Super Righteous Player
Chapter 989 - 47: Teacher, You Forgot to Assign Homework

Chapter 989: Chapter 47: Teacher, You Forgot to Assign Homework

Outside the nightmare, Thirteen Fragrances and Husky surrounded Annan.

While Isaac was busy nearby the control panel, checking something.

"Strange, why can’t we make contact?"

Thirteen Fragrances murmured, "Just now Annan clearly responded... It didn’t seem like he couldn’t hear."

"He must have heard, but didn’t hear clearly."

Isaac took a deep breath, his hands constantly moving and his brow furrowing, "I think I understand. This is not Bernardino’s nightmare... but a dream within a dream.

"Have you noticed? Annan’s actions and mindset lack a portion of logic—missing ’restraint’ and ’vigilance’. He’s like he is in a dream right now.

"Or rather... the content of this nightmare, is a reenactment of ’Bernardino’s dream’."

"A dream within a dream?"

On hearing this, Husky instantly perked up, "We’ve fought through a dream within a dream instance before!"

After they arrived in this world, the first major nightmare they participated in was "Nightmare: Gemini" when they entered the Cinder Barrens.

That was a nightmare created through meticulous design, to achieve the effect of a "dream within a dream". Its purpose was to hide the nightmare’s true purification method, thus achieving an infinite cycle.

"An endlessly repeating tragedy, huh..."

Thirteen Fragrances also murmured.

Isaac shook his head, "Although I don’t know which one you’re talking about, this should be unrelated. Because this nightmare hasn’t been crafted by someone, it’s in its native form... This means its logic will be simpler, leaning more toward the abstract."

"Do we need to pull His Majesty Annan out first?"

Thirteen Fragrances raised a more pressing question, "It seems he can’t hear us... This suggests our ritual can’t reach him."

"That’s not necessary."

Isaac shook his head again, "What’s currently malfunctioning is only the part that delivers information and treats Annan.

"Since Lord Hugo’s purification process for this nightmare is still effective, it won’t be fatal for now, so there is no need for such drastic measures... After all, being forcibly dragged out of a nightmare isn’t a very pleasant experience.

"It’s like the feeling of drowning in a dream and then waking up startled."

He spoke casually, as if he had finally found something.

At about shin height, a faintly seen line was indented. Just like a patch affixed to that spot... yet the slot to dismantle it was nowhere to be seen.

Isaac lightly touched it, performing some kind of reverse transformation.

The edges that originally sealed that "metal patch" quickly melted into some kind of gel, and a small portion of the shell automatically popped out.

Isaac reached out and pulled it down.

From the roughly palm-sized square gap, intricate ritual lines could be barely seen within. They shimmered with flowing light, like the integrated circuits on a chip.

"It should be here..."

Isaac murmured softly, pulling out several panels connected by numerous wires.

They were about the size of a tablet and not very thick. Thirteen Fragrances glimpsed from behind and roughly guessed what they were for.

There were at least sixteen interfaces and eight sets of different markings. By pressing and lifting various keys to combine them in different ways, they could drive the internal mechanical parts to shift to different positions, transforming into different types of shapes through purely mechanical effects.

Such "transformable bricks," when stacked to form a plane, became a programmable ritual that could dynamically correspond to changes.

"What is this?"

Thirteen Fragrances asked with some curiosity.

To him, it looked like a chip magnified many times over.

Then the actions of Isaac now could be said to be akin to a lithography machine...

"This is a movable self-executing ritual logic circuit board, commonly known as the 16-8 baseboard. It has sixteen interfaces, eight movable switches. It can be connected to Series 12, 16, and 20 boards."

Isaac pondered and adjusted the logic on the board, while explaining, "You’ll have to learn this stuff sooner or later."

"Can it perform rituals automatically?"

"There are plenty of things that can perform rituals automatically... but the key is that it’s movable. That’s why it can’t be designed too small. You could think of it like this—I press a button, and it makes these eight crisscrossing lines on all four sides combine in different ways.

"By the time it’s reconnected to the collective, the logical expression is already different. From this, simple rituals can be constructed... like ’branding a horn lying here’ with a ’bloodstained’ trait, or ’considering its location to be somewhere else’."

Isaac multitasked, sitting on the ground to start programming on the spot while simultaneously explaining to Thirteen what this thing was.

But actually, Thirteen grasped the concept of this device even faster than he had anticipated.

——In simple terms, it’s like movable type printing.

Bulldozing changes through a ritual is almost akin to redoing it. So for parts that aren’t crucial and might need to change anytime due to different requirements, this kind of board could take their place.

A ritual itself can be understood as directly achieving a specific effect, provided that specific runes or magic circles are used with specific procedures and characteristic magic materials.

In this process, human participation isn’t necessarily required.

But it has another constraint, which is that it must be manually performed.

Using one ritual to interfere with another is very difficult to accomplish. The properties and concepts inherent in the ritual can also affect the specific effects of other rituals.

It’s like using an alcohol-based solvent, which when wanting to react with another solution, must also consider the potential reactions with alcohol.

However, rituals are not as simple as "alcohol."

Each ritual has very complex properties... For example, the first ritual Annan witnessed in his second cycle, "Tongue in the Mirror," had characteristics beyond being a magic material like "the soul of someone who can foresee crimes but remains silent about them." It also had traits of "mirror," "lock and key," "protector," "reflection," "home," "cycle," and others.

It could serve as a "lock and key" element in another ritual, but its "mirror" and "reflection" traits might destroy that ritual and skew it in another direction.

And if this ritual doesn’t lead to any outcome, its failure isn’t as simple as just throwing an error during compilation—it would explode outright.

But if you add an extra link between the two rituals... as a conceptual filter, the situation changes.

Adding a sub-ritual to a ritual allows for pressing different "buttons" when different effects occur. Then these buttons, through purely mechanical means, can change the basis of another ritual.

Its true significance lies in circumventing the constraint that "a ritual cannot nest another ritual."

This kind of technique, which requires long-term study, contemplation, and practice to master... you can tell at a glance, is definitely not the style of Heath Tower of Black.

"Is this something that the wizards of Jade Tower have to learn?"

Thirteen instinctively inquired.

Isaac’s voice suddenly rose an octave, "This is a required course! It’s tested every year!

"You might not be tested on it, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need to learn—if your base’s ritual breaks, what will you do? Send a letter to the teacher saying, ’Hey teacher, my ritual is broken, can you come fix it?’"

He quickly realized that these weren’t his own students.

Therefore, Isaac sighed and added, "I will get you a few books when I return, as well as the research notes from my apprenticeship days, for your use."

"Yes."*2

Thirteen and Husky simultaneously responded in agreement.

"This needs to be learned."

Isaac insisted earnestly, "It’s really useful. If you don’t know this, a large ritual might take days to adjust if you place one material in the wrong position. With this, you just need to change a few parameters, flip a few switches."

"Yes..."*2

Husky glared at Thirteen with a complaint.

With this reminder, the list of books to read and homework to do just got longer.

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