Chương 20: Printing Press

After freeing Enala from her binds, Nolotl escorted her to her workplace to deliver the doctor's notice as he didn't trust her at all to do so. Letting her die once was twice too many times. Hmm, perhaps I regret it more than I originally thought. Gnosiamancy valued apathy, but at the end of the day, Nolotl was a living and breathing person, not just an accumulation of information and calculations.

"Do we really have to take the stairs?" The postgraduate groaned.

"Some exercise would do well to your mind," the Empyrean gave her a cheap excuse as he really didn't want to risk taking the elevator again. Their way down to the printing press was rather slow as even if they were descending stairs, Enala was the perfect example of a gnosiamancer: active of mind, sluggish of body. The enchantress panted heavily, but her complaints about taking the elevator ceased as she changed the subject.

"Do I really need to take a break?" Enala said as she slumped her body on the stairs' railing.

"I'm really close to a breakthrough with the printing press, I think I'm able to automatize the process greatly and I would like to have it done before the total celestial alignment." Nolotl grunted noncommittally all the time, but she continued pestering him. For a postgraduate whose age was closer to her 30s, or even past, she loved pestering a teenager.

Though truth be told, celestials already looked younger than terians—especially the case with Originals and Tamoreans—so Nolotl looked well past his 20s for their standards. His height and build certainly contributed to that, even if he was at the short end of the spectrum for terians. By the time they reached the quarters where the printing press was located, Enala had to support herself on the terian to not collapse.

"The part of your being that is tired is your mind, not your body," the gnosiamancer retorted, but the enchantress just continued sweet-talking him into letting her keep working. He couldn't understand why she even thought he was able to keep her from working. Sure, he would ensure she didn't kill herself, but the ambush was a more pressing matter and… Nolotl chuckled as he sensed a certain brain wave.

"So please if you could stop, I would greatly appre…" she continued talking oblivious to his thoughts.

"Enala," the Empyrean interjected her, his tone stern.

"Y-yes?" The enchantress yelped and hopped, separating her body from Nolotl's.

"I am willing to let you continue working on your project and also let your read the Second Mind ritual book, if you accept my conditions."

"I… Can I take back the offer on m-my body?" Enala responded sheepishly. How could be a woman old enough to be mother of four be intimidated by a student? The terian sighed internally, though his cultural bias was showing as 30-year-old celestials didn't tend to have four children.

"No, I'm not interested in your body. I never was."

"Oh…" She deflated slightly.

"I…" He tried retorting that gesture, but no words came out of his mouth. Why does that make you sad? Argh! I don't understand you, woman! He kept the shouts to his Cognition, otherwise she would have fainted from the sheer violence that was rising in his blood.

"These are my conditions. One: I am going to observe you during work and when you are reading the Second Mind framework. Two: I will be allowed to access the printing press, study it, and use it. If you accept them, I will grant both of your wishes."

"Hmm…" The enchantress let her fear and shyness die as she pondered. She almost looked like her age with her serious face. She somehow managed to make messy hair, dead eyes, and copious bags under her eyes into something appealing.

"You aren't going to assault me again, right?"

"If you demonstrate any diminishing mental faculties or are on the brink of death, I will intercede. And let me tell you one thing," the terian's expression worsened and his eyes glittered with brutality, "I'm not afraid of using violence. Understood?" Enala nodded rapidly, her loose hairs bobbing up and down with her head. But yet again, he had no authority to do so, even with his status as an Empyrean. She was singlehandedly deciding he had power over her. Perhaps I should explain that to her…

but I guess I can do it once I'm sure she doesn't kill herself. He knew that he was being too rough with her, but that spiritual part of him simply didn't want to see the woman die.

"I take that as if you are accepting my offer?" Nolotl mused with crossed arms, unapologetically putting strength on them so their muscles and blood vessels were visible.

"A-against my best judgement, I must take on that offer," she responded after recovering a bit of her composure. But not much. She was quite the pathetic woman, she lacked Cilin's spine or the rest of the empyreans' confidence.

