The Mech Touch

After Ves came up with the concept of giving life to extraordinary trees that could grow all sorts of fate-defying spirit fruits, how could he not be excited?!

His imagination fully went into bloom as he began to produce all kinds of galaxy-shaking fantasies!

He imagined a future where spirit fruit trees spread across human civilization.

Though these remarkable trees were expensive to grow and maintain, the fruits they grew were absolutely worth the effort!

With each fruit that grew from their branches, a human could gain power that was otherwise nearly impossible to obtain!

Ves imagined a future where mundane individuals with no special talents could become extraordinarily powerful with the help of his fruits!

"No longer will humanity be shackled by their own limited talents and the inherent deficiencies of humankind!"

The ability to turn this impossibility into a possibility would shake the foundations of human civilization and spark a golden age that could definitely surpass any of the ones that came before!

This wasn't hubris. This was a future that he could actually realize if he succeeded in his research!

Previously, it was unimaginable for him that the mere idea of developing a modified money tree could lead to such a momentous ambition.

If he succeeded, he would become a celebrated figure throughout humanity!

His contributions to society would exceed that of the Polymath and any other Star Designer!

Not even the Common Fleet Alliance could surpass his efforts!

As long as he cracked the secrets behind mass-producing fruits that contained beneficial spirit seeds and empowering human spirituality, he could single-handedly lead human civilization to an ascendant height that far surpassed the reach of other alien civilizations!

Neither the Seven Apex Races of the Milky Way Galaxy at their height nor the major alien races of the Red Ocean could shake humanity's strength once a lot more people unlocked the power of their spiritualities!

Humanity already occupied a dominant position in the Milky Way, and that was when the vast majority of humans were mere norms that did not possess any advantages.

Although second-class and first-class humans were able to break their biological limits by relying on increasingly more sophisticated implants and genetic treatments, these measures were unable to shake the deficiency in spirit.

Under ordinary circumstances, the only way for people to transcend into greatness was to put in an untold amount of effort and hardship in their work!

Despite the immense amount of humans living in the galaxy, how many of them could actually overcome all of the nigh-impossible hurdles and reach the top of their respective professions?

Over a span of four centuries, only a few hundred god pilots and Star Designers had emerged.

Even though a single person among them was incredibly powerful, the total number of humans who had reached the pinnacle of their professions was still abysmally low!

This was the great problem that the Mech Trade Association had always tried to overcome.

Whether the mechers managed to develop a solution or not, the cost had to be prohibitive, thereby preventing them from elevating humanity to a higher level.

What Ves came up with was different. As long as his spirit trees came into existence, people could shed their mortality and gain strength beyond any measure with the help of a couple of spirit fruits!

"People can't grow strong by relying on spirit fruits alone. They still need to put in the effort!"

How could transcendent power be so easy to obtain?

Mech pilots had to struggle against overwhelming odds in order to evolve into an expert candidate, expert pilot, ace pilot and finally god pilot.

Each of them needed to develop their willpower, conviction and other related traits step-by-step in order to earn the right to wield greater power!

"Spirit fruits can't help people perfect their will." Ves surmised. "What it can do is make up for the shortfall in talent and spiritual accumulation."

Ves finally envisioned a more realistic way of creating high-ranking expert pilots en masse!

"I need to unify my solutions into a cohesive ecosystem!"

Spirit fruits was just the start. They could provide mech pilots who originally did not have the qualifications to go any further the potential to undergo apotheosis!

However, potential was potential and did not translate into actual strength. Even if a mech pilot is a hundred spirit fruits, all of that additional power if the person was too weak and muddle-headed to forge his potential into a strong and overpowering will!

This process of refining one's mind and willpower into an extraordinary force of will had stumped many mech pilots.

Even those with an abundance of talent had fallen into obscurity because they failed to navigate the journey that could sublimate their lives!

"Don't I have another solution for that, though?"

He thought back on his Aspects of Lufa. He already envisioned a few research projects related to leveraging the different glows to assist with polishing the willpower of different mech pilots!

If what had happened to Ketis was any indication, then a lot of mech pilots would be able to find enlightenment and avoid the detours and dead ends that might block their progress to their next evolution!

In this way, the combination of spirit fruits and glow treatments formed a nearly complete breakthrough system!

With the help of the first solution, many more people would be able to obtain chances that they were denied due to congenital deficiencies!

With the help of the second solution, the difficulty in advancing to the next rank would probably be reduced by 75 percent!

Any of the two solutions in isolation was enough to boost humanity's strength.

When they were being utilized in combination, the results would definitely change the course of humanity's history to a massive degree!

The amount of expert pilots, Journeyman Mech Designers, swordmasters and possibly other extraordinary professions would skyrocket!

With the expansion of such an enormous base of extraordinary figures and the continued assistance of spirit trees and glow treatments, the speed and probability that any of them would overcome the subsequent hurdles were greater!

