CHAPTER 138: A RELAXING DAY? NAH... LET’S MAKE INFINITE ENERGY INSTEAD

The next day arrived a lot earlier than Ethan would have liked it to.

Apparently, when you had multiple minds that needed rest at the same time, sleep didn’t last as long as it should have.

His mental processing speed worked against him , a few hours of rest felt like a full night’s cycle to the system-enhanced parts of his brain, even though his body clearly disagreed.

After a couple of minutes spent laying on the bed and just looking at the high ceiling, he sighed, moved off the bed and headed towards the bathroom.

After ten minutes, he finally stepped out, toweling his hair dry before moving to the sink. The mirror was still fogged, and when he wiped a hand across it, his reflection stared back.

His blue eyes let out a subtle glow as they looked back at him.

Compared to his self a couple of months back, just after his regression, he could see his progress being reflected back at him.

Well, that might be because ONI was still active but still.

Ethan shook his head, chuckling faintly as he tossed the towel onto the rack and walked out of the bathroom.

His apartment was still half-furnished minimalist, and painfully empty....save for the furniture that came with the place.

He knew María would hate the way it currently looked, as it had no homey touch to it.

He had intentionally chosen not to buy anything permanent.... at least, that’s what he told himself, but the truth was, he sucked at decorating.

Ethan stood in the middle of the living room, mug in hand, staring at the blank wall opposite the couch.

An art or two would make a world of difference but he had no idea what to buy... So instead of just randomly choosing and having to look at it every, he preferred to leave the wall as is.

Besides, the view through the window was a work of art of itself.

The sun had just begun to rise over Atlanta, painting streaks of gold and amber across the skyline. From his window, Ethan could see the city slowly come to life.

He took a sip of his coffee, the bitterness successfully supplementing any bit of sleep his body needed.

It was pretty relaxing just standing here and looking at the world below. He really had to remind himself to take simple breaks like this, away from everything else, unlike in his previous life.

He stood there for a while longer, watching as the sun slowly rose past the horizon before a ding from his phone interrupted the moment.

He reached for the phone resting on the counter, glancing at the screen.

It was a message from Isabela.

[Morning, Ethan. We’re settled in. Base systems are online. Vigilants are already arguing about who gets the best room.]

[P.S. — You owe me coffee for making me deal with them.]

A smile appeared on his face as he read.

[That’s good... oh, and as for the coffee... we’ll see.]

Almost instantly, a new bubble appeared.

[Cheap. You’re cheap.]

Isabela had become a lot comfortable with him ever since she found out he had saved the Vigilants.

They were close enough now, for jokes like this to be exchanged which was a good thing.

If she was this comfortable with him now, then that meant her loyalty was also with him.

Another message came through before he could set the phone down.

[Anyway, we’ll send a a detailed report of our new base later, but for now, everything looks good.]

Ethan could practically hear the smile on her face through the message. He could feel that she really cared for the Vigilants, even if she didn’t want them to know.

He knew that she was this happy because she knew they were completely safe right now....or as safe as possible.

Ethan then typed back:

[Good. Let the team take it easy today. No heavy assignments until I say so.]

A few seconds passed. Then:

[Well, that’ll be hard since they are impossibly motivated due to the challenge you gave. They’re already running tests for fun. Zero’s trying to ’break into Sentinel,’ apparently.]

That made him let out a quiet chuckle. Of course they were, it’s not everyday you’d get the chance to make half a billion in a single job.

An impossibly hard one but a single job nonetheless.

[Let him try. It’ll be good practice.]

He put the phone into his pocket and took another slow sip of his coffee, savoring the warmth as the caffeine did its work.

He put the cup in the sink and moved towards his home lab. Today being the weekend didn’t mean he had nothing to do.

Though as it seemed, maybe he needed a new hobby. But for now tinkering in tech was the only thing that sounded remotely fun to him.

Walking into the lab, he put on a pair of gloves and his lab coat before moving towards the work desk.

Close to it was something that was vaguely the shape of a massage chair, covered up with a cloth.

This was a ’little’ side project he had been working on since his return. It hadn’t been registered in the system’s inventions tab yet because it was incomplete, but that was about to change.

Tapping his work table, the metallic top let out a ripple before before it shifted, revealing a compartment below.

Inside were several palm-sized metallic cores — prototypes he’d made himself. Most of them were half-finished, unstable, or outright failures from the past two weeks.

He picked one up, turning it over in his gloved hand.

It had several glowing blue lines running right all the way across its surface.

"Athena?" He called out as he scanned the core with ONI.

{This one seems more stable, there’s a 10% chance that it’d just blow up though.} Athena answered.

"That’s good enough," Ethan said, "it’s a whole lot stabler than the previous ones."

Where were these cores?

Well, they were just little things that could basically provide infinite energy....

An idea that Einstein would definitely have an issue with.

But how did he achieve it or rather, how was he going about to achieve it?

He hadn’t.

Not yet.

At least, not completely.

Ethan set the core back down on the table, exhaling slowly. The truth was, he wasn’t creating infinite energy. He was trying to mimic the illusion of it.

A closed-loop energy cycle, one that could continuously recycle and convert output into renewed input without significant loss.

A system that didn’t break the laws of thermodynamics but bent them just enough to make quite a few scholars squint in confusion.

It was impossible to make an energy system that had zero loss of energy, that was the only part he had to deal with before he could say he truly achieved Infinite Energy.

But he was close enough.

Though, this pet project wasn’t for the world yet. Releasing something like this now would be the equivalent of handing a loaded railgun to a toddler, pretty cool, yes, but world-ending if handled wrong.

Plus, he, even with his multiple minds, was not ready for the headache that would spark.. At least, not until his end goal for OmniMed was achieved.

So no, this was just for him.

It was the product of sleepless nights and an unholy mix of physics, quantum mechanics, and what Athena had once called ’Ethanian stubbornness.’

It was supposed to be the beating heart of his next creation, the Simulation Chamber.

Well, unlike the system’s simulation chamber, this wasn’t an actual simulation chamber...

It was a virtual world capable of emulating reality down to the quantum level—or at least close enough that the difference would be imperceptible to the human mind.

In other words, Ethan was building a reality inside reality.

Why?

Well, that’s where the simulation part came in.

In that world, Ethan controlled every single thing from the flow of time to the laws of physics themselves—though, for now, only in theory.

The prototype couldn’t support a full environment yet; what he had so far was more like a sandbox for ideas.

Though the difference between it and the system was that the system only simulated the performance of tech created with the TDI, while this?

With this he planned on actually simulating decisions made in the real world. It was his Magnum Opus.

With data that Athena would collect through Sentinel he’d just feed it into the machine, giving it access to real-time human data and therefore predictions of the actions of said humans.

It would be like future sight but with VR data prediction.

The simulation chamber would let him see the consequences of his actions play out in real time.

But.... All that was for the distant future... Right now, it was no more than a fancy chair that could send you into a full body VR world.

He placed the core into the slot on the side of the covered chair, the faint hum of energy resonating through the lab as the lights along the base of the chair came to life.

"Let’s hope it doesn’t explode.." he said with crossed fingers.