The Mech Touch

After some time, his latest spiritual product took shape. Through his deliberate manipulations, Ves formed it into a more definable shape compared to his previous creations.

Artificial design spirits such as the Solemn Guardian, Bravo and so on evolved their forms according to their evolution. What they looked like and how they presented themselves wasn't as important as their inner self.

The Golden Cat and the Superior Mother were different. Ves birthed them with a solid appearance in mind. The Golden Cat would always be a cat while the Superior Mother would always appear in the guise of his mother!

Now that he had come up with another innovation in the form of implanting innate abilities into his artificial creations, Ves felt that he should take another step forward and purposefully define the shapes of his spiritual products.

As a spiritual entity meant to suppress glows and offer relief, Ves decided to mold it into a benevolent shape.

When he came up with the idea, he chose to adopt a marketing mindset. What shape would people be comfortable with? What form allowed his new design spirit to gain an instant measure of trust and appreciation from other people?

He decided upon the shape of an angel.

"Even to secularists like me, angels always evoke a good impression."

Angels were ubiquitous in modern culture and often used in various fictional settings. Ves had watched plenty of fantasy dramas in his youth which prominently featured these holy, white-winged people.

Of course, in some of the old religions of humanity, the true nature of angels was a bit more complicated than that. They were beings of energy and adopted various shapes depending on their role and purpose. The depictions that Ves had seen on the galactic net ranged from psychedelic to horrifying!

There was no way Ves would make his latest spiritual product look like a holy monster in order to be accurate. Even he wouldn't be able to trust a monstrous collection of wings covered by hundreds of eyes!

"It doesn't matter. I'm just borrowing from the predominant cultural perception of angels. It's not like I'm really creating my own heavenly court or anything!"

As he molded his angelic spirit, Ves briefly paused when the question of gender came up. As someone who was able to exert an increasing amount of control over the birth of spiritual entities, he could pick any gender he wanted for his design spirits.

He briefly considered choosing a female in order to please his fiance, but he quickly shook his head.

"This is not a Hexer spirit! I don't have to cater to her whims all the time!"

He decided to settle for turning his new creation male. The grey phantom which he used as an ingredient possessed a masculine flavor, so he encountered less resistance in the process.

His sixth spiritual product took shape.

The life that welled within the fused collection of shards continued to exert their wondrous effects.

The universal life energy that Ves had derived from the serum had almost disappeared. It was not for nothing though, as the developing spiritual life form rapidly gained strength while achieving a greater degree of wholeness.

What interested him a lot was how the spiritual construct he formed out of the shards of the spiritual restraint had fused seamlessly into his developing creation.

With an abundant amount of life energy from Ves as a medium, the spiritual object retained its distinctive form while simultaneously integrating with the greater whole as if they belonged together.

Ves was afraid that his 'spiritual implant' might dissolve or lose its shape, but fortunately that didn't happen.

Time continued to pass. Ves kept observing the creation process carefully. He no longer had to inject his spiritual energy, but still did so at various points in order to influence the direction of the unborn spirit's growth.

Eventually, the angel spread its sacred white wings and opened its glowing golden eyes!

A pulse emitted from the newborn spiritual product that ran swept throughout the entire vault and continued to expand throughout the entire ship!

Wherever the pulse passed, anything spiritual in nature briefly dimmed!

"Wait, what?! This is dangerous!"

Ves instantly realized that this uncontrolled pulse that heralded the birth of another spiritual entity might mess up some of his stuff!

He turned around and focused his spiritual senses on the Ancient Sarcophagus.

Fortunately, its restrictions were as strong as ever. That made Ves a little suspicious about the red coffin. Perhaps the crystalline creation possessed some of the properties of a B-stone. If not for the fact that the coffin was necessary to keep Nyxie imprisoned, he would have tried to cut off some samples in order to perform some material research!

He turned to his cat. "Are you okay, Lucky?"

"Meow."

His cat felt nothing. The clansmen aboard his ship should feel nothing. Even he wasn't affected by the uncontrolled pulse.

This was by design. As a creation meant to restrain glows and spiritual phenomena, Ves really wasn't assured the angel might be used against him some day.

Even if he managed to instill a considerable amount of loyalty to him and the Larkinson Clan in the spiritual product, life had a way of running out of control.

Living entities weren't always defined by the circ.u.mstances of their birth. No matter how many restrictions that Ves programmed into them, the kind of life that Ves created never possessed the rigidity of AIs.

Life was all about growth and evolution! If something about them became a hindrance to their survival or ambitions, then they always had the opportunity to change themselves!

For this reason, Ves never put too much stock in behavioral programming. This was why he broke one of his principles for once and carved out a backdoor in his new design spirit's very makeup!

No matter what, the angel's special abilities should never be used against him or any members of the Larkinson Clan!

Ves spent a lot of effort and ingenuity to turn this backdoor into a core aspect of his spiritual product. While it probably wasn't foolproof by any means, it was incredibly hard to subvert this backdoor.

