The Mech Touch

Ves retired back to his stateroom after he conducted his reckless experimentation.

He shoved all considerations about his mech design projects and luminar crystal technology aside for the moment.

Compared to these ordinary concerns, the new insights he realized just a moment ago had significantly expanded his understanding of spiritual manipulation and spiritual engineering.

He opened up another new door in these fields. Even though he only took a single tentative step inside another room, he could already foresee the countless possibilities and great potential of this pivotal breakthrough.

First, the ability to create spiritual constructs with his own Spirituality meant that he could imbue himself with the same kind of 'triggered abilities' and other artificial functions as his mech designs.

Essentially, he could treat himself as an empty system. By using up some of his free spiritual capacity, he could program some spiritual software programs to add permanent abilities and augmentations to his mind.

For example, he could construct a permanent spiritual eye and ear that remained functional even if Ves did not concentrate at all. This made it vastly more convenient to observe his surroundings and to pick up hidden presences that could circumvent regular sensory organs and devices!

This was just the simplest application. He could program much more elaborate and complicated spiritual constructs, thereby augmenting himself even further.

Ves might not be a biotech expert or a traditional spiritual sorcerer, but as a mech designer it was enough to approach it as a hardware or software engineer!

He could use his vast understanding of mechs and the components and technology that made them work to selectively create spiritual components that operated in a similar fashion to mech parts.

This was something that he had already come up with but couldn't execute. Now that he proved that he could form spiritual constructs in his minds, he was finally free to revive this idea!

However, just like real mechs, his Spirituality was limited by its capacity.

Now that he looked back at his earlier experiments in a sober and more objective fashion, he realized that forming more and more spiritual constructs slowly altered the balance of his spirit, which in turn affected his mind and personality.

He was literally rewiring his personality and capabilities back then! When he discovered that he had become a lot more clumsy at designing mechs, he had become incredibly frightened.

Ves was a mech designer! The ability to design mechs was of paramount importance to him! He could never stomach the idea of crippling his talent and affinity for mech design just because he wanted to create a couple of spiritual augments!

Fortunately, the process was reversible. So far, he had never seen any spiritual constructs decaying by themselves, but it was not that difficult for him to unravel them, especially since he created them in the first place.

All and all, Ves had managed to avert disaster.

What made Ves today him was mostly due to the mix of spiritual attributes in his mind.

A large portion of it was locked in his design seed, which was basically fixed and unmovable. Ves speculated that even if he expended all of his loose spiritual energy, he would still retain some of his talent, personality and capabilities.

He still felt uncomfortable after losing just a modest amount of his fluency in mechs. Every difference counted, so he felt a lot more reluctant to create spiritual augments and leave them floating in his mind.

It was difficult to come up with a spiritual augment that was useful enough to offset the loss in mech affinity.

However, Ves already developed some ideas to mitigate the harm. The most obvious one was to just create a spiritual augment when needed and keep it for as long as he needed it. Once it lost its purpose, he could just unravel it in order to recycle his spent spiritual energy and attributes.

It was very troublesome to do so each time he needed to make use of a specific spiritual augment. He had to manually program the spiritual augment from scratch, which could take minutes, hours or even entire days depending on its complexity!

He grinned. "I can probably circumvent this process."

Now that he had left the range of the Darkbreak module's interference field, he regained access to his cranial implant and restored his partially-digitized mind.

The sudden boost to his cognitive functions reminded him that he could store and retrieve as much data as he wanted from his implant!

Therefore, he only had to design a spiritual augment once and store the design in his implant's vast digital storage space. Once Ves wanted to conjure up a sophisticated spiritual eye, he could instantly retrieve the template and fill it up with single-attribute spiritual energy!

While the new process wasn't instant, at the very least he didn't need to reinvent the entire wheel from scratch every time!

This was the best approach he came up with. From his unsavory spiritual experimentations on William Urbesh, Ves learned that the spirit of an individual was incredibly important. Just a minor change could permanently distort or damage someone's personality!

Currently, Ves did not desire to change who he was. His career was on an upwards trajectory and his long string of successes in the past proved that he was already on the road of success! Why should he attempt to fix something that wasn't broken in the first place?

Ves was happy with himself. While he wasn't perfect, he accepted and embraced who he was, warts and all. His strengths and weaknesses defined him as a person, and it shouldn't be simple at all to alter the very fabric of his life!

However, that did not mean he could apply these changes to other people.

"This is the second major implication of my discoveries!"

Leaving aside the utility of spiritual constructs, Ves could already tell he could employ them as a much less destructive and much more controlled way of altering people's minds!

