Nick looked at the adult person in front of him.
It had taken him three years to grow the newborn baby into its adult form.
It still wasn't alive.
A complex array of machines kept its body alive.
This human had been born brain dead, and he was still brain dead.
The machines fed it all it needed to survive.
Nutrients, water, oxygen, whatever it needed.
The human had fully grown, and it was as healthy as it could be.
And it looked just like Nick.
'You will be the one who will save humanity,' Nick thought.
Nick went below the floor of the big hall in which the newly grown human was and created more machines.
There were already Star Energy and Pure Energy generators down here, but Nick made even more.
He made more powerful ones.
At this moment, the human's Soul and its physical body were disconnected.
It had a Soul.
It had a body.
But the Soul was in stasis.
The Soul operated through the brain, and as long as the brain didn't work, the Soul couldn't connect with the body.
Yet, as long as the brain was healthy, the Soul also wouldn't vanish.
In essence, the human was turned off.
The human had already reached the Second Realm, and Nick had manipulated its advancement from the outside.
He couldn't create life that had a Soul himself, but as long as the Soul wasn't active, he could still control biology.
This meant that Nick could shape and change the human's body with his ability.
From time to time, Nick changed the neurons inside the brain.
The human was learning one Technique after the other without being alive.
After Nick had created many more Pure Energy and Star Energy generators, he made something else.
A shell.
He surrounded the human's body with the same material the Starbreaker Base was made of and changed its shape.
In the end, a powerful and tall statue was created, which surrounded the "sleeping" human.
The statue looked just like Nick but was over ten meters tall.
With the creation of the statue, the sleeping human was completely isolated from the outside world.
The only way Nick could still sense it was because he had left one of his perception drones inside.
There were also other ways to access the insides, but one needed the ability to travel through minuscule Pure Energy wires that connected Starbreaker Base with the machines inside the machine.
Nick could do that, but others couldn't.
Nick stood in front of the statue and looked at it for a while.
The hall had been explicitly designed to evoke awe.
For specific reasons, Nick had decided to take inspiration from the architecture the Ancient Ones had used to create places of worship.
In front of the gigantic and powerful statue, most humans would feel inferior and powerless.
That was exactly the effect Nick wanted to achieve.
'Now, it just needs to grow.'
Nick took a deep breath.
'Time for the next step.'
Nick's perception enveloped the world again and analyzed all the humans.
He needed to choose the next human very carefully.
As he saw the different cities, he was somewhat reminded of Crimson Fungus City.
Life was not pretty.
There were already several Adolescents in the world, but there was not a single level two Extractor.
The cities were almost completely helpless in front of an Adolescent.
Some cities were destroyed, while others were secretly controlled by intelligent Adolescents.
Food was not an issue, but there were many ways to make humans suffer without touching their food.
After looking at the world for several minutes, Nick focused on one city in particular.
This was one of the worst ones.
An Adolescent that fed on conflict was living below the city.
It constantly released a gas that made people very irritable and violent.
Since the city wasn't very big, the gas could encompass most of it.
It was densest in the middle of the city, but the effects weakened with distance.
The city center was a cutthroat world.
It was essentially lawless, and people killed each other for the smallest of reasons.
Meanwhile, the more peaceful people who avoided conflict retreated to the city's edges.
Many of them knew that something weird was going on with the city, but nobody living near the center believed them.
Sadly, the humans also couldn't retreat.
The wilderness was extremely dangerous.
If they stumbled upon a Hatchling, they would die.
So, they were forced to live on the edge of the city.
On the edges of the city lived a family of five.
An adult woman, an adult man, an older man, an extremely old woman, and a teenager.
Four generations lived in this house.
The extremely old woman was one of the few people left who had witnessed the end of the last era, which had happened a bit more than 50 years ago.
Back then, she had only been about ten years old.
The teenager living in the household liked to listen to his great-grandmother's stories from the old world.
The stories she told seemed almost magical.
People flying through the skies.
Kilometer-tall buildings.
The Champion of Light.
Aegis.
These things seemed unbelievable.
But most of all, the teenager was interested in how it felt to live in such a world.
It sounded peaceful.
People didn't fear Specters.
People lived in abundance.
Everyone could become much more powerful just by spending a bit of money.
The teenager wished he could live in such a world.
Sadly, he knew that this was just a dream.
Whenever he saw the violence in the city, he had to sigh.
People just kept fighting.
Why couldn't they work together?
If they just worked together, they could find ways to become stronger and defend against the Specters.
Naturally, the boy's beliefs were quite naïve.
And yet, they also weren't.
After all, it was possible.
The last era had shown that it was possible to fight the Specters.
Well, that was until the Sun intervened.
As the teenager looked at another murder taking place from a distance, he made a wish.
He wished that he had the power to change things.
He wanted to make the world a better place.
He was inspired by all the heroes his great-grandmother had told him about.
People were willing to sacrifice themselves for humanity.
Why couldn't the current people also do that?
If necessary, he would be the first one to step forward.
He had enough of this senseless fighting and violence.
Sadly, he knew that he didn't have the power.
'It's him,' Nick thought.
Nick gathered his Zephyx.
And then, the teenager vanished.
'You will be humanity's Emperor.'
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