The Mech Touch

The difficulty of producing universal life energy was unimaginable.

This was not a regular form of spiritual energy. Its core attribute centered a higher concept of life!

Ves had only encountered a few varieties of high-end spiritual energy.

From the high-grade life-prolonging treatment vials, he was able to extract the universal life energy that served as the key ingredient to extending people's lives.

From Cassandra Breyer, he came in touch with the five elements of earth, water, fire, wood and metal.

From the Polymath, he not only encountered the metal attribute once once again, but also tasted the power of truth!

Each of these high-end attributes were powerful. Each of them opened up a lot of new possibilities. Each of them also happened to be extremely difficult to reproduce!

If what he learned from various sources was any indication, then the only way for the Big Two and the Five Scrolls Compact to generate universal life energy was to squeeze it out of the brains of high-ranking mech pilots!

"What an incredibly barbaric and inefficient process!"

While Ves could easily imagine the deranged cultists of the Five Scrolls Compact undertaking such a demented activity, it was hard for him to accept that the Big Two also engaged in such a terrible activity!

The suspicion that the Mech Trade Association, which had always stood up for the rights of mech pilots, eagerly sacrificed the lives of expert pilots and ace pilots in order to extend the lives of a cabal of geezers was too horrible to accept!

Although Ves still hadn't collected enough proof to clear his doubts, the possibility always remained.

He did not need to look any further than the research files that he had inadvertently obtained from the pinnacle lab on Prosperous Hill VI.

His eyes clouded over as he focused inward. He dug up a collection of research documents that he had managed to steal from the Supreme Sage's lab.

Project Cain encapsulated that former top bioresearcher's attempt to extract a special substance from the brains of dead expert pilots. The goal was to improve the yield and make it easier to produce greater quantities of high-grade serum!

There was no way the MTA had no relations to this macabre research project!

Perhaps its upright principles did not allow the organization to conduct this research directly. Outsourcing this controversial activity to a disposable third party associate was a lot safer!

The more Ves thought about it, the more this scheme made sense!

The MTA could just profess innocence if the public found out about the horrible experiments that they had secretly commissioned one day. After all, the mechers had done none of the actual work. It was the 'rogue scientists' that had gone down the wrong path!

Until then, the mechers could reap all of the gains without accepting any responsibility! It was a devious scheme that completely fit their behavior pattern!

Every external research partner was a tool as far as the MTA was concerned. The Supreme Sage and other 'research partners' were not as honored as they thought.

Perhaps they might hold value as long as their standing remained high, but the mechers would not hesitate to dump them as soon as any of them turned into a liability!

Ves even thought about his own relationship with the MTA. Were his friendship with Jovy, his acquaintance with the Polymath and his status as a contributor of restricted technology just levers to make him more useful to the Association?

What if he outlived his usefulness? Would he get cleaned up by them one day?

He shook his head. The mechers shouldn't be ungrateful!

As long as Ves grasped their goals and motivations, he could ensure that he remained a useful asset to them. His relationship with the MTA was safe as long as this was the case.

It didn't take much for him to remain in the good graces of the Association. He just had to keep improving as a mech designer. The greater his contributions to the mech community, the more he facilitated the MTA's purpose.

As Ves thought about how to maintain his relationship with the MTA, he suddenly reached another epiphany.

"Wait a minute." Ves abruptly paused. "Why am I thinking about improving humanity through spirit trees when I can more easily do so with my mechs?"

The grand design that he tentatively called the Spiritual Uplift Project was extremely immense and far-reaching.

In order to develop the spirit fruits that could seamlessly merge their spiritual seeds with people's spiritualities, he needed to develop a self-renewing source of universal life energy!

The only way that Ves could accomplish this was to create a new spiritual product that excelled at this job!

It would be the mother of all spirit trees.

By forming a spiritual entity that was largely based on high-end universal life energy and little else, Ves hoped to create a 'Tree of Life' that could produce an endless amount of its main ingredient, thereby ridding him from his dependency on extremely rare and expensive serum!

This was a much more efficient way of producing universal life energy than squeezing it out of the brains of high-ranking mech pilots as if they were oranges!

"It's too difficult, though!"

As far as Ves was aware of, most spiritual life forms were unable to handle such high-end energies. They were too powerful and high quality to be handled by low-order life forms.

The thought of creating a life that could produce universal life energy right away was an incredibly arrogant goal!

The biggest challenge to creating this so-called Tree of Life was to ensure that the new spiritual entity did not instantly expend all of its high-end universal life energy into nurturing its low-end spiritual energies.

"Difficult! Difficult! Difficult!"

While Ves had a few ideas on how to start with nurturing this extremely special Tree of Life, it would probably take decades if not centuries for this remarkable life form to fulfill all of its functions!