"Let me guide you through our little workshop then." The printing press was a modern invention born out of the hands of gnosiamancer enchanters, more crafters than actual mages. As a matter of fact, it was so new, that it had yet to leave the Empyrean Academy. The city of Descent had already benefited from these prototypes, but the same couldn't be said for the whole country of Origin, let alone the others.

They were exceedingly loud machines too, a thing that riled up his inner avian side, but he managed to keep his Animal Spirits in check. As expected from a creation on its earlier stages, the printing press was filled with messy haired workers with copious bags under their eyes.

Postgraduates dominated the scene as they tinkered with the devices, but—more awake and healthier—students also pullulated the place as they carried paper, ink, and enchanting materials, more passionate about the credits they would be granted by helping their seniors than making history. And those were the ones that Nolotl had interest in. Two boys, barely older than Nolotl himself, helped with one of the printing presses.

Their two minds he recognized perfectly, for he had decimated them after they had tried to kill him. The gnosiamancer students were no longer unidentified.

"Ah, I knew that one would pique your interest," Enala interjected with the tone of a guide.

"Sure," the Empyrean of Information responded if just so the enchantress wouldn't suspect of his objective.

"Does it have something special?"

"Indeed!" Tiredness fleeted out of Enala's eyes, and it was instead replaced by passion. I retire from my previous thoughts; she looks better with life on her visage.

"This is one of the first models we've built! It isn't automatic nor can it reshuffle its contents with the same ease as the new prototypes, but it's able to make perfect copies of any given input. Perfect for making standardized status formularies!"

"So all the formularies I filled whenever I read someone's status came from this specific machine?"

"Q-quite!" The passion wavered as an incertitude threatened her.

"Enala," he put a hand on her shoulder. She wasn't exactly petite, but his hand failed to find solid purchase as it was too big for her shoulder.

"Y-yes?" The enchantress still stuttered, though fortunately now it was out of shyness.

"Take deep breaths, will you?" There were more pressing matters, namely dealing with the would-be-assassins next to him or the time loop, but cosmos forbid he let the woman die again on his watch.

"Remember our deal."

"R-right," the woman took deep breaths, her chest slowly heaving up and down with each inhalation and exhalation.

"I'm calmed now." Nolotl squinted his eyes at her, but after she failed to portray any bouts of insanity, he considered the exercise as completed.

"Good enough for me but watch out. I'm being serious here."

"Sorry, it's really easy to… let go."

"Shouldn't be," he replied.

"You are a gnosiamancer, getting a hold of yourself is the first thing they teach us. How about reinforcing your emotion-numbing cantrips?"

"I never did well on those lessons," Enala sighed, "and I never intended to become a fully-fledged mage. I just wanted to have a simple life as a civil servant, but high grades led to one thing, and before I knew it, I was an enchantress when I picked the Enchantment Proficiency Boon."

"You don't lead yourself to near-death without passion," or actual death. He didn't say that last part.

"I love my work!" She protested.

"I'm just… not good at managing it."

"I see," his eyes wandered to the many movements on the workshop. It was a loud place, but tunning out sounds was rather simple with divinations. After all, that school of magic didn't just help gather information, but also repel it. But perhaps abjurations would have done a better work at it.

"Can I get some explanation on what printing presses are. I know what they produce, but I only know the basics, and I don't know how they do it."

"Oh, of course!" Enala switched back to her guide voice.

"The act of printing started as a way of producing books faster. Without gnosiamancy, divination, or transmutation, it may take months to produce a replica of a book, and even with it, it takes gnosiamancers or photomancers days. Our first prototypes were aimed at standardized and mass-produced products like status sheets. A single imprint was enough to create hundreds of them per day, though that number is now closer to the tens of thousands."

Even though the enchantress was speaking fast and with fervor, her cognitive state didn't degrade. Possibly because Nolotl was looking over her shoulder all the time with a stern gaze, and she was well aware of that. She seemed able to pace herself enough to not succumb to Madness. You have resisted Madness.

