"Open an employee entrance. Full security measures," Nick ordered.
"Affirmative."
Nick had seen all the details of the Containment Unit, and he knew that entering was not dangerous to him.
One of the walls of the Containment Unit turned liquid and parted, creating an entrance.
Nick could see the Jolly Cannibal through the open door, and the Jolly Cannibal looked back with a smile.
Nick smiled back.
Naturally, Nick wouldn't smile like this usually, but the Jolly Cannibal believed that Nick was a human.
Smiling after accomplishing something like this would be a normal human reaction.
He stepped through the entrance, and the Jolly Cannibal laughed.
Nick approached one of the walls and created several vibrations.
"Teach me your language," he said.
An expression of realization appeared on the Jolly Cannibal.
The next moment, he appeared beside another wall.
It moved so quickly that Nick hadn't even seen it move.
It was like it had teleported.
Several vibrations followed, and the Jolly Cannibal said the fitting words.
After around 30 minutes of this, the Jolly Cannibal just taught Nick all the relevant words via voice transmission.
Nick already knew the basics of the language.
Communicating via voice transmission was literally tens of thousands of times faster than communicating via vibrations, which was already around ten times faster than talking.
The limit of voice transmission was the thinking speed of both parties.
Within five minutes, Nick had become a master at the language of the Enlightened Ones.
The Jolly Cannibal had simply given Nick the definitions of about 200,000 words, and Nick could easily remember them.
Finally, Nick could properly communicate with the Jolly Cannibal.
"Bring in the corpses," Nick ordered.
"Affirmative."
The five drones entered through the entrance and emptied their bellies.
The eight corpses had been transformed into long and hard meat sticks.
When the Jolly Cannibal saw the sticks, it smiled with excitement.
It slowly walked forward, grabbed one of the sticks, and took a bite.
Nick could feel the production of Zephyx, and the Containment Unit absorbed 99% of it.
"I am the new Emperor," Nick said.
While it took another bite, the Jolly Cannibal looked at him. "You're a bit weak for an Emperor."
"There are stronger humans outside, but I am the leader of the true resistance. You most likely know what I'm talking about," Nick transmitted.
"I know," the Jolly Cannibal said with a laugh. "I'm one of the knowledge transmitters. At least, that's what they called me."
It was a bit risky to give the Jolly Cannibal his identity, but it was necessary to make the transfer of knowledge as smooth as possible.
Nick didn't need to ask the Jolly Cannibal about its loyalties.
It was obvious.
The Jolly Cannibal was only loyal to itself.
Its next step was becoming an Eternal, and it knew that the Sun would never let it become one.
In fact, it knew very well that it would be killed as soon as the Sun knew that it still existed.
Keeping such an immense repository of knowledge alive was far too dangerous.
This meant that the Jolly Cannibal relied on Nick.
They were bound together.
If Nick died, the base would deactivate again, and it would lose all access to food.
And if Nick succeeded… well…
Then, it could continue living without any worries.
Sure, it was extremely dangerous, but it was contained.
Killing it was akin to wasting money.
The Jolly Cannibal had the valuable ability to generate Zephyx without having to destroy the world around it.
It just needed some corpses.
It was essentially a Zephyx generator.
And if the Sun were destroyed and humanity became free…
It could just eat for all eternity inside the Containment Unit.
Most likely, humanity would also find a way to make it into an Eternal.
The true path to power and survival for the Jolly Cannibal was to work together with Nick.
So, they had a shared goal.
The demise of the aliens.
"I will tell you about what we know about history," Nick said.
Then, Nick transmitted basically everything he knew about history to the Jolly Cannibal.
"Wow, seems like the Specters are way worse than back then," the Jolly Cannibal said.
"There were more Adversaries back then, but most of them only appeared after humanity became strong enough to suppress them."
"Compared to the current era, our era had it much easier," the Jolly Cannibal said.
"Was the Nightmare a thing back then?" Nick asked.
"No," it answered. "We had nothing like that. We also didn't have the Maw, the Null, or Nurse Alice."
Nick furrowed his brows.
He knew that they didn't have the Maw, the Nightmare, or Nurse Alice, but he didn't know that the Null also hadn't existed back then.
"Did you have any Eternals?" Nick asked.
"We had five of them, excluding the Sun," the Jolly Cannibal said. "I assume they were all killed when the era reset since all of them had been contained."
"There was the Eternal Terror. It was a traveling Force Specter that scared everyone to death. Luckily, it moved very slowly."
"There was also the Global Starvation. That was a Physical Specter that made eating extremely painful for everyone."
"There was also this guy I really hated. He was called the Infinite Rot, and he made it so that any organism that died rotted within twenty minutes. You had to consume everything very quickly, or it would rot inside your mouth."
"We also had someone that was similar to Nurse Alice. The Despair Harvester. Any human who lost hope just died."
"Lastly, we had the Trial Master. This guy was like the Maw. It forced powerful people into a fight to the death inside their minds against artificial opponents. If you lose, you never wake up. If you win,you will forget everything that happened in the dream within the next couple of minutes."
Nick nodded.
'Normal people had it worse back then, but powerful people had it easier. The Trial Master was the only one who was an issue for the powerful people.'
'Meanwhile, we have the Maw, which completely suppresses humanity's peak powers.'
'We also had to deal with the Envious Researcher.'
'Life back then was miserable for the normal people, but the stronger ones were in less danger.'
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