The Mech Touch

The completion of the Everchanger marked the end of the current round of design projects.

While Ves and Gloriana unofficially had to complete one more expert mech for Venerable Brutus, it was not a part of the lineup of the Larkinson Clan, so it didn't exactly count.

Besides, the lead designer of this project was some distant Hexer Master Mech Designer. Ves and his wife only played the role of contributing mech designers this time. Aside from lending their design philosophies and unique expertise, their input on the overall direction of the expert rifleman mech was fairly limited.

Ves didn't mind. It was nice to let others do the bulk of the work this time. No matter what, a Master Mech Designer was able to impart significantly greater benefits to any mech design, so Venerable Brutus would definitely obtain a more powerful machine.

It also helped that the Wodin Dynasty committed a lot more hex credits in its development than with his previous expert mech. Brutus' standing within the dynasty had risen meteorically now that he was accompanying his sister and the Larkinson Clan to the Red Ocean. The Hexers no longer treated him as an ordinary good boy!

The day after completing the Chimera Project, Ves and his wife woke up feeling completely rested and content.

After teasing Aurelia for a while, Ves headed to his office and reflected upon all of his gains from the latest fabrication session.

"I've succeeded against all odds, Lucky. Isn't that great?"

"Meow." The gem cat unenthusiastically responded as he lay on the desk and flipped his tail just a single time.

With everything that had happened yesterday, it was hard for Ves to remember that he had accomplished the most important goal that he set for himself.

By turning the Everchanger into a masterwork mech, he put Venerable Joshua onto the fast track.

While any expert pilot would be happy to use a decent expert mech, there were limits to how much an inferior machine could foster their growth.

The insufficient quality of an ordinary machine would eventually hamper an expert pilot's development and make it a lot harder to break through to ace pilot.

Masterwork expert mechs didn't suffer from this problem, at least according to Master Willix. The second rung of Senfovon's Ladder of Craftsmanship roughly corresponded to expert pilots, which meant that the two belonged to each other.

When both the mech and pilot were exceptional to the same degree, they could further each other's growth.

Just like Venerable Jannzi, Venerable Joshua's growth rate had now become supercharged now that he received the support of a sufficiently powerful expert mech.

Both of them possessed a realistic chance of advancing to ace pilot, and they didn't even have to wait until they grew as old as Patriarch Reginald Cross to reach their bottlenecks!

All in all, the expert pilot that aligned most closely to Ves' domain and design philosophy obtained an unlimited future after this success. That was the most important result. Everything else was a bonus as far as he was concerned.

That didn't mean that Ves ignored his bountiful harvest.

He specifically set aside time for himself to process and integrate all of his recent innovations, insights and discoveries.

Hours passed by as Ves took a lot of mental notes while reviewing the footage of the fabrication run. He studied what he had done and how the Everchanger improved as a response. He also paid special attention to the blood ritual that Venerable Joshua performed on his own accord.

After thinking about it, he was able to reconstruct the probable logic behind Joshua's move.

"The key is Blinky." Ves realized.

Mrow?

The companion spirit exited Ves' head and floated around the office.

"Yes, you played a key role in helping the Everchanger evolve to a higher order living mech!"

Venerable Joshua resonated with Blinky for many days during the fabrication run. The constant exposure allowed him to gain a greater understanding of the nature of spiritual life forms.

At some point, he came up with a revolutionary idea.

What if his living expert mech turned into an entity that was closer to Blinky?

This was what Joshua set out to accomplish. Though he knew nothing about mech design or spiritual engineering, his intuition and feel towards life was not inferior to that of Ves!

Although their outlooks towards life were slightly different due to their different backgrounds and progression, their stances were similar enough for them to be able to cooperate.

"Resonance and alignment are the building blocks." Ves theorized Joshua's unusual method. "They are the necessary elements for Joshua to exert his influence. If he doesn't possess a connection to the mech, he wouldn't have been able to induce any transformation."

The key was Joshua's force of will.

Ves recalled that this was the basis of an expert pilot's power! Without an empowered will, an expert pilot was unable to distort reality!

"I see now."

According to his guess, the bloody handshake that Venerable Joshua performed wasn't a mysterious magic ritual or anything like that. It was just a psychological trick that helped him channel and exercise his force of will in a special manner.

Perhaps the blood shed by two life-oriented individuals played another important role, but Ves assumed this was just the trigger. What really mattered was that Joshua was able to exert his force of will in a special way that distorted reality by upgrading the life order of a mech!

Ves tried to figure out the requirements of this method and how easy it was to replicate it so that he could make more higher order living mechs.

Obviously, Venerable Joshua's cooperation was necessary, and so was a normal living mech.

Ves wasn't sure whether the mech in question had to be attuned to Venerable Joshua. If so, then this imposed a lot of limitations on how many higher order living mechs he could make.

"What else is required?"

Could Venerable Joshua perform this transformation alone or did he require the cooperation of Ves and Blinky to perform this major step?

Ves thought deeply about it and couldn't come up with a solid answer.

He intuitively felt that Joshua wasn't capable enough to upgrade the life order of a mech by himself. The expert pilot wasn't a creator and didn't specialize in this aspect. This was something that Ves was good at, but as a Journeyman, he could only do so much.

