Kill the Sun

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.

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.

Protection.

It was very difficult to create a connection fast enough that it could absorb Zephyx from a Specter at a speed that would allow it to block a significant blow.

As it stood now, if Nick got hit by any attack that would absorb more than 10% of his Zephyx, his Barrier would just collapse and turn off.

Working on fixing that would take a long time.

However, that function also wasn't very important for Specters.

If a human received a significant injury to their head, their neck, or their upper chest, they would die almost immediately.

Meanwhile, a Specter would only die when their Specter Core received significant damage.

Even more, compared to humans, Specters could move their Specter Core.

If Nick expected a gigantic attack to hit his upper body, he could move his Specter Core to one of his feet.

Then, even if everything above Nick's waist exploded into pieces,he would still be able to regenerate and survive.

Lastly, regrowing parts of a body was, most of the time, more Zephyx efficient than blocking an attack with a Barrier.

However, except for these two things, the Diet Specter Barrier could do everything that a normal Barrier could.

By the way, the reason for the Diet in the name was the lack of defensive capabilities.

It essentially lacked the one thing that made Barriers so important to humans.

"If you can send complaints, you can basically do everything else as well," the Technician said with a smirk, scrolling through different numbers on his Barrier.

Strangely enough, causing a former Governor's sentence to increase was the action with the most safety checks.

The only reason why it needed that many safety checks was because all the different departments needed to be contacted when that happened, and they all automatically asked for their individual identity checks.

Nick just wordlessly nodded.

"How's your camouflaging going?" the Technician asked.

"We are on it," Nick answered.

With we, Nick was referring to himself and Ghosty.

The Technician was dealing with all of the technical things while Ghosty was focusing on Zephyx Manipulation.

While Ghosty knew more about Zephyx Manipulation than the average Governor, he still wasn't a big authority on the subject.

Any random Protector knew more about this topic than him.

However, the Technician was fully focused on the technology aspect and didn't have time to deal with Zephyx Manipulation at the time.

The Technician simply called for Nick whenever he needed him to test something before sending him away again to continue theorizing on his own.

Of course, he also focused on technologies other than just Barriers.

In fact, as long as Nick could interact with human society via his Barrier, the Technician saw the topic as finished.

The main thing the Technician focused on was Zephology.

In order to create powerful materials,humanity needed gigantic and advanced machines.

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.