"This makes no sense…"
Tesh bit down on the side of her curled forefinger, her elbows resting on the dining table of the academy's cafeteria.
"I'm telling you, just forget about it."
Nate, her two-year-younger cousin, shrugged his shoulders.
"Nothing good will come from concerning yourself with this man."
As one of Tesh's proxy guards within the academy, he obviously took a more conservative stance.
"You say that, but…"
Tesh pressed her lips together.
"Something just doesn't stick."
Reaching out, Tesh grabbed her cup of diluted wine, only to put on a little grimace as the sour taste filled her throat.
Still, this little bit of numbing agent was much better than its raw, likely toxic alternative. Ever since the faction fight devastated the academy's water plant, drinking thin alcohols became a necessary precaution against drinking the polluted river-borne water.
"Haah…" Nate sighed before picking a piece of boiled chicken off his plate. "Well, I'm not saying there's nothing going on. He's an edge case, so there's bound to be some drama about him."
The young, fifteen-year-old man leaned back in his chair as he threw the chicken in his mouth.
"But is it really something worth your time?" he asked as he then chewed his bite.
Nate stayed silent in response, staring down at the faintly red surface of her drink.
"I wasn't always where I am now, Nate," Tesh muttered before also leaning away on her chair. Contrary to her younger cousin, however, she used the momentum to stand up. "And his face, his casual confidence…" she shook her head.
For but a moment, Tesh closed her eyes, summoning her slightly uncanny memory of her encounter with the infamous teacher.
"What he did…" She shook her head again while opening her eyes. "It was a perfect move to dissolve the whole situation and continue along."
Tesh turned her eyes over to her cousin.
"It's not what someone of his reputation would normally be able to do."
The look on Tesh's face clarified a bit.
"And that only makes me wonder, if he's not as useless as everyone paints him, just what was this answer of his?"
//\//\//\//\//\
"So that's my room," Theo muttered now that he finally had some time to actually take a proper look at it.
With two hours left before his next assignment, he was free to do whatever he wanted.
So, obviously, rather than strolling through the academy in hopes of chancing upon another potentially unpleasant and troublesome encounter, Theo retreated back to his room.
It was a relatively comfortable place, with a high-quality bed, a sizeable drawing table for him to study at, along with a considerable alchemy stand occupying nearly half of the whole room.
'A bedroom and a workplace at the same time,' Theo thought, grinning to himself a bit. 'They really are trying to be efficient here, aren't they?'
Even now, after taking his time to absorb as much of the knowledge from his memories as he could, Theo still could only recall fragments of his past.
He could remember some memories from back when he lived at the ducal estate, enjoying his life of privilege as one of the duke's heirs.
He could remember anything he wished to remember, but those memories remained as something he could watch but not feel in his heart.
And while it only made accessing them a bit more tedious, it meant Theo would remain unaware of the local common sense that would normally be derived from the sum total of one's experiences since childhood.
"That could be problematic at times. But for now…" Theo threw a glance across his room, locating a small library shelf filled halfway through with handwritten books, journals, and scrolls.
"For now, let's make the most out of the time that I have!"
Eagerly rushing towards the bookshelf, Theo grabbed the first piece he could get his hands on before freezing on the spot and closing his eyes.
'Come on, buddy, it's time to wake up.'
After the hearty meal of the extorted sandwich, Theo could feel his sense of self returning to the relatively usual state.
And while it was pretty clear the potential of his hive was but a fraction of the original… For what he wanted to achieve, its current size should suffice.
'Scan and incorporate the book.'
With this simple order, what little nanites Theo's nanorgan produced from the nutrients it siphoned rushed towards his fingertip before manifesting like a tiny, gray cloud that then quickly permeated throughout the scroll.
A moment later, as the nanites seeped back through his skin into Theo's body, the data they carried rejoined the hive.
This process took, at most, a few seconds. And while it obviously came at the cost of a small portion of the nanites burned out to achieve it… With how rich that stolen lunch was, Theo didn't really have to worry about it yet.
And just like that, he went through as much as half of his personal library, adding up the contents of the books to the hive's library before finally reaching the limit of what he could afford.
Incorporating new sources for his hive AI to interpret was merely one of the tasks that he was in quite the hurry to complete.
"Now then, let's see," muttering to himself, Theo sat down on his bed before closing his eyes.
The moment he did, a selection of new recipes flashed before his eyes, all dissected into steps, necessary materials, procedures, and suggested timings for everything…
It was a distilled and then organized form of all the knowledge that Theo's hive learned from the books, enriched by all the guesses and logical expansions born from Hive's parsing power.
"Those two look nice," Theo muttered as he locked in two recipes that caught his fancy.
An elixir of happiness and a brew of relaxation.
Both then lit up when Theo updated his Hive by infusing his personal herb and materials storage with the nanite mist for a while before filtering it through the knowledge from the recently incorporated books to turn them into an inventory list of all that Theo had access to.
A list that was then used to highlight both of Theo's recipes, making it clear he was perfectly free and ready to get them done.
"Distilling vodka, setting wine, or concocting potions," Theo smiled to himself as he gathered the necessary materials, once again highlighted in his vision by the hive, before bringing them over to the alchemy station and, with a pull of a special cord, starting the fire beneath the main cauldron.
"In the end, it's all the same, isn't it?"