Nanomancer Rising: Divine Alchemist Reborn as Academy's Worst Teacher
Chapter 78: Second stage already?!

Chapter 78: Second stage already?!

"Ah!"

A long, melodic moan escaped from Tesh’s lips as she suddenly felt a presence enter her.

It wasn’t anything like before or anything she’d felt before.

Not like when she accidentally swallowed a fly, not when she was forced to drink a beer she hated the taste of, not even when Theo fed her what she thought to be that hateful drug or just recently, back when her master gradually dismantled the whole of her cultivation.

This time was simply different, more... profound?

Feeling this foreign energy was now all the more easier, with no energy Tesh could call her own to obscure her sense of it.

The feeling of weirdness lasted only for the short moment it took Theo to alter the formation, inducing a powerful current of mana to start feeding into the void. And just like a raging current clashing into the piston of a water engine, the mana from the formation started to accelerate the foreign mana from before.

In the end, however, the formation’s mana was but a driving force while it was the sliver of her master’s energy that kept the reins of the process, using the newfound fuel to burrow in an extremely specific, complex way through her insides.

’Why does it feel so... different?’

Tesh gritted her teeth, refusing to allow even the slightest hint of hesitation to take root in her head.

Now that she gave up on years’ worth of hard work, all she could do was hope she made the right call. Hesitating?

What was there to hesitate about? She’d already lost all there was to lose, meaning, she could only keep gaining from now on. But for that end, she had to remain relaxed, allowing those energies to course through her flesh regardless of how unexpected of a feeling it may induce.

That is, unless she wanted to give her master a hard time and thus limit how far he could take her on this road.

And so, against her best instincts, Tesh relaxed, allowing the slight heat radiating from Theo’s hand to spread throughout her body while his energy continued to press ahead all over her insides.

At some point, Tesh started to lose her sense of the passing time, too immersed in the feeling of her insides getting re-arranged by her master’s mystical touch. And before the process could even reach halfway point, Tesh finally found something to use as a foothold of her confidence in her master’s methods.

Even with more than half of the process still to be completed, Tesh could already feel the difference between her old cultivation and whatever technique it was that she was unknowingly training right now.

Before, cultivation felt like an annoying duty, an arduous process that she had to really focus on to keep it going. In other words, unless she was willing to spend entire days on cultivation, a small fortune on the cultivation materials and then another small fortune on all sorts of pills and special techniques to make the transformation of her body into one of a higher grade even a bit easier.

Right now, though?

Even though only a small part of her body was now fully wrapped in the remnants of mana left behind by the surge that continued to carve itself through her flesh, Tesh could feel just how smoothly mana was already flowing through it.

What she had to focus and meditate for before, now was happening even outside of her control, as if her cultivation turned from a pond upon which she had to slowly pour bucket after bucket of mana into some kind of a pump that actively sucked the mana out from its surroundings to fill the much bigger pond much faster than Tesh could otherwise do!

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’How is it so much easier?’

This was the one question that plagued Theo’s mind, even though he had a theoretically correct answer to it.

When establishing the cultivation structure for his two disciples, he decided to go with a slightly simplified design based on his own structure and just brought down a notch.

It wasn’t his intention to keep his disciples forever weaker than him, not at all. In fact, with this slightly simplified version of the cultivation structure, they were already well on their way to surpass him in the near future!

In the end, it was all about the cost and the pay-off. In Theo’s case, his higher degree of detail and perfection meant that he could grow stronger than either of his students while still within the same realm of power... But he would have a much, MUCH harder time advancing beyond each stage.

Lukas and Tesh, on the other hand, could advance much more smoothly, with their simplified cultivation requiring a lot less commitment to advance and develop while offering mildly smaller returns.

In a way, rather than a nerfed-down version of his own cultivation, what Theo imparted into his students was a more optimal and efficient version of it!

As for why it was so much easier to induce cultivation into his disciples than it was even to do it for himself, the answer couldn’t be any easier — even with all of their cultivation now gone, their flesh was still quite used to handling considerable amounts of mana. That’s why, contrary to how Theo had to slowly get his body accustomed to the presence of this new power, pretty much tearing his body open before allowing it to heal into a slightly different form, those two...

All they had to do was to absorb the mana the formation spat into its former void, filling their surroundings with more energy than any of them or all three of them combined could hope to consume.

But it was all exactly as planned.

After all, Theo’s disciples were still only trying to establish their new foundations. It was only natural for the cultivation of such a low rank to take but a fraction of the energy from the dissolved higher ranks of their former cultivation!

’Still, the loops should be completed around...’ Theo held his breath for a little as he dragged the sliver of his own nanite-infused mana through his disciples’ bodies, "now!"

Not even realizing he uttered the word out loud, Theo nearly had to back up when the mana within the void suddenly rushed towards his two students, sucked in by their mana-starved cultivation structure.

Now that the frame for their cultivation was properly established and with the sliver of Theo’s energy serving as a starter to it, the two of them near instantly fell into a state of deep meditation, focusing on nothing but gradually absorbing the powerful currents into the flow of mana within their own cultivation.

In fact, the two of them reached such a level of focus, their bodies started to shine with a weird aura, nearly throwing Theo into a spiral of panic as something unexpected appeared within his otherwise perfect plan.

While the shine of their bodies was something Theo didn’t expect to happen... Heck, while this kind of a shine was something Theo didn’t even recognize in the first place, upon a quick look at their inner states, he could quickly tell it wasn’t anything to worry about.

Sure, his students were shining now. But as he looked closer, it appeared as if this shine was merely a side-effect of something else, something that just felt right yet eluded Theo’s attention no matter how hard he tried to put his finger on it.

And as if to reward everyone for their hard work, the other side-effect of what Theo couldn’t really figure out... was just how easy it became for Lukas and Tesh to circulate their newly obtained energy through their structures, quickly reinforcing and then filling it up to the level that allowed Theo to move over to the next stage of the plan; next stage of their cultivation.

’I suggested they could reach as high as a stage below what they used to be at,’ he thought, taking a quick moment to glance back at the formation, measuring the amount of energy still left in it before turning his attention back to the students in front of him. ’And while I’m starting to have my doubts whether that’s possible or not... It won’t hurt to try it, would it?’

A small grin appeared on Theo’s lips as the bodies of his disciples started to naturally tense up, not as a result of them losing the control or the will to follow his request to stay relaxed... but simply because of just how much of an effect growing to the first stage of cultivation had on their flesh.

In this way, it was wrong to say they tensed up.

Instead, their bodies merely toughened up to the level that made it seem as if they grew tense!

An effect that only caused Theo’s grin to widen as he took in a deep breath and prepared for the official start of the second stage of cultivation, the level he could still remember engaging in himself...

And the stage that, in a way, his students began all on their own already!