The Mech Touch

Ves didn't want to raise average mech designers.

Anyone who received his tutelage should follow a unique and exciting path. This was why he tried his best to help his students develop in more creative directions.

Ketis was a good example of someone who managed to do that. Though Ves wasn't directly responsible for her ascension to swordmaster, he had succeeded in laying the foundation to her successful rise.

As Ves listened to Maikel and Zanthar elaborate on how they had narrowed down their studies to their chosen specialties, he felt that the young men weren't quite there yet. Their ambitions weren't small, but they were still a distance away from setting unique and original goals.

Well, it wasn't as if he could expect anything more out of students who had yet to graduate. They still needed to learn how to walk before they could run.

For a moment, Ves thought about granting them companion spirits as a little experiment. Would he be able to turn them into the next versions of Ketis if he granted them a little spiritual assistance?

It was a viable idea. While he didn't want to accelerate the growth of their companion spirit seeds by using up a portion of potent universal life energy, it wasn't necessary to go that far. The two adolescents still needed years before they became ready to do some actual design work. This gave them plenty of time for them to grow alongside their companion spirits.

Perhaps this was a better way for them to develop the companion spirits that were most suitable to their specialties. Accelerated growth might provide instant power and allow a companion spirit to become immediately useful, but Ves was not ignorant of the downsides of this approach.

The bond between him and Blinky wasn't quite comparable to the bond between Ketis and Sharpie. Whenever he saw the pair, he noticed that they were a lot more in tune with each other.

Sharpie automatically assisted Ketis in whatever task she did in the most appropriate manner.

In comparison, Blinky spent most of his time sleeping in his mind, trying and failing to defeat Lucky in violent scuffles and trying to deepen his bond with Goldie instead of Ves. He was too much of a playful cat to provide any serious assistance to Ves during his design work!

"At least he's able to supply me with energy on demand." He muttered.

Ves knew that Blinky had a lot of untapped potential. Just his ability to manipulate the Worclaw energy in his body was extremely important to his future health.

Yet because Blinky grew so rapidly without learning any lessons in between, the Star Cat was like a newly-graduated mech pilot who just entered the cockpit of a Valkyrie Brunhild. The disparity was too big!

Though this was a serious problem, Ves knew he had to be patient. He could already feel Blinky growing more and more familiar with his new abilities. It would only be a matter of time before Blinky mastered his potential to the same degree as Sharpie.

As for granting companion spirits to his students, Ves decided to flesh out this idea later. He still had to find and combine some good ingredients in order to provide Maikel and Zanthar with spiritual assistants that fully complemented their future design philosophies.

This was the best way to transform them into exceptional mech designers!

If the pair managed to bloom under his tutelage, then he would enjoy a very stellar record as a teacher. By that time, Ves predicted that a lot of people would clamor to become his student!

"Sir, when will we be obtaining our cranial implants?" Maikel impatiently asked. "All of the assistant mech designers are already starting to get theirs. Once they recovered from their surgery, their learning speeds increased by multiple times! When will we get to enjoy this enhancement?"

Ves snapped out of his contemplations. He directed a disapproving glance at Maikel.

"You little brats. Are you that impatient to improve yourselves?"

The pair nodded like chicks.

"Well tough luck, because you're not getting any yet if I have anything to say about it." Ves grinned.

"What? Why?!"

"Because you already have enough augments! Look, the basic courses that you still have to go through aren't that difficult. It is worth slowing down a bit in order to go over them with plenty of attention to thought. Piling up a cranial implant on top of your already-formidable genetic augments is completely overboard for mech design students like you. I'm afraid that you'll just rush through the basics without experiencing the gradual revelations that any future mech designer enjoys. It is by thinking about and questioning the theory that design philosophies are born."

The two dummies didn't get it. They just thought that Ves wanted to make them suffer by denying them a powerful study aid.

As someone who possessed a cranial implant himself, Ves knew how it could distort the mind of someone who depended on knowledge to achieve success. While it was truly worth it to obtain one, it was better to wait until the recipient in question had matured to an extent.

Every student who aimed to reach Journeyman had to develop an intimate appreciation of the boundless field of mech design. At the same time, they needed to respect the knowledge that their predecessors had accumulated and made available to those that came after.

Knowledge had a price, and only those who worked hard to expand their understanding would have a better idea on how to forge their own path into uncharted territory.

Of course, this was all his own opinion on the learning process. It might be that he was just pulling guesses out of his butt without knowing whether they reflected reality. He based most of his theories out of his own personal journey into mech design, and that was hardly representative of what other mech designers had to go through.

Ves seriously doubted they possessed the System!

He finished the little session by handing over some long-term homework assignments to the pair. He was already preoccupied with several different projects and had no time to guide his students as closely as he liked.

It wasn't all that bad, though. Despite their complaints, Maikel and Zanthar ingested enough candy to turn themselves into formidable learning machines. They could navigate his library on their own. If they really needed clarification, they could always approach one of the Apprentices in the Design Department if necessary.

When Ves finally dismissed them, he contemplated whether he should bind them more closely to him in the future.

The alternative was to let them develop on their own without trying to push them into a direction of his choosing.

If he chose the former, then Maikel and Zanthar would very likely become eligible to join his inner circle in the future.

Ves turned his attention back to his various projects. Aside from spending time on fleshing out the Chimera Project and the Sentry Project further, he spent several hours trying to synthesize better luminar crystals.

His progress in the latter was rather inconsistent, but he was slowly learning how to get better at synthesizing luminar crystals through the process of trial and error.

Basically, he made a lot of mistakes and screwed up more times than he could count!

Fortunately, his workshop was so well-equipped that he could easily synthesize hundreds of modest-sized crystals a day, especially when he was just out to create samples instead of full-sized products.

"Damn. The hardness of this crystal has dropped by 27 percent compared to my current best." Ves muttered as he tossed another finger-sized crystal over his shoulder.

A pile of hundreds of crystals of different shapes, sizes and colors rested haphazardly on the deck. No cleaning bots had cleaned up this mess as of yet as Ves may needed to scan or revisit them afterwards.

After experiencing yet another failure, Ves started anew and studied the formulas that were heading in the right direction.

"Blinky, how do you think I can increase the hardness of my crystals?"

Mrow mrow mrow.

"Okay, let's try this then."

Ves reached across the work table and picked up three different samples of special materials that he recently received.

"Out of these three materials, which one will increase the hardness of the crystal when added to the formula?"

Blinky pointed at the sample in the middle.

Mrow!

"You sure?"

Mrow mrow!

In fact, Ves didn't need to ask. By focusing his attention on what his companion spirit was feeling and thinking, Ves would easily be able to notice a subtle affinity towards one of the materials.

"What about the Illustrious One? What does he think?"

When Ves briefly channeled the luminar design spirit, he temporarily viewed reality in a different fashion.

It was hard to describe how certain elements stood out more while other elements receded in importance.

Yet just because his senses became more freaky didn't mean he could easily piece together the formula to synthesize second-class luminar crystals.

"What is the damn ratio?! How should I balance out the different materials?!"

It wasn't enough to know the right materials. In order to create a truly superior product, he had to process them and combine them in numerous sophisticated ways. Only by following the right steps would he be able to synthesize crystals that were tough enough to survive the rigors of expert mech combat.

Yet in order to get closer to the correct proportions and processing method, Ves could not completely rely on Blinky and