Each of the people they were planning to hire for Jack's research institute had already been templatized and their template had been updated to retain the memories of the interview with Nora. So it only took him about 15 minutes to talk to and then soul bond each person.

By the end of the day, he had soul bonded 23 people, and with each person, he found the soul bond modification process became easier and easier. But by the end of the day, he was mentally exhausted.

And by the time he had soul bonded all one hundred and fifteen people, he could make the soul bond modifications almost instantly, but he was mentally drained and felt like his head was stuffed with lead.

When he woke up the next morning after a long fourteen hours of sleep, he felt something was different, but at first he couldn't quite figure out what.

After a few moments he realized it was his Genesis Heart interface that had changed, specifically his Genesis Store catalog.

When he checked his catalog, he was surprised by what he found.

Increase Energy Points Generation Rate: 10,001/sec

-Cost: 10,000 GP

-Description: Increase your Energy Points generation rate to 10,001/sec.

Increase Energy Points storage capacity: 1,000,000,000,001

-Cost: 1 GP

-Description: Increase your Energy Points storage capacity to 1,000,000,000,001.

He could raise his EP generation rate again!

Was forming soul bonds stretching my soul, or were the modifications I made a form of soul exercise?

He wanted to increase his EP generation rate because it would allow him to expand his soul space, support more people in parallel self mode, and support larger and longer simulations.

But he also wanted to buy that soul enhancement technique. Sure, he'd just discovered that forming and modifying soul bonds was also strengthening his soul, but he had no way of knowing how efficient it was compared to the technique.

He also didn't like the idea of forming soul bonds solely for the purpose of strengthening his soul.

On the same day he'd discovered that he was EP gen capped due to soul strength, he'd also earned the one-billion-EP-spent achievement that gave him one billion GP. Then about two weeks later he'd earned the achievement for spending 10 billion EP that gave him 10 billion GP.

And he expected to earn the achievement for 100 billion EP spent in about a month. And then the achievement for one trillion EP spent in about three years. So, no matter how much of his GP he spent now, he'd still earn enough GP to buy the soul technique in a few years.

And if he increased his EP gen rate, he would be able to earn those two achievements even sooner.

He checked his GP balance.

Genesis Points (GP): 21,000,195,114

He did some quick math and figured he had enough GP to raise his EP rate to about 200,000 EP/sec if he spent most of his GP. And that was assuming his soul strength would even support an EP rate that high.

Since he would earn enough GP to buy the soul technique in a few years at worst, he felt no qualms about spending GP to raise his EP rate.

He focused on the EP rate increase item in his store catalog and mentally pushed to see how high he could go.

The limit, when he found it, was 100,000, and like all his achievements, his limits apparently increased by a multiple of ten.

Without hesitation, he spent nearly 5 billion GP to increase his EP generation rate to 100,000 EP/sec.

[Energy Point Rate Increased: 10,000/sec -> 100,000/sec]

He could now support nearly one hundred people in parallel self mode at the same time!

He could also go anywhere on Earth with his remote-presence technique and run it continuously without worrying about running out of EP. And, if he saved up enough EP, he could run a global simulation, like the one he did for the lottery, for more than a few hours.

He had about 15 billion GP left, so he spent 10 billion to increase his EP storage capacity to 10 trillion EP.

[Energy Point Capacity Increased: 1,000,000,000,000 -> 10,000,000,000,000]

When he'd needed to run a simulation to try and predict the winning lottery numbers, he'd only been able to run the simulation for a few hours. But when he re-ran the numbers, he found that he could run the simulation for days.

Though, there was the problem of light.

The outermost sphere in the sim, at Approximation level, captured the light that had been emitted by the stars outside the solar system and was traveling through space inside the solar system.

Once he started a simulation, that light would continue to travel to Earth, but the last of it would arrive about 10 hours later. Then, the stars would seem to disappear from the point of view of the simulation Earth. And all the stars disappearing would cause massive panic.

He could create simulations that generated light from the outer edge of the simulation, like what Madison was doing for her 10 kilometer radius server sphere, so he wondered if he could get a simulation to generate fake light from the stars.

He summoned Jeeves and asked.

"Yes, sir. That is possible. It would require adding an outer layer at Nominal-level, but that layer would only need to be about one kilometer thick."

So, he'd have an innermost layer at Subatomic-level that encompassed Earth, a layer at Atomic-level that encompassed the Earth/Moon pair, a layer at Approximate-level that encompassed the solar system, and a thin final layer at Nominal-level.

And because the simulation costs were linear with respect to distance from him, ignoring the volumetric increase entirely, that last layer would only cost him an additional 1 EP. He still didn't understand how that was possible, but he wasn't complaining.

For every one and a half days of EP generation, he could run a full Earth sim for one day. Though that assumed he didn't spend any EP during those one and a half days.

More realistically, he'd be able to run one full-day sim about once a week.

Being able to theoretically look 24 hours into the future was huge. He wasn't sure what he would do with that capability, but he now had it.

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