The Mech Touch

The old Master soon had his fill of teaching the younger generation. After taking one last wistful look at the NuMan, the esteemed biomech designer flew away with his extensive guard duty in tow.

Ves and Gloriana watched the old man depart.

"According to the galactic net, Master Werther Cline is over three centuries old." Gloriana broke the silence.

"Damn." Ves looked impressed. "He must have experienced a lot of ups and downs."

Anyone who was able to live this long was a legend as far as everyone was concerned. Though Master Cline didn't seem all that impressive due to his restrained demeanor and ordinary garments, the brilliance of his mind and spirit was the real deal.

Ves yearned to reach this level of power. When would he be able to pass on profound lessons to ignorant youngsters?

Not anytime soon, that was for sure. There was no way for Ves to catch up to the likes of Master Cline within a century. Not unless he resorted to unconventional means that had a very high chance of backfiring on him. He had too little confidence that he'd be able to merge a portion of the Unending One's formidable powers.

Perhaps one day, that might change. As long as he kept building up his knowledge, he might one day be able to absorb the power of a dark god and become a greater mech designer in the process!

"Biomech designers have quite a few skeletons in their closets, it seems." Gloriana remarked as she finally turned away from the NuMan.

"That's the price of knowledge, I guess." Ves replied. "The more you learn, the more possibilities you can choose from. It becomes harder and harder to cling to your morals and stay true to your original purpose."

Those were steps that Ves would never be able to take. He was not a biomech designer and it was too late to start when he had already developed his own style and approach towards mech design. He would just become very mediocre at designing biomechs.

As Gloriana started to float towards the remaining exhibits, Ves took one last look at the silent and unmoving NuMan.

When he listened to the story behind this aberrant organic machine, he couldn't help but develop a novel theory about the failure behind the attempted consciousness transfer.

What if.. the mech designer in question hadn't taken his own spirituality into account? What if this essential quality that was essential to sentient life remained behind in the old body, thereby leaving the transfer incomplete?

According to his own rudimentary theories on spirituality, this might very well be the case!

Did this mean that the experiment could have succeeded if Ves was involved?

His body shuddered.

He firmly shook his head to throw aside this radical thought. Even if he held the secret behind allowing people to transcend their human existences by transferring to a greater body, there was no way he was crazy enough to pick up where the designer of the NuMan left off! He was not a degenerate!

Ves eventually caught up to Gloriana and began to view the remaining display models. While the diversity in biomechs opened his eyes to several more possibilities of biomechs, his attention wavered.

"We're so limited in comparison to these biological architects." Ves sighed. "We are only ever able to create machines. Even if I can do a little more, I'm all on my own while these biomech designers have an entire community of their own."

"You don't need to feel jealous, Ves. The grass is always greener on the other side. You're fantastic in your own way. The mechs we'll be able to design in the future will blow all of these biomechs out of the water."

She wasn't wrong, but Ves still felt he was missing something. He might be able to steer his design philosophy in a much more interesting direction if he started to work with biomechs.

Yet even though he didn't care too much about the MTA, he still had to be careful about staying within the confines of the rules.

The Age of Mechs was an era where most of humanity lived under a single order, after all. For better or worse, the MTA and the CFA dictated the rules that all humans must abide by. Those who scorned them did so at their own peril.

Ves did not want to end up like the Skull Architect. Even if the wily war criminal managed to change his coat and regained a 'legal' identity, Professor Cortez still had to restrain his work so that it did not exhibit any of the distinctive traits of his previous works.

That was not the kind of life that Ves wanted to live. He wanted to design his mechs with as little constraints as possible. If that meant playing by the rules of the biggest bullies in the playground, then so be it. He had no greater ambitions that required him to break the rules.

He and his wife visited a number of other places that prominently featured biomechs. They visited another exhibition hall which prominently featured current bestsellers in the biomech market.

The hall was a great place for the pair to get up to date on the current trends. They also gained a deeper insight on how biomechs performed compared to classical mechs.

"Biomechs have a distinctive advantage in atmospheric conditions." Ves observed as he looked at a spaceborn biomech. "This mech here doesn't look like it belongs in space."

Gloriana concurred. "There are astral lifeforms that are natively adapted to life in space, but many of them are too big to be adapted to the scale of a mech. That makes it a bit more difficult for biomech designers to derive their spaceborn mechs from existing life."

This was a rather interesting phenomenon in the biomech community. A lot of designers preferred to copy successful works of nature rather than come up with a brand-new biomech from scratch.

