The dark magic teacher didn’t need to make extensive preparations for his testing as it was a rather simple one. It could all be achieved within the confines of a 10 by 10 room, although it had to be a bit higher than most rooms, towering some good four meters.

It was time to be tested again and Gabriel was nervous, he had heard that everyone that had challenged this teacher was “surprised” by what the test was, had they gained the approval though it or not.

Therefore, when he saw the dark magic teacher stand in front of the testing room, besides the door, wearing white, light blue and pink clothes he was already shocked. Even though he had researched about the teachers’ abilities and their tests to gain the approvals, he didn’t research what they wore and well… Gabriel expected a dark magic teacher to wear darker clothes.

But this shock surfaced only for a moment on his face, and he immediately regained his composure and entered the room first, as the teacher signaled him. With a sharp tone on his voice, he started explaining what he had to do.

Unluckily, this test in particular was binded close to some important memories of me with my sister so I can’t undo the spell blocking this test except for some general terms, albeit more specific than “surprising”.

I was tasked to cover myself with darkness so that not only I wouldn’t be able to see but the darkness itself had to block some _______ for some periods of time so that the room would undergo through changes which in turn uncovered the next task.

This repeated itself for about five different times, but the task was always different. In some of them I didn’t need to move, but in others it was a requirement and on one I even had to _______ to continue. There were also some parts where I had to cast a spell from another specialty to progress.

It was definitely an interesting experience and after what felt like five or six hours but had actually been only two, Gabriel had managed to gain the approval of this teacher, meaning that he had already gained access to a floor he hadn’t accessed before.

Now he had three more days to gain the approval of at least two more mages so that he would be let to enter another extra floor of the magicians manor library. He was already making mental preparations for the challenge that the botany teacher would propose to him the next day.

It was another female teacher this time, not that it mattered much, but Gabriel had heard that she had been hired through a contact rather than by skill, but this didn’t mean that she was unqualified either, it just meant that she got a bigger salary for the job she did.

This damaged Gabriel’s mental image of her and so he believed that even though this challenge wouldn’t be a breeze, it would still be quite easy to pass through and gain her approval. But he didn’t expect something out of the ordinary to happen.

Unbeknownst to him she had been contacted by her father and she was told that if she was forced to approve of this student she would lose her increased salary, making her new one unfitting for her relatively luxurious lifestyle.

This was why she planned to make a harder test than she would normally do, she would ask things that would have usually been seen at the second or even third year and not only on botany, but the student would also need to be incredibly knowledgeable to even progress on the test she had made.

Gabriel was tasked to brew three different potions which’s names he can’t mention because of the magic curse. He needed to brew all of them inside a limited time frame of one hour, which to a master of the craft would be a good pace, but Gabriel had only ever read about potions.

Specifically, he had read about only two of the ones he was tasked to brew and even those he had mostly read about their effects and usual situations when they were used rather than the ingredients required to create them.

Still, looking around the room he was able to identify multiple plants and herbs from his stay within Grumbonk’s abode and even remembered some of the effects these plants had, so he started preparing potions with ingredients he believed would create certain potions.

Yet it was all theoretical, based of the effects of the plants and Gabriel knew that this wasn’t a reliable method because he had experienced that some ingredients drastically change their flavor when cooking, so why couldn’t some herbs change their effects when it was brewed?

Gabriel made some progress, but it wasn’t enough. This challenge was clearly made for people with more knowledge and experience than him and even though he was very knowledgeable for his now four years of age, he still could only experience so many things within that time frame.

Surprising the teacher, he managed to go in the correct way for the three different potions he was tasked to brew and even managed to almost finish one of the three concoctions, although he missed some key components which were impossible to know unless one had learned specifically about them, as they helped the reactions progress quicker and more efficiently so that the potion became better, faster and sometimes even gained new properties.

In other words, I was demolished unfairly, but as I didn’t know how to free myself from the mental magic used to keep me quiet about the test, I could only suffer quietly and try my best in what was to come. I had also started pushing my expectations down, because if I lost another time I would only get fail with my personal goal and gain less information, yet I didn’t lose hope yet.

The very next day he had a challenge that would probably be a dangerous one. Explosive magic was taught by a teacher with dubious professionalism, but he was smart. As the tale went, he had learned this magic by himself when he was experimenting with fire magic he learned from the chief of his village and ended up destroying more than three houses and was thus kicked from the village.

Gabriel knew that this teacher was almost in love with explosions, it was his life, basically. He had studied it ever since he had basically accidentally found out about it, finding the little changes he could make so that the explosions lasted longer, were bigger or even had different colors.

This fascinated him, so when Gabriel was told by this same teacher that his task was to create a safe explosion in a small, safe environment, he though he was joking and asked for the “real assignment”, but the teacher simply mumbled something about being forced and told Gabriel that that was the assignment.

Gabriel was stumped, as basically all his preparations were made with big, long and striking explosions in mind, not some small and safe explosions. What was he going to do? He glanced at the teacher and saw that he also wasn’t enjoying this and decided to make a bold move.

He wasn’t going to make a small explosion, if he was going to fail, at least he would do so in style! But he wouldn’t let this opportunity go to waste, so he acted as if he was going to make a small explosion as best as possible, but he realized that the teacher had found out about his plans about making a big explosion, but he didn’t comment anything.

Gabriel took this as a form of approval and decided to keep working on his great explosion, which ended up engulfing the whole room and cracked the walls, but neither Gabriel nor the teacher were damaged because Gabriel had created a safe explosion even with it being so big and colorful.

Even though the teacher had seen similar things they wouldn’t come close to the size of this one, so he awarded him with his approval immediately and started asking questions about how this explosion was created, because even though he had seen the process it was different if someone who had experienced it told you how to make it.

Yet Gabriel had wasted a lot of his inner energy, his mana, to cast this spell and because he had already received the approval of this teacher, he didn’t need to suck up to him anymore so he promised that he would answer it on the next week, which was now only two days away.