Kill the Sun - Chapter 677

The Diet Specter Barrier.

Naturally, it was the Technician who gave this Barrier its name.

One of the biggest projects the three of them had been working on was creating a Barrier with functionalities similar to the standard Aegis Barriers but usable by Specters.

A Barrier from Aegis had a surprising number of functions, which was why it took so long to produce a working prototype.

Well, one year wasn't long for normal people, but one year of work by the best researcher in the world was a lot.

Originally, the Barrier was supposed to be identical to a normal Barrier, but the Left Arm put in a veto.

While the Left Arm secretly supported Nick and saw him as a human, she couldn't make it public.

She had to appear as if she believed Nick was a full Specter and that she distrusted him.

So, she "forced" the Technician to make any Specter Barrier distinct.

This meant that the Barrier had to be a different color.

In this case, black.

It was also imperative that it was impossible to change the color of the Barrier without completely destroying and rebuilding it.

It was also important that all attributes except for the ones governing permissions of the owner had to be "abnormal" as further indication.

So, the Technician just put guest everywhere.

These two things made Nick's Barrier impossible to overlook and not find strange, and that was the point.

No Specter should ever be able to travel through human society without raising several eyebrows.

The Left Arm even ordered that all Specter Barriers sent a log of their activity to the Technician and the Left Arm, but the Technician managed to refuse that order by complaining about too much work. He would do that in the future, but since they only had a single one, he wouldn't implement it.

Naturally, in secret, they had already talked about this change.

This was only a smokescreen to make it seem like the Left Arm was being draconian on the restrictions,while the Technician just wanted to relax.

This little conflict would make it seem like the two of them were working together but still had disagreements.

The researchers had also seen the black Barrier a couple of times, but they weren't really surprised about that.

They didn't know what the color of the Barrier signified, but it was normal for prototypes to look different from standard models.

Thanks to the Specter Barrier, Nick could now traverse human society again.

However, there were two functions that Nick didn't have access to.

One of them was the database.

Due to security reasons, no Specter Barrier was allowed to access the database. If a Specter needed to know something, a member of Aegis would tell them.

Naturally, this was also just a security measure to put on a show.

Nick had free access to a terminal in the Technician's office, where Ghosty was logged in.

He could read whatever he wanted in the database via that.

The other function that wasn't included was also the biggest and most important function of normal Barriers.

The more powerful the material, the more advanced the machine had to be to manufacture it.

In general, the durability of materials was classified by rank.

Rank one materials didn't have any Zephyx inside them, while rank nine materials could theoretically suppress any Eternal.

Of course, the most powerful materials in actual existence were rank eight materials, and they could only be created in Aegis' headquarters and only by the Technician personally.

The machine that created these materials was over 20 meters wide, and the Technician needed to use a ridiculous amount of Zephyx to create just a small bit.

The process is also extremely lengthy.

When people heard that, they felt awe at the marvel of such advanced technology.

However, if people could actually see the machine and knew a bit about Zephology, they would be terrified.

This thing was a chaotic mess!

The wiring was about as chaotic as the veins of an organism, and no single function was localized on only one spot!

It was like everything was happening everywhere on the device.

The issue with that was that humanity technically wasn't advanced enough to create something like that yet.

The workings of the machine were so complicated that the Technician forgot what the first half of the machine did before finishing the calculation.

It was like a person that went on so many tangents that they forgot what they had been talking about originally.

A huge chunk of the Technician's time was spent on increasing the power of the machine, while about 20 researchers were working on isolating parts of the machine to create smaller machines, which could be shipped to individual cities and strongholds to increase output.

However, this machine would become obsolete if Nick managed to master conjuring materials.

Nick's ability to conjure materials was what the Technician was most interested in.

Because of that,he kept working on a way to quantify different materials into terms that Nick could use to conjure said materials.

If he managed to achieve that, he could make Nick create extremely advanced materials that were useful to humanity.

Alternatively, he could also teach other Specters how to generate these materials and create some form of Specter Material Factory!

While this new technology wouldn't be able to deliver supremely advanced materials for decades, it had vastly more potential and scalability.

In the long term, this would make the old way of creating materials obsolete.

If more materials could be produced with less Zephyx, the prices of all the devices would drop significantly, allowing Extractors and Manufacturers to buy more gadgets.

Right now, cities could only mass produce rank three materials, which was also the reason why most cities had walls that could defend against Adults.

Nevertheless, building and maintaining these walls was a big drain on the economies.

Rank four materials could also be produced by the cities, but they couldn't be produced in big quantities. 90% of rank four materials were used on Containment Units capable of suppressing Elders.

Only very few cities could produce their own rank five materials.

Crimson City had been one of them due to Ghosty.

If a city couldn't produce a material, they needed to buy it from Aegis.

And that was expensive.