Nanomancer Rising: Divine Alchemist Reborn as Academy's Worst Teacher
Chapter 88: Waking up (1/2)

Chapter 88: Waking up (1/2)

"Mh-hmm..."

With a lazy moan escaping from her mouth, Tesh finally pried open her tired eyes, only to be met with an unfamiliar ceiling.

At first, she just stared at it, dumbfounded, her mind too groggy to make even the slightest sense of what she could see.

Then, it hit her.

’What the hell?’ She asked herself, shaking her head before pushing with her hands to the back as she moved her upper body up and took a look around.

To the left, all she could see was a rather narrow dimension of the building—or rather, a shed—she woke up in. To the front, the only difference was the presence of the simple door. But to the right?

"WHAT THE HELL..."

Tesh screamed out before she could even try to make any sense of what she saw.

Because to her right, Lukas was soundly asleep with a content smirk plastered all over his face. So soundly, in fact, not even Tesh’s shout managed to get him to wake up!

In the panic of the first, still drowsy moment, Tesh turned over to her stomach and then crawled away, finding no other way to deal with the issue than to escape, caring not for shape or form of her means to do it. Yet, with the panic now settling in, it also chased away the remainder of Tesh’s sleepiness, allowing her to see the world around her more clearly.

’Wait, aren’t we both dressed?’

This notion denied what Tesh feared the most—an accidental adventure that would leave a stinking mark down in her history, deprive her of her chastity and all the benefits she could exchange it for, and finally bind her down in a relationship she never had any say in from the very moment of its conception.

By all means, even if doing the deed was a pleasurable act, it wasn’t something she was willing to just willy-nilly cast aside like that!

Thankfully, now that her sleepiness no longer impaired her thoughts, she could confirm that no permanent damage was done. Not with both hers and Lukas’ clothes still on and lacking the distinct marks of intense workout that set one in a headspace of disregarding the state of one’s clothes to begin with.

Sure, Tesh could feel the stink of her old sweat still sticking to her skin. Lukas’ messed-up hair also revealed the situation wasn’t all that simple. Yet pretty much as soon as Tesh gave it a thought, she felt like slapping herself in the face when the realization struck.

’Shit! Right! It’s a given we would both look like that after spending an entire day cultivating so damn hard!’

With a wave of intense relief flooding her body, Tesh rolled again before dropping down on her ass, her breathing finally stabilizing and slowing down to its usual pace.

Yet, as soon as the sound of her breathing started to slow down, she felt another peculiarity.

The mana in the air... Heck, even the mana in her very flesh... They behaved in a different way than what she would expect.

The mana in the air was way too much concentrated to be natural, as if she never left the formation teacher Theo...

’No, that’s not right. It’s the same effect, but only a fraction of its effectiveness,’ she thought after taking another, closer look at the situation.

Strangely enough, the same couldn’t be said about Tesh’s internal state of affairs.

Just like with the behavior of mana in the air before, she didn’t really have all that much to compare her current power with... save for how strong she was back before meeting Theo. And while her cultivation should be around the same stage as it was before that weird, unorthodox man first appeared before her eyes only to become a presence in her life she could no longer ignore...

Just like with the formation before, her current self, despite staying within the same realm that she was before, was in a whole different league when it came to strength... Or her ability to handle mana, the amount of mana she could drive through her cultivation, the ease with which she could cultivate, the rate at which she could absorb mana, the precision with which...

’Heck, at this rate, it might be easier to point out all the things that are the same instead,’ Tesh thought, her jaw instinctively clenching as the full scope of her new reality started to dawn on her.

On one hand, her cultivation was a blessing, for it was the hint that finally allowed her to realize just how she ended up here in her current state and with Lukas sleeping soundly as he did for only divine knows how long. On the other hand, though...

"Just where is this strength coming from?"

As a cultivator of many years, Tesh didn’t even need to test it out. Just by observing the way in which mana behaved within her system, the ease with which she could control it, or even the rate at which she absorbed more and more mana from the air, just with those three she could establish an extremely important fact.

’Isn’t that a level of strength rivaling those of sixth... no, seventh stage?’

Tesh could only gulp her saliva as she stared blankly out into the space, her mind too shocked to remain confined within the four walls of this rundown shed she was in.

At the same time, her earlier statement somehow managed to wake Lukas up where an outright shout failed to do so.

Or maybe there was another condition her fellow disciple had to fulfill to gain the privilege of lucidity?

Regardless, Lukas slowly came to be, rising up from where he laid down only to use his fists to wipe out the grime from his ears before freezing still and just staring blankly at the shed’s doors.

Curious about his reaction, Tesh playfully decided to just stay silent, watching with silent amusement as Lukas’ face went through a series of changes, from confusion through a sudden spike of fear bordering on terror, all the way to sudden calm and understanding... An inner peace that shattered as he looked to the side and saw Tesh.

And then, as if to mirror her earlier reaction that he slept through,

"What the hell?!"