Nanomancer Rising: Divine Alchemist Reborn as Academy's Worst Teacher
Chapter 117: Cultivation struggle

Chapter 117: Cultivation struggle

The process of cultivating the fourth step was nowhere near as complicated as the hive’s instruction made it out to be.

In the end, no matter what exactly each step was all about, it could be boiled down to just absorbing more mana into oneself and developing better, more efficient ways of managing it.

That, however, only held true for the very first few moments of Theo’s cultivation, the short time he needed to regain all the mana that he had lost, filling up his structure to its absolute limit.

Thankfully, the next part wasn’t all that hard either. After all, in essence, it was pretty much the same as what Theo did back when cultivating the third step and developing his dantian.

Reaching the full potential of his current cultivation was easy. But when it came to going beyond that...

’I guess that’s what makes cultivation hard,’ Theo thought as he realized just how much harder it was to force more of the world’s mana into his structure to alter how it worked than to just fill his existing, inner infrastructure.

Still, while it was still the formation left behind by Julius, the moment Theo took a single sip of the actual high-grade materia prima, his body felt as if it suddenly stood on fire.

With the nanorgan going into overdrive to process this extremely reactive and energetic substance, Theo’s insides flooded with the freshly minted nanites. And as those bonded with the mana Theo continued to absorb through the formation, he could watch in real-time how one of the nodes in his structure started to develop into a bigger and bigger version of itself.

’Come on,’ Theo thought, putting the hive’s help aside as he monitored the process with just his own perception, ’just a little bit more...’

By all means, his cultivation was currently unbalanced. With the nature of his power coming from the equal mix of mana and nanites, what Theo was doing right now was compensating for the lack of nanites during his earlier cultivation that left him with more mana than he had the nanites to bond with.

And now, while even more mana continued to flow into his system, Theo’s focus quickly moved from the cultivation of the fourth step of his technique to actually remodeling the mana already present to bring it in-line with how it was actually supposed to be.

Doing so inevitably slowed down the rate at which Theo could expand the copy of his dantian. Yet, as the balance of his inner power shifted back to how it was, allowing him to turn his focus back to the task at hand...

’Wait, wasn’t it a lot harder to grow it before?’

The difference between how fast his secondary dantian grew before and now, after he fixed the nature of his mana, was as stark as the difference between night and day.

Before, it felt like he was pumping out more and more air into a balloon, extremely careful not to do it too fast and risk it popping. Right now, though?

Right now it felt as if the balloon of his secondary dantian expanded all on its own, freely allowing the mana Theo absorbed to flow into it and fill the gaps of its now increased volume!

"I guess there’s a reason why keeping a proper ratio of all the elements of the fuel was always such an important thing," Theo muttered to himself as he recalled one of the ancient images from his old life of something called a "gas station".

A place where one could pump different types of fuel into their car, fuels that hardly differed between each type and yet, would lead to massive differences in the performance of an engine processing it into power.

Just like a mixture with fewer octanes would provide a considerably smaller amount of bang for the buck, cultivating through mana alone was an extremely arduous process in which this raw energy had to compensate for the natural resistances of one’s body.

Rather than focusing on just accumulating more and more of the power, a cultivator would have to actively fight against the resistance of their body, forcing them to slowly change to the new shape capable of holding greater amounts of mana than before.

When it came to Theo, however, the task of altering his body could be fully left to his nanites, allowing nearly all of the mana he absorbed to simply fill his new structures up.

That would be the simplest and most straightforward solution to the problem of cultivation... but not the most optimal one, nor the path Theo - with a bit of the hive’s advice - decided to follow.

No.

Rather than splitting the process of cultivation between his nanites and mana, each burdened with a different purpose, Theo opted to combine the two, making his power a lot more versatile even if slightly less effective at each of the necessary tasks.

Sure, a pure mix of nanites would do a better job at changing the inner workings of Theo’s body in the same way that raw, unadulterated mana would be much thinner than the kind of energy Theo cultivated, allowing him to store much more of it in his structure.

But by splitting those two tasks to two separate forces, Theo would doom himself to forever balancing those two while separating his physicality from whatever he decided the magic to be, his mysticality, mayhaps?

’Good thing I decided to follow the hive’s advice back then,’ Theo thought, breathing a sigh of relief while feeling how a single drop of cold sweat slid down from his forehead, through his cheek, and then all the way to his chin, dropping down from it only to become a tiny stain on his robe.

Back then, he didn’t have the slightest idea about the intricacies of magic and cultivation. But now?

Now, Theo could feel the difference.

By having his nanites bound with mana and only then alter how his physicality worked, Theo didn’t develop an entirely separate realm of mysticality. Instead, he kept his mana as something perfectly physical. And by using mana-filled nanites to alter his body instead, he continued to make his flesh more and more attuned to the mana itself, making it infinitely easier to mold it in ways that higher realms of cultivation required!

’Phew!’

Finally, after cultivating for what felt like several hours, Theo breathed a sigh of relief.

Even with the benefit of his unorthodox cultivation method, things were starting to get more and more laborious the higher he went. And cultivating just the very first goal of his fourth stage already turned out to take Theo quite some time!

’I would complain,’ Theo smiled to his own thoughts, ’if not for how this is still lightning-speed when compared to how long others would have to cultivate to achieve the same results.’

What was merely a fourth step for Theo actually encompassed the sixth and seventh stages of a local cultivation, making Theo’s progress even faster than what he was willing to acknowledge.

In the end, though, it was but the first goal out of several he needed to achieve to fully complete the fourth step, bringing his power level to a theoretical equivalent of a cultivator of the seventh stage... Which still didn’t account for just how much more efficient Theo’s cultivation method was!

That, however, was the end of the good news. Because as Theo took another look at the list of the hive’s instructions, he ended up stuck just staring at the next step of the method.

Understanding what the instruction said was one thing. But figuring out how to make it happen?

’Establish a resonance between the dantian and its copy,’ Theo read out the instruction in his head over and over again. Then, his lips twisted into an ugly grimace. ’How do I do that, though?’

In theory, cultivation was all about increasing one’s potential to hold increasing amounts of mana. But when it came to the details, things were no longer as simple.

’Normally a resonance would apply to sound... No, to waves,’ Theo thought, trying to approach the topic from a scientific point of view. ’But neither my mana nor the nanites are a wave! And they don’t act like one either!’

A sudden realization suddenly dawned upon the man, causing a cold chill to move up his spine.

’What if...’ He gulped his saliva down as he was forced to consider the possibility, ’what if turning my mana into something physical by binding it to nanites I’ve effectively created a bottleneck I will never be able to pass?’

In theory, this wasn’t a total and absolute disaster, not yet. Theo could always just abandon all his gains and recultivate his entire cultivation from scratch, without making the mistakes that he was now starting to believe he did...

"But it doesn’t make sense for things to work this way," he muttered to himself as he put the notion of recultivation aside. ’All I did was follow the hive’s instructions thus far, so the chances of it putting me on a spot like that...’

Theo took a deep breath to calm himself down, giving himself a few more moments to try to figure out the solution to the problem, only to keep on failing over and over again.

No matter what he thought, what angle he tried to bite it from, what kind of theoretical approach he tested... All of them either wouldn’t work at all, made absolutely no sense, or failed to yield any results.

Heck, not even looking into the next steps made Theo’s guesswork any easier.

And so, left with no other choice, Theo did the one thing he wanted to avoid, especially now that his hive was clearly trying to gain some degree of autonomy.

’Hey, hive, I know you’ve been monitoring my struggle, so why won’t you just cut me some slack and explain what the hell am I supposed to do now?’