Nanomancer Rising: Divine Alchemist Reborn as Academy's Worst Teacher
Chapter 75: Now, strip!

Chapter 75: Now, strip!

’This is insane...’

Lukas gulped down his spit as he stared into the field while struggling to keep himself focused when pressed by the mana in the air.

Somehow, his new teacher managed to create a spiritual spring right in the academy’s outlands—a part of its massive compound that no one ever got to developing before.

This place used to be as desolate as its name suggested, with nothing but overgrown ruins of the once ambitious projects from all the way back before the headmaster cut on the frivolous spending, saving the academy from financial ruin.

Now, though?

With just some small trenches and a handful of ashen blessroot pieces scattered through them and then connected with pieces of paper nailed to the ground with nothing more than pebbles, Theo somehow managed to transform an uninteresting field...

Into something Lukas, quite literally, had no words to properly describe.

’Just what is the cost of running such a potent formation, I wonder,’ he thought, rolling back to what little he managed to learn about the topic in the few lessons he participated in before deciding this wasn’t the field for him.

To his side, however, Tesh appeared to be even more shocked... no, horrified?

"Just how..."

Her eyes open as wide as was her mouth, her pupils racing from one point of the formation to another, her shoulders already shaking from the constantly growing pressure of the mana inside of it.

And then, their dear fucking teacher decided to make things even harder to believe.

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

Lukas gulped his saliva down.

There was no way he could believe those words. It was simply too impossible to happen.

He’d reached the fourth stage of cultivation after years upon years of pain and effort.

Stuck in the limbo of having no resources to cultivate and thus no way to gain abilities necessary to obtain those resources, he was stuck cultivating with just what little mana he could gather from the air. It wouldn’t be until teacher Julius accepted him as a disciple that Lukas’ worries came to an end, allowing him to jump from the second rank to his current fourth one in just a year.

But this place, this formation?

The mana in the air was already as dense as what he remembered feeling back when he went through one spiritual stone after the other, eagerly accepting Julius’ wish to ’invest’ in him or, as he came to understand the whole deal, to have him catch up with his peers so that he could be of actual use to his teacher.

Then, once again, while shocked beyond belief, Lukas still managed to somehow hold on.

Tesh, on the other hand, did not.

//\\ //\\ //\\ //\\ //\\

’...’

Tesh stared wide-eyed at the marks of the formation.

’So... beautiful...’

She couldn’t form even a single, simplistic thought beyond the one she just did.

While not a formation master, she did happen to like the field enough to actually implement some of its tricks back during her dark era of acting as the phantom thief of the academy.

Heck, even her phantom crown was, in part, a mobile formation!

But now?

Right now, the phantom crown, a gift given directly by the academy headmaster and, if she were to believe the man’s words, a gift he crafted with his own hands...

Right now, it appeared as child’s play, a mere scribble of a child that only now picked a painting brush for the very first time in their life. A picture that only a loving mother could appreciate, as opposed to the definition of beauty laid out right before Tesh’s eyes.

’I still remember the pains I went through to map out the formations of that crown,’ she thought, gulping her saliva down as her shock grew so immensely massive, it became somewhat... ineffective?

There was a limit to just how much shocked one could get. Beyond that limit, however, they would simply grow numb to any new shocking events, too far gone already to react any further.

And upon reaching this state of mind, Tesh was finally able to start thinking.

’Back then, it was one hell of a mess. But this?’

The clear lines connecting the nodes. The hierarchical arrangement of the main circles and the simple way in which they all connected with each other.

Even the formation’s nexus, which was the center of its magical weight, was a whole work of art all in its own right. On one hand, it was where all the mana of the formation would gather, but on the other hand... it was a total and perfect void, deprived of any form of interference from the formation nodes or lines themselves, creating a small area where one could enjoy the benefits of the formation without worrying about affecting the way it worked, regardless of what they did within that very nexus!

And as if that wasn’t enough, Theo decided to just go and prove that even after growing numb to shocks, even upon reaching the realm where nothing could shock Tesh any further... It was a belief that only a frog in the well could have, truly unaware of just how far detached his way of thinking was from what Tesh would consider a common sense.

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

//\\ //\\ //\\ //\\ //\\

"What are you standing still for, guys?" Theo, after waiting a considerable while for his disciples to move, finally came out and scolded them out loud, effectively breaking their daze and forcing their minds to resurface back in reality.

Yet, the very moment the two of them looked towards him with unfathomable levels of shock written on their faces, they both suddenly fell down to their knees, their breathing growing haggard as they struggled to deal with the mana in the air.

For as long as they ignored its presence, they could just live with it by way of habitual cultivation. The moment they noticed it, though, even the slightest lapse of concentration, even the faintest of doubts were enough to throw them in for a loop, effectively forcing the two of them to put all their attention to retaking control over their own inner strength.

Even if they were going to let go of it in just a few moments, it would be all for naught if their cultivation went berserk right now!

"Teacher...!" Once again, Lukas was the first to speak. "If this is the punishment you designed for being late..." he gritted his teeth and paused for a second he needed to reaffirm his grip over his own cultivation now that it was constantly battered by the powerful currents of mana forming within the cultivation. "We apologize, but we were stopped by teacher Celeste, so we couldn’t get here any..."

Once again, Lukas gritted his teeth and lowered his head, this time taking a considerably longer while to regain his mental footing.

This, however, was just the right chance Tesh was waiting for, anxious from the moment she brought in less money than her fellow disciple yesterday, through the two times he spoke in first today and all the way to the current moment, when she finally got her chance to mark her presence as Theo’s disciple...

As someone who was the first to discover this madman’s potential.

"We’ve tried our best to cut her questions to the minimum, escaping as soon as we’ve got the chance to do so," Tesh explained the event of the recent past Theo wasn’t aware of, making use of the time she took to speak up to actually speak for a bit longer than Lukas did before. And then, even as she took a pause... she managed to recover and speak again before Lukas could regain control over his own cultivation.

"Still, for being late, we apologize and beg your forgiveness!"

Gritting her teeth, Tesh dropped her head down hard, slamming her forehead against the ground in a desperate bid to have their teacher show some mercy.

Theo, however, only stared at them with a bewildered look.

"What punishment are you guys even talking about? I know I told you to find me in the morning, but in my book, you two were quite early," he stated with a shrug of his shoulders, seeing the struggle of his disciples yet struggling himself to figure out just what it was that those two struggled against. "Well, either way, the sooner we start, the sooner we will be able to end," he then stated...

Only to casually waltz right into the formation, reach his disciples and grab the two of them by their collars, only to then drag them towards the very center of the formation—its nexus.

The moment Tesh and Lukas reached the void, their entire bodies suddenly went limp, reaching some weird levels of relaxation the very second the pressure from the mana vanished.

The mana was still there.

Heck, it was even more potent in the formation’s void than it was within its active regions! And yet, maybe because it was merely seeping into the void rather than flowing in rapid currents as it did outside of the void, it exerted almost no pressure on the two of them at all.

"Are you guys okay now?" Theo asked, still weirded out by their struggle but happy to see it was apparently over. Yet, pretty much as soon as his two disciples got their bearings and moved to nod their heads...

"Good," Theo stated, cutting their response short before they could even attempt it. "Now, strip."