Compared to the extremes that Ves needed to go through in order to progress his ultra-ambitious Spiritual Uplift Project, it was a lot easier for him to achieve similar results by designing mechs!

This was what his epiphany was all about.

"I was putting the cart before the horse. Before I can think about helping every human transcend their limits, I should focus on a more attainable goal such as making mech pilots stronger!"

As Ves turned his thoughts in this direction, he realized that even without the use of spirit fruits, he could use another medium to nurture a human's spirituality.

"The answer is mechs!"

Although the limitation of using mechs was that his solutions were solely confined to mech pilots, this was still a good start.

Ves recalled the fundamental creed of every mech designer. It was a goal that the MTA forcefully hammered into his head and that of his fellow colleagues.

"Mech designers exist to serve mech pilots."

It was a simple statement, but not it gained an additional meaning through the epiphany he had obtained.

The conventional way for mech designers to fulfill their creed was to design good mechs that provided immediate battle strength to mech pilots.

A strong weapon allowed mech pilots to put up a better fight!

"However… that's not the extent of my style."

Sure, his living mechs always provided immediate advantages that could help a mech pilot win a battle. The increased cooperation between a living mech and a mech pilot along with the remarkable properties of glows usually resulted in better results.

Yet what Ves actually fixated upon was imparting his mechs with growth potential. By making them alive and giving them the possibility to grow stronger over time, they could become stronger and more useful weapons that could help their mech pilots achieve even greater victories!

"That's not the extent of what I can do, though!"

He didn't realize it until now that he was mostly prioritizing the growth of the mech.

His latest attempts to make the weapon stronger such as developing increasingly more sophisticated living mechs and increasing his use of design spirits all served to strengthen one part of the equation.

He had subconsciously neglected the other part of the equation, yet that was illogical.

As a mech designer who was obsessed with man-machine symbiosis, how could he leave out the growth of the mech pilot!?

"If I treat my living mechs as spirit fruits, how much help can they provide towards my mech pilots?"

The results would be massive! Any mech of his design that could induce targeted growth to its mech pilot would be at least ten times if not a hundred times more valuable than a competing machine!

In fact, the allure of piloting a mech that could actively help a mech pilot grow stronger was a fatal attraction to the entire soldier profession!

Ves wanted to smack his face for missing this incredibly promising possibility!

Unlike his previous ideas, it was a lot more attainable for him to realize all of these amazing new growth-oriented mech models.

The reason why he was so confident about it was because they had already come into existence!

"My Chiron, my Quint and my Enlightened Warrior are already growth mechs in a sense!"

Even Ketis joined the party. Her Monster Slayer and her Second Sword was imbued with a portion of her swordsmanship which they could pass on to their mech pilots!

All of these existing mechs proved that the idea of using machines to actively nurture the strength of mech pilots was viable!

In truth, Ves had only scratched the surface of growth mechs up until this point. He had been too ignorant of the possibilities. All the times he spent on improving the performance of his mechs had caused him to neglect the greater potential of design philosophy.

If he turned his main products into the mech industry's version of spirit fruits, then he could revolutionize the mech community a lot sooner!

The entire body of mech pilots would become profoundly grateful to his contributions as he introduced a much more accessible method for them to improve their talents and exceed their congenital limitations!

As long as his growth mechs lived up to their promises, they could change the face of the mech market!

Who would want to buy a mech that wasn't capable of actively nurturing mech pilots?

"The mechs that lack this essential feature will all turn obsolete overnight!"

The only way for other mech designers to compete against machines that served mech pilots the best was to incorporate Ves' solutions into their own work!

As far as Ves knew, the only way to make that possible was for Ves to advance to the rank of Master Mech Designer and 'realize' his design philosophy!

His eyes widened as his passion burned even hotter than before!

He no longer felt confused about his future direction as a mech designer.

Ever since he became a Journeyman, he explored his design philosophy and developed a lot of new applications. He continually created more and more methods and techniques while at the same time fleshing out his theoretical framework.

Yet no matter how much he expanded his spiritual toolbox, he never felt that any of them brought him closer to advancing to the next rank.

This was no longer the case.

Ves felt it in his bones that the concept of growth mechs could be the key he was looking for all of these years.

It was not the key that he could use to unlock the gates that allowed him to realize his design philosophy.

Every mech designer could come up with many different ideas to progress their design philosophies.

However, not all of them were as good. Some were more attainable. Some were easier to research. Some fit a mech designer better than others.

Ves had no doubts, though. From the moment he formally conceived of the concept of growth mechs, he already knew that it was the best and most fitting innovation that he could embrace!

"This is it! This is the one! This is my path that will lead me to Senior and Master!"