He trained his body with brutal physical disciplines and martial arts until pain became just another signal for his mind. He trained his mind with meditation until his thoughts were no longer a chaotic storm, but disciplined soldiers awaiting his command.
He even spent a few years after, reveling in every pleasure known to man. He wanted to get it out of his system once and for all. Of course, it didn't work like that.
But after a while, the thrill vanished and Silas didn't find these pleasures all that interesting.
This decade and a half long journey was honestly the highlight of his life and his proudest achievement.
He had already unraveled the secrets of quantum teleportation by then - a feat that redefined civilization - but that felt like a parlor trick in comparison. The fact that he could sit in a burning building or on his throne and feel only what he chose to feel... That was true power.
This control was what gave Silas to call himself a superhuman again. He thoroughly understood that becoming stronger was not just about power level, it was about a complete elevation of your existence.
'you are as strong as your weakness' were the words he decided to base his entire power system against. As such he always made sure that he was strong in every regard, be it mental, physical, emotional or social before he could say that he had transcended his previous position.
So, in Silas's eyes, strength must always be comprehensive.
Unfortunately, the next stage for transcendence never came in Silas's life but this new world gave him hope.
This journey was the reason why Silas didn't find the heroes in comics believable. Maybe the fact that he didn't understand it didn't mean they were not real but that his study into human nature was incomplete.
But in any case, learning that this world has the same history as his previous one gave Silas hope for a broader multiverse...
------
Currently, Silas knows of three pathways of advancement in this world.
The first one is technology pathway. This pathway includes human augmentation, genetic engineering, energy and material sciences, nanotechnology, etc.
The first thing Silas noticed was the strange and lopsided nature of their technology. It was a complete paradox.
On one hand, their genetic engineering and material sciences were shockingly advanced, rivaling the capabilities of his own world. They could manipulate life and create alloys that should have changed their society entirely.
Yet, their energy production was primitive, and their information technology was a joke. They had the components to build supercomputers but were still fumbling with the equivalent of dial-up. It just didn't add up.
This was what truly baffled Silas. In any civilization, material science is the foundation. It dictates the pace of all other fields. After all, how can you build advanced energy reactors or data networks without the super-materials and conductors to make them? It was like finding a master watchmaker who hadn't figured out how to build a simple water wheel.
They had the ingredients but not the recipes.
The only explanation Silas could settle on was that this technological growth wasn't natural. It hadn't been built from the ground up. Instead, it must have been heavily suppressed, with all the breakthroughs being funneled into a single, hidden stream. He made a guess where that stream led.
Given human nature, it had to be weapons. And he was right.
This world, for all its backwardness in daily life, was light-years ahead in the art of killing. Their soldiers were genetically augmented, their armor was crafted from impossible materials, but they all went home to houses powered by burning fossil fuels. It was the most brilliantly stupid, and terrifying, technological imbalance he had ever witnessed.
He just couldn't understand it. It was like the empires had banned all advanced technologies from civilian use. This seemed incredibly short sighted to Silas.
Even he had relied on the ingenuity and creativity of humans for most of his achievements, yet the empires in this world didn't respect it in the slightest.
"But it's none of my business," he muttered, though the puzzle kept nagging at him. The official story was that the four empires and massive corporations controlled all research and development. But that didn't make sense either.
Surely, even the greediest corporate entity would see the astronomical profits in selling life-changing civilian tech.
So, Silas decided to dig a little deeper into the structure of these so-called corporations. What he found didn't just solve the puzzle - it made him laugh out loud.
"So that's it," he chuckled, a grin spreading across his face. "This world has no hope of improving whatsoever."
The corporations weren't corporations at all. They were fronts created and controlled by powerful superhumans to build their own private armies.
There was no thought of progress, no spark of genuine innovation. Every brilliant mind, every groundbreaking material, every genetic secret was being used for enhancing personal strength.
Silas found that the empires were the same. This was a true **Superhuman World**
------
If Silas wanted to take the technology pathway, the process was still the same as in his previous life: make academic achievements, get recognized by people in the field, find investors and then conduct research.
This was the path Silas took in his previous life. But Silas had developed an aversion to this path by now.
The misery of scraping every material you find just in the hopes that it can give fruition to your idea was just too much.
Silas's pain can be represented by the incident involving quantum displacement engine inside his time travel machine.
This quantum displacement engine is a crucial subsystem designed to actually help him travel through time. It worked by causing quantum level instabilities to create infinite mass and energy at the same time. The instability caused by this reaction is used as the fuel to push him through time.
This application was derived from the research of one of the scientists under his command.