"Ugh…" Nolotl groaned, thinking on the madness update of the Real-Time Status spell made it retrigger again. It brought him an annoyance similar to…

"Ugh!" He groaned again, now in fury.

"Er… something wrong?" Enala asked hesitatingly.

"Nothing, I just remembered 'The Game'." The Empyrean of Information didn't even finish the sentence and the whole workshop groaned in annoyance as a wave of psychic damage spread through the Cognition, the students and postgraduates looking at him in a foul manner but failing to comment on it as they went back to their work. Surprisingly, the psychic damage only benefited Enala as she seemed more composed now, as if she had been slapped or dropped a bucket of cold water.

"As I was saying, you can see with the first models that they were no different from stamps you may find in seals, but they only work for a given imprint at a time. Our research has been to make printing an automatic process, one that does not require of manually creating a stamp." She led him to a workbench where there were multiple metal keys with reliefs of individual letters.

"Our current plan is to make an interface for gnosiamancers to shift around the keys so they can assort them into their mental image."

"How curious…" Nolotl grabbed one of the keys and he wasn't surprised to find that the pieces were enchanted with simple movement enchantments that would allow them to move in the cardinal directions of a plane.

"This way a single person can operate an individual press and modify its contents in real time if an issue were to arise."

"Yes… but there have been some problems. That's what tends to happen with engineering," Enala admitted with a sigh.

"Because we want the movable printing process to be hands-off, making so all the computation load is on the machine rather than the gnosiamancer, we need to make it so each can interact with the others without colliding with them, which leads to failure." This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"But that's impossible!" The diviner realized in horror.

"To avoid the keys from colliding with each other they would have to know the positions of every other key and ignoring the fact that these small keys cannot hold that many enchantments, the sheer number of binary comparisons is… well, mind-boggling!"

"Quite," the enchantress sighed again.

"The algebraic complexity of such computations are O(n^n), but we have devised an algorithm to bring them down to a still egregious yet more manageable O(log2 n). The problem with it is that its implementation is also presenting its own issues."

"Fascinating," Nolotl laid his hand on his chin in nothing but enthrallment. He had expected this detour to be boring, only a way to ease his consciousness rather than contribute to his survival at the end of the month. But now, he couldn't say the same. The sheer mental stimulation provided by the possibilities before him filled him with life. Information Alignment increased by 0. 00001%.

Enantyum's self-reporting status spell seemed to think the same as his Information Alignment augmented by 10 microtaums, the bare minimum accepted by magehood where Alignment increases became perceptible. Nolotl smiled as he now looked forward to resolving this printing press problem whilst also tackling his would-be-ambushers.

"I will admit," Nolotl said between yawns, "engineering is a far more complex field than I originally thought."

"Tell me about it…" Enala's face was laying in the workbench, making her words almost unintelligible as she babbled straight on the desk's wood. Lazily and deathly, the enchantress turned her head to the side. It spoke to their exhaustion that they could get sleepy with all the noise around them.

"Theory is always a wonderful field. You make a theory, you find an axiom, you resolve a calculation, and you are done. But in engineering you need to do all of that and then find that they don't really work. And then you try again, only to find that they still don't work. So you try yet another time, and again, and again…"

"Yes, I have witnessed myself," the Empyrean rubbed his eyes, only to find deformation on his skin.

"It's been a while since I have developed bags. It feels…"

"Awful? Miserable? Repulsive?"

"I was going to say endearing," the cocoa-skinned gnosiamancer responded with a smile.

"Endearing?" The deadly pale enchantress chuckled miserably.

"Yes," he nodded.

"Lacking sleep because you need to study for an exam or meet a deadline is miserable but doing it for a project you have true passion for, that's something endearing, Enala. Not exactly healthy but endearing, nonetheless."

"I guess you are right…" She blinked slowly.

