Nanomancer Rising: Divine Alchemist Reborn as Academy's Worst Teacher
Chapter 96: A gamblers’ nest, that’s what action houses really are!

Chapter 96: A gamblers’ nest, that’s what action houses really are!

<Would you like to have all runes engraved upon the object listed out?>

Theo staggered his step, slightly taken aback by the sudden prompt.

It wasn’t that he didn’t expect the hive to scan the runes off the egg, but to have it do it so readily?

’Yeah, do you even need to ask?’ Theo asked in his thoughts, holding himself back from rolling his eyes as he reaffirmed his step and continued to walk ahead as if nothing ever happened. ’And, as usual, get it all sorted before displaying.’

For a moment, the mana within Theo’s body stirred, the hive slowly adapting to the presence of this convenient energy. Next, for but a single moment, all the mana within his cultivation came to a complete stop...

Only to then start flowing through the structure again, as if nothing ever happened to it at all.

The change, however, was all there for Theo to see in its full glory of an extremely long list displayed right on top of his vision. A list that was split into a total of five segments, for some reason – starting with the least useful one.

<Invalid Partial Runes: Runes that were judged to be decisively incomplete and that couldn’t be restored through the predictive generation> said the header of the list, followed by a long, perfectly well-organized list of... some random scribbles.

Each of those pictures a mix of a kid’s scribble and some random shape created by the most random of circumstances. And for every single field containing a picture, there were three more fields of likely nature of the scribble, its most probable use and then several pictures depicting possible ways of restoring it, each as likely to be on point as it was likely to have absolutely no meaning or purpose whatsoever.

All in all, save for learning to notice the characteristics of the runic writing, this whole category could be largely dismissed, left for when Theo gained a better understanding of the runic writing as a whole, giving him a better shot at properly restoring those missing runes.

’Now I get why there’s apparently an entire study and then several different businesses accompanying those eggs,’ he thought as his eyes moved over to the next category of the hive-provided list, ’without a hive, they would all be bound to classifying each of those runes by hand. And by no means would they ever be able to study it at such depth as the hive did.’

Heaving a mental sigh, Theo closed his eyes and slightly nodded his head, a silent bow of appreciation to just how much of a help his hive was.

Sure, Theo pursued the goal of not relying on the hive as much as he could, hoping not to let his own creativity and intellect rot away in neglect. But when it came to processing data at inhuman speeds and with inhuman precision, nothing could beat the mathematical intelligence of the nanite swarm!

A notion only further proved by the header of the second part of the list.

<Valid Partial Runes: Incomplete runes with enough substance to them for the generative reconstruction to have high likeliness of accuracy>

The second part of the list was visibly shorter, merely a fraction of the part that came before it.

Sorted in the exact same way as the rest of the list, each line contained the picture of the rune, its assumed nature, purpose and then, quite like in the part above, several pictures of the possible alterations to the shape with changes limited to just the reconstructed parts.

’Now we are getting somewhere,’ Theo thought, smiling to himself as he quickly looked through all the runes in the second part of the list, making a mental note of a total of three runes that he could find an immediate use for.

’Chances are, I simply lack the proper context to see the value of the rest of them,’ his eyes moved to the runes he largely ignored, like the one the hive described as the "sub-structural converter" of the technical nature or the scary-sounding "fission augmenter" of the reactive nature.

’As for those natures...’ Theo looked at the specific column shared by all the parts of the list, ’while I can guess their meanings from their given names...’

He breathed out a long sigh.

’I will have to ask the hive about their exact meaning later, won’t I?’

As easy as it would be for Theo to just do it right away, just reading through the list got him distracted enough. And right now, he was more interested in just getting a full look through the list than studying it in detail.

"Master!" Tesh suddenly called out, forcing Theo to switch his focus from the runes to the reality at hand. "It’s the alchemy auction house!" she happily reported, her eyes shining with excitement while her entire body screamed about her desire to be useful and, through her usefulness, earn her right to a praise.

’Just another bid to get ahead of Lukas in that competition of theirs?’ Theo shook his head, half-amused and half-tired by this weird race between the two. ’I wonder, if there’s any real reason behind it, or do they just do it for the sake of it?’

Theo shook his head before turning his eyes in the direction the girl was pointing at.

The building itself was truly magnificent, a piece of an art more than a structure designed for a practical use.

It consisted of the perfect cube of a main hall, fully constructed out of some kind of fancy stone Theo couldn’t even find the name for. Then, from each of the cube’s corners, rose a tall yet extremely narrow tower, rising quite a bit above the dome sitting atop the cube.

"It looks more like some kind of a temple than a trading house," Theo muttered as he instinctively turned towards the building, the word "alchemy" in what Tesh reported enough to pique his interest.

"A temple to greed, you mean," Celeste commented, her face souring as soon as the group changed the direction.

"What, you have something against the trading houses?" Theo asked, genuinely curious about the reason she could have for such a strong, averse reaction to a place that was pretty much a staple in every cultivation or adventuring story Theo read back in his old life.

"Do you really need to ask?" Celeste rolled her eyes. "This entire thing is a gamblers’ den, not a trading house!" she exclaimed loud enough to draw the eyes of several people nearby. "While the actual trades are closed in the VIP rooms of the place, the simple folk get cheated out of their hard-earned money by having stuff marginally better than staples presented with a decorum fitting for the most precious of items!"

Celeste’s anger only grew as she continued her rant about the auction house, easily crossing the level of agitation Theo ever saw her at, the trial at the tribunes’ tower included.

Then, the realization struck him, right at the same time as the instinctive drive to keep his tongue locked firmly behind his teeth.

’Did she lose a fortune in a place like this or something?’ he thought while thanking his instincts, hive, fate or whatever it was that made him keep this thought to himself. Judging by the fury in the woman’s eyes, rubbing salt into her guessed wound wouldn’t exactly be the smartest idea.

"Teacher Celeste, with all due respect, Teacher Theo dabbles in alchemy himself," having none of the instincts that made Theo swallow his words, Tesh spoke out. "He doesn’t need to buy anything there. Just the sight of the auctioned items should be enough to serve for an inspiration!"

"That’s..."

Contrary to Theo’s expectations, Celeste didn’t explode. Instead, she appeared to have reached the level of anger at which her body put a stop to her obsession, forcing her to calm down.

"Well, that does seem like a sound idea," she begrudgingly admitted, as if ever stepping foot in the auction house was akin to having her entire bloodline cursed with bad luck. "But still..."

Theo took a deep breath, his brain itching to go study the list of the runes some more, even more than he was interested in whatever wonder of alchemy the locals could produce.

Maybe it was his arrogant part thinking, but after turning used tires into high-quality whiskey, Theo no longer considered alchemy an art but merely a tool.

Still, even if only a tool, alchemy often did require some kind of an inspiration. And seeking inspiration was the very goal of this trip to begin with, wasn’t it?

"Well, you said it yourself, Celeste," Theo looked over his shoulder and into the woman’s face, "they do put up quite the decorum for even the most ordinary items, don’t they?" he mentioned with a small smile before turning his head back and then hurrying his step a bit, more to pass on the message than to hasten their arrival, "and it just so happens I’m in the mood for a good show!"