In a century or so, the number of god pilots and Star Designers in existence might exceed 10,000 individuals!

The addition of just a single new figure at the top was already a cause of celebration for humanity as a whole!

Ves could hardly imagine how his set of solutions would completely transform the upper echelon of human civilization!

The Common Fleet Alliance would no longer be able to compete against the Mech Trade Association!

"All of this can be possible one day!" Ves gasped in exaltation!

Although he was far from being able to realize all of these fantastic solutions, his existing capabilities gave him the confidence that he could give birth to an entirely new age!

As his passion and excitement continued to rise, the energy surrounding him became more active than ever!

His mind became affected by an exceptional mood and a sense of mania had completely overtaken his consciousness!

As his imagination went into overdrive, his awareness blurred as he developed an extremely strong urge to plan out his amazing ambition.

He used his implant to put all of his ideas and speculation into words. He created over a hundred different diagrams that encapsulated his theoretical framework and even drafted a few spirit tree designs.

When his passion and drive had reached a peak, he came up with the culmination of work by coming up with the design of an unprecedentedly powerful design spirit!

It was only then that he had slowly calmed down.

His excitement faded and his passion returned to a reasonable level as he beheld the results of his effort.

The reason why he was no longer able to sustain his drive was because he had hit too many walls!

As much as he became impressed by his ambitious new goals, it was anything but easy to make it all happen!

When he reviewed all of the documents that he had made in a span of a few hours, he recognized that he was wholly inadequate to realize even 10 percent of his master plan!

He needed to become a superb spiritual engineer the likes of which humanity had never seen!

He bet that not even Five Scrolls Compact could come close to developing all of these impossible solutions!

It was only up until now that he understood the magnitude of what he attempted to accomplish.

"This… is not an ordinary design anymore. It has far exceeded that level. This… is a grand design!"

Perhaps the grandest of all! Only Star Designers were capable of leveraging the strength that they had grown step-by-step by designing mechs into other powerful applications!

It was extremely arrogant and foolish for Ves to think that he could complete a plan that could only be tackled by Star Designers!

He had a long way to go before he developed his prowess and improved his mastery over spiritual engineering to the point where he could create his long-awaited spirit trees!

It might take a century. It might take two centuries. However long it would take, Ves was determined to pursue this ambition!

He clenched his fist as determination filled his body!

"A day will come when I shall realize my grand design."

He needed to be patient, though. The journey was a marathon, not a sprint. He needed to get close by researching incremental new solutions over a span of many years.

Not only that, he couldn't do it alone. He needed the support of hundreds if not thousands of brilliant researchers and assistants to solve the sheer amount of problems that prevented him from completing his grand design!

There were a few problems that he could potentially solve in a matter of years.

Developing a safe and systematic approach where people could make use of the Aspects of Lufa to accelerate their progress and trigger controlled breakthroughs was much more attainable.

Developing a spirit tree that could grow helpful spirit fruits was much harder in comparison!

The biggest challenge that Ves was grappling with was how the consumption of a spirit fruit could lead to a permanent improvement.

If Ves injected his spiritual energy into another person, the spike of energy would probably pass through everything before dissipating into the spiritual realm.

If he forcefully tried to inject it in someone's mind or spirit, a violent rejection process would occur as individuals were unable to cope with foreign spiritual energy!

Ves had only witnessed a few instances where powerful spiritual entities were able to absorb and digest foreign spiritual matter.

Both the Unending One and Cynthia had shown this capability. Yet in either of those cases, the process which they relied upon to absorb foreign energy was violent and forceful.

Ordinary people could never replicate such a high-end process!

Even Ves had only been able to reproduce a part of the Unending One's devouring capabilities by incorporating the dark god's spiritual fragment into Blinky.

"I can't rely on this direction to develop a solution where other people can absorb foreign energy."

This was why he turned his attention to a different and more ambitious direction.

"The key is universal life energy."

This high-end spiritual energy attribute was incredibly powerful, but also happened to be incomparably gentle!

A small quantity of universal life energy could assimilate into any spirituality as long as they had room to grow!

If Ves wanted his spirit fruits to achieve actual results, then he needed to come up with spirit seeds that behaved in a similar fashion!

The only solution that he could think of was to add universal life energy to all of the spirit fruits!

As long as they contained a sufficient amount of this powerful energy, they could facilitate the assimilation of any kind of spirit seed with foreign attributes!

"Perhaps a spirit seed that only consists of universal life energy is enough to bestow humans with spiritual potential!"

Ves had always speculated that this might be possible, but he never dared to test it out because he did not want to waste a finite quantity of universal life energy in his possession.

Yet… what if he found a way to replenish it? What if he could grow it by himself instead of relying on obtaining more high-grade life-prolonging treatment serum?