Saul stumbled two steps back in fright, his boots thudding heavily on the stone-tiled floor.
The corpse bound to the conveyor belt suddenly opened its eyes. Its head didn’t move, but its eyeballs darted frantically to the left.
When it saw Saul and Kaz, its pupils dilated sharply and trembled slightly, as though it had seen something exciting.
“He’s still alive?” Saul couldn’t help but ask Kaz.
“How could that be?” Kaz walked up calmly and, right in front of Saul, lifted the black leather covering the new apprentice.
Beneath the leather was a dissected chest cavity, ribs spread open like wings, and the torso hollow and empty.
Below that, the legs had been shredded into strips of flesh mixed with dirt and stone.
They’d been cut quite finely.
Yet the apprentice’s eyeballs were still moving, shifting upward as Kaz walked. His lips parted slightly, revealing clean white teeth.
Saul felt his stomach churn.Since coming to this world, he had seen plenty of blood and horror inside the wizard tower, which had helped him hold back from vomiting.
But now, the trial meant for him had officially begun.
He forced himself not to look away.
The nausea and dizziness persisted, but Saul kept telling himself it was just a corpse, incapable of suddenly springing to life and biting half his face off.
The fear eased slightly.
“His brain has long been dead. What’s left here isn’t his soul. And under normal circumstances, he’s not aggressive,” Kaz said as he pulled the black leather back down. Then he turned to Saul. “Afraid?”
Saul took a deep breath of the bloody, foul-smelling air.
“Yes.”
“Oh?” Kaz raised an eyebrow.
“But I can do it.”
“Hmph.” Tutor Kaz snorted. “This isn’t a job you can do just because you want to. The corpse you’re looking at has already undergone two rounds of processing, hazard control, and material recovery. These mutated corpses need to be specially disposed of, or they’ll escape and turn the wizard tower into a cursed domain. But before they’re eliminated, we salvage some useful experimental material. Your job is the final sorting and cleanup.”
Kaz slapped the black leather.
Slap!
“You’ll use your knowledge or your intuition to identify the parts that have gained magical properties through mutation but aren’t tainted by spirits. Separate and place them in the corresponding small boxes on the table, close the lids, and seal them. The rest goes into the large box below. After you leave tonight, someone else will collect the boxes and replace them with new ones.”
“I’ll grade your work based on how much useful material you recover. As long as you turn in five usable items each month, you’ll pass. If you exceed ten, you’ll earn an extra magic credit.”
Kaz raised his chin and pointed at the still-moving corpse. “Now, tell me. What do you think is salvageable?”
Saul walked up to the conveyor belt, summoned his courage, and pointed at the twitching eyeballs.
“Are these useful?”
“No,” Kaz replied expressionlessly.
So apparently, parts that look active aren’t necessarily useful.
Perhaps it was due to some kind of strange corruption that made them unusable. To a wizard, they were worthless.
This job really doesn’t pay easy money.
Are dark-type wizards always dealing with corpses and spirits?
Saul took another deep breath.
He was getting used to the stench now. Though it was still disgusting, it no longer made him gag.
He lifted the black leather all at once, forcing himself to look.
Perhaps it was the result of becoming an apprentice—his mental strength had grown. Though Saul still felt unwell, he could now look directly at the mess on the conveyor belt without getting dizzy.
Under normal vision, the dismembered corpse looked no different. Saul couldn’t tell which parts might be wizard material.
From the corner of his eye, he noticed Kaz tapping his right arm with his left hand repeatedly, his patience wearing thin.
“With my knowledge… or my intuition. But my current knowledge is useless here. So it has to be intuition. What is intuition? Gut feeling? Or mental power?”
Saul cautiously glanced at his left shoulder. Unfortunately, the hardbound book there was only good for saving his life, not earning a living—now lying quiet like a salted fish.
So, he had only one method left to try.
Standing before the apprentice’s corpse, Saul began visualizing the Human-Monster Movement Diagram.
Without the aid of a crystal ball, immersion was difficult. But thanks to last night’s experience in the lab, he could now enter a semi-meditative state without one.
In this state, he could see elemental particles and things normally invisible to the naked eye.
Now, in Saul’s vision, the twitching eyeballs looked like a snail’s feelers, extending from the face and swaying curiously.
The lips were covered in a layer of tiny, hard black spikes.
The teeth beneath them faintly shimmered.
Saul fixated on that flicker. It looked oddly familiar.
Like a loot drop indicator in a video game.
Loot drop! Loot drop!
“Still haven’t found it?” Kaz’s impatient voice broke Saul’s meditative focus. “I’ll give you a hint. There are at least two salvageable parts on this corpse. As long as you find one, you pass.”
No time to verify whether what he’d seen with mental vision was real. Saul pointed to the corpse’s mouth.
Kaz frowned. “You mean the mouth?”
“No, the teeth.”
A brief flash of surprise crossed Kaz’s face.
He stepped forward and took a slender black rod from the long table, prying open the corpse’s lips.
“Ahem…” He turned back, his expression a bit awkward as he looked at Saul. “Yes, that counts.”
Success!
Saul suppressed the excitement and continued using semi-meditation to scan the body.
Then—
He saw two glowing spots.
He feigned uncertainty and pointed to one of them.
Kaz nodded and asked if he had seen anything else.
Saul carefully looked over the whole body again, then straightened up and said, “No, that’s all I found.”
“Not bad,” Kaz said casually, pointing out the third glowing spot Saul had intentionally left out. “There’s another one here.”
Then, he verbally guided Saul on how to use tools from the nearby lab bench to dissect and recover the materials. Each piece was placed into a small box, closed, and latched.
The remaining parts were wrapped back up in the black leather and stored in the large box beneath the table.
That box was inscribed with sealing runes that contained spirits.
Only a large red stain remained on the conveyor belt.
Kaz nodded and jerked his chin, signaling Saul to pull the lever on the conveyor again.
With the sound of machinery turning, the bloody conveyor belt rotated downward, and another corpse emerged from behind the black leather curtain.
Saul narrowed his eyes as he saw the exposed head.
He recognized this one, too.
She was the maid who had flirted with him when delivering his books on the first day and appeared in his nightmare that very night.
That voluptuous maid.
Why was she dead, too?
An accident? Or murder?
“You know her?” Kaz asked flatly, noticing Saul’s expression.
“Yeah. She delivered my materials.”
“Death is common in the wizard tower.”
“If they keep dying, what happens when there’s no one left?”
“We recruit from nearby towns. People are eager to send kids here.”
With that, Kaz pointed at the maid. “She’s got… at least one salvageable part. If you can find it again this time, this job’s yours.”
Saul perked up. He had no time to mourn the maid. He flung back the black leather.
The maid was naked. A long wound across her chest proved she had been dissected, too. But being an ordinary human, even though she’d died to something strange, there weren’t many unusual remnants on her.
Unlike the apprentice just now, when he was dropped into the big box, there was barely any weight left.
(End of chapter)