"But from the way the principal talked about them… her wary tone. I could tell they're not just any ordinary Fifth Stage Core Masters."
Christian stayed silent, letting her words sink in.
Ordinary Fifth Stage Core Masters, huh?
He found himself stuck on that term.
Ordinary or not, wouldn't it still only take a single thought from someone at that level to kill him?
And the principal… she was already at the Sixth Stage.
Just how many years would it take for him to grind his way up to that level?
Christian let out a quiet breath and shook his head.
He gave no comment on Olivia's casual tone when speaking of stages of power… levels that both he and even she would likely need hundreds of years to reach.
She seemed to have her sights set awfully high…
But did she not realize? The time required to reach the next stage increased drastically with every step forward.
He had taken nearly six months just to reach the First Stage.
The Second? He estimated it would take at least two full years, and that was already being generous.
The Third? That could take over a decade on its own.
Christian didn't know the full extent of Olivia's talent.
But judging from her rate of progress so far, he could estimate that her talent was roughly on par with his sister's.
A far cry from someone like Nina, or even her own mother, Eva.
So then… where exactly did her confidence come from?
Was there something he didn't know?
In the end, Christian chose not to dampen her mood. Instead, he simply continued the conversation with her.
Hearing more about the pair, Dravik and Sylen, Christian didn't think much of it. There was no hostility between them, after all.
He just planned that later, once he had enough strength, he would make them kneel lightly before Eva. Just enough for her to see that they were nothing special in the end… and that was all.
Like that, before long, his conversation with Olivia came to an end.
With silence enveloping the office, Christian found his thoughts drifting.
His mind returned to Eva, who had been in a low mood lately.
And he couldn't help but wonder… should he really have a child with her?
Strangely, a part of him suddenly wanted it.
A child, one that truly belonged to the both of them.
… But was he really ready for that?
Feeling like he was skipping ahead in life too fast, without resolving the many present problems, Christian stood up.
He decided it was better to get his body moving and focus on work, rather than stay seated, tangled in thoughts.
He walked into his workshop, where Alpha's incomplete body lay, and started working.
Christian sat hunched over his workbench, surrounded by a clutter of wires, fiber-optic strands, miniature tubing, and other custom mechanical parts. His gloved hands moved with careful precision.
He should have already finished Alpha's body, at least according to his initial estimates.
But over the past few months, he had made countless adjustments and upgrades.
Parts he had completed were taken apart and replaced.
Systems he once believed to be optimal, even things he had been proud of, no longer met his standards.
His knowledge was constantly upgrading, and with it, so did the designs.
What once seemed satisfactory, no longer felt acceptable.
And Alpha was unlike Zero, whose body he had rushed to complete.
With Alpha, he could afford to take his time.
So, even if it meant scrapping components he had painstakingly crafted, he still chose to start over again and again.
Even then, it shouldn't take more than a few months to finish her. And this time—he meant it.
Christian wasn't too concerned about Alpha's completion time anymore.
What weighed more heavily on his mind was Iris's body.
With Iris, he still couldn't even see the finish line.
The design is for her to have a micro fusion core… as in, a miniature nuclear reactor, as her energy source, after all.
But creating something of that complexity wasn't just a matter of effort or time.
It wasn't something he could invent so easily, not yet.
After all, he still hadn't finished studying all of the mechanical knowledge available in the modern world.
Until then, there was no foundation for him to advance the technology on his own.
So Christian didn't dwell on what remained far off. Instead, he focused on what his hands could do now.
Thinking about body related problems, he couldn't help but be reminded of Eva and her condition once again.
Because, he had discovered that Eva possessed a special physique.
It was something extremely rare. But with the rise in his knowledge base regarding essence, he was still able to reach that conclusion in the end.
Still, the problem wasn't that she had a unique physique. Instead, that her physique had a problem.
And that only made things harder and harder for him, especially since he had yet to even identify what kind of physique it was.
Even so, while the problem seemed to grow increasingly complex, Christian wasn't too discouraged.
Thanks to the ever-growing influx of people from other worlds, he was constantly expanding the knowledge available to him.
So, at some point, he was bound to uncover everything he needed to understand her condition.
Whether the situation of more people arriving from other worlds, was actually a good thing or not, one might wonder.
But for Christian, it was a good thing.
After all, most of the newly appearing groups weren't as overwhelmingly powerful as the earlier arrivals, who had been around the fifth or even sixth stage. And they are too wary of the older groups. So, they are behaving in a careful way.
And, more importantly—how were they arriving?
Meaning, they were coming through space.
Of course, they didn't possess those abilities themselves. Even the principal, a powerhouse at the sixth stage, couldn't teleport between worlds under her own power.
Each group had its own method, and means that allowed them to be transferred here.
And Christian, who had been eavesdropping on countless people, was slowly collecting pieces of information related to space itself from them.
Which meant, in the not-so-distant future, he could finally begin working on his sister's space technique.