Chapter 330: A Po' Boy Once Mo'
"We have to buy the psionic shielding, since we don't know if they can communicate using their minds. If they can, and our minds aren't shielded, they'll probably be able to read ours. Or even control them! That would be devastating," Aron said. He definitely couldn't afford to give up the upper hand by allowing the aliens to invade the thoughts of humans.
"Plus, with the mind control defense knowledge, we might even be able to extrapolate how to control the minds of other intelligent beings."
[When it comes to kinetic weapons, we don't need to buy those. We're already far ahead in that category and we'll only continue advancing,] Nova said, resulting in Aron striking the kinetic weapons knowledge off the list.
"Plus, we can use the disintegration function of the atomic printers as a weapon, as long as we can figure out how to increase its range." Aron received a look of approval from Nova. She wasn't capable of creative leaps of logic like that, so it was something she truly appreciated about him.
[Not only that, but it can also be used in many different ways. It can be used to board enemy ships, as a stealth infiltrator by breaching and dropping surveillance devices, or even as a bioweapon. We just need to strengthen it so it can handle the stress of being fired from a coilgun.]
"By the way, how are the golden research labs doing? We've only used a tiny bit of their results," Aron asked. There was much to implement from the golden labs in Lab City and he had only tapped into a small bit of their potential.
[They're about in the same place as their conventional counterparts. The difficulty is that you're the only person who can inscribe and charge runes,] Nova answered as she showed him some parts of the tech completed by the golden labs.
"Let's see if there's any tech we can use to help us solve that problem," Aron said and went on a window shopping spree again.
"Now that's way too expensive even though I'm flush with SP right now," he said when he found what he was looking for.
[Runic Imprinting, tier 1
They say laziness is the father of all discoveries, and this technology follows that rule. It was discovered by a runic imprinting worker from a magitech civilization who hated spending his time and energy imprinting runes. The hard work drained his mental energy and stamina, leading to a rocky marriage, and due to wanting to remain with his wife, he had an epiphany and built a device that could do the work for him. As a result, he ended up the richest, most powerful man of that civilization.
Price: 15,000,000,000sp]
Despite his complaining, Aron still added it to his list to buy later. "Although we can earn more SP the more tech we release to humanity, it would be counterproductive right now. But once Earth is united, there'll be no need to hold back anymore and we can start a cycle of massive SP farming.
...
"Now I'm poor again," Aron sighed as he looked at the pitiful 100 SP remaining on his system screen.
"When the system is finished assimilating the new knowledge, you can start integrating it into Lab City and test simulation 01," he said. The researchers in Lab City had given him pleasant surprises before, so he hoped they would do the same with the recent purchases, whether they were whole or in part. It would be difficult to produce further research results on technologies he had wholly purchased, but his partial purchases had branched out into multiple directions and his whole technologies had been used in some very creative ways. In fact, if Earth wasn't currently pressed for time, he would have preferred to only buy technologies piecemeal, as it was cost-effective to give the creative minds in Lab City a starting point and let them have their head determining where to go from there.
All the technologies that were being sent were things that Nova hadn't found inside the universal simulation. She'd spent the last week checking and compiling a list of their current tech, which had delayed Aron's shopping spree by a week. It had been a worthwhile tradeoff, though, as he now had a better idea of what they needed after discovering everything they already knew.
The new tech also included the knowledge of nanotechnology and megastructures, as there were two civilizations that had developed enough to ascend to an entirely new reality, and each of them were fanatic about one of those fields.
The civilization that had fanatically researched, invented, built, and improved megastructures had begun doing so when they discovered that their planet would face a devastating supernova shockwave from a relatively close solar system. They began by building a massive shield around their planet, then eventually emigrated from the surface of their world to a Dyson sphere around their star. From there, they learned how to harness black holes, and eventually discovered a way to use them to travel to different dimensions and left the material world behind entirely.
The one that focused on nanotechnology, on the other hand, had been forced to do so when faced with a civilization of marauders that used nanobots as weapons. The marauders would launch a "gray goo" style apocalypse on planets, or other celestial objects, then harvest them for technology and resources. The civilization that was under attack was already a galactic-scale empire, with multiple planets terraformed and colonized, so they began their evolution with the idea of defending themselves from the terrible planetkiller weapons, only to eventually ended up miniaturizing their entire civilization and moving to the quantum world.
Obviously, Aron couldn't immediately skip to the end and lead humanity's emigration to a higher, or at least new, plane of existence, but he still found it ironic that the planetbound civilization had focused on building megastructures, while the galaxy-spanning empire focused on shrinking everything down, yet each had reached similar destinations in the end. Still, the system's description of the knowledges had given him a general idea of a successful research path for future development.
'To each their own,' he thought, 'but at least I'm the beneficiary of their advancements.'
The system didn't waste any time in integrating the knowledge into Aron one after another after he confirmed his purchases, but this time—thanks to his latest evolution—he didn't even feel dazed, let alone the freeze he used to feel when he was receiving knowledge assimilation. Plus, the speed at which the knowledge was assimilated into him had greatly increased; it only took thirty minutes for the system to impart all of the knowledge he had just bought from its shop.