Over the next three years, Nick captured a couple of Demons, which he delivered to Aegis, and three more Hero traitors.
By now, there were four Containment Units that were torturing humanity's traitors, and Nick's Zephyx generation had increased by quite a bit.
'The intensity of suffering truly makes a great difference,' Nick thought. 'With just these four Heroes, my speed is almost equal to killing one of the Corruptors and causing an entire region to go into an uproar.'
Originally, with just the guards, Nick estimated that he would become a Peak Demon when he was 130 years old.
But with the new intensity, he believed that he would advance at the age of about 105.
'The faster I advance, the faster I can help humanity.'
Naturally, while Nick was capturing the traitors and Specters, he also spent time with the suppressed Adversary.
Sadly, not much progress had been made within these couple of years since they were getting into the real difficult stuff.
Making Star Energy with a portable device was brutally difficult.
Another piece of bad news was that Nick hadn't been able to find or contact War's newest servant.
It was like War's newest servant was not using Greater Relays at all.
'Either it's using a new form of communication, or it gives its orders in person. I can't be sure which is true.'
At this moment, Nick was listening to the Adversary while practicing his Zephyx Manipulation.
Nick was only listening to the Adversary half-heartedly since it was talking too slowly, and he was fully focused on his Zephyx Manipulation.
By now, Nick had trained his Zephyx Manipulation for several decades, and he had become quite good at it.
'That should do it,' he thought as he imagined a complex diagram of manipulation lines.
He looked through it several times,making sure that he hadn't made a mistake.
'I practiced Zephyx Manipulation for so long, and while it has given me a couple of useful abilities, none of them had been good enough to properly integrate into my Specter Core.'
Naturally, creating abilities from scratch was beyond difficult. The efficiency of these abilities was pretty bad, at best.
Most of the time, one would need to use a crazy amount of Zephyx just to perform a slightly useful party trick.
But after decades of focusing on it, Nick finally developed an ability that was useful.
He had already tested this ability several times, and it seemed to work.
Sadly, without integrating it into his Specter Core, the effect was limited.
'My time here is about up anyway,' Nick thought as he punched a couple of words into the Containment Unit.
"Sad: Alright. See you later then!" the Specter answered.
Nick went one room up and sat down.
'I haven't integrated a self-made ability into my Specter Core yet. It should work, but I've never tested it.'
Nick closed his eyes and focused on his Specter Core.
In his mind, he saw an extremely complex and almost endless pattern of manipulation lines.
He knew what a couple of them did, but most of them were completely alien to him.
If it were that easy to analyze how Specters achieved something, everyone could have whatever ability they wanted.
'Probably only Shields have the mental capacity to properly analyze these natural manipulation lines.'
In Nick's mind, the Specter Core unwrapped and turned into a long and oval diagram.
It was so gigantic and complex.
There were six complex diagrams traveling out from a single point, which represented the center of Nick's Specter Core.
Two of these diagrams were further split in two, making them take up more space than the other ones.
'Those are from the Nightmare and the Maw. Technically, they only gave me one ability each, but that ability has different effects.'
Nick looked around.
'There's so much space left. I can probably fit over 50 more of these complex diagrams in here.'
'However, my primary diagrams will probably take up more space when I advance. I should place my new ability somewhere that won't interfere with the growth of the others.'
In Nick's mind, a new diagram appeared above his right arm.
It was extremely complex, but compared to the others, this was barely anything.
Its entire size was probably less than 1% of the size of any of these abilities.
'Complexity, efficiency, effectiveness,' Nick thought. 'Each of these three aspects impacts the others.'
'When you want to reduce the complexity, the efficiency will get worse, and the effectiveness will also reduce.'
'If you want to increase efficiency, complexity will increase, and the effectiveness will decrease.'
'If you want to increase the effectiveness, efficiency will suffer, and the ability will become more complex.'
Nick looked at the gigantic diagrams.
'These are complex beyond imagination, but that makes their effectiveness and efficiency top-notch. For what these abilities do, they barely need any Zephyx.'
'But that makes them almost impossible to understand. I don't know how many people in history managed to understand such complex patterns, but it couldn't have been many. Most likely, only the level nine Extractors of the Enlightened Ones managed to understand these diagrams.'
Nick looked back at his self-made diagram.
'Compared to these diagrams, mine is just a kid's drawing.'
Nick sighed.
'That's the power of the Sun.'
'Since the Sun grants the Specters these abilities, the Sun must understand them.'
'Yet, the Sun doesn't seem to be conscious or intelligent.'
'It's just a machine.'
'This means that the aliens know how these work, and they managed to create a machine that could just assign such complex abilities to Specters.'
'And humans are just copying them with their Zephyx Synchronizer.'
'That's also why a human's abilities barely improve with power. The abilities are static, and the only difference that power makes is the amount of Zephyx a human can push through the diagrams.'
'But Specter's abilities improve.'
'Why is that? The Sun, obviously.'
'The Sun doesn't interact with Zephyx Synchronizers, but it interacts with Specter Cores.'
'It advances the abilities of Specters when they grow more powerful.'
Nick looked at his diagram for a while.
Then, he put it down beside the bottom of the Nightmare's ability.
Nick's diagram had already ended when the Nightmare's diagram had just barely started to prepare.
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