The Mech Touch

"Stop, stop, Ves. Your explanation has become too convoluted." Gloriana spoke as she sat next to her husband on the couch in the living room. "According to you, prime materials are equivalent to heavenly materials, but is that truly the case? You originally defined prime materials as anything that can be used to store spiritual energy, but do sympathetic materials that only respond to certain attributes fall within that category?"

Ves looked stumped for a moment. "Uhhh..."

"Aside from that, what is exotic radiation can produce a so-called heavenly material that can't be used by expert pilots to generate prime resonance? As far as I recall, B-stones are spiritually reactive in that they can block spiritual energy, but that same properly also causes them to be unable to produce any sort of prime resonance. Isn't it a misnomer to call it a prime material in that case?"

"Uhhh..."

He had to admit that his nagging wife had a point this time. Ves had automatically been equating prime materials to heavenly materials when they actually referred to two separate types of materials. Their definitions did not match.

"Have you taken a look at the MTA's database as of late? I highly recommend you to visit it again. The mechers have recently updated the official industry standards to account for the emergence of materials transformed by constant exposure to E energy radiation."

Ves did what she suggested. He called up a projection and visited the Red Association's internal portal and immediately sought out the page that explained all of the latest updates.

He immediately grew surprised and a little fascinated in how much the mechers chose to reveal.

According to their general explanation, all forms of matter could be classified in many different ways.

One of the fundamental distinctions that people could make was the overall energy state of matter.

Previously, humanity only needed to put different materials in two broad boxes.

Matter could be mundane such as carbon or iron.

Matter could also be exotic such as Iridescent Mercury or phasewater.

Yet now that the Red Ocean became exposed to exotic radiation originating from Messier 87, a new category had to be made to classify the materials that emerged through unprecedented circumstances.

The Red Two decided to redefine their entire materials science framework in order to take the latest changes into account!

All matter could now be divided in three broad categories.

Low energy materials could be produced without any influence of exotic radiation at all. They were the most basic forms of matter of the universe and could be found pretty much everywhere.

Medium energy materials emerged in environments with at least a small amount of exotic radiation. They were called exotic materials in full, but most people had long taken to shorten it by using the term exotics as a convenient shorthand.

The Red Two claimed that the Milky Way had always produced E energy radiation, but not at a level where it disrupted people's lives.

Humanity and most natives from the Milky Way and the Red Ocean had evolved in a medium energy environment. Their biologies or their tech had become accustomed to taking advantage of the medium energy materials formed in this kind of placid but mildly energetic galactic environment.

Times had changed. Now that red humanity had entered a high energy environment, it became inevitable that a powerful galaxy like Messier 87 triggered the formation of so-called high energy materials! This new classification of materials had the potential to possess even more powerful properties that could massively strengthen the performance of mechs and starships!

Certain high energy materials could be produced at the current levels of E energy radiation.

However, just like Ves, the excellent research groups of the Red Two had already managed to find ways to concentrate E energy radiation under controlled environments, thereby breeding a host of even more energetic materials, all of which possessed even stronger properties!

In order to make a distinction between exotic materials that could be produced in a medium energy environment and the newer class of materials that could only be produced in a high energy environment, the latter received a separate name.

"Hyper materials, or hypers for short." Ves uttered. "I guess that works."

He had the vague suspicion that the Red Two had always known about the existence of heavenly materials. They just didn't use a term that was obviously steeped in religion, superstition and a heritage that they desperately wanted to bury.

This was why they probably found a similar enough word in the form of 'hyper'.

It was short.

It provided a lot of clarity.

It also conveyed an easter egg to 'those in the know' such as Ves that this was meant to be the new standard term for heavenly materials!

Ves most certainly received this message. Personally, he felt that it was a good choice.

"Now that you have learned about hypers, how do you define prime materials?" Gloriana asked after she had given him enough time to take in the new information.

Ves spent a few more seconds on rearranging his theoretical framework on matter. Everything made a lot more sense now that he was able to put every form of matter in three broad categories.

"According to the Red Two's latest model on matter, the prime materials that I have been working on should probably exist as a subcategory of hyper materials. My own definition for prime materials is any form of matter that can store spiritual energy. I can further sub-divide them into sympathetic materials that can only store specific attributes of materials and more broader cache materials that can store any type of spiritual energy."

His wife frowned again. "You have invented several new terms in a short amount of time. Can you clarify what you mean by your new classifications?"

Ves understood that it may be a little difficult for other people to follow his train of thought.

"Take Unending alloy for example." He said. "With the knowledge that I possess today, I can treat it as a hyper material, as it is only possible to make it in a high energy environment or raw materials that emerged from one. At the same time, it is also a prime material as it can be used to make a prime mech. Furthermore, I can classify it as a cache material because it can store any attribute of spiritual energy without any discrimination."

