A week quickly passed in the blink of an eye, and in the week that passed, Braun had made significant progress in many of his plans.

Foremost, his lucrative online business selling furry porn had boosted his monthly income to great heights, going from a measly zero dollars a month to, according to his rough calculations, could net him over 20k, and that’s only with his current fanbase.

With the current trend of his following’s growth, it’s well within his reach to rise over 30k a month, and perhaps even more if he expands into other forms of monetization like monthly patronage, a lesson course, affiliate links and so much more.

Secondly, he had begun uploading song covers online under the alias Bean, with his profile picture being a simple darkly colored bean with a white background. On there, he had already posted three different song covers. He garnered a few hundred followers, albeit it was much smaller compared to the over a hundred thousand followers he had on his FurGod account online.

Thirdly, Braun expanded his repertoire of ‘weapons’, discarding his airsoft gun for a more potent nailgun powered by batteries, along with a couple of real throwing knives that he modified from his kitchen knives.

Moreover, he managed to glean more details about his applications in weapon augmentation and evolving external objects. The strangest thing he noticed was that if he augmented an object, he could also increase its ‘throwing speed’, so even if he were to just flick his fingers, a simple card could fly as fast as him doing a full-force throw.

Braun was stunned by this revelation and couldn’t help but perceive just how close it was to almost breaking the laws of physics entirely, but upon considering the fact that zenithral power virtually granted a connection to an infinite source of energy, replacing the kinetic energy needed to cause an object to fly at greater speeds isn’t that unimaginable.

Hence, the potency of his thrown weapons increased greatly, while amplifying the danger of his guns, since besides just increasing the speed of the bullets, he can augment the gun’s shooting potency itself which stacks with the speed of the augmented bullet.

It’s essentially stacking the augmentation of two different objects, the gun, and the bullet. Braun mused.

In addition to his weapons, he successfully enhanced his regular night outfit, pushing its defense beyond the level of a normal bullet-proof vest. Even if he shoots a bullet at point-blank range, he’ll only feel a slight tinge of pain at the point of impact and a tiny reddening spot on his skin.

By continuously augmenting an external object, its augmented qualities would slowly turn permanent and undergo a qualitative evolution while remaining the same thing, giving rise to another path of evolution for Braun.

This form of evolution had its own pros and cons, with its main advantages being stability, predictability, and control. Unlike evolution through change where an object would quite figuratively evolve into a new, greater form, this constant augmentation gives rise to greater innate qualities to the object at a steady pace, with results clear and precise.

It’s great because while evolution through change was quicker and more explosive in terms of qualitative growth, it requires a lot of zenithral power, with each ‘stage’ of evolution requiring more and more power, and was the main reason why his strongest weapon, his futuristic gun born from the fusion of an expensive pistol, a lighter, a flashlight, and a phone remained the same as before with no new components added.

On the other hand, augmentation was a constant process with no ‘bottlenecks’ impeding an object’s progress, meaning, in theory, he could just sit inside a cave, carefully augmenting a wooden sword until it could slash apart the heavens.

Although cool, it’s too time-consuming. The amount of zenithral power he can currently wield is too little to make such significant leaps and still borders on the realm of human limits such as a wooden sword capable of cutting through stone or plain cotton tanking through a bullet.

Supernatural, yes, but not to the point of divinity. Perhaps when he reaches the levels akin to demigods, any ordinary object he touches can be on par with those mythical artifacts with tales written across history, such as the grand Excalibur or the Holy Grail.

Lastly, and most importantly.

Braun grinned, his eyes locked onto the screen of his phone that displayed the camera footage of a random street in the city. Then, with the click of a button, he shifted to another camera, and slowly, the shifting perspectives revealed the fruit of his two-week-long labor.

With unrestricted connection and control over the city’s cameras and a local satellite, I can basically view the entirety of this city through any device, granting me a nigh-omniscient vision of the land.

Taking a deep breath, he put on a strange-looking device that covered the upper left quarter of his voice. Turning it on, he saw with his left eye an array of camera feeds, each displaying a different part of the city.

The strange device was a VR headset he modified and evolved into a monstrosity of technology powered by the endless energy of Zenith. Even though it connected to virtually hundreds of cameras and a satellite, it operated smoothly and barely had any fluctuations in its performance.

Stolen story; please report.

This was the wonder of evolution, to transform a simple VR headset into a single-eyed visor capable of showing the entirety of a city.

Of course, there is the strange fact that these cameras existed in the first place, and the local satellite orbiting this place is too coincidental. If I hadn’t been so careful with my malware, I would have been exposed to that organization already and tracked down before I could even gain a small access to their satellite.

There were untold hardships in his quest to gain access to the satellite’s vision, but in the end, it was worth it. It greatly expanded his vision of the city, allowing him to almost see every nook and cranny he wanted.

Soon enough, various spectacles of needless crime and indecency came into view.

In one dark alley, two girls eloped in the murky, damp place, naked and covered in glistening sweat.

