With the initial excitement of dabbling into something as mystical as magic, Theo could finally see the boring truth about the whole cultivation thingy.
'Isn't it… quite boring?' he thought, raising his eyebrow a bit as he grew used enough to the whole process to allow a stray thought or two. 'It's just… more of the same.'
Just like before, all he had to do was keep infusing the most dense part of his cultivation with more and more nanites. And to a degree… that was it.
In truth, with the need for Theo to control the direction of his cultivation gone now that he had properly established its structure, cultivating grew even easier than before.
'If that's all there is to it, then why is everyone making such a big deal of it?' Theo couldn't help but ask himself.
All he did was pour more and more of the soup into his throat, swallowing the bigger chunks of what the soup was made from, only to feel them quite literally dissolve while moving down his throat.
Just with this alone, his nanorgan would do all the heavy lifting, snatching most of the nutrition from the food and using it to construct more and more nanites which, in turn, Theo would infuse straight into his pathway at steady intervals.
The only challenge in the whole process came from matching the pace at which his existing internal energy flowed through this path, so that he could infuse it with more nanites right as it passed straight by his nanorgan, decreasing the distance the nanites had to move through and thus leaving them in that much more energized state.
'If anything, the greatest challenge here might be about staying patient for long enough to see the effects,' Theo thought, taking in a deep breath to condition himself for the long road ahead…
Only for the first step on his hive-provided list to suddenly light up, only to then dim completely out into gray as "completed" appeared right next to it.
The very moment this happened, something finally changed.
While noticing the change was easy, however, figuring out what this change was all about took Theo quite some time.
'It's like…' even once he properly grabbed hold of this weird, strangely distant sensation, he struggled to find the right words to classify it. 'It's like breathing with my skin?'
Theo could vaguely remember how there were some organisms back on Earth capable of such a feat. And while what was currently going on likely was nothing alike, it was still the closest comparison he could draw.
It was as if an extremely faint itch appeared all over his skin, whether it was covered in clothes or not. An itch so faint and distant, Theo really struggled to even notice it, only for it to reduce to just a vague sensation of weirdness the moment he lost focus.
While the sensation was barely noticeable, the effects it had on his cultivation… No, the effect this change had on his nanite-based structure couldn't be any easier to notice.
The flow of energy that coursed through Theo's pathways, formerly centered around a singular point of where he condensed the nanites at, now started to equalize throughout his entire structure. Rather than acting like a ball pulled along the path, it was growing into just a natural, river-like flow of something that filled his pathways in equal way at any point of it.
By no means was this a quick process, with this strange energy taking its sweet time to permeate through Theo's skin and then even longer to penetrate through the walls of his microscopic pathway, making it seem as if the nanites had a really hard time keeping it pure enough to even allow it in.
'Still, slow or not, it's a blessing to have it,' Theo thought, taking another hefty gulp of his soup as he compared the growth limited to just his nanites with the growth this outside energy allowed him to achieve.
By no means did it change the nature of the flow within his pathways. It was still but a constant momentum of weirdly reinforced nanites. Now, however, for every nine parts of the nanites, there appeared to be one part of just pure, unadulterated energy.
And quite noticeably, the more of this weird energy amassed within Theo's pathway, the more of it ended up attracted from the outside, sinking into Theo's skin only to get refined by the boundaries of his pathways and then integrate into the flow, closing the virtuous cycle.
The more energy Theo absorbed from the air around him, the stronger his cultivation — or, to be more specific, the flow within his structure — pulled on the energy in the air, endlessly accelerating the process even if only by one tiny little bit at a time.
Still, with each passing second, he needed to focus less and less, almost as if the entire cultivation thing was quickly becoming an automated process, something that was happening out in the background without Theo's active interference or oversight.
It was reaching that barrier of becoming fully automatic so fast, in fact, Theo failed to even notice when the second part of his current step was marked as completed, leaving him with just the very last hive-born instruction.
'Thinking about it, maybe it's going to become fully automatic right as I reach the limits of how much I can absorb?'
This logic only made sense, for the limit that Theo could feel getting closer and closer to, to turn out to be the very same limit outlined by the hive.
And as seconds passed and turned into minutes, the amount of energy Theo could still fit into his structure grew lesser and lesser, making it seem as if he could reach it right away, in just one more minute…
A minute of peace and focus Theo never got, when the sound of his doors creaking open reaching his ears created the first distraction. And while that alone he could still ignore, the implications of his doors opening…?
Theo didn't even need to spare the thought to figure them all out, when a small commotion followed, with a silent "oh shit" serving as the cherry on top of it all.
'Who the fuck…'
Losing his focus, Theo failed to control the process for but a single instant, only for it to slow to but a fraction of its earlier speed now that he no longer supplied a steady stream of nanites to his flow.
Whether it was due to the nanites and this energy establishing some sort of a balance that allowed for the optimal absorption of the energy, or an already established balance getting wrecked when Theo was no longer mentally there to guide his nanites while the energy continued to flow in…
Whatever the case and reason, right as Theo was about to finish the step and move on to potentially even more interesting stuff… someone interrupted him.
And as he stood up and turned around with his fierce expression reflecting the quickly changing state of his soul, his eyes landed on the one girl he was relatively familiar with, regardless of the perfectly dark outfit taken straight out of a criminal villain comic-book.
The one girl Theo threatened to kill if she ever again dared to step uninvited into his room.
Which, by all means, she just did.