In short, Ves possessed the method but not the power. Joshua possessed the power but not the method.

Only by working together and pooling their resources together could Ves and Joshua make a mech that was far beyond their individual level to make!

Ves' eyes lit up as understanding finally dawned upon him. "In the end, we accomplished the impossible by relying on the power of synergy!"

They could have never pulled this off if even one of the requirements weren't met.

There had to be a living mech.

The living mech possessed enough building blocks to possess greater potential for life.

The mech designer was capable of creating new life.

The expert pilot was capable of bending the rules of reality related to life.

The expert pilot was able to resonate with the living mech.

The expert pilot needed a way to trigger the transformation.

As long as Ves was able to meet these conditions in a future project, he was curious whether he could replicate the outcome. If so, then he might hold the shortcut to progressing his design philosophy!

"Creating a mech that is more alive than before isn't necessarily the key to helping me advance to a higher rank." Ves reminded himself. "What is actually important is how I can take advantage of this to push the synergy and cooperation between man and machine to the next level!"

Creating a powerful living mech was not his end goal. His true purpose as a mech designer was to serve mech pilots, so any ground-breaking inventions had to feed back into his ultimate ambition.

He would have plenty of opportunity to figure this out by observing Venerable Joshua and the Everchanger in action. Their unprecedented mutual cooperation would serve as an ongoing experiment to Ves. Hopefully, the pairing would provide plenty of research data in the coming years!

After making this determination, Ves focused on the nature of higher order living mechs.

He realized that he needed to come up with a more systematic framework to classify different forms of living mechs.

One living mech wasn't the same as another living mech. His earliest Marc Antony model was technically a living mech, but it was a rubbish one that hardly possessed any added value!

"So far, I have three confirmed living mechs that have reached the highest order that I know of." He muttered. "The Quint, the Shield of Samar and the Everchanger definitely stand above the rest."

The Devil Tiger and the Ouroboros had potentially joined this exclusive club as well, but Ves wasn't able to confirm this suspicion. Even if they did reach the highest life order that he knew of, he would never admit it to anyone.

All of his other living mechs had not reached this order. The Dark Zephyr, the Riot and the First Sword were clearly 'less alive' when he compared them to his masterwork expert mechs. To him, there was a clear and obvious difference in life state between the two groups.

There were other living mechs that were even weaker than his regular expert mechs. Most of them were based on his older and weaker mech designs. The further he went back in his career, the less life his products contained.

When Ves looked back on his entire body of work, he began to group them under four different categories.

"The degree of life in a mech can be classified in at least four orders. The zeroth order is the starting point and describes any mech with no signs of life."

He decided to start with zero instead of one because such a mech wasn't alive in the slightest.

This didn't necessarily mean that such a machine was weak. Many mechs designed by other smart and powerful mech designers did not possess a drop of life, but they could easily demolish his Bright Warriors and other living mechs in battle!

The MTA's cutting-edge first-class multipurpose mechs, the overpowering Olympus Mons, the innovative Charlemagne and the unkillable Belisarius were just some of the examples that mechs didn't need to be alive for them to be strong!

The zeroth order was simply a means for Ves to classify his own work. It did not set any norms or assumptions that living mechs were stronger than non-living mechs. He would have to be incredibly arrogant to believe that every other mech designer in existence was useless!

"If the zeroth order contains no life, then the first order possesses the beginnings of one."

These were the mechs that for some reason or another contained the beginnings of an X-Factor, which meant that other people could also make mechs that belonged to the first order under special circumstances.

Ves himself assigned his earliest mech designs to this order as well. His virtual mechs as well as the variants of other people's designs possessed enough life to make a difference, but not enough for it to be a strong selling point.

The second order was when living mechs truly started to kick into gear. Starting from the Desolate Soldier, every mech that Ves had designed up until now possessed roughly enough life to develop a half-conscious personality.

If Ves left out the influence of design spirits, then second order living mechs were able to nudge their mech pilots and provide plenty of subtle assistance!

They also possessed greater growth potential. When they partnered up with the same mech pilots for many years, they could grow in a direction that allowed them to provide even greater assistance to their partners.

However, no matter how much growth a second order living mech experienced, it was hard for it to jump to a higher order. They needed a powerful external injection in order to upgrade their life order by another step!

Currently, the third order was the highest life order that Ves was able to realize. It described a mech that was not only alive, but also conscious and fully equal to any other sentient life form.

It was not 'alive' in the way that a bacterium or a mouse was alive, but it was a true living entity that was capable of exercising logic, reason and emotion!

Their influence over their physical mechs went against common sense and they were able to work together with their mech pilots to an unprecedented degree!

Third order living mechs were the ultimate products that Ves could strive for, at least for now. While it was easy enough for him to guess that even higher orders might exist, he couldn't even imagine what that would be like. They would have to be substantially more remarkable than the Everchanger!

When Ves mentally listed out the four different life orders, he suddenly realized that it sounded awfully familiar to Senfovon's Ladder of Craftsmanship.

In fact, knowing about this theoretical model may have unconsciously influenced Ves to create a similar scheme.

"Then… does that mean I can publish my own theory one day?"

His eyes lit up. This was definitely a promising idea! He just needed to come up with a catchy name for his new theoretical framework.

"How about… Larkinson's Orders of Life?"