Ch 26 – Bootleg Death Crystal

As he reads through the file with his curiosity hook, the secrets the whole world kept under wraps were shown to him in full view.

'Quirks didn't come into existence a century ago out of nowhere, in fact, quirks have existed thousands of years ago. From the dawn of humanity, quirks have been there since the very start, earliest verifiable records have been from the ancient roman empire from the hints that the mythological roman gods might be real such as Zeus. But it was theorized that Jesus might also exist and all other mythological beings are all real.' Braun read, his eyebrows raising at the new info he learned.

'So, the gods are perhaps real, huh, well time travel is far away from now unless I make some time crystals or a bootleg version of it to travel to the past and find the real source of quirks.' Braun thought, a gleam showing in his eyes at perhaps a new goal he will have to do.

'Sigh, I'll leave this for later. For now, I still have to train my ability, especially both nuclear forces to not accidentally blow up the whole planet by messing with the atomic structures of the surrounding area.' Braun thought, opening a golden portal beside him and returning back to his base.

Appearing right inside his lab, he walks towards an operating table in the side of the room where a certain figure resides, a figure that he has fooled with finest to the highest degree.

"Hello there young lady, so you're the Seer huh?" Braun mutters, standing right beside the bound Seer while he takes off her hood and face so that she can see his face.

Glaring at him, her face turns into a frown while her brows were furrowed.

"Oh don't be so angry at me, I didn't want to do this either, I did this because I need to! So be a good girl and I'll give you a painless death," Braun mutters, a grin appearing on his face as he taps into her brain's electrical signals, and with a single command, the glow in her eyes disappeared and she died just like that.

Watching the invisible barrier around him glow white, he grabs his vacuum gun and sucks in the invisible soul of the girl, and watches the green vat where the tube of the vacuum gun leads to suddenly having a weird bubble inside it.

'Welp, I thought souls would be harder to store, who would have thought it would be this easy.' Braun thought, grabbing the glass container with one hand and bringing it towards the wall where a hollow part is seen with the size being exactly the container's size.

Putting it inside the wall, he presses a button and watches the soul gets sucked in towards a glass tube straight towards the table beside him.

As he watches the soul pass through a white filter, the soul becomes whiter in appearance and less in size, and as it falls off the glass tube straight into a vat of white liquid, pressing another button, the process starts with a ray of white light shooting into the vat and he watches the liquid slowly dissipating away and the soul rapidly changing in appearance, it slowly becomes more opaque, more white, along with the ray being absorbed into it as if it was a hungry beast sucking in all the energy it was being fed.

And as an explosion of white light fills the whole lab, a floating white crystal was left in front of him that causes his grin to widen, one that is sinister as if he has gained something that will bring the end to the world.

'Bootleg Death Crystals baby, harnessing her soul and crystallizing it into a crystal, I'm basically able to glance into the future with this bad boy.' Braun thought, grabbing the crystal with his arm and his mind getting connected to the crystal, the future being shown to him clearly as multiple timelines were shown at once to him, his brain being overloaded with information that would have probably made a normal human puke or dizzy.

Though unfortunately, all of those were merely his deaths and nothing special like future knowledge or precog.

'Now I only need to make a device that concentrates the future visions into specific ones where I will have the highest chance to die and basically have danger senses that can show the future in advance. With this, I'll basically be unkillable with my higher processing power and if I want to, I can let my AI control my body and be untouchable, unkillable, even be immortal, never taking a single hit to the body.' Braun thought, the atomical structure of the crystal being ingrained into his brain and with his concentration rising to the max, another white crystal appeared in his left hand causing him to chuckle.

'Though this does have some very big weaknesses like time manipulators, for that, I would have to get time crystals to deal with them. Though getting one would be harder than getting a xylarian crystal on earth.' Braun thought, walking towards his drawer to take out his tools and materials, ready to grant himself precog danger sense.

Taking his assortment of materials back to the table, he starts making the device by first opening his brain and ripping out his AI chip that was taken out by nanobots, the open skull being fixed by more nanobots that repaired his cells to peak condition.

With the floating screens in front of him now gone, he felt a bit disoriented at first but quickly returns his body and mind back to normal.

Grabbing the crystal through a pair of tongs, he first disassembles it into shards through his nanobots and disassembles his bloody chip, taking out some parts and replacing them with new ones, and soon, after a few minutes of intense hard work, a new and repurposed AI chip presented itself to him.

'The chip itself would calculate the desired visions for me and I would only need to respond to it, or I can let the chip give suggestions on what I should do next and just follow it, or if I'm really in a desperate situation, I can give the chip partial control over my body and bring my survivability to near unkillable.' Braun thought, opening his skull one more time and inserting the chip inside it, the sensory nerves around his head that senses pain being temporarily turned off so that he doesn't feel anything.