If he made these realizations a year ago, he wouldn't have mutilated and corrupted William Urbesh's mind and spirit so much! He could have simply created some sturdy but inert spiritual constructs and stuffed them with most of the attributes related to fear, cowardice and timidity.

By bottling up those undesirable traits, he effectively removed them from the board in William's mind. This meant that his personality would shift in a direction where he naturally became more capable of piloting a mech without getting frozen by his own fears!

Ves wouldn't have ended up with the mute and taciturn Silent William if that was the case!

His eyes lit up as he thought about the potential of regulating other people's spiritual attributes.

Most norms didn't possess enough spirituality to make any meaningful changes. In fact, he was deeply reluctant to alter even a single pinch of their spiritual energy at all for fear or wiping out their sentience!

It was a different case to those with spiritual potential. As long as he did not decrease the overall level of spirituality in someone's mind too drastically, they would still be able to remain stable while their personality underwent substantial changes!

He thought back on all of the people with spiritual potential on his staff.

For mech pilots, the strength of their spiritual potential was not enough. The purity also mattered.

Usually, this meant that the more single-minded and dedicated someone became towards a certain pursuit or ideal, they became more likely to achieve a breakthrough in their chosen profession.

To mech pilots with spiritual potential such as Casella Ingvar and Imon Ingvar, Ves might be able to induce both of them to become expert candidates if he purified their spiritual potential!

By bottling up various irrelevant spiritual attributes, their spiritualities became less polluted by distractions, thereby allowing them to become much more focused on a chosen pursuit that was compatible with their spiritual attributes!

"This is an interesting interaction."

In his theoretical framework of mech pilots, those with spiritual potential usually started their advancement after they consciously shaped and altered their personality. Through discipline, training, and other purposeful activities, they honed their will until it gained a quality that enabled to fuse with spirituality!

In other words, the mind shaped the spirit.

This was what was supposed to happen. Almost every Larkinson expert pilot and other expert pilots in existence advanced step by step by honing their minds and wills first.

Even those who only became expert pilots accidentally such as Venerable Pelican had already developed a very strong will and obsession!

What Ves came up with subverted the normal process.

He theorized that if he changed someone's spirit first, it would result in a specific change in personality. These changes in personality which narrowed the thought patterns of the individual in question would then circle back and affect the evolution of the spirit.

To put it simply, the spirit shaped the mind, which in turn shaped the spirit.

If Ves could develop this process and turn it into a practical and proven method, then he may have finally invented a way to artificially create high-ranking expert pilots and mech designers!

His heart beat faster as he realized the great promise of this method.

"Wait! This is also dangerous!"

There was no guarantee it would work as smoothly as he thought. Messing with someone's spirit was literally the same as messing with someone's personality and sense of self. Minds and spirits were so complicated and interconnected that a single change might induce a lot unanticipated changes!

Ves would never subject his own clansmen to the reckless experiments that he was already forming in his mind. The risks were too great!

Yet the temptations of this possible new method was too great. Even if he wanted to withhold the use of this method because the MTA already paid too much attention to him, it would nonetheless be helpful to keep this option in reserve.

One of the benefits of developing a safe way to foster expert pilots and Journeyman Mech Designers was all of the missions he could complete!

The Rim Guardians and the MTA issued a lot of missions related to helping people breaking through. The mission related to William Urbesh was hardly unique. Ves knew that there were much more merits he could earn as long as he attempted to fulfill them with his new method!

If not for the fact that he would attract too much suspicion, he wanted to log into the Rim Exchange right away and snap up all of those missions right away!

He vigorously shook his head. "I need to control myself!"

He still had to develop this ability further, but he did not dare to experiment on himself or his Larkinsons. He did not believe it was wise to hire volunteers from local states and subject them to life-changing and potentially-damaging experiments.

"I still need test subjects, though." He sighed. "It's best to get a lot of them. I need to perform a systematic study to test the limits of this method."

Where could he get his hands on hundreds, if not thousands of humans who he could mess around and get rid of without getting into trouble with the authorities?

It wasn't as if there was some giant superplanet floating around in the Nyxian Gap that just happened to offer a huge population of degenerated people who no one cared about.

"Wait a second.. there's always pirates!"

As the ultimate scumbags of the galaxy, pirates had forsaken all of their rights as a human! The Big Two explicitly stripped them from all of the protection they afforded to other humans!

Ves would not get into trouble at all if he used a bunch of pirates as test subjects. If some of his harmful experiments ever got exposed, at most he would suffer some damage to his reputation. He would not get in any legal trouble as long as he properly documented proof that his test subjects were recognized pirates or members of outlawed organizations!

"Why didn't I realize this sooner? The Nyxian Gap is filled with test subjects!"