Theo wasn't used to pain.
He went his whole life living in the comfort of the civilization that reached the peak of personal freedom and creativity.
With the help of the nanites, one could easily alter their body to live in a perpetual bliss of constant release of endorphins mixed with the constant removal of their side effects, like the dependency of building resistance.
Theo, however, liked to do things the usual way, finding the excitement and anticipation of creating something to be much more fulfilling than just the cheap release of pure physical bliss.
Right now, however, what he faced was as far removed from what he was used to as it could be. The pain of the nanites literally burrowing through his body was something he simply never faced before, never learned to live with or resist.
And yet…
Rather than using his nanites just a little bit to mute the pain, Theo gritted his teeth and decided to just endure it, using the pain as the anchor for his focus.
Without it, he could never keep himself as attentive as he needed to be to keep the hive's guidance to the necessary minimum.
'What's the point of cultivating or practicing magic if I'm letting the AI do it all for me?' he thought, willingly struggling through the process just to experience what it felt like, to personally register every single element of this magical journey.
Even if said journey was hardly anything beyond the pain akin to a parasite eating through his flesh all over the place.
The first loop through the entire path, one that circled around every bone, every organ, every limb, took Theo a total of an hour of nothing but constant, mild suffering. The kind of suffering not unlike an unreachable scratch—but brought to its absolute limits.
A pain that would not subside at all, that is, not until the moment Theo completed the first full loop.
A point Theo's hive made sure he wouldn't miss by making the list of instructions flash out before his closed eyes, with the second step now marked down as completed.
'Finally,' Theo allowed himself just a single-worded thought before tensing all over as he pushed even more of the nanites into the condensed particle he used to burrow through his flesh.
The very moment Theo did so, two things changed.
First, rather than the pain of having his flesh cut open, Theo merely had to endure the pain of having those tiny, internal wounds re-opened.
By all means, when compared to how it felt before, Theo felt like sighing a long sigh of relief.
The pain had turned into nothing more than a slightly irritating itch.
That's when the particle of condensed nanites started to bleed the excess, leaving it behind in the freshly re-opened wound like a comet would leave a trail of matter behind.
This trail, however, rather than making for quite the beautiful sight on a night's sky, instantly moved to sear into Theo's flesh, instantly turning the sense of relief into one of panic.
'Shit…'
Gritting his teeth to the point he felt as if they were starting to crack, Theo somehow endured the first wave of the pain. Yet, right as he felt like he was slowly getting used to it…
A red alert flashed before his eyes, revealing how, the very moment Theo lowered his guard even a little, his control slipped out of his mind.
For a moment, the pressure on his consciousness released, freeing him from the burden of keeping precise control over the nanites, forcing them to act like an intrusive force in his flesh rather than a complementary force instead.
'Back to it,' gritting his teeth even harder, Theo took a breath before taking another bite of the meat from the drumstick in his hand.
By now, the process of eating the meat became quasi-automatic, either growing into a manual habit or steered by the hive's guidance.
Regardless, with the supply of nutrients continuously feeding into Theo's nanorgan, he could keep the process of cracking open his cultivation going. And just like before, he had no other choice but to just endure the pain, lest he was going to give up on his desire to do this whole cultivation thing properly.
It wasn't until roughly ten minutes later that Theo noticed something else, a difference to how things went back when he was still in the process of completing the first loop.
Back then, the pain of the internal wounds would persist for quite a considerable while, long enough for Theo to still feel the itch from the latter part of the first loop. When it came to the initial part of the second one, however?
While initially much worse, the pain of those wounds subsided a lot sooner, as if the nanites themselves ingrained themselves into Theo's flesh, always ready to counteract whatever problem occurred, cutting short the step of sending the nanites over.
In the end, as Theo only realized when the nanite nuclei reached the starting point of his path for the second time, the second loop took a bit less time for him to complete, cutting the initial time by roughly a third.
The third loop came with the mild pain turning into nothing but an irritating itch, taking Theo only about half an hour to complete.
By the time Theo moved on to the fifth loop, he could barely feel the itch of messing with his flesh at all, only taking about a quarter of an hour to complete a full process.
It was only by the time Theo completed the tenth loop around his whole path that the slight tingling in his body would persist for long enough for him to complete the whole loop, reinforcing the pain-turned-tingle before it could completely stop.
"Huh?"
A moment later, when he suddenly caught himself distracted, Theo realized that he no longer needed to manually control the flow of nanites through his path—it continued all on its own.
A change that his hive happily marked down by adding "completed" to the last step of the structurization process, only to playfully refuse to flash the change up, leaving it to Theo to notice the appearance of a new instruction at the very bottom of the list.