"Hahaha!" He erupted after he noticed that at least one of the features of his new spiritual product worked as he intended. "No matter who you are and who you will turn into, never forget your allegiance!"

The newborn angel might not have much of a personality as of yet, but the copious amount of universal life energy infused in its spiritual existence had likely accelerated its mental development.

The angel was already smart enough to understand Ves. The spiritual entity recognized his own creator and knelt down to show his thanks for coming into existence.

The gesture of obedience pleased Ves immensely! His spiritual senses continued to rake over the winged spirit. A quiet field surrounded the entity, causing the area around him to gain a measure of unnatural calm.

Ves nodded with satisfaction. Even though he could feel the new entity's glow, his spiritual energy received no disturbance. For now, the angel was literally incapable of impeding his creator.

Even if he did, Ves was not weak by any means! He always held a few tricks back against his own creations.

After observing his prostrating angel for some time, Ves pulled out a palm-sized hoop from his pocket.

"I name you Lufa, the Angel of Tranquility! Now, enter this totem that I have fashioned for you. Don't worry. You will be paired with a mech design soon enough."

Lufa's glowing golden eyes pulsed as he received his name. The newborn spiritual entity quickly obeyed his first instructions and entered the hoop that Ves had made.

Ves grinned even wider. The hoop he created was not made out of regular material. Underneath its Breyer alloy exterior was a ring of B-stone!

As expected, Lufa's nature allowed him to ignore the blocking and dampening effect of B-stones!

Seeing that Lufa was safely stowed inside the medium he prepared, Ves approached Nitaa and held out his hand.

"Give me the Larkinson Mandate."

Once he obtained the book, he carefully bound the hoop around the thick medallion that depicted the head of the Golden Cat. The new addition hardly changed the look of the front cover.

The purpose of the hoop was simple. Ves hoped to keep the Angel of Tranquility close to the Golden Cat.

By ensuring constant close contact with the embodiment of the Larkinson Clan, Ves hoped that Lufa would never become estranged to the Larkinsons.

Keeping them in close proximity also served another purpose as well. Goldie's value to the clan was essential, but Ves wasn't sure whether she was capable of defending herself against every possible threat.

More importantly, the Larkinson Mandate was her physical anchor. If anything happened to it, Goldie would surely suffer!

Therefore, adding the Restraint Hoop to the Larkinson Mandate would hopefully protect the book and the ancestral spirit from extraordinary threats.

Was Ves being excessively cautious and paranoid? Probably.

Did he regret going through so many extremes? Not at all!

He might not need this much protection today, but who knew what threats he faced in a couple of decades for now. Ves would rather have too much protection at hand than come up short when he faced an insurmountable enemy!

"Meow."

Lucky floated towards the Larkinson Mandate and sniffed at the Restraint Hoop.

"This is not for you to eat." Ves tapped his gem cat's head.

"Meow meow."

Nyaaaa.

The Golden Cat looked curious as well at the new addition to her 'home'. The B-stone core of the hoop partially reduced her sensitivity, but other than that she didn't suffer any detrimental consequences.

"What do you think about your little brother?"

Nyaa. Nyaa?

"Hmm. That sounds weird. Even though Lufa was made with pieces of you, he's not actually your child. Anyway, can you mentor him for a time? He's completely new and needs to be integrated in his new life. You can pass him over to other friendly design spirits if you like."

Nyaaa!

While Goldie still looked young, she was already eager to exercise some responsibility. She immediately turned to Lufa and began to communicate with the spiritual angel.

Seeing that Lufa was receptive to Goldie, Ves put down his final concerns and returned the book to Nitaa for safekeeping.

After tidying up the vault, Ves returned to his stateroom and began to reflect on the creation process.

Even though he hadn't tested the innate ability that he added to Lufa, he wasn't in a hurry to test it out. There was plenty of time to test Lufa's various properties and abilities when he stabilized his existence and gained a finer grip on how copious amount of power.

Ves ran back the creation process in his mind with the help of his implant. While he hadn't recorded any footage because much of the process happened out of sight, he made sure to record all of his thoughts, emotions and other mental fluctuations in digital form.

Being able to live through them from a detached perspective was a very effective way to reflect on his decisions. He could also spend as much time as he wanted on analyzing every change and reaction that he perceived.

He developed a lot of questions about the nature of B-sontes.

The existence of the spiritual restraint made by some ancient alien jailer proved that it possible to replicate the effect of B-stone.

Ves wondered whether the alien spiritual engineer derived the unique restraint-attributed spiritual energy from a B-stone.

He also wondered whether the reverse was the case. Was it possible to synthesize more B-stones by transforming restraint energy? Would he be able to create other spiritually-reactive exotics with a certain method?

He had no idea!

The onset of all of these questions made him realize how little he truly understood his own specialty. His lack of answers indicated that despite his innovations, his theories were still too shallow!