The moment the chip connected with the neurons of his brain, his whole vision rapidly changed, and soon, visions flowed into his brain, countless vision of him dying was shown to him but slowly, all those visions disappeared into a select few, one example was him messing with Strong Force and accidentally blowing the whole lab up.

'Finally, I also have precog!' Braun thought, letting out a groan of exhaustion from his mouth, the mental exhaustion finally catching up with him.

'Sigh, the more I read through Rick's memory, the more terrifying he becomes. He could as well be a true God who can create universes, he can bend reality on a whim, bring literal perfection to an imperfect world, and more. But slowly, his knowledge is becoming mine, and now my latest invention could be said to be something half decent to Rick.' Braun thought, shaking his head at how absurd Rick is as a being, but sadly, all of that power was wasted due to his emotions and love for his family.

'He knows how unimportant friends, families, love, and even emotions are, yet he still keeps them dear to him. Hiding behind an uncaring façade, how… annoying, born with a genius so great yet all wasted trying to preserve his humanity, that one little wisp of humanity he has left that never seems to sniff out into nothingness as if an undying flame. But I will be different, Rick sees the infinite multiverse as a cage, I see it as… freedom.' Braun thought, standing up from his hover chair and towards the entrance of his lab.

'It's high time to master this death precog of mine, this should rapidly increase my reaction time, muscle memory, processing power, and more that would be beneficial to me as a whole.' Braun thought, opening the door by scanning his hand on the scanner beside it and walking out to the sandy island he owns illegally.

'Though it would be dangerous as I will have to have the grit and will to force my drones to kill me, but that's an acceptable risk for my progress.' Braun thought, multiple hatches opening on the cubic lab he has that shoots out a flock of drones to the air, all drones surrounding him with a sense of foreboding and death entering Braun's mind.

"AI, kill me through using Drones 1 – 100 with any means necessary," Braun mutters, a prompt appearing in front of him saying if he wants to proceed and he presses yes, and as soon as he did, multiple visions enter his mind out of nowhere.

As the one hundred drones prep their guns at him, he closes his eyes and listened to the visions with full concentration, the hair on his skin rising up to fully sense the surrounding area around him, his breath becoming slow and steady while the sound of his heartbeat fills his ears, and with his mental timer hitting one, the assault commence.

Like a shadow, his body moves around with stiff like motions as if he was a robot following orders to the very last bit, without missing a bit, bullets at supersonic speeds rain down on him from all angles, be it left right up down, he dodges them all as if he was seeing in a 360 degrees manner.

But his mind soon slowly becomes exhausted from the thousands of bullets that killed him in a multitude of visions, and soon enough, a bullet pierces straight through his brain, and the drones finally stop attacking.

As Braun's body drops down to the ground with closed eyes, he was left there, just simply dead, his heart slowly stops beating, his lung stops breathing, his muscles stop moving, all of it was over for Braun who was officially dead.

But soon, one drone went to stab a syringe into his body and his brain was easily restored back to normal along with his eyes opened once more, he lets out a gasp and hastily sucked in big breaths of fresh air towards his oxygen lacking body.

Putting his hands on the sandy ground, he shakes his head and regains back his clarity.

'Whew, it worked like a charm, and if not, I would have just loaded back while in soul form back to when I was still alive.' Braun thought, shaking the sand away from his body, and stands up with a single hop.

"AI, resume the order," Braun orders, and once more, he moves around for his dear life, dodging bullets left and right, the movement needed for each step becoming less and less, the distance between him and every bullet becoming nearer and nearer, from 2 inches, to 1 inch, until he was dodging them with less than an inch to his body.

His robotic and stiff movements became accustomed to the rapid synapses being sent out in his brain, his movement becoming that of a snake, twisting and moving his body around in ways unimaginable, abusing the freedom his power gives him like floating in mid-air or increasing the gravity mid-jump to push himself in any direction.

Slowly but surely, his movements and instincts rise through the roof, his instinctual sense of danger rising like never before from the threat of actual death, his body begging for this to stop but his mind says no, continuing this arduous task of his.

Each of his breath, each of his movement, it was all a calculated move processed by his brain in rapid succession, from the twitches of his fingers to his toes, the bullets never once graze his body let alone his clothes, and by the time the sun set, he was dodging bullets by the centimeters, the wind pressure being produced by the bullet being used by his body as leverage, the sound of explosions being zoned out of his mind and only the bullets were left in his mental landscape, everything else being nothing but the void and his mastery has reached an unnatural level in just a single day.

AN: This is 2118 words, you're welcome.

Not gonna lie, I want to be insane right now. Just think about it, it's basically optimistic nihilism crank to the max, you're basically happy all the time (in the chance that you get to choose what type of insanity it is, kinda like the Joker but more on the comedy side instead of the kill kill side) and live life to the fullest, does that sound insane to you? Oh fuck, am I getting insane right now?!

To quell my deteriorating mental health, why don't you send me some powerstones?

(May 27, 2022 – 184th day of writing)