How should I put it... "nouveau riche" wasn't a very polite term, but Despair Tower really did have that sort of air about it.
You could say Black Enigma Tower was putting on airs despite clearly lacking the capital for it, but even though they could have supported all their Official Mages with the Inner Tower area, they would never actually do so.
Still less would they build additional subsidiary towers for those dependent Mages between the three main towers.
Black Enigma Tower had not remained completely unchanged, but they would rather use those central areas to grow Black Taro than allow Mage Towers to be built haphazardly atop the central magic array.
Even if those Mage Towers were merely for show and could not draw energy from the main magic array at all.
After all, as long as there was an Elemental Pool near a node, it would inevitably affect the main magic array's reaction speed.
No matter how slight or slow the effect was, it still existed!
Therefore, if he had not entered Black Enigma Tower directly under Gilbert's identity, no matter how skilled Hill was, he could not have entered the key area between the three main towers without anyone noticing.
And the most ordinary-looking place among them, the one anyone seemed free to enter, was actually Black Enigma Tower's most heavily defended location: the Great Library.
That was what made Black Enigma Tower so difficult to deal with. As long as the three main towers unleashed their full power, the central area's defenses would not be inferior to those of the Soul Main Tower... in other words, the place that housed apprentices and knowledge was the safest place.
Only when all three main towers had been destroyed—they truly shared prosperity and ruin—would the apprentices face the