Turning back time a little, to the beginning of the year. A flood of thesis review requests poured into the Magic Tower’s Thesis Review Association. Even researchers who, under normal circumstances, would have hesitated and waited years to gauge the atmosphere were charging in with burning eyes this year.
The reason was simple. Come March, the questions Isaac Upperhills had set for the Magic Tower entrance exam could very well shake the very paradigm of academia.
If one fails to see the connection, they need only look at how the thesis titled The Relationship Between the Uncaptured Seven Traitors of the Empire and Imperial Society’s Market System was discarded after the announcement of Iapetus’s death.... They need to understand how someone’s four years turned into scrap paper.
Also, as always during this period, there were those retaking the Magic Tower entrance exam to transfer into popular schools. Taking everything into account, it was a chaotic start to the year. Then Isaac’s exam, which seemed to set the sky ablaze, passed, and the researchers' thesis reviews were buried in last quarter’s filing cabinets.
In mid-March, after all that noise had faded in the face of the millennium problems, two researchers were drinking beer.
Glug, glug. Clack.
"So, how was that exam the other day?"
"It was damn hard."