The Mech Touch

In the initial experiments, Ves manipulated Peter Seterin's spiritual potential like a mortician dissecting a corpse.

He knew what he was doing was wrong and unnatural in a way, and the increasing resistance he encountered only reinforced that impression.

Peter Seterin was alive. His spirituality, however weak it may be, represented his strength as a person and a living, sentient being.

From his various interactions with other spiritual entities such as his spiritual products, he always made a big distinction between their states before and after Ves breathed them to life.

As long as they hadn't come into existence, spiritual products remained a disparate collection of ingredients. Ves could tinker with the ingredients and manipulate their merger process to an extensive degree.

Yet once they came to life, their entire state had shifted. The whole became more than the sum of the ingredients. At that point, the spiritual product he created could no longer be altered as if it was a machine. He had to treat it as a proper lifeform which mainly changed through growth rather than mechanical tinkering.

Though Peter's spiritual potential showed signs of neglect and even atrophy, it still possessed defense mechanisms of its own! While Ves managed to bend it at first, once he tried to force a change that deviated too far from Peter's original mindset, a portion of his spiritual potential actually broke!

"Ahhhhh!" Peter yelled as he felt something deep inside his being tearing apart!

The moment Ves induced substantial harm to Peter's spiritual potential, it suddenly did something drastic.

It retracted in itself!

It was as if the residents of a town fled to a castle which barred its gates and posted archers on the wall. Peter's spirituality began to retract and compress itself into a form that was similar to a seed, except not as strong.

Peter visibly sagged once that happened. Though the unknown change shielded him from the soul-searing pain of losing a literal chunk of his spirit, he also became less detached to one of the sources of his strength.

As Ves studied Peter's changed condition, he speculated that the shift caused his test subject to devolve back to a norm.

The reason why he felt this way? Once his spiritual potential compressed itself into a seed for self-defense purposes, it actually became less tangible!

Ves found it much harder to manipulate the inert seed. It was as if it weakened its presence to the point where it had gone out of phase from the dimensions that Ves operated in! Unless he could pull off a similar trick, there was no way for him to alter Peter's spirituality despite the huge disparity in strength!

He frowned as he stared at Peter's sweaty, shaking form. The repercussions of all of the changes that had occurred still left a very harmful impression on his psyche.

"This experiment is largely a failure." He muttered.

There was no reason for him to feel disappointed, though. Failures could reveal just as much as successes.

His botched attempts at altering Peter's spiritual potential generated several new phenomena that Ves had never witnessed.

The results provided even greater support to his theory, which stated that recklessly messing with someone's spirit could easily lead to great harm.

The only question he had right now was whether Peter's retracted spiritual potential would stay huddled like a hedgehog forever. As Ves peered closely at it with his spiritual vision, he intuitively felt that it might be harmful if maintained for a longer period of time.

This was because once the spiritual potential tightened itself into a shell, it didn't interact with any external impulses, including Peter's own thoughts and emotions!

Ves guessed that the state of Peter's spiritual potential therefore depended on how much danger it perceived.

If Peter's spirituality believed that it would get messed around once it lowered its defenses, it might decide that starving itself was better than the alternative!

As Ves observed, analyzed and derived numerous mechanisms related to spirituality and how it responded to certain changes, Calabast continued to remain baffled.

Unlike her partner, she possessed no spiritual potential at all. Even if she did, there was no way that she could perceive the elaborate spiritual changes happening out of her sight.

The only way she could tell that something happened was by observing Peter Seterin's drastic changes and reactions. His body language, his stress levels, his facial expressions and his words all indicated to her that Ves was manipulating the captive in an invisible and inscrutable manner!

The sight of it frightened her. Though she had managed to uncover Ves' greatest secret, she did not actually have a good understanding of what Holy Sons were capable of. Certainly, his mech designs provided a lot of clues to her, yet she always assumed that his powers mainly applied to mechs.

Now that she witnessed him manipulating people directly instead of resorting to indirect methods such as glows, her evaluation of him as a threat had risen considerably!

Fortunately, she was an ally of Ves instead of his enemy. She knew that for all of his lack of constraints, he treated his friends and allies sincerely.

That did not take away from the disturbing nature of his current experiments, though. Pirate or not, Calabast deplored senseless cruelty. If Ves wanted to punish Peter, then he should just give the poor fellow a quick execution.

"What is happening to Mr. Seterin?" She decided to ask directly. "Is there a point to all of this or are you merely developing a new torture method?"

"I am conducting serious research! Right now I'm just exploring the mechanics and learning from failure. Once I succeed, you'll definitely support me even more!" Ves defended himself.

He continued to poke and prod Peter Seterin's retracted spiritual potential and concluded that he could no longer do anything to it in any meaningful way.

"Take Mr. Seterin away and bring in the next test subject." He said.

Calabast partially lowered the jamming to transmit a command to her men. A pair of Black Cats soon entered the room and dragged the exhausted and mentally-wounded prisoner away.

"What do you want to do with Mr. Seterin? Do you still need him or can we end his suffering?"

He thought for a moment. "No. Don't get rid of him. Put him in detention on a ship where he won't be disturbed. I will have to observe him for a longer time and possibly experiment with him even more. Qualified test subjects are hard to find and I don't have the luxury to pick a bunch of them up on the street."

