Chapter 534

Every nation had an institution for training spies—well, the Northwest Republic did not have one yet—but the Arcane Tower Federation was no exception.

No one knew when it had begun, but the Arcane Tower Federation's intelligence department had started gathering orphans from among the common folk, instilling loyalty to the nation in them from childhood, teaching them all manner of espionage skills, and training them into outstanding spies.

Most of the orphans had fairly ordinary talent, but every so often, there would be a particularly gifted one. Those talented children would be selected for more advanced training. Whenever they gathered a batch of such gifted children, the Arcane Tower Federation would invite veteran ace spies to serve as instructors and teach them.

That was how the elite spy training class came to be. As for the 1,096th class, it did not mean that Wood and the others were the 1,096th batch of elite spies to receive training. Rather, the year they trained was the 1,096th year since the Arcane Tower Federation's official founding.

There had been twenty-five young people in that class. The oldest was already sixteen and had even taken part in official missions; the youngest was only eleven and had received basic training for merely three years.

Yet after the initial training, that eleven-year-old child had surpassed everyone else with an indisputable, overwhelming advantage and become their class monitor.

After six months of special training, at graduation, the instructor—once an ace spy himself—said with a sigh, "So long as this child does not die young, he will surely become the Federation's next-generation ace spy, and he'll be stronger than me!"

His prophecy swiftly became reality. Just five years later, that sixteen-year-old youth had already become one of the Federation's finest spies.

The reason for using the phrase "one