The woman promptly gave Emmet the task guidelines. Within a two week span, Emmet would have to travel to a little house about half an hour away from campus and set up a basic level one warding formation around it. All materials would be provided.

In the end, Emmet did it in only four days. The first day, he did a survey of the place, planned out the blueprint for the formation, and then laid a basic groundwork. The second day, he brought out the bulk of the materials and built up the base layer. The third day, he completed the top layer and inserted the circuitry. Finally, the fourth day, he completed the circuitry and inside logic, stitched it together, did some bug testing, and then gave the outer layer a nice sheen.

It had helped that Emmet now had a car, and could transport materials and travel around relatively easily, allowing for an easier construction. Although there were some minor mishaps, namely with scaling up a warding formation so large, with some quick thinking, they were resolved and Emmet was able to finish early. The biggest roadblock by far was the physical requirements for the job. Often, Emmet would have to lug around heavy materials in order to assemble the formation, causing a lot of strain. Luckily, however, he had done farmwork for many years, so he was used to a lot of the movements and could complete it without calling for any help.

Seeing the completed warding formation at the end of the fourth day, the contractor was shocked. In merely four days, it was already done? After observing it, she made sure to test the formation thoroughly, and after seeing that it was made excellently and very studily, she became impressed. Especially for someone so young, the formation was extremely impressive. In fact, there were many aspects of it that went above and beyond than the required specifications. After some thought, however, the contractor mused that it made sense. The boy had been personally recommended by Maisy Harbinger. How couldn’t his constructions be impressive?

The contractor promptly transferred Emmet the proper payment, including an extra fifty points for a quick construction, and gave some respectful praise before bidding him goodbye. She also casually requested that she mention her name to Maisy if given the chance.

After this experience, Emmet felt incredibly fulfilled, and couldn’t help but develop a strong desire to continue doing some more tasks. It was incredibly fun! It also helped Emmet get some actual experience in building such a large scale formation. Although he had completely memorized the theory, it still took some fine-tuning to translate it to real life, and the process really helped with his hands-on skill and dexterity.

A few days after completing the first task, he took on another one, this time constructing a large scale barrier enclosure formation for a professional hunter. This time, Emmet’s resume had become a bit stronger, as he had now added his warding formation task completion to his experience section. However, just like the first time, it took handing over Maisy’s recommendation letter to completely convince the contractor to hire him.

After completing the task with flying colors, however, he once again was able to add something to his resume, gradually building it up.

After that, he took on another task… and then another one… and then another one. Emmet quickly became addicted to completing tasks. Other than giving practical experience, he felt it was much more ‘real’ than debugging or anything else he had been doing. This was emphasized by the fact that he could personally receive the thanks of the contractor after completing the job. The only thing he didn’t like was the physical labor that sometimes came with the jobs. One unexpected byproduct of this, however, was that after each manual-labor intensive task, his stamina would improve, and his body would strengthen overall. Although it was unnoticeable on his figure at first glance, he could feel his overall strength and vitality improve.

The semester zoomed by. Emmet tackled any interesting task he saw, one after another, slowly increasing in scale and difficulty. Every task he took, his resume grew longer and more extensive, and the easier it was to convince contractors to hire him. Many of the tasks were very unique, helping him grow his experience, and he found it just as fun as debugging interesting formations. Although debugging was always enjoyable, there was also a great satisfaction that came with building something from the ground up. Emmet targeted those ground-up construction types of tasks first, but also chose some other interesting tasks like research and knowledge-sharing.

Time was like a speeding car, zipping toward its destination. Month after month, Emmet’s life was fulfilling.

Like this, the first semester of his second year quickly passed. While the first year had seemed to pass as slow as a turtle, this third semester had passed so quickly it left Emmet rattled. Where had all the time gone? It was like he had just blinked, and the semester was over. He could remember first tackling his first advanced pile formation like it was yesterday.

