The Tower of Illusions at Fernandez Magic Academy had not originally existed for student trials.
In the academy's earliest records, it had simply been called the "Tower of Simulation."
Back then, the academy was still in its infancy, nowhere near possessing the complete and stable educational system it had today.
Or, more accurately, the academy had never originally been founded to teach young people who had not even crossed the threshold of becoming professionals.
It had been more like a vast workshop built jointly by mages.
Preserving knowledge, exchanging results, conducting research, verifying theories.
As for teaching?
To spellcasters who had already climbed high upon the path of magic, repeatedly teaching young apprentices how to reliably cast [Mage Hand] was as dull as making a goblin teach a troll how to do accounts, compared to simulating a new spell that might leave its name in history or verifying some spatial structure that existed only in theory.
Of course, no matter how reluctant they were, the academy ultimately needed successors.
More realistically, the academy needed money.
Teaching the children of nobles, merchant guild magnates, and city councillors until they at least looked like passable spellcasters was one of the academy's most dependable ways of securing educational funding, maintaining the council's support, and keeping the great families willingly opening their purses.
Yet even so, in the eyes of truly high-ranking spellcasters, such matters could only be considered necessary costs for keeping the academy running.
Rather than patiently correcting the apprentices' crooked, lopsided casting gestures, they cared far more about research that burned through heaps of Gold Shield and magic crystals.
For instance, whether an enchanted siege engine could still keep its internal magic arrays stable beneath a dragon's breath.
Or whether a new defensive magic array might develop uncontrollable deviations within the