In another dark alley, a young man was being robbed by a girl in her teenage years.

There was even a gang fight happening, with a group of hooligans beating each other up, either with their fists or makeshift weapons.

It was a chaotic spectacle of order and crime, with Braun’s mind struggling to comprehend the vast sea of perspectives. Although a struggle, with Braun’s brain rapidly adapting to the strain, it slowly became an easier endeavor for Braun, with his mind’s capability of processing knowledge greatening as a result.

…

Time passed as he continued to view the city with his nigh-omniscient vision, and his brain had largely grown to adapt to the rigorous mental strain. However, by the time it did so, it was almost the break of dawn and the amount of crooks committing crimes greatly lessened.

That would have been a problem for Braun before considering his plan was to focus on searching super crooks, but things are different now.

Besides the things he learned and acquired this past week, he hadn’t been slacking off and continued to explore the city, and encountered two more instances of supernatural events transpiring, one of which being in the north and the other southwest, totaling the three parts of the city as:

Two north, two southwest, and one southeast.

Each time the event ended, everyone in the city had their memories wiped and all corresponding technological data was purged, leaving no trace of the erased event, leaving it as a figment of history.

Through the repeated event of memory erasures, Braun’s resistance strengthened and he managed to greatly resist the effects of the memory erasure, and successfully retained a majority of his memories and only needed a little of bit joggling to reawaken those memories.

Now, with access to the cameras and satellite, he can potentially find supers hidden amongst the normal humans and deal with them before they cause a riot and get captured by the organization. If he succeeds, he can take another step closer to the mystical world of superpowers, and see for himself just how grand it truly is.

For now, though, he still had to eat an early breakfast before quickly finishing his commissions and continuing his search. With the sky still dark, he headed towards his kitchen with plans of heating his prepared meals like before.

He proceeded as usual, by first dumping a terrifying amount of food into a large platter, heating it up in the oven, and serving himself a few shots of olive oil and a whole protein shake.

As he silently waited for his food to heat up, he placed more of his focus on the near-endless visions playing in his one-eyed visor and randomly browsed through the dark alleys, where he suddenly noticed an unusual event.

In a random dark alley near an abandoned warehouse, at the very periphery of a city, a relatively tall individual wearing a gray hoodie to hide their face in a cast of shadows, stood in a fighting stance, with a group of gang-like people standing at the end of the street.

The two groups stood at a standstill before the lone figure rushed forward.

The hoodie-wearing man swung his fist forward, aimed straight at the metallic crowbar flying his way.

The villainous crook wielding the weapon snickered in disdain, thinking that the guy was a dumbass when he froze in shock as the man’s fist bent the crowbar before it connected with his face, sending him flying away with teeth flung out from his mouth.

Everyone went silent upon seeing the twist of events, unable to comprehend how a normal man managed to deal such a monstrous blow, when the lone figure abruptly charged in, arms pulled back, ready to deal another burst of punches.

Before some of them could react, a gut-wrenching punch was sent towards their stomachs, knocking them unconscious.

One of the crooks regained focus and swung their metallic bat at the lone figure ruthlessly, eyes gleaming with a cold light.

The lone figure remained unfazed and didn’t bother to turn around, allowing the metallic bat to hit the back of his head, and as the sound of metal hitting metal resounded, the hood of the the man’s hoodie fell due to the wind pressure, revealing a head fully covered by silvery threads, which seemed to extend down to his neck and speculatively all throughout his whole upper torso, including his arms.

Everyone froze, frightened by the visage presented to their eyes.

He continued to move, using their temporarily stunned minds to finish them off.

“Phew…” The figure, tired from the arduous fight, breathed a sigh of relief. They covered their head with their hoodie’s hood once more, before running off, disappearing into the alleys of the city as the sun rose, dyeing the land a warm orange glow.

Braun stared at the alley where the nameless man ran off to, his eyes turning into inquisitive slits. Green light flickered in his pupils, with a grin forming on his face.

He turned off his oven, grabbed an umbrella with a strange sword-like handle, a sling bag, and darted off, jumping through his bedroom window, and landing on the ground with a silent thud.

He darted off, running deep into the nooks and crannies of the city, hopping from one wall to another like an adept hunter chasing after its prey. Like a shadowy blur, he rapidly closed the gap between himself and his target as he followed the map in his mind while viewing the various feeds in his one-eyed visor.

Soon enough, he scaled up a wall, and grabbed at a metallic bar, pulling himself up to hide in the shadows above the dark alleys. He silently waited, his breath quiet and his body as still as a calm lake.

In the distance, he heard a rapid flurry of steps before a hooded figure came into view.

Green light suffused from Braun’s eyes, and as soon as the figure came into his general vicinity, Braun clearly felt the strange, mystical aura emanating from the hooded man, an aura that, with such close proximity, had a sense of familiarity.

This… His pupils dilated. This is similar to my zenithral power!