Over these six months, Emmet could really have said to have graduated a tier. By this point, through his extensive studying, he had already studied through all of the available basic level textbooks - every single basic level book that looked interesting enough. He suspected his reading speed now might be even greater than some actual students’ who had been taught to read from youth, just from his constant practice. Thus, he had now moved on to solely reading the intermediate level textbooks and beyond. However, he only sped through them faster and faster, like he was racing. Part of this was because he now had the consistent help of Maisy. Whenever he had anything that he was remotely confused about, he would immediately go to Maisy and she would rapidly lead him to the right answer. Thus, his pace was incredibly quick.

Other than textbooks, Emmet read more and more reference books about the world around him and grew more and more amazed. The more he read, the more the workings of his surroundings slowly came to him like simple intuition, and he felt more connected to the world at large.

While he learned at a rapid pace, Emmet also continued to be a teacher to many other first year students at the company. It seemed that every week, more and more first years would approach him for some help. So far, Emmet was still able to help each of them without altering his schedule too much, but it was quickly becoming a time burden. However, he was insistent on continuing to help to the best of his ability. It was only because he had such a good teacher, Maisy, in his first year that he was able to achieve so much. Thus, he strove to give the best and simply-worded advice he could to help out the struggling first years.

As for his addiction to completing tasks, it never slowed. In the midst of his busy life, he still found time to do task after task. Whenever he saw something interesting that was within his realm, Emmet would stop and immediately pick it up. The more tasks he completed, the better he became with constructing, and he quickly developed a reputation among some networks of contractors as a rapid and reliable constructor. At this point, his resume had developed into quite an impressive list of accomplishments. Following Maisy’s guidelines, he included only the largest scale tasks he had completed, including some of his previous employers praises under each item, and would proudly hand the document to each new employer. Eventually, he became relatively well known among his level. Oftentimes, didn’t even have to look for tasks; there would often be contractors who would personally seek him out. Obviously, this was also helped by his reputation as having been recommended by Maisy Harbinger.

As for a certain other person who lived in his dorm...

Over the past semester, he had spotted Tauruk multiple times by coincidence, often seeing him across the street when cruising in his car. Each time, Tauruk would be gloomily looking down toward the ground, so he wouldn’t notice Emmet in return. To this day, he still didn’t realize that Emmet had ditched his hoverboard and now drove around a car.

Any time he spotted Tauruk in these moments, Emmet couldn’t help but feel a bit worried.

At this point, the guy was not looking good. He had finally managed to buy his own hoverboard, and would travel around campus riding on it instead of walking. However, every time Emmet spotted him, he looked more and more haggard, some untrimmed peach fuzz growing out on his upper lip. He had also gained weight, his stomach sagging forward a bit every time he made a turn. Clearly, he was stressed, and things didn’t seem to be going well.

This led Emmet to a realization. He had been too engrossed in his studies to pay attention before, but now he could no longer ignore it. Tauruk was technically still his ‘master,’ and he was his squire. So if Tauruk wasn’t doing well, and failed the second year cutoff, then he would be cut from the school as well! This thought made him shudder. After all this time, he definitely didn’t want to end his formations education after just two years; he still had so much to learn and experience! He had also recently noticed that Tauruk’s rank in the first year end of year assessment had been in the bottom half, and couldn’t help but worry it would stay there.

He started to try to tentatively approach Tauruk, in an effort to fulfill his duty as a squire and help him out, maybe give him some pointers, but Tauruk would not have it. Any time Emmet would approach him, Tauruk would instantly turn away and pretend to not have heard of seen him. After multiple tries, Emmet could only deflate and try to think of something else.

Eventually, he brought up the issue to Maisy. To his surprise, she quickly smiled and gave a thumbs up. “Leave it to me! You’ve got way too much potential to leave here after just two years!” After asking for Tauruk’s personal details and schedule, she told Emmet not to worry, and to just focus on improving his formations craft. She would handle everything.

That had been just two days before the end of the semester. Thus, Emmet had no idea what she had in mind yet, just how she was going to let Tauruk ascend the rankings and make the cut past second year. However, Emmet deeply trusted Maisy, so he quickly threw the distraction out of his mind. If she said so, Maisy would definitely find a way to let Emmet stay at the school!