Nick left the underground city to clear his mind.
'My multiplication factor has increased from six to seven. With this, I am one step closer to talking with Nurse Alice.'
'I just wish I wouldn't need to do all of that.'
'Sadly, my life is not mine.'
'It belongs to humanity.'
Then, Nick focused on the world.
'Many people know a lot about me, but I can't just delete my information from all of their minds.'
'If one city didn't know about me, that's just an outlier. If all cities suddenly start forgetting that I exist, it will be suspicious.'
Nick looked at the Sun.
The beam leading to the Sun was just as red as the beam leading to the Champion. In fact, it was even a bit redder since the Sun knew about his newest ability.
At this moment, the Sun was the being that knew the most about him.
This meant that Nick could no longer improve his multiplication factor.
After all, to delete the Sun's memory of him, he would need to find every alien who knew about him, and to do that, he needed to find all of the aliens first.
And the aliens were not on Earth.
'Sevenfold is as high as it will go.'
'That's still an improvement of 40% compared to my old ability.'
Nick focused on Earth's development.
A couple of days ago, the Shark Mother had also been suppressed.
Aegis was growing at a terrifying rate.
'There's not much I can do for now. I have pushed my multiplication factor as much as I can, and now, I need to become an Early Adversary.'
'But that won't be as easy.'
'I could cause suffering to the Shields, but that will only be momentary suffering, and it won't be as strong as directly causing them suffering.'
'The growth of an Adversary is slow due to a lack of Shields.'
'Aria is only a Late Protector, and everyone else in the underground city is weaker.'
'Advancing will take a while, but I don't have another option.'
'It's the fastest way I have.'
'Nevertheless,I should put on a show for the Sun.'
'Otherwise, it will question the source of all the Zephyx I am creating.'
Nick had to mess with Aegis once again to find an excuse for his Zephyx generation.
'There are many ways to mess with Zephyx, and since I am going to need a lot of Zephyx, I will be using most of them.'
This time, it wasn't Nick's goal to delay Aegis' progress in technology.
No, this time, his goal was to make the Shields suffer.
It was not a nice thing to do, but he needed to do it.
The first thing Nick did was to travel to the bottom of the ocean.
Just a bit below the ocean's bottom, Nick started to summon one material after the other.
The materials were perfectly in line with the architecture of the Suffering Ones, the era that came after the Enlightened Ones.
The materials were not very hard, but they would be quite impressive and expensive to the Suffering Ones.
After creating a big ruin, Nick created a couple of old machines in the ruin.
Finally, he created a crate.
The crate would be made with the absolute best materials the Suffering Ones could make.
At that point, Nick took out some machines he had gotten from Deep Core Base and started to print materials.
The materials had to be made with Pure Energy, which meant that Nick couldn't conjure them himself.
Over the next hours, Nick assembled a machine.
It was half-broken, but it still kinda worked.
Finally, he put the machine into the crate and hid it in the center of the ruin.
The machine Nick had created could print materials made with Pure Energy that reached the fourth level.
Materials of that level were not special.
Aegis could theoretically create materials that could even contain an Initial Eternal.
Meanwhile, this thing could only withstand the power of an Elder.
However, these were materials made with Pure Energy, and Aegis couldn't produce such materials.
Even more, this was one of the extremely few machines that didn't need a Seed.
Nick made it seem machine had been created before Seeds had been a thing.
If someone found this ruin, they would think that the Suffering Ones had managed to retrieve a machine from the Enlightened Ones that worked without a Seed.
This would be an insanely valuable find.
Sure, the materials it produced were not great, but if they could learn how the machine did it, they could learn how to make stronger materials.
Nick looked at the crate.
'But opening this crate doesn't represent progression.'
'It represents degression.'
The reason for that was simple.
This was not a machine made by the Enlightened Ones.
Nick had made the machine.
And he had made it as convoluted and filled with errors as possible.
It still did its job most of the time, but it would do so by taking only wrong steps.
There was absolutely incorrect usage of Pure Energy, which would waste an insane amount.
There were countless unnecessary transformations of Pure Energy.
It essentially took the amount of Pure Energy needed to create a level six material and only made a level four material.
On top of that, the material wasn't very stable.
It would look fine for a while, but after a couple of years, it would start to expand and become weaker.
Trying to understand the machine and use its workings for other things was like trying to understand the basics of physics by only looking at quantum physics.
The person would be looking at teleporting particles that did completely random things while trying to understand why water turned into steam when heated.
Sure, it was related, but trying to understand basic water physics by looking at quantum physics would lead to insane confusion.
One just needed to know that the water molecules would gain enough energy to break free from their liquid state.
Another metaphor would be a person trying to learn the population of the city they were in by inspecting all the grass and stone of the city under a microscope.
It would take decades to learn how the machine worked, and in the end, they would learn nothing.
It would just tell them what not to do.
There would be progress, but the effort put in would far outweigh the progress made.
'That should take care of the Tinkerer's suffering and any researchers below her.'
'Now, for the others…'
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The author's . If he gets more than 1000€ per month, he will increase the number of words in the chapter.