The discoveries he made today had already enriched his understanding of spirituality even more. He learned that people who were weaker than him on a spiritual level still possessed the means to resist his manipulations to varying degrees.

The more he distorted someone's spirit beyond its natural state, the more it resisted the changes.

This kind of external manipulation was different from what he did to William Urbesh. Back then, Ves contaminated the former coward's spiritual potential with another influence. These caused changes to occur within his castle, thereby rendering most defense methods useless.

The enemy was already inside and in control of some of the gates!

"There's a very important difference there." Ves concluded.

Changing someone's spirituality through contamination was an insidious method. It was like slipping in spies into a castle and turning some of the people inside into traitors.

Despite the ease of this method, this was a very destructive and uncontrollable means of transforming people. Seeing how William Urbesh ultimately ended up made Ves swear it off against using it against his own clansman.

In contrast, the new method he applied to Peter Seterin showed great promise despite the initial lack of success.

He attempted to amplify one of Peter's traits by creating an open spiritual construct and piling it up with one of his strongest and most abundant spiritual attributes.

Due to the difficulty in grasping and manipulating Peter's spirituality, Ves could only pull out one of the stronger attributes, which happened to revolve around lust.

The outcome proved that the method he used on the spiritual foundations of mechs also worked on a living person's spirit.

The problems that ensued complicated his plan, but Ves was confident he could overcome some of them. He just had to break down the problems he encountered and figure out the appropriate solutions.

In his previous experiment, the crucial difference lay in his authority. His own Spirituality and the spiritual foundation of his mech designs that he fostered with his own spiritual energy belonged to him. They naturally allowed Ves to manipulate them as he possessed full ownership over them. They considered him to be on their side.

It was different for Peter Seterin. Even to a close friend, his spiritual potential would likely resist any changes that caused it to move further away from Peter's actual nature.

This was a great issue to Ves as it constrained the scope of his changes. If he pushed someone too far, they would activate their most desperate form of defense and simply close their spiritualities to any external influence.

"I just have to rein myself in then." He muttered. "This is quite a hindrance, but reassuring as well."

The defense mechanisms at least showed that humans weren't defenseless against unbridled spiritual manipulation. Perhaps they had more means of defending the integrity of their spirits that Ves had not discovered as of yet. That was what made these experiments so valuable. Knowing what took place was always better than remaining clueless!

The Black Cats soon brought in another prisoner, this time a true unrepentant pirate. Once the attendants bound the Crona Lord to the chair, they soon left so that Ves could resume his second round of tests.

"Hmm, let's do something different this time."

Previously, Ves wanted to start off with something easy and attempted to distort Peter's spirit by amplifying one of his strongest personality traits.

However, Ves had overlooked that he was dealing with a bunch of pirates and depraved criminals. Their personalities were rotten and their spiritual potential, if they had any, reflected their ugliness!

Perhaps it might be a different story if Ves attempted his manipulations on someone nobler such as a Larkinson. Yet against scum, Ves would only be turning them into bigger bastards if he amplified one of their core spiritual attributes!

"Maybe I need to perform subtraction instead of amplification."

He partially replicated what he performed within his own mind when he went overboard in creating spiritual augments.

He created closed spiritual constructs that sought to leverage a specific spiritual attribute separately, thereby isolating them from the rest of someone's mind and spirit.

When Ves quickly read through his current test subject's record, he noted that the man possessed an unhealthy desire to beat up slaves in order to establish his martial prowess.

"You brat! The Crona Lords may have fallen, but the Allidus Alliance won't let you get away with taking out one of their suppliers! Lord Hivex is going to hunt you down and tear you from limb to limb before letting his docs put you back together so that he could do it again! Hell, once I get out of here, I'll do it myself!"

Ves grimaced. "Well, you're quite a cruel guy, aren't you? Let me see if I can fix that aspect."

He went to work. Again, he encountered great resistance when he attempted to take some of his test subject's spiritual energy and mold it into a shape that was meant to contain some of the man's cruelty.

Ves encountered a couple more setbacks.

First, he couldn't create a big enough construct to his liking.

Second, he couldn't draw out all of the spiritual energy with the right attribute. The test subject's spiritual potential was already on guard so Ves could only redirect a modest portion into his newly-created spiritual construct.

Overall, the changes Ves had made was a lot less drastic than the ones he applied to Peter. Fortunately, the second test subject's resistance to alterations had not reached a critical threshold.

Both Ves and Calabast stared at the test subject closely. Before, the bearded Crona Lord snarled and scowled at his captors.

Now, some of the animosity and aggression on his face had faded. Though the pirate still showed obvious dislike towards the Larkinson Clan, Ves managed to tone down his hatred by a noticeable degree!

This time, Calabast became genuinely impressed!

"This is interesting. It's as if you drugged this pirate! I can think of numerous interesting applications for this trick."

The pirate may have grown less furious, but he hadn't turned into a vegetable! He still retained plenty of spunk!

"You dumb kid! Release me now so that I can cave in your face!"

"..."

"Well, he already said worse just a minute before. It's progress, at least."