"I do it for the love of the game, not the money nor the fame. It certainly is… endearing." Her skin wrinkled too much for her age as she smiled; the lack of sleep was obvious. Though Nolotl couldn't help but find that tarnished visage beautiful. You have resisted Madness. Even though he had managed to configure the Regressor's self-reporting status spell to not show unless it was passed a critical threshold as he had some time to tinker with the spell, the alert still appeared. …

"Pulsars!" Nolotl jumped out of his seat—scaring the life out of Enala and making her fall ass-first onto the ground—as he noticed the significance of the alert.

"W-whuh?" The woman gesticulated from the ground as she rubbed her head, even if it was a completely different part of her body that had been hit.

"Okay, this is it," the diviner said after having clapped his cheeks to wake himself up.

"It's sleepy time. We have been working for far too long." Nolotl linked himself with the Cognition and checked the passage of time, only to discover that two days had gone by. Two days since they had come to the printing press workshop. Two days without going to sleep. Two days without showering. Two days without eating. Two days without… no, they did drink at some point, though he couldn't remember when as his thoughts were sluggish.

The only reason why Enala wasn't either dead or a babbling buffoon was because he mandated her to get some rest, even if it was closing her eyes for five minutes or drinking water.

"I can keep gooooing…" A yawn interrupted her at the end.

"Yeah, I don't think so," Nolotl offered the woman a hand and she took it, casually raising her from the ground even if she didn't pull her own weight.

"Oh, wow," Enala said with eyes wide open.

"You are strong… Pretty strong."

"You are not going to convince me to let you go with plain compliments."

"That… was not my intention," she responded with an offended scowl.

"Sorry, lack of sleep gets me," the terian grabbed his head as it pounded, the lack of sleep transforming into a throbbing pain. His gaze wavered from time to time as it became blurry and unfocused, and the same was true for his thoughts. Resistance to Cognitive Harm helped with the mental effects of sleeplessness, but not the physical fatigue. There was no saving that.

"So what now, am I going to get bound to a bed against my consent?" Enala inquired with a raised brow as the Empyrean released her.

"Are you going to behave like a normal, upstanding adult without the need of a babysitter?"

"Yes?" Even with his lack of sleep, the doubt in the enchantress' tone was obvious.

"Enala…" He exhaled with overwhelming physical and mental exhaustion.

"I will, I will!" Enala stated defensively.

"Please, don't… just let me sleep in my room." A slight blush appeared in her visage.

"Can do that, but you have to uphold our accord."

"I know…" Another yawn escaped her lips.

"Honestly, I doubt I can stand upright for much longer."

"Let me accompany you to your room then," the enchantress blushed more and mumbled something incoherent at his proposal but ended up accepting with a shy nod. Sluggishly, both gnosiamancers left the workshop and made their way to the atrium of the Information tower, but as Enala made her way to an elevator, Nolotl grabbed her by the wrist.

"Riding one of those contraptions in your state is a recipe for disaster."

"I am tired, Nolotl," she groaned.

"I can barely take a step forward, let alone climb several flights of stairs."

"I could carry you if that's the issue," he responded with complete nonchalance. Enala flushed before a glimpse of wakefulness sparkled in her eyes.

"Isn't that way more dangerous than riding an elevator?" Nolotl shrugged.

"I guess I can do some exercise…" Apparently, Enala Pril couldn't do some exercise. Her breath became ragged from the very first floor, and she started throwing out the most colorful and varied curses Nolotl had heard in his life.

"You know, I may be learning more about the art of cursing than engineering from you," Nolotl jested as the enchantress supported herself on his neck which only prompted more curses from the woman.

"Damned be the ignominious jungles Celestials decided to tread upon which led to your own birth, wicked huckster," the enchantress scowled at him.

"You might have a better time if you stop cursing and instead focused on breathing," the terian couldn't help but smile at the celestial's insult. Some people might not even consider them even that. They had to stop a handful of more times before reaching Enala's floor, but they managed to reach it without a heart attack or collapse, which was a win in his book. With small and heavy steps, the enchantress guided him to her room.

From the door Nolotl immediately knew that it was far better than those of most students, but still not quite the suite he had been given for his Empyrean status. As a postgraduate who wasn't a teacher but a researcher, the lodging gifted to her was modest. Anything else would have gone out of her own pocket, and Celestials knew scholars didn't have a coin to their name.

