The Mech Touch

Ves did not intend to use a lot of spiritual ingredients this time.

The Sanctuary was unlike the Superior Mother. The latter not only served as the ancestral spirit of the Hexer people, but also embodied the six phases of existence.

With potentially the entire Hexadric Hegemony worshipping her in the future, the Superior Mother would not only be flooded with spiritual feedback, but also come in constant contact with Hexers whose beliefs and ideals largely conformed with her own nature!

Ves guessed that these interactions would make sure that none of the abilities of the Superior Mother would be weak!

The design spirit of the Sanctuary design didn't need to do so much. Ves could already resort to other design spirits if he wanted to fulfill a different purpose or needed some additional versatility.

He aimed to instill the strongest spiritual restraining abilities to his next spiritual product. He gave up everything in order to achieve this extreme.

This was why he only made use of four main ingredients.

He did not include the minor ingredients in this consideration. The spiritual images that served as the initial programming of his upcoming creation only guided the birth process.

Only the main ingredients were capable of defining the resulting spiritual entity!

Ves carefully inspected each main ingredient.

The grey phantom that was caught in its spiritual restraint looked as tortured as ever. Nothing had changed despite pulling it out of the imaginary realm for a number of days.

As the key ingredient of his new design spirit, Ves knew he had only one shot at making the most appropriate design spirit for the Sanctuary. He doubted whether he could stumble upon another turbulent wave in the imaginary realm where he could grab another imprisoned ghost.

He was a little bit worried whether he could succeed in killing and shattering the grey phantom. So far, it appeared to be completely vulnerable to normal attacks.

If necessary, Ves was willing to draw upon the precious charge of his F-stone to empower his attacks. He did not want to fail in the very first step of his plan!

The second ingredient that Ves intended to add was a spiritual fragment that Ves had taken from Goldie.

It hurt the ancestral spirit quite a bit to lose a fraction of her strength. Ves had to do a lot of persuasion in order to borrow another spiritual fragment from her being.

It was for a good cause, though. While he wanted to keep his upcoming creation pure, he was too worried about the possibility of betrayal. In order to instill a strong sense of loyalty towards him and his clan, he wanted the newborn spirit to appreciate him and his clan down to its very soul!

Since Ves only wanted to borrow Goldie's essence in order to guarantee the loyalty of his resulting creation, he did not take too much. Her spiritual fragment likely wasn't big enough to grant any other powers to his upcoming creation.

The third ingredient was a dose of universal life-attributed energy derived from another drop of life-prolonging treatment serum.

Though he only had so many drops in his possession, Ves did not intend to save it up. It was worth it for him to invest this rare resource in the upcoming process.

In the short term, Ves wanted to gain some protection against mysterious spiritual phenomena. While he wasn't naive enough to believe that a single spiritual entity could fend off an entire anomalous hazard, as long as he received a bit more protection, he might be able to fight for his life!

Nothing was more terrifying to him than becoming engulfed by a lethal anomaly! He did not want to become the next victim who lost his bond with the Larkinson Network!

In the long term, Ves wanted to continue to enjoy the protection of such a useful spiritual entity. He couldn't wait for it to grow into power gradually. Making it as strong as possible right from the beginning was much more desirable to him. Expending some universal life energy was not a big deal, especially since it might empower his spiritual product in other ways.

In fact, Ves already prepared a very specific plan for that. Some of his previous experiments granted him the confidence that this little addition might turn out well.

The last major ingredient was his own spiritual energy. Different from the universal life energy derived from the serum, his own life-related attributes weren't good at nurturing. What they were actually good at was breathing life where none existed!

This was something that even the serum couldn't do! This was a product of his personal domain which he formed after developing his personal ideals and convictions as a mech designer.

Considering the ambitious nature of this creation attempt, Ves prepared a P-stone filled with excess spiritual energy.

He had constantly pumped at least some of his spiritual energy into P-stones every day. Since his Grand Dynamo churned out lots of spiritual energy, why should he waste it by leaving his mind a full capacity all the time?

He was glad that he did so, because he intended to invest a lot of his own spiritual energy this time. He had a feeling that trying to combine the spiritual shards that originated from the spiritual restraint was going to be very difficult.

Its properties were opposite to more conventional varieties of spiritual energies. The fact that it was able to get along well with B-stones was reason enough to believe that the spiritual restraint was difficult to process!

After he finished his inspections and ran through his plan one last time, he decided to pull the trigger.

"Well, this is as good a time as any to start." He muttered.

Ves concentrated his mind and began to form a spiritual hammer in order to shatter the grey phantom.

Of course, he did not waste his time on attacking the main body of the tortured ghost. The key in breaking the grey phantom lay in destroying the spiritual restraint.

As soon as his hammer slammed against the cloud of spiritual energy, it met a surprising amount of resistance!

"Ahh! I knew it wouldn't be easy!"

The toughness of the spiritual restraint exceeded his imagination!

However, Ves had plenty of energy left to spare. He paid no mind to his previous failure and struck his spiritual hammer again.

"Damn! Why is it so hard?!"

He repeated his actions again and again. He kept slamming the spiritual restraint, guessing that its ability to withstand attacks was finite.

Ves suspected that the vortex and the spiritual energy contained within may have fed the spiritual restraint.

