Nanomancer Rising: Divine Alchemist Reborn as Academy's Worst Teacher
Chapter 65: What are the chances

Chapter 65: What are the chances

With the timer ticking, there was little for Theo to do but to stand almost perfectly still and keep his movements restricted mostly to just turning the page.

A process that, quite quickly, forced Theo to realize just how boring it was.

Regardless of how much he wanted, he couldn’t use the book in his hand as a lecture to pass time, not when all it had to offer was some mystical gibberish that served more as the views on the matter it was all about than it could help enlighten the reader about its actual nature.

’It is only upon the witnessing of the divine grace left behind by the Supreme that one can peer into the secrets of the arcane. It is upon one’s humility that enlightenment is born, giving them the right to peer into the Supreme’s process of creation and His great plan for its works.’

Theo spared some time to give the book a chance, but with the excerpt like the one he just read being in the absolute top when it came to sense and clarity, he would instinctively dismiss the great majority of this writing, all the while finding new levels of appreciation he had for his hive.

’If I had to sort through thousands upon thousands of books written like that, all in a bid to find one, maybe two things that each of them might have right...’

Theo slightly shook his head, breathing out a sigh as he momentarily closed his eyes to let them rest a bit.

’I would soon go insane, wouldn’t I?’

Thankfully, rather than facing this issue, Theo could simply enjoy the benefits of having a powerful artificial intelligence do it for him and on a level of precision no human could ever arrive at.

As for how the hive had gone from reading thousands upon thousands of books at once by saving them as packages of meshes of varying thickness as analyzed by the nanites, translating those meshes into the local writing of this world, translating it into the pulse language the hive itself used, then trying to derive some actual sense from it all as understood through the perspective of scientific knowledge it came pre-packaged with and then all the knowledge the hive already absorbed?

Each step of this process was complex enough for one to make explaining it a job and research of their entire life, only to find themselves lacking to single-handedly peer upon the true depth of those tasks. Other elements of this process were never designed to be understood by a human, with the whole building process of the AI so far removed from the way a human brain could ever operate, even attempting to understand how the AI really worked would be a futile endeavor to begin with.

Once again, however, Theo didn’t need to pay the details of the process almost any mind, free to focus on just the results the hive started to spit out not even halfway through the process, opting to feed its host the processed information piecemeal rather than first completing the whole library’s package and then brute-forcing its absorption by its own circuits and then Theo’s fragile, biological wiring of the brain.

For a moment, the light vanished from Theo’s eyes as his vision faded, replaced with strings upon strings of seemingly chaotic numbers the meaning of which Theo didn’t even bother to try to understand.

The whole event lasted for a few seconds at most, a few seconds during which the letters of the local language morphed into the numbers Theo was perfectly familiar with, numbers that changed so quickly, Theo could never hope to properly focus his eyes on them.

That’s why, while the entire learning process was taking place, rather than trying to inspect how it went in the finest possible detail, Theo simply relaxed his eyes, freeing them from the strain of trying to decipher an ancient calligraphy contained within the pages of his book.

Theo’s vision then returned to the usual, with the first package of information now entering the slow process of registering within his long-lasting memory in the form of mental hyperlinks, each leading to a proper package of information lodged firmly within his hive.

In this way, rather than absorbing all of the knowledge he would likely only use once or twice in his entire life, Theo was free to make his hive shoulder most of the weight of this task. It came at a cost of always having to take a moment to ’recall’ the knowledge he didn’t really have. Thankfully, be it the perception of the world around him or even the intuitive understanding of concepts, having the knowledge actually locked away from his brain had no bearing on those deep ways in which his brain operated.

In a way, even though Theo didn’t exactly have the facts, his brain was fully capable of projecting them wherever this particular set of knowledge came to be important, only forcing Theo to actually revise the process if he really wanted to get into the details.

For all the perks and benefits of this way of allocating his resources, Theo still had to pay the price of actually absorbing so much information – by repeating the process of having his vision black out over and over again, in a stable rhythm for the remainder of the time his hive dictated.

And so, having nothing better to do, Theo pretended to read some awfully misguided book on a topic he never really cared about, his vision turning on and off as the nanites battered his mind with more and more hyperlinks to the information stored in his hive, all the while the hive itself worked hard to properly process and cross-connect the newly obtained information, turning it from raw knowledge into the integral part of the greater understanding of the world around him.

A process not so different from cooking, where just putting the eggs into the shopping bag would be one thing, while cracking them open, separating the white from the yolk, whisking the whites and then mixing both the aired whites and the yolks into the batter would be a whole other thing.

And just like it was with Theo absorbing the knowledge, having it dissected into tiny bits and then cross-referenced within the matrix of the knowledge already stored within his hive... It came at a cost.

This time, a purely physical cost of having nearly all of his nanites running at their full potential, split between analyzing the texture of the books and scrolls on the library shelves, processing the texture data into the local text, translating it twice and then actually integrating it into the greater whole of knowledge – all of which led to a gradual but constant build-up of simple heat.

Just like a processing unit in a computer would need a whole cooling unit to remove the excess heat, so did Theo’s nanites and hive as a whole – by integrating itself into Theo’s body and using his natural heat-exchanging methods of his endothermic body, designed to keep its temperature stable, regardless of the temperature of the world around him.

In simpler terms, however, all the heat produced by Theo’s nanites now resulted in quite the heavy sweat appearing all over his body, from the soles of his feet all the way to the tip of his head. And with an hour still left for his nanites to complete their task, Theo’s robes were already soaked fully through, making him feel as if he was taking an extremely uncomfortable bath while still standing nigh-perfectly still by the library’s shelf.

’I just need to endure it for a little longer,’ Theo thought, gritting his teeth as he could feel fat drops of warm sweat evaporating off his skin to remove some of the heat... only for the drop of sweat to slide down the natural curvature of his face, join hands with all the other drops of perspiration and then slide all the way down to the bottom of his chin only to then fall down to the collar of his robe.

’Just endure it a little longer, and hope...’

Theo managed to cut his thought short before he could actually raise the encounter flag.

Yet, this world clearly had deemed him to be too much of a cheat with his nanites, in turn making sure to raise the flag even if Theo actually stopped himself from doing so in time.

"Huh? Theo?" Approaching from the side, Celeste, one of the only few teachers Theo actually ever interacted with, had picked precisely this time to appear in precisely this place. "I didn’t expect you to... Wait, what’s with that sweaty look of yours? Are you okay?"