"This is it, you can go away now," Enala said as she shoved him to the side. The strength of her gesture was so pitiful that it metamorphosed into being cute.

"Shoo shoo." Nolotl drew a sarcastic smile—one which many would classify as a crude 'shit-eating grin'—as he noticed the obvious intentions of the enchantress. Most gnosiamancers were masters of mess as they could recall perfectly where they had left their stuff, meaning that nothing was never truly lost, even on an ever-growing pile of mess. And by the looks of it, the shipwreck of a woman before him wasn't just a master of mess, but the very incarnation of the word.

Enala hissed at his grin—making him question who was the terian here—before Nolotl decided he was pestering the woman enough and left her alone, going back to the stairs toward his own abode. As perfect as his memory was with Perfect Recollection, Nolotl had trouble remembering what happened after that, only a vague blur of dropping to his bed and collapsing not even a second later from exhaustion. So sudden was his unconsciousness, that the next thought already woke him up.

"Ugh…" The gnosiamancer grabbed his head as he rose from the bed. He still wore the same clothes he had been donning for the last days.

"Of course, I've only slept six starless hours. Damned circadian clock." With a handful of groans and pants, Nolotl made his way to the bath and washed his body on the hot and relaxing water. He almost fell asleep in the tub. To fight his sleepiness, the terian decided to exercise. A handful of repetitions of the usual: sit-ups, push-ups, planks, squats…

By the end he was exhausted and meriting another wash—he might not sweat yet dust and humidity easily clung to him—but he only got around a quick cold shower to finally dispel his remaining drowsiness.

"Okay, let's go over what has happened on these last two days," he sat on his desk. He didn't intend to use it, but the sitting position brought him into a meditative state.

"The two gnosiamancers brought by Luminol that tried to kill me during the total celestial alignment are the Finil twins, Moda and Armoda. They aren't anything special from what I've seen these days on the workshop, but that I already knew as they were easy to kill." His thoughts went back to that day for an instant and he saw the twins standing before him. They intended to kill him, so he replied in kind yet with the brutality of the quetzal.

What he had done to the twins' minds could only be classified as straight-up mental violation. And that was fine. Only a bit of an over-zealous self-defense, but the situation merited it as he would've died way sooner or without claiming full revenge. What wasn't fine was why they were even there.

"They are students nearing graduation seeking to be enchanters, not battlemages. How has Luminol convinced them to participate in an act of assassination?" Nolotl stood up and pranced around the room in frustration.

"Threats? No, you don't send someone to kill another person with threats. A lucrative deal? Enala, surprisingly, seems in charge of the printing press, so maybe the workshop fell in disarray after her original death… Ah, it's likely, but theorizing like this will do nothing for me; only waste my time. I need to get this information out of them." After having walked in circles naked for a while, the Interlooper decided it was time to get dressed and down to business.

His clothes were dirty, but thankfully he had a comical assortment of the same attire. With a flaunt of his cape, Nolotl went down to the Central Tower to get something to eat. Working and exercising on an empty stomach for two days wasn't exactly healthy. It was late for breakfast yet too early for lunch, so the cafeteria was mostly deserted. No longer did students populate the place, but rather workers, researchers, and whatnot.

Considering the empty state of the hall, there was no need to go to the section reserved for the Empyreans, yet he still did it out of instinct. He was surprised to find someone there.

"Ah, truly an advent of fate, don't you think?" Paizon, Empyrean of Chaos, greeted him as he toyed with a fork between his fingers with masterful sleight of hand.

"I don't know what to respond to that…?" the Empyrean of Information frowned at the white-haired man.

"No, no! Nolotl, this is supposed to be where you say 'Fate does not exist'!"

"Fate does not exist?" he added with a hint of confusion as he placed his tray on the table.

"Ah, you are expert on removing the spice in life. Though expert is a measly title. Nina's still the master, you know?" the ataxiamancer pointed at him with the fork.