The new terms that Ves used could be used to form a hierarchy of classifications and subclassifications of materials.

What Ves truly desired was prime materials. Any prime material could play a huge role in his works. Even if he did not have a mech at hand that could make good use of a specific prime material, he could always design a new mech that made the best use of available resources!

His wife quickly picked up on what Ves tried to convey with his new words. The single example was enough for her to comprehend his newly revised theoretical model.

"If that is the case, then a P-stone should also be considered a hyper, a prime material and a cache material, correct? It may have vastly different physical properties when compared to Unending alloy, but in terms of usage they are still remarkably similar."

Ves nodded. "That is correct."

"Do you have any examples of a hyper and a prime material that is not a cache material?"

"Yes, but only one. The Gray Lotus that I recently upgraded incorporates a small amount of Black Demon Steel. It is a hyper, a prime material and a sympathetic material that is extremely rare and precious." He responded.

It might not be so rare anymore now that the Red Ocean had entered a high energy environment. Even if he couldn't get his hands on additional quantities of this exact alloy, he believed he could definitely obtain other sympathetic materials with similar properties!

Now that they were talking about this topic, Ves also exposed his latest attempts to artificially promote the formation of prime materials over at the T Institute.

His wife smiled when she heard how her husband used Helena's glow of all means to speed up the transformation of sympathetic materials aspected towards death energy.

"You have essentially confirmed that it is possible to make useful new hyper materials by relying on the blessing of gods." She asserted. "Is it possible for the Hexers to produce a similar result if they gather a large amount of other Hexer mechs such as Blessed Squires to produce 'sympathetic materials' that are closely aligned to the Superior Mother?"

"That is theoretically possible, but... I'm not sure if it will work that way." Ves hesitantly said. "The strength and the intensity of a glow has to be strong enough. The Hexer mech also needs to be alive and actively cultivating in order to produce an environment where one particular type of elemental energy has become dominant. These are difficult conditions that not many other parties can replicate."

Ves had a strong hunch that the Red Two and the first-rate colonial superstates possessed enough heritages and secret knowledge to produce prime materials and sympathetic materials in their own ways.

They might even master methods to make effective use of the properties of all of this new matter!

Ves was not arrogant enough to assume that only he could make good use of prime materials. He could already figure out several more ways to take advantage of materials such as Black Demon Steel without involving living mechs or resonance.

"What about the mechs themselves?" Gloriana asked next. "Is it possible that the glows of your living mechs can steadily induce transformations of its existing material components over time?"

"It's possible, but I don't think it is a desirable outcome. In fact, many mechs designed by others are also suffering from this problem. The uncontrollable mutations can easily produce major flaws if the affected mechs and other machinery haven't undergone revisions."

The greater the energy density of an environment, the greater the problem!

Anyone who managed to travel to Messier 87 would probably have to overhaul their mechs and starships pretty quickly before they mutated to the point where they became inoperable!

At the same time, Ves was not sure if an object made in Messier 87 would degenerate when it traveled to a less energy dense environment such as the Red Ocean or the Milky Way.

The considerably lower concentrations of ambient spiritual energy might negatively affect the performance of at least some of the hyper materials, especially when they were explicitly used to leverage the power of heaven.

In fact, it might not even be necessary to travel to an entirely different galaxy to rob certain hyper materials of much of their potency.

It was enough to drain much of the ambient spiritual energy in a specific area to cripple the functioning of machines that relied heavily on E energy radiation!

Blinky was able to do this to a limited extent, but his current cultivation stage was not high enough to produce an energy vacuum on a typical battlefield.

Ves believed that his companion spirit might one day grow powerful enough to make that happen. Perhaps Blinky might be able to do it when he grows as strong as Emma at her current state one day!

All of this indicated that it was dangerous to develop an overreliance on hypers. Exotics still had their place in red humanity's society.

These medium energy materials were completely self-contained and were mostly stable enough to function precisely the same in any sort of environment no matter the energy density level.

The only anomaly of sorts that did not quite fit in any of the three existing boxes was phasewater.

On the one hand, it behaved like an exotic material for the most part.

On the other hand, its extra dimensional properties caused it to gain access to a lot of energies located in the higher dimensions. This was where phasewater derived much of its power and potency.

Up until now, it did not appear that phasewater exhibited the traits of a hyper material, but according to the phasewater theory that Ves had learned, this shouldn't be the case.

The current theories did not exactly line up with observations in reality. This meant that Ves and the people who wrote all of the textbooks did not understand phasewater as well as they thought.

What was phasewater, exactly?