Granted, it was a waste of time to start from scratch. Just like how classical mech designers resorted to licensing existing mech components, biomech designers plagiarized the products of evolution in order to obtain a winning formula.

While an unending amount of exobeasts resided on planets throughout the galaxy, the amount of unique lifeforms living in space was substantially less!

It was not hard to imagine why. Space was inherently hostile to many forms of life. Humans themselves would quickly suffocate and freeze to death if they entered space without the protection of a suit. Many other alien races were subjected to the same restriction.

Yet there were always exceptions. Just like how ancient sea creatures slowly evolved to be able to live on land, a relatively modest amount of alien creatures managed to overcome all the odds and succeeded in adapting to life in space.

This was the origin of most but not all astral beasts swarming in the galaxy to this day.

Since gravity and other constraints no longer exerted a limit on their size, they tended to balloon in size. They also adapted in other ways that made it difficult to transplant their evolutionary successes to biomechs.

All of this meant that it was several times harder to design a spaceborn biomech than a classical one!

As for the spaceborn variety, the organic machines could still put up a good fight, but there were considerably less models to choose from. Ves noticed that every spaceborn biomech was designed by either a Senior or Master.

The exhibition hall featured only a single exception! Evidently, the only Journeymen who were qualified to design spaceborn biomechs were the direct disciples of Masters who specialized in them to begin with!

Gloriana thought this situation was a bit absurd. "This is a major weakness of the biomech industry. Are most Journeymen truly incapable of designing space-capable biomechs?"

"I don't think the problem is that exaggerated." Ves responded. "There should be a shortcut or something that allows lesser biomech designers to design something that can fight in space. It's just that the barrier to entry is so high that their products are not competitive enough to sell in the market. Their inferior products are so bad that they would have to sell them at a price that is below the cost it takes to grow them to maturity."

Classical mechs did not face the same constraints. Their b.a.r.e metal construction performed okay enough in the harsh environment in space as long as they were made of the right materials.

While certain exotics and other metals degraded when brought to space, no mech designer was stupid enough to incorporate any of them in their spaceborn mech designs.

In fact, these materials were so unpopular that they never showed up in landbound mechs either. There were plenty of times where landbound mechs had to be transported from one star system to another.

After taking note of this odd quirk, Ves and Gloriana visited one last location before they were done for the day.

"Meow…?"

"Miaow.."

Both Lucky and Clixie clung close to their owners as soon as the group stepped onto a hill that overlooked an enormous field that was situated hundreds of kilometers away from Veoline.

Scattered groups of other tourists gawked at the astounding sight before their eyes.

Thousands of giant skeletons poked out from what appeared to be a literal sea of bones. While there were plenty of humanoid and bestial bones strewn at random, the caretaking organization of the boneyard fixed the skeletal structure of a large number of former biomechs together.

This resulted in an incredible sight. Ves could imagine the contours of many different biomechs by looking at the skeletons that remained of them. The fact that there were thousands of them caused the boneyard to take on a much more macabre atmosphere.

"Look, Ves! There's a half-rotted biomech lying over there!"

She was right. Ves spotted what appeared to be a light skirmisher whose flesh was already starting to decay. The organic cells that made up the fleshy parts of the biomech all needed to be fed and taken care of in order to survive.

Once they were deprived of these resources, they would go into hibernation.

The biomech was still recoverable at that point.

Yet if this period of absolute neglect stretched on too long, then the outermost cells would begin to die off in order to transfer energy and nutrients to the core cells.

The light skirmisher in question was roughly at this phase. Its core cells that were buried deeper were still relatively healthy, but the exterior looked like a rotted mess.

"What a sad way for a biomech to die." Ves curled his mouth in disapproval. "Why are the locals letting these mechs decay like this? A recycler can extract plenty of usable resources from these corpses."

"Maybe it's not cost-effective to do so. Their organic makeup doubtlessly make it harder to salvage any usable parts and materials from these machines."

Even if it was a bit more troublesome to recycle biomechs, Ves didn't see this boneyard was needed. He bet that all of the bones lying here could be broken down in order to separate usable materials. Yet instead of doing so, the local biomech designers decided it was fun if they dumped their trash in an open landfill.

It looked damn impressive, though.

"Maybe biomechs deserve to be buried in proper graves."

"Are you kidding? Biomechs are too big. Planets would run out of available space in no time. You'd have to stack the graves!"