"I can guess," the gnosiamancer held a sigh, not knowing nor bothering to understand the sense of this meaningless conversation. Paizon and Nina did have a rivalry born out of their selected elements. The orderly Arcane and the chaotic… Chaos didn't match quite well. Though it was incorrect to call it opposites. Like Life and Death, or Light and Void, they were just two faces of the same coin. In a way, the bombastic Paizon could only be complimented with the pillar of a woman that was Nina Metio.

"So what leads you here, gnosiamancer?"

"Food?" Nolotl stated as a matter of fact.

"Is it really food? Not some sort of grand-scale conspiracy?" The terian's heart almost jumped out of his chest, but keeping his reactions in line was literally part of his trade. Instead, he acted with the same confused nonchalance and said "Yes?"

"Oww!" The ataxiamancer pouted.

"And for once I thought we were going to have something interesting happening. The start of month is like the first day of the week, you come from a really fun or cozy break only to be greeted by the dullest of moments."

"Surely you have ways to keep yourself entertained," Nolotl mused as he ate.

"I do, I do," Paizon playfully tapped on the table.

"But sometimes one wants to be entertained with others. You know how some people just want to make others miserable? I just want to make others… spicy?"

"Something tells me that you have spoken without thinking." The difference between the men's tone was significant. Paizon's jumped up and down like some sort of melody, but Nolotl's was constant like storyteller. A bad storyteller in any case.

"I tend to do that, yes," the man of the orange and stormy eyes revealed.

"But only because I want to amuse you all. If you just speak after thinking, where are the funny misunderstandings and mistakes?" Nolotl squinted at the grinning ataxiamancer.

"I can enjoy your antics from time to time, Paizon, but right now I could do without them."

"Ah, that's where you are wrong, my friend! No one can do without Paizon." His smile was coy. Knowing. Something about it unsettled Nolotl, he felt as if the man before him knew way more than him. Which he did—he was the strongest of the empyreans for a reason—but not in that way. The prince of Tezlan felt blind before the Empyrean of Chaos. Paizon was playing a game greater than any other seen before, and he couldn't even comprehend but the first rule.

But he was aware that the reason why Paizon was pestering him was because he didn't allow him to play to the full extent of his capabilities, so the gnosiamancer threw him a bone.

"Have you heard any rumors?" That was the magic sentence. Even though one would think gossip to be more related to Information or Space, it was the Empyrean of Chaos that rejoiced on them. Though Mio didn't lag behind either.

"I have, I have," he responded with a tooth smile from side to side of his face.

"What you want to hear though, that I cannot tell you. Not because I don't know, of course-""Of course," Nolotl interjected sarcastically.

"-but simply because I don't want to tell you." The ataxiamancer wasn't annoyed by the interruption at all. Instead, he was smiling even more than before.

"So if you don't want to tell me what I want to hear, what will you tell me, oh "Begetting Signal"," the gnosiamancer addressed him by his monicker.

"Hmm, what could I indeed? Many, so many choices~" The white-haired man hummed in amusement.

"It is said that our friendly Beta Methasome wants to make a grand spell for the total celestial alignment. A masterwork of Void, if I say. Yet she doesn't seem to quite achieve it, and time is fleeting from her. You yourself know how frustrating it is to not meet deadlines."

"Woah," Nolotl stated in the plainest tone possible.

"You weren't kidding, I'm not interested at all on that at all."

"He who warns is not to be blamed, only to be despised," Paizon said with his hands on the air and yet another knowing smile.

"Good day to you to, Paizon," the Empyrean of Information stood from his seat after having finished his meal.

"I almost enjoyed wasting my time with you."" Almost is a powerful word, my friend!" He chuckled.

"I await the day it is transformed and then removed from the sentence completely!" Nolotl left the Empyrean of Chaos behind. It was true he didn't want to interact with him, Enantyum had already warned him about the… unpredictable behavior of Paizon. The longer he interacted with the ataxiamancer, the more his script would be made useless. Now it was time to avoid an ambush.