Nanomancer Rising: Divine Alchemist Reborn as Academy's Worst Teacher
Chapter 82: Celeste’s passion

Chapter 82: Celeste’s passion

There was something extremely charming in pure contrast.

A contrast like an extreme sport one would indulge in to get away from the boring mundane of everyday. A contrast like deciding to cheat on one’s diet after months of strictly upholding it.

Or a contrast in the form of the academy’s picture of elegance, Celeste, now squatting down, her elbows pressing from the sides at her knees while her hands continuously massaged her temples.

Heck, even that crazy look she had in her eyes only made her all the more attractive? Interesting? Curious?

’Tsk, I can’t even quite put my finger on what’s making her so damn...’

Theo squinted his eyes, only to then open them wide.

’Addicting?’

He fearfully gulped his saliva down.

’Don’t tell me, I’ve got a dommy-mommy fetish in this life or something?’

With the technology of his old life, Theo explored quite literally every single kink he could imagine or learn about from the network. And thanks to the illusion-born experiences, he also got to live through all of the interesting ones, even if only in the realm of hive’s projection.

Now, however, it was something different.

For one, this weird pull he felt towards this fellow teacher of his was real, not induced by the nanites.

And for the first time in both of his lives, Theo simply couldn’t tear his eyes away from this adorably contrasting sight.

"Ugh!"

Celeste moaned with a healthy dose of mental pain reverberating through her voice as her hands turned from massaging her temples to viciously rubbing into them, to the point they started to leave marks.

"Screw it, put them down, I will just show you!" Finally arriving at a somewhat reasonable conclusion, Celeste jumped up in an energetic, livid manner no one would expect from the picture of the academy’s beauty and elegance. Her long hair waved in the air as she gave Theo a demanding look.

’Yes, mommy...’

Smiling to his own thoughts as he distanced himself from his fetishes, Theo, curious to see what the girl would do, carefully lowered his students down to the ground.

A moment later,

Poof!

Just like when he did it himself before, Tesh and Lukas suddenly started to levitate in the air, as if some strange force coated them in an invisible harness and then tugged them up in the air.

At a first glance, what Celeste did appeared to be exactly the same as what Theo was doing... But as soon as Theo looked closer, he noticed the difference.

Earlier, he carried them up by floating his own spiritual energy in a pattern that created a harness of sorts before looping back on itself and joining back with Theo’s flow.

Celeste’s execution, however, couldn’t be any more different.

First, her levitation spell was a closed-off loop, operating all within its own autonomy and with just a pulsating tendril of mana connecting it to Celeste herself and transferring the necessary mana to keep itself going.

Secondly, rather than merely pushing her mana through a chaotic, random flow, a task made all the harder by conducting the experiment outside the limits of one’s body, she created a much more rigid, limited shackle.

On one end, Celeste’s method lacked the grace, finesse and flexibility of Theo’s solution, turning out to be something much more solid, defined.

But for the task of just carrying Theo’s two disciples up in the air and letting them float along as they moved?

For that very narrow and specific task, Celeste’s spell was leagues ahead of Theo’s solution because at the cost of its grace, finesse and flexibility, it was just that much better at this very precise, niche-even task.

"So, each spell should be tailored to its use-case, is what you are trying to show?" Theo whispered softly a moment later, before he could even put Celeste’s spell to a test by moving a step.

"Isn’t that obvious?" Celeste shrugged her shoulders, still all angry but at least no longer as actively angry as before.

The raging flame of fury from before had somewhat settled into a smoldering ember of it, doused down by Theo’s clear eagerness and initiative to learn.

Sure, his weird lapses in common sense and basic knowledge were still weird, but...

Celeste, ultimately, was a teacher.

Quite the talented and passionate one to boot, a fact proved by her considerable accomplishments and the mere fact of her being a holder of a star-teacher status.

That’s likely why, when she encountered someone actually willing to learn, her instincts simply took over.

At least, for this very moment, rather than a fellow teacher she had a whole lot of suspicions about, Theo has now turned into a troublesome student that finally showed some promise at changing his life around!

"But wouldn’t it be too much of a bother to keep creating spells whenever you need them?" Theo quickly added, eager to abuse this opportunity to get Celeste off his head while also more than happy to actually learn.

There was a limit to how much he could figure out from books alone and not by his own fault. Theo’s hive was a monster when it came to sorting and parsing information, but...

But for all the knowledge Theo gathered from the books, it was on him never to ask more about magic as he focused all of his attention strictly on cultivation.

’That might actually turn into a much bigger issue if I let it sit for any longer, ugh...’

Theo raised his eyes, pretending to put all of his attention on the impromptu lesson Celeste, in her rage, offered.

"It’s not like we can predict with any real accuracy what kind of spells we might find in need of, so that means it shouldn’t be something we need to prepare in advance," Theo continued to speak, thinking out loud in a bid to show his thought process to Celeste while eagerly waiting for her to chip in and correct him on parts he was wrong. "Also, it wouldn’t make sense for you to just have randomly prepared a spell that’s just a perfect fit to carry those two in the air. No, it has to be something else..."

While speaking all of that, Theo’s real focus was already on what he would do as soon as he could get back to the academy.

The limits of his current cultivation technique were the first push that pointed him in the direction of the main library. And now, by forcing him to realize just how little he knew about everything beyond cultivation itself, Celeste just gave him another fat reason to hurry up and get his nose into books!

’Did I make a mistake by getting Tesh to liquidate Julius’s advanced books?’ Theo thought, only to then shake his head a little. ’No, I can’t think like that. If I were to use them, I would only further skew myself against magic, festering in subpar ways rather than seeking the most optimal path.’

"That’s right," Celeste, unaware of the internal debate Theo was having with himself, replied to the last thing he actually said, herself brimming with enthusiasm now that she found someone who not only listened... but also actively did some thinking on his own end. "It’s not like we could prepare a spell for every occasion or, even worse," she shrugged her shoulders, "prepare them in advance. But that’s also what we would need to do to use those spells, right?"

By now, there was no sign left of Celeste’s recent fury, with the teaching enthusiasm now fully replacing it.

She raised her hand before pointing her finger at Theo’s chest, only to then lean a bit forward and poke said finger right into Theo’s solar plexus in a playful tug.

"That’s why we all cheat the system a tiny little bit."