Nanomancer Rising: Divine Alchemist Reborn as Academy's Worst Teacher
Chapter 108: Ordeal at the library

Chapter 108: Ordeal at the library

"No rest for the wicked, ey?"

Theo muttered to himself as he looked up, trying to peer through the darkness to see the actual roof of the academy’s main library.

Ever since the whole ordeal at the auction, the world refused him even the slimmest degree of peace.

From negotiating the compensation, explaining the general purpose of the materia prima to his disciples, somehow chasing Celeste back to her actual duties and then overseeing the progress of his two pupils...

It wouldn’t be until the very next day when the package from the headmaster had arrived at the doorstep of Theo’s mansion that he finally saw his hopes reignited. Even then, he still had to go through an entire day full of administrative tasks of organizing the stuff left to him by Julius.

Even with the help of his two disciples, getting everything in order was no easy task, not even when he decided to just sell all that he couldn’t make an immediate use of, even if it meant selling at a considerable loss.

To say that Theo never doubted his approach to organizing all of his spoils would be an over-exaggeration. But with Theo falling victim to the sunk-cost fallacy, he couldn’t really change his mind without admitting that this policy wasn’t all that smart to begin with.

In reality, however, it wasn’t Theo that changed his mind. It was his circumstances that changed since the fateful moment with the headmaster back at the auction hall that forced him to change his priorities.

A change so profound, it literally forced Theo to put his wish to leave the academy aside and redirect all of his attention to making the most out of what he had all the while trying to grow stronger as soon as he possibly could.

And now, after an entire day of sorting through documents, recipes and general cat-and-mouse play with the servants who still harbored some loyalty to Julius and tried to either hide away or outright steal Julius’ possessions that Theo had yet to take over, he finally reached the library and entered through its back-gate, finding the whole place – as promised – fully abandoned, with not a single soul in sight.

"As much as I would love to just take this opportunity to get some mental rest..." Theo sighed heavily, putting those heretic thoughts aside as he moved to the geometrical center of the library’s layout before sitting comfortably down on the floor and pulling out two bottles of the high-grade materia prima.

The bulk of his order has yet to be realized. In the meantime, however, Celeste managed to hook him up with three bottles of high-grade materia prima, which turned out to be quite a bit more expensive than Theo expected after learning of the price of the low and mid-grade versions back at the auction.

Now, however, with one bottle already down the endless drain of testing, Theo was left with just two more.

For his purposes, however, just two bottles had to be enough. And so, with the memory of all the recent problems, issues and anxieties now shoved deep down the bottom of his mind, Theo breathed out before grabbing the cork of the first bottle with his teeth and tearing the cap off the bottle’s neck.

Next, he started to gulp down the relatively tasteless, mildly sweet and thick concoction.

’Tastes like some sort of bland syrup,’ he thought, trying to ignore the unpleasant sensation of such a viscous liquid nearly clogging his airways as he downed the entire bottle in one go.

Still, the displeasure of drinking the materia prima was quickly drowned by the euphoric feeling of fulfillment when the thick liquid washed through Theo’s nanorgan, providing it with material even better for nanite synthesis than the biopadding developed back on Earth.

"Haaa..."

With the heat slowly accumulating in his chest from just how fast his nanorgan started to pump fresh nanites, Theo breathed out, putting all of his focus to just controlling the process.

It took half of the first bottle to replenish the nanite reserves he expended during the combat back at the auction house, finally ridding him of the power born from the flesh of his enemies. But now?

Rather than trying to advance his cultivation – normally a perfectly feasible feat given the production rate of the nanites and the considerable mana already infused into the materia prima – Theo had no other choice but to start expending his nanites for no other purpose but to artificially increase the limits of just how massive his hive could grow.

’Just a little bit more,’ Theo thought, feeling the presence of the mana-rich liquid in his stomach quickly dwindle as the nanorgan greedily gulped it down.

Pop.

Due to just how thick this materia prima was, when the last drop flowed out of the bottle and into Theo’s mouth, it did so with quite the fun little sound.

"Haaa..." breathing a long, warm breath, Theo once again expelled the excessive heat from his body.

By now, a hot steam surrounded him, making it seem as if his insides were literally on fire.

Just that, this wasn’t steam at all.

It was the nanites that his body could no longer handle, hanging around in close proximity, waiting for Theo to put them to a proper use.

’Careful, man,’ Theo warned himself as he took in a fresh breath of air and slowly changed the angle of his focus, from just containing the nanites to actually putting them to work, ’just keep it steady now!’