Right now, the grey phantom and its shackles no longer floated in the spiritual vortex.

Like a fish out of water, Ves hypothesized that the spiritual restraint could only last so long out of its natural habitat!

After dozens of repeated impacts, Ves finally saw some signs that his guess was right!

"It's breaking down!"

The resistance had lessened after each hit. The strange cloud with unusual properties visibly weakened, and after his thirtieth strike, the spiritual restraint eventually broke!

As soon as the grey phantom lost its shackles, it experienced an unprecedented feeling of relief, hope, bliss and other positive emotions.

It had awaited this moment too long! While Ves quickly collected the shards of the spiritual restraint, the grey phantom strangely began to turn white as its repressed positive emotions swelled as its earnest desire had finally come true!

Though Ves honestly did not expect the grey phantom to turn into this form, he recognized the value of this unanticipated consequence.

"Haha, this is a good opportunity to reduce my loss!"

Because the grey phantom was filled with alien attributes and attributes related to negative states such as pain, hate, despair, hopeless and so on, Ves initially thought that he needed to cut them all out. After all, for a design spirit that was meant to provide Sanctuary, he couldn't allow it to induce any negativity!

Yet now, the grey phantom had turned white, which was an indication that its positive attributes had spiked while its negative attributes lost a lot of steam!

Before this spiritual torture victim could ascend to the afterlife or enter the cycle of reincarnation or something, Ves quickly slammed his spiritual hammer against its spiritual body.

The weak ghost shattered after just a couple of hits!

"I need to work quickly now!"

He collected the shards of the phantom into a separate pile and quickly began to sort through them. He pulled out any shard contaminated by a large amount of alien, irrelevant or negative spiritual attributes and tossed them away, causing them to slowly fade back into the spiritual realm.

Ves adopted a fairly strict standard in order to ensure the greatest amount of purity. Only a select few attributes that would be helpful to a mech design like the Sanctuary remained in his grasp.

Though his filtering process weakened the quantity of usable spiritual shards by at least seventy percent, Ves didn't care!

After processing the first main ingredient, he quickly dealt with the second main ingredient.

He shattered Goldie's spiritual fragment and began to blend the resulting shards with the shards of the phantom.

As for the shards of the spiritual restraint, he did not toss them all into the mix. Instead, he partitioned them into half.

One half of the spiritual shards entered the main pool of shards. As soon as this happened, a strong rejection reaction took place.

The spiritual shards that originated from the phantom and Goldie repelled the spiritual shards that originated from the spiritual restraint!

Ves already theorized this outcome, and did not panic. Instead, he began to inject a copious amount of spiritual energy that originated from himself and began to cautiously fuse some of the shards together.

"Hahaha! It actually works!"

Ever since his mother noted how 'impossible' it was for him to be able to form life by stitching different kinds of spiritual ingredients together, he suspected that this was one of his greatest strengths.

For some reason, he possessed the power to merge incompatible attributes into a unified whole in the process of creating a new life form!

Now, he understood a bit more how exceptional this was because the incompatible shards actually fused together with his own spiritual energy as a medium!

Of course, the fusion process wasn't easy. Ves felt as if he was forcefully trying to glue the ends of two magnets with the same poles together. While it was possible to overcome the repulsion force, Ves needed to expend an even greater amount of spiritual energy in order to force this result!

"No matter! I have plenty of energy left to spare!"

Ves only fused a number of incompatible shards together in order to make sure that this process was sound. Before he continued it, he stopped his current actions and instead directed his attention to the remaining half of the shards that originated from the spiritual restraint.

He had something special in mind for these weird shards!

"Let's see if I can't make something else out of these exceptional remains."

He began to fuse the shards together. Since they originally consisted of a single whole, there was no rejection at all. However, it was not his intention to revive the spiritual restraint.

Instead, he began to blend in some prepared spiritual images into the mix.

While continuing to fuse the shards, he also began to mold and shape the unfinished amalgamation while applying many other spiritual techniques.

After several minutes of complex manipulation, during which he also infused a small portion of universal life energy in order to add more strength, Ves finally completed his sub-creation!

What he created out of some of the remains of the spiritual restraint was something similar to a spiritual construct!

"And not just any construct!"

This one happened to share some similarities to Ketis' mind sword. It was a living, evolving spiritual construct that was capable of activating a unique ability!

Since his time was limited, Ves only briefly inspected the finished construct before shoving it inside the unborn spiritual product!

It was as if he was adding an implant to his upcoming design spirit. If this experiment worked as expected, then his design spirit would likely be born with the ability to activate a specific effect!

"My new design spirits will finally come with their own innate abilities!"

Innate abilities!

None of his artificially-created design spirits possessed this powerful feature. Qilanxo was able to form space barriers. Zeigra was able to induce corrosion. Ylvaine could cast his sight into the future.

As for his design spirits? They couldn't do any of that! Most of their abilities mainly pertained to manipulating the moods of people. Not even the Golden Cat and the Superior Mother were capable of affecting reality so directly.

This was different! If this experiment truly worked, then he was one step closer to creating actual gods!

"Ahem, not gods!" He quickly corrected himself. "I mean extraordinarily empowered artificial spiritual entities!"