

And that was merely the baseline—the absolute minimum required for a successful promotion to Rank One.

Of course, advancing to Rank One was far from straightforward. The gap between theoretical training and actual achievement was immense.

At the same time, many magic initiates stagnated midway through their growth.

In reality, junior and intermediate initiates formed the largest demographic of initiates within the Magus World.

Even accounting for these factors, Sein realized that the divine tower still invested close to a hundred magicoins per initiate, regardless of their success rate.

Where initiates from noble families held an undeniable advantage over commoner initiates was in their ability to access resources with ease, a privilege afforded by their lineage.

In this world, geniuses who could grow through sheer hard work alone were a rare minority.

Resources, more than anything else, were the deciding factor for success.

The more than two thousand initiates that Sein had recruited to the Divine Tower of Dark Flame over the past three years, along with the thousands expected to enroll annually in the future, were almost entirely penniless children from commoner families.

With so many initiates needing education and training at the divine tower, high expenses were inevitable.

But... where would the money come from?

Sein could only turn to the tower master.

As for the other largest expense—“upgrading of the tower’s facilities and equipment”—it was another initiative spearheaded by Sein but one that had received full support from Dean Keith!

In fact, when it came to improving the tower’s facilities, Keith was even more eager than Sein.

Hundreds of years ago, Keith had proposed similar upgrades to the tower master, only to be flatly rejected.

The primary reason was clear: Dark Flame had established the divine tower for himself.

The training benefits provided by the law nodes suppressed by the divine tower were what mattered most to the Rank Five mage.

Public benefits were never his priority!

As far as Dark Flame was concerned, the divine tower only needed to be constructed modestly, providing enough conveniences to benefit himself.

He had never considered turning it into a long-term career.

This attitude was also why he could remain indifferent to the divine tower mages’ mass exodus and unprecedentedly promoted Sein to the position of dean.

Simply put, he simply did not care about all that!

However, during his three-year absence, the oversight of the divine tower’s affairs had been left entirely to Sein and Keith.

With Dark Flame away, Sein and Keith had relative freedom to implement their ideas.

For Sein, his push to improve the environment and upgrade the facilities of the divine tower was not driven by grand ambition or long-term strategy.

Instead, it stemmed from his experiences at the Divine Tower of Verdant Spring.

Master Lorianne was a Rank Four mage who was extremely willing to invest heavily in her divine tower.

Unlike Dark Flame, Lorianne treated her divine tower as her career.

Influenced by his mentor’s example, Sein could not help but notice the flaws and inefficiencies in the Divine Tower of Dark Flame.

After discussing his ideas with Keith, the two were surprised to find they were in complete agreement!

Sein had even considered following Lorianne’s example by expanding and upgrading the tower’s public library.

Unfortunately, this plan had to be shelved temporarily due to the lack of funds.

Upon leaving the laboratory, Sein had internally grumbled about the poor timing of the tower master’s return.

Yet, as the conversation shifted to the divine tower’s upgrade, his mood began to lift.

Perhaps the tower master had returned at a perfect timing after all.

When Sein and Keith simultaneously extended their palms toward the tower mage, Dark Flame fell into a long, contemplative silence.