The steam rising around Theo thinned out as if a gust of wind diluted it with dry air, spreading the moisture of the steam throughout the entire library. Or rather, with the gust of wind created with just the slightest whisk of Theo’s mana, the highly concentrated nanites diffused throughout the entire building, filling every nook and cranny of the library’s bottom floor.

’The loss...’ Theo thought, summoning a hive’s display of its own status. Status that depicted roughly a tenth of Theo’s excessive supply of nanites in red, ’is manageable.’

By pushing the number of nanites beyond the realm of what he could control, Theo had no other choice but to accept the much increased maintenance cost that came with it. And while the task at hand shouldn’t lead to a permanent decrease of his hive... How could Theo expect the old rules to still apply when what he was doing was, quite literally, breaking those very rules himself?

And so, having no other choice, Theo blew the cork out of the second bottle before putting its neck to his lips yet holding off on pushing its bottom up to take a gulp.

A moment later, the first stage of Theo’s task finally reached completion, with his nanites successfully permeating through the entirety of the library. A result achieved at the considerable price of nearly twenty percent of all the nanites that went beyond the limit of what he could effectively control.

And so, after taking a big gulp out of his last bottle of the high-grade materia prima, Theo closed his eyes and took in a breath, patiently constructing the next order for the hive. It was a part of the task he would normally do with a stray thought. But now, with his brain already pushing its limits by controlling nearly thrice the size of its actual limit of the hive’s size, forming a proper thought actually became a challenge.

Still, roughly five minutes later, Theo opened up his eyes and pried his mouth open.

"Go."

Theo’s soft whisper carried his will to the hive, instantly stirring the air in the library as the nanites finally rushed to action.

"Ugh..."

In a single instant, the weight of all those nanites lifted from Theo’s consciousness. Now that they had their orders, all he had to do was keep drinking the materia prima, providing his nanorgan with ample nutrition to make it compensate for all the loss of using excessive number of nanites.

A mere moment later, however, a world of pain exploded in Theo’s head, making it feel as if his brain suddenly stood on fire.

’Just endure it,’ Theo gritted his teeth as the knowledge gathered by his nanites flew into his brain like a steady stream, just rapid enough to make it feel like he was dying while not actively doing any lasting harm to his gray matter.

By all means, learning every word of every book, scroll, script and instruction stored within the library’s bottom floor was much more than Theo’s brain could effectively handle. That’s why, rather than actively trying to process the seemingly endless stream of data, it only served as a circuit that passed all of this computing burden over to Theo’s inner hive.

In the end, Theo had to use all of the nanites that were still within the limits of his current cultivation to just parse all this newly obtained data, turning it from random marks in a language he still struggled to read into tokens and then adding it up to specific parts of the array of different libraries...

"Heh..." Theo chuckled before taking another sip of the materia prima and shaking his head with a self-reflecting smile. "Who am I even trying to bullshit? It’s not like I even know how the fuck it does all that it does..."

The hive was, by all means, the piece of technology that went beyond the understanding of anyone alive, be it in this world or back on Earth.

There were some engineers that knew how it came to be... But by the time it reached its current form, how exactly did it work? That was something not even the greatest genius in the world could ever answer, not when Hive’s intelligence, processing power and processing algorithms were all a result of a natural, neutral growth.

In a way, the mechanical brain of the hive, constructed from the myriads of nanites involved in it, was as complex as a human brain if not more. And given how humanity only ever licked the surface of the true complexity behind a biological brain, any attempts to understand the inner workings of mechanical brains were bound to fail.

Thankfully, whether Theo knew how his hive worked or not, the fact that it worked was pretty much undeniable. Especially when the amount of data that could make any sane person go mad in an instant continued to flow into it, only to turn into neat data-packages Theo could then access at will while the hive would slowly simmer the crux of all the meanings contained inside into his base perception.

For now, though, Theo had no other choice but to ignore his curiosity, sit down, shut up and just bear with the burden while slowly sipping at whatever he had left of his materia prima, patiently waiting for his nanites to gather the data, for his brain to send it over to the hive and then for the hive to absorb it into its inner code.

A process that the hive conveniently displayed the progression of in form of a simple bar in a bid to give Theo some degree of comfort in knowing just when his painful ordeal would end.

What was designed as a mental relief, however, only made Theo’s torture all the heavier given how even now, roughly an hour into the process, the progress was currently at a measly seven percent!

And so, Theo took another sip before pushing the progress bar aside and slumping down where he sat.

’This is really going to be a long night, ey?’