Nanomancer Rising: Divine Alchemist Reborn as Academy's Worst Teacher
Chapter 69: Enlightement

Chapter 69: Enlightement

’Did she actually buy it?’

Theo silently stared at the letters in the book, the title of which he didn’t even bother checking.

Normally, those letters would morph into words which would then transform into sentences, each carrying a potentially different meaning depending on how closely one was willing to look. There was a meaning given through the sentence, another meaning stemming from the deliberate choice of words, and then another one hidden in the order the words were arranged in...

All of those meanings, however, currently flew above Theo’s head as he stood as still as possible while observing Celeste with but the corner of his right eye while silently praying for success.

And for every passing second that Celeste stood dazed, deep in her thoughts, silently munching on her thumb’s nail while pinning her eyes down on her shoes... for every passing second, Theo’s hopes grew.

’She really looks like she bought it!’

While it was still too early to celebrate, Theo couldn’t stop his soul from rejoicing already.

All that bullshit hidden in the few words he spoke... did it really work?

Obviously, for Theo’s nonsense to hold some weight, he infused it with a bit of his own philosophy, his own natural sense of fairness and common belief of how things should be. There was no other way for him to make the bullshit he happily threw around have any weight otherwise.

And yet, for how long of a shot it was, Theo’s attempt clearly struck a bullseye!

"It seems you’ve got deep into reading before I could even answer, huh?"

Finally, Celeste’s face cleared up as she looked up and hung her eyes on Theo’s profile for a short while.

She then smiled gently, a hint of some deep sadness flashing in her eyes only for the woman to shake her head with polite resignation and then sigh away.

"Seeing you work so hard for your student’s sake, it would be discourteous on my part to keep bothering you, wouldn’t it?" she then added, the intensity of her glare exploding through the roof...

Only to then vanish, as if it was no more but a momentary hallucination, Theo’s brainfart that made him overinterpret the meaning of the look she gave him.

Throughout all of this, however, Theo stood his ground, pinning his eyes into the book he didn’t give two shits about, pretending to read the words he was currently too tired to even decipher the meaning of.

In the end, though, Theo’s efforts proved to be as valiant as they were effective, with Celeste sighing again before turning around and leaving.

Not leaving the library, of course, that would be too much for Theo to ask for. Instead, she just walked off somewhere far enough that Theo’s frozen-still eyes could no longer see. As for what she did from there on?

Theo neither could tell nor, in all honesty, could care.

Sure, it was amusing to watch how her expression changed as she sank into her thought. It was adorable to see her get all serious and bothered as she allowed her thoughts to roam freely, surely arriving at a whole set of different, interesting ’realizations’ of what the mystery in his behavior could signify.

’Just like all the cultivation world’s I’ve read about, the people of this place would really benefit from learning about Ockham’s razor, huh?’

Resisting the desire to shake his head, Theo merely rolled his eyes before locking them on the book again, flipping its page just to appear busy studying it.

Yet, right as Theo was about to settle back into his exhausting routine of consuming all the knowledge there was to be gained from this branch of the library, something clicked.

Just by bringing up the concept of Ockham’s razor, something as simple as a belief that in most cases, the simplest explanation had high chances of being correct, the remaining timer for Theo’s absorption of all the information from the library... remained exactly as it was, slowly ticking away while the nanites gradually scanned every fiber of every book, scroll and set of notes stored on the shelves.

This was a physical process that could be accelerated if only Theo could afford some bodily cooling. Beyond that, any sort of enlightenments, breakthroughs or strokes of genius had no bearing over it.

The same couldn’t be said about the latter part of the steps that the whole absorption process consisted of, with the very idea of supreme simplicity acting like its titular razor and slashing away what felt like a third of the mental burden Theo had to suffer through just to assimilate all the new knowledge!

It was as if his hive, already trained to cut the bullshit and leave only the valid and valuable parts of those books behind, suddenly found an efficient shortcut in doing so, allowing for a much simpler processing, parsing and then hyperlinking of all the new knowledge into the existing data structures!

That, in turn, greatly decreased the cooling this part of the process required for Theo to keep his inner nanites operating on their peak efficiency to run the hive, opening up some room in terms of cooling for him to speed up the reading process.

In the end, with this single enlightenment, what was supposed to take him a tad less than an hour more ended up completing in just about thirty minutes, not only saving him from half an hour of doing nothing but standing almost perfectly still, but also all the energy and effort necessary to complete all the tasks happening in the background!

Finally freed from his burden, Theo breathed a long sigh of relief as he felt his nanites gradually flow through the air and sink through his skin back into his system, instantly rushing to alleviate the existing problems of his tired body, from restoring the muscles exhausted after over two hours of standing, through manipulating the hormonal glands and even boosting the efficiency of Theo’s heat exchange, allowing him to feel cool breeze on his forehead for the first time in what felt like ages.

This recovery process, something that would normally happen overnight and after ingesting a whole slew of different herbal augmenters, ended up taking no more than ten minutes; ten minutes Theo spent slowly sorting through all the newly gained knowledge, trying to find his bearings on how he should approach his actual goal.

A question he couldn’t answer before, daring not to make a hasty choice when it came to a future of another human being.

And a question that now had a pretty damn obvious answer... even if this very answer came with a whole lot more effort, costs and preparations for Theo to complete for him to turn it from theory to a reality!

’At the very least, though,’ Theo thought, closing his hand to slam the book closed before quickly putting it back on the shelf and turning towards the library’s exit, ’now, I know where to begin!’

Or so he thought, turning on his heel in his desire to leave the library and go pay a visit to the academy’s formation workshop... only to face the very person the existence of which he comfortably stored in the very back of his head.

A woman with the dangerously curious if not outright passionate look in her eyes!

"Uhm... Excuse me?" Theo muttered, happily using his former exertion to now raise his arm and wipe his forehead with the sleeve of his robe. "Is there something on my face? Because if not, would you mind... Ugh... giving me some room?"