Time slowly passed, and Emmet debugged more and more formations. The more he worked, the more experienced he became, and the more he got to know his fellow coworkers.

Eventually, he felt comfortable enough to bring his textbooks to the workplace to study when there was downtime. During breaks, he started to pull them out and look through a current chapter to attempt to understand the material. Although he couldn’t read the dense blocks of text, he could attempt to look at the diagrams to decipher a meaning.

One day during a break, Maisy spotted Emmet at a workstation looking down into a textbook, and walked over to pat him on the shoulder. “Hard at work, huh? Few squires are so ambitious to study curriculum, that’s commendable!”

“Haha, thanks, big sis Maisy…” Emmet laughed, rubbing his forehead tiredly. He slightly shook his head in exasperation. “If only I could understand any of it though…”

“Don’t get the material?” Maisy asked. “If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask me. As a seventh year, I’ve taken most of the basic level classes.” She gave a confident thumbs up. Over the past week, she had been greatly impressed with this little squire’s debugging skills, and even more so his rate of improvement, so she was more and more willing to help him out. In her opinion, he was more talented than many of the actual first year students!

“Thanks!” Emmet bowed his head, grateful for her kindness, but shortly after, let out a short sigh. “I’m probably too far gone though. I’ve never actually really learned how to read, so I can only look at the diagrams… I’ve been trying to decipher them but they’re labeled so confusingly...”

“WHAT?!” Maisy exclaimed out, gawking incredulously in his face. “You can’t read?!”

Emmet cringed a bit, surprised at Maisy’s outburst. His face quickly turned bright red, and he averted eye contact. “Y-yeah… I… don’t know how to read… no one ever taught me...”

Maisy stared incredulously at Emmet for a few moments, as if she couldn’t believe it. After seeing Emmet’s honest-looking expression, however, her face suddenly turned determined. “You know what, I’m taking matters into my own hands! From now on, during breaks, I’m gonna give you lessons. You’re gonna become a literate young man, whether you like it or not!”

His eyes lighting up, Emmet could only quickly nod.

Maisy wasn’t joking. The very next day, she brought in a basic instructional book for the letters of the alphabet. Starting from A, she began to vigorously teach Emmet the phonetic pronunciations. Emmet would listen and nod along vigorously.

These lessons continued on, day after day. Every break, Maisy would teach Emmet a bit more about the language. After the alphabet was vowels and consonants, and after that was basic words, sentence structure, grammar, etc. Emmet was a quick learner and would absorb the information quickly. All he really needed was a patient teacher to guide him through the first, and most difficult, steps. He already had a good intuition on the grammatical rules of the language from speaking, so in that aspect, progress was swift.

However, just as expected, overall advancement was still extremely painstaking and tough, at least initially. All of this writing and reading was completely new to Emmet. Learning something completely foreign, how could it be easy? Thus, Emmet worked extremely diligently, following Maisy’s every instruction. Every day, he allocated at least three hours after classes to studying the concepts Maisy had introduced, including writing out the letters, memorizing vocabulary, reading passages, and working on the grammar.

To his surprise, within a month, he was able to read a few basic picture books without any errors! Motivated by this progress, Emmet worked even harder and longer, increasing his daily studying to four hours or more. The longer and more complicated passages that Maisy would assign for Emmet to read were extremely tough, and he would have to glue himself to the text for hours at a time.

However, his hard work paid off. Before he knew it, things began to click. Once Emmet knew the letters and what they meant phonetically, he could look up words in the dictionary, opening a whole new world of opportunity. And once Emmet developed a base vocabulary, he was suddenly able to understand a large portion of the simply worded chunks in his textbooks. Then, once he picked up word after word, he could read them more and more fluently, often only having to run off to Maisy or look in a dictionary a few times per paragraph for the weirder jargon. Although it took a long time, and many patient lessons, the more he read, the more his vocabulary expanded, and eventually, he suddenly found that for the most part, he could read his textbooks just fine!

After that happened, the ideas came to Emmet like a tornado. It was like the haze had completely cleared. Forget about those fancy terms… this whole chapter here, when distilled, was just talking about that one picture on page 17 of his puzzle picture book! And that chapter there… well, that whole thing was just talking about that diagram on page 22! He was absolutely certain of this too, because just a few weeks ago, he had debugged formations of both those exact prototypes, and their structures nearly exactly matched what was in the textbook! Emmet slowly realized that he had in reality understood most of the concepts all along, but just not in the same context or form that the professors had presented it in. It was flabbergasting. Remembering just how confused he had been just weeks prior, he could only shake his head disbelievingly.

After understanding that, the progress was lightning quick. Emmet would link up the concepts in his mind, and his progress went flying. Within two months, he had completely caught up to the material in his classes, and then after that, disbelievingly almost felt the material was actually pretty simple. Although it would take upwards of a few hours to decipher through the language of a chapter, after linking the ideas with diagrams in his puzzle book and his debugging experience, Emmet would feel the concepts click within his mind instantly. Having personally worked with the structure of these ideas, and already knowing how to amend their faulty variations in physical reality, he had a leap start and could fathom them nearly instantaneously.

Although he progressed much more rapidly, there would still be occasional moments where he would have to fill the gaps, where he reached material that was completely foreign. However, even so, he spent a relatively quick amount of time studying the concepts, and after understanding the intuition, would put it into his memory and move on. Whether he knew it or not, he now had a strong base of understanding to stand on, and could learn the concepts with just a few reads.

Thus, he had plenty of time to read ahead in the textbook, and before long, quickly shot way ahead of each class’s curriculum. In actuality, the toughest thing for Emmet was memorizing the names and terminology; the rest seemed pretty understandable. It was such a drastic change that Emmet would oftentimes wonder if he really fathomed the material, or was just building off of misunderstanding after misunderstanding. However, he would go to Maisy, and she would affirm that he had the right idea.

One unexpected side effect of this amazing progress was that his confidence in himself grew. While in the beginning of the year, he was as shy and introverted as could be, completely unsure of himself, deep into the semester, his talents were now confirmed. As such, he began to carry himself more comfortably, and before long, many of his coworkers had noticed that he was walking around with his head held higher and higher, his previous unease nowhere to be seen.

Like this, a whole six months quickly passed, and the semester ended.