Nanomancer Rising: Divine Alchemist Reborn as Academy's Worst Teacher
Chapter 74: Array

Chapter 74: Array

’Just why am I like this?’

Theo sighed heavily, leaning against the shovel he stuck in a pile of freshly dug-out earth.

Preparing the formation wasn’t so easy, after all.

First, Theo had to forget all that he thought he understood from when he saw the portable, pre-made formations.

Those were all just a bait for the idiots, not reaching even a tenth of the potential a proper formation should have.

When it came to the blueprint, the subject turned out to be extremely easy.

There were two elements that defined every formation. A flow, a channel for mana to flow through, and an object, meaning everything else. A single object could house a whole other formation, fully designed to fulfill a much more specific purpose.

Theorycrafting around this concept was exactly what Theo’s hive was made for. And despite Theo’s fears of relying on this power too much, he could never come up with designs as optimized as his more mechanical self.

All he had to do was provide the whole thing with a leading purpose. Which, in the case of his two disciples releasing all of their existing cultivation to start anew, couldn’t be more obvious.

’To think I wouldn’t even need those spirit stones,’ Theo thought, as his thoughts returned from when he, still full of optimistic estimates, started with the project.

By now, the sun managed to both set and start to rise again, leaving Theo with just a few precious hours to finish.

Crafting the most optimal blueprint for what Theo wanted was the easy part.

And now, several long hours of heavy labor later, Theo could finally look back upon his work with pride.

Over just a single night, he transformed an open, relatively empty field on the academy’s outgrounds into a neat staging area for the formation.

All that was left now was to actually install the thing.

Theo brought out a long sheet of paper rolled on a stick before laying it down over the ground and then painting long, dotted lines with a drawing coal.

With but a single thought, Theo’s nanites then burned through the marks, sheering the long sheet of paper into several dozen shapes Theo marked out.

’That’s conduit for the flow.’

Theo carefully collected all the pieces before storing them safely away in a small, elaborate pouch.

Next, he grabbed several ashen-black sticks only to create a route between all of his earthworks with a glance. And as he proceeded from one dug-out to the other, Theo used his knife to cut roughly finger-long pieces of each stick.

The ashen blessroot, one of, if not the most common of all the formation materials.

A relatively common herb carbonized in a high-powered furnace.

And now, its finger-sized pieces scattered all over the field, establishing the physical nodes of the whole conduit.

It wouldn’t be until a full hour passed that Theo finally added the last connecting piece, securing it down on the ground with a random pebble.

Tired after a whole night of heavy work, Theo finally found some time to sit down, to rest.

In their heads, the two of them likely wanted to show their diligence by showing up early to Theo’s class.

By doing so, they would find a small note he left for them, instructing them to bring the spirit stones over to where Theo prepared the field.

In Theo’s eyes, however, those two brats arrived right as he thought he could finally get some well-deserved rest!

Thankfully, there was no need for Theo to worry about the inner workings of his formation.

All that could be observed, his hive observed. And what could be better than an eldritch monster of computing power to analyze whether Theo made any mistake or not?

But now that Tesh and Lukas stood in the entrance of the clearing and stared upon Theo’s field...

Deep down, Theo felt a pull.

Something weird about responsibility.

"You guys are early," Theo muttered as he glanced up to the sky. "I would ask what gives, but I can easily guess the answer."

With a sigh, Theo stood up.

"I still need to get this thing running for a bit, so you two will have to wait."

Neither Lukas nor Tesh moved, weirdly still right where they first saw the field.

’Oh, right!’

Dazed after a whole night of heavy-duty work, Theo recalled one of the elements he included in his formation.

At its core, it was a retaining array equipped with a bonus of harvesting arrays scattered throughout the three spiraling, concentric circles of the magic circuit.

The ’obscure’ array was just a last-moment addition.

With a snap of his fingers, the flow of the mana through the looping circuits changed a little, releasing the two from the choke of the auxiliary part of Theo’s set of arrays.

In a way, it was pretty much like an electrical circuit. And all that Theo had to do was arrange it like he would the toys back when he found great pleasure in crafting high-end toys just for the thrill of it. When accounting for Hive’s additional help, Theo’s blueprints were both clear and simple.

Just by comparing the arrays he used to the ones described in one of the manuals he pirated from the shop would allow anyone to easily grasp the concept of the entire thing.

Which in this case mainly focused on retaining the mana within, imprinted through the arrangement of all the elements of the whole array. And on each of the looping rings, there were four additional array objects, each containing a separate formula, straight out of the book, of a harvesting array. It was only on the outermost ring that Theo added ’obscure’ objects to not make his experiment as openly visible.

Theo released his disciples from the hold of the obscure, and yet they remained motionless, staring wide-eyed upon the field marked with over eighty deep trenches, each housing a piece of the ashen blessroot. Connecting the whole thing with the slips of paper in a special, geometric form completed the whole array.

A simple work, yet also a beauty of simplicity.

Which directly translated to the effectiveness of the array, traditionally encumbered by the imperfection in the local crafting process.

A technical jump comparable to moving from abacus to quantum computers in the difficulty of the process, and from casting iron into shapes to machining its exact dimensions in a precision-focused workshop.

And now, this powerhouse of simplicity and thus effectiveness in what little this formation did, was all for Theo’s disciples to abuse.

"Teacher..." Lukas gulped, taking great pain just to move a single step forward.

"What is this place?" Taking over the lead, Tesh pushed through her own shock and made a whole three steps before nearly kneeling down under the pressure of the mana in the air.

Now that the formation was all done and ready, it passively gathered the mana from the air at the rate any cultivator would during a chill meditation.

All that those harvesters, part of the formation, yielded, however, would be nigh perfectly retained within the formation, quickly bringing the levels of mana inside to quite the uncommon level.

Obviously, once the surplus would be exhausted, one could only absorb the mana at the same rate as usual, but...

Harvesters were just a bonus, just like the obscuring objects on the outer perimeter of the whole field.

The main function of the formation was to retain energy.

Which gave Theo confidence to smile as he properly stood up and looked at his students with just a slightly weary smile.

"If you do a good job, I might get you as high as one level below your current cultivation stage."