MTL NOVEL Chapter 4: A student's challenge
"Just sit in the corner, read your book or whatever, and just as we agreed — don't you dare bother me!"
With those words said while nearly shoving her pointed finger in Theo's face, Celeste moved away from the corner where she had seated him and over to her slightly elevated podium, where she started to sort out her notes.
'Finally, some time to get my thoughts in order,' Theo thought, sitting back in the chair at the very corner of the room while outright devouring Celeste's sandwich.
That alone earned him a few curious and then weirded-out looks that ultimately evolved into ones of legitimate concern, but before Celeste could bring the topic up, the first students started to arrive in her class.
'Finally…' Theo thought as the sense of satiation filled his body, even with all the nutrients that his nanite-producing organ whisked away for the purpose of maintaining the integrity of the hive.
With the disaster abated, Theo finally opened up his book, pretending to immerse himself in the lecture while he silently observed the students coming into the class.
Contrary to his initial expectations born when he recalled Celeste was one of the academy's best cultivation teachers, the students were nothing like the characters from all the wuxia, xianxia, or other types of cultivation novels Theo read in his past.
Rather than fluttering robes with colors describing their level, they all wore relatively simple clothes consisting of plain pants and simple white shirts.
'Oh right, that's apparently one of the academy's policies,' Theo recalled from his memories, only to then smirk a little. 'To make them understand what it feels like to be stripped out of the status they were born in, huh?'
As much as he wanted to, Theo held himself back from shaking his head over the naivety behind this reasoning.
Even as an absolute outsider, someone who saw the people in this class for the very first time in his life, he could easily notice several cliques centered around figures that, even in their perfectly plain clothes, remained prominent.
They just had this… aura, the sense of authority rising around them that made it clear who was the leader of each clique and who was the follower.
'Heck, they are even glaring at each other,' Theo took note, pretending to keep reading as he ignored the several curious and then some disgusted looks some of the students threw his way.
"Okay, everyone, get to your seats. The lesson's about to start!" Clapping her hands, Celeste called the class to order.
And even though she looked like the biggest pushover of a teacher with her cute face and relatively petite build… there was something in her voice that made all the students follow her order and turn silent at their seats.
"I know you are all sick and tired of this, but let's start with the usual," Celeste suggested as she walked to the front of the lectern before resting her back against it. "What is cultivation?"
"Cultivation is an art of using established techniques to harness and manifest energy within one's body!" the class replied in one voice, reciting the answer just like a group of soldiers would reply "Sir, yes sir" to any order given by their drill instructor.
"What do we use techniques for?" Celeste continued.
"To make the process systematic and organized!"
"What's the cultivator's biggest fear?"
"To lose control over their energy and go berserk!"
"Good." Celeste smiled as this simple brainwashing exercise was completed before stepping away from the front of her lectern and then moving back to her rightful spot behind it. "Today, we are going to learn more about the nature of energy…"
At this point, Theo merely rolled his eyes and turned his attention back to the book he found in the teacher's supply room attached to the class.
It wasn't that he had no interest in the content of Celeste's lesson. He opted out of listening because every topic she would bring up would result in a cascade of memories reigniting and re-registering within his mind — memories containing the lessons from the time when his father, the duke, had yet to give up on Theo's education.
And with all the respect for Celeste, one of the star teachers of the academy, a group lesson could never compare to the level of personal tutoring from a teacher that actually graduated as one of the three best educators of the academy!
'To think that a world would exist where cultivation exists alongside magic, spiritualism, and even technology,' Theo thought, baffled by this memory-based discovery as his thoughts drifted too far away for him to focus on the book.
In short, cultivation, while an extremely advanced, complex, and huge field all in its own right… was but just one way for one to use the energy that Celeste talked about. And the only difference between cultivation and other fields of energy usage lay in the medium used for it.
Cultivators would infuse said energy into their own bodies, creating circuits and structures within their own flesh for it to flow through and bear effect or, as the locals would call it, manifest.
Mages, on the other hand, would use various tools to channel their energy — or mana, as they preferred to call it — manifesting it in the form of all sorts of magic spells. The spiritualists would channel energy through something called 'consciousness projection,' which was nothing more than a cryptic name for spirits they adopted to make their field appear less mystical and more scientific in nature.
There were quite a lot of different fields of energy usage, and Theo's alchemy… was just one of them.
Still, just like in the real world where some fields of science harnessed much more attention than others, not all mana-related fields were considered to be equal. And given how the recent advancements in the understanding of energy challenged the entire legacy of alchemy, it had turned into a field hardly anyone pursued anymore.
After all, what was the point of spending days, if not weeks or even months, gathering precious herbs and all sorts of various materials, before wasting even more time turning them all into a precious potion… only to have it produce but a slightly better effect than the energy-rich pills sold off the counter in any of the specialized shops at the academy?
Thinking about all of this, Theo had no other choice but to, once again, resist his desire to shake his head.
'To a degree, I can't help but agree with this sentiment,' he thought. 'The same thing happened to pretty much all the fields of craftsmanship when humanity went all in on industrialization and factories back on Earth. It wouldn't be until much later when people started to value hand-crafted stuff simply because of how rare and thus expensive they could get, turning them from an actual product into but items of vanity.'
This situation… wasn't good for Theo.
Or so he would think if he actually had any designs on greatness.
'Now that I think about it, is there any reason why I should even bother staying in this academy?' Theo leaned back in his chair and looked up, completely detached from the reality around him as he considered his options.
A this point, Celeste's lecture, the students questions, the scraping of the chairs, the noise made when Celeste scrapped her chalk against the blackboard… All of it turned into the perfect background song for Theo's internal debacle.
'Maybe I should just leave and have some fun adventuring around? As long as I have some food, my nanites should allow me to survive through even the weirdest or most dangerous encounters, so why stay shackled to this place and the bad rep I have here?'
Even though Theo's rebirth threw him into the shoes of… well, local Theo, he had no divine obligation or any sort to follow that poor kid's path. No system appeared to give him a task with the penalty of death for ignoring it, no princess came to beg him to defeat the evil lord.
And since the world itself didn't bother to restrain his freedom of choice, for what reason would Theo do it to himself?
'Well, I don't think it would be all that easy to get back to an academy like this once I leave it, so I might as well just get the most out of my remaining time here before leaving to do whatever.'
In the end, just like there was nothing forcing Theo to stay, there was nothing forcing him to leave… at this very moment, at the very least. And since there was already a huge scheme going on to have him fired, was there really any incentive or benefit to going out of his way to foil everyone's plans when he could simply go along with it?
'This way, I could avoid others trying to mess with me later,' Theo thought, blinking his eyes a few times as he pulled his attention back to reality, satisfied with this skeleton of a plan for the nearest future he came up with for himself.
"Theo? Any idea?"
"Hmm?"
Addressed directly, Theo had no other choice but to bring his eyes down and his attention back to Celeste at the forefront of the class.
And judging from how everyone in the class was now staring at him — some with smirks of amusement, others with greed in their eyes, while some with helpless boredom — it appeared that Celeste herself was the one to break their pact of non-interference.
"Sorry, could you repeat the question?" Raising one of his eyebrows, Theo asked.
He couldn't care less about the smirks of the students. Not when the situation was so obvious, the biggest challenge for Theo was not to openly cringe.
'Trying to build up your authority by calling me out and then humiliating my ineptitude out in the public, aren't you?' he thought, easily discerning the most intense of the student's stares, likely coming from the guy that somehow pushed Celeste to break the non-interference deal.
"Not paying any attention, are you?" Celeste shook her head, her eyes slightly distraught. "But fine, let me repeat. What is energy at its very core?"
"It's a potential," Theo replied without even a second of hesitation.
Just like yeast had the potential to dissolve the sugars and turn them into alcohol, just like a pen sitting on a table had the potential to fall down if pushed off it, just like a piece of dry wood had the potential to release heat energy when burned…
"That's…" Celeste's face froze in surprise for a moment, her eyes slightly widening as if to showcase how Theo managed to catch her off-guard. "That's an interesting thought. Could you elaborate?"
'Oh, shit,' Theo finally snapped to proper attention, realizing the mistake he just made. 'Even if that's the correct answer, who is there to say it's still correct in this world? And even if it is, why would I assume they are on the level where they can understand the complexity hidden behind this simple answer?!'
Squinting his eyes to hide the momentary panic, Theo scoured his memories…
Only to realize that there simply was no definition of energy kept in his mind. And that… that could only mean one thing.
"At its very core, energy is a fundamental concept, a paradigm that we establish the rest of our theories upon, making it something that, by definition…" Theo spread his arms open and shook them, "something that doesn't have a proper definition by its own, just the assumed one."
The stares in the classroom changed. From ones of pity, amusement, and outright annoyance, Theo's words managed to shift them a bit towards surprise and… curiosity?
"Bollocks!" The very same kid that Theo noticed before, one that carried as much authority in the air around him as he did arrogance on his face, shouted. "Energy is everything!"
The corner of Theo's mouth rose up a bit. Yet, before his desire to be petty and humiliate the kid right then and there could take over, he recalled his agreement with Celeste.
'She doesn't look like someone who would do it for no reason, so its safe to assume it's that kid that forced her to do so,' Theo reasoned, only to ultimately roll his eyes.
"If the young master says so, then that most certainly is the truth, right?" he asked, before turning his eyes away and focusing them back on the surprisingly interesting content of the book in his hand.
'You are the student here, so you obviously know better than a teacher and a reincarnator with a full library on advanced physics and biology installed in his brain, don't you?' he thought in the privacy of his own mind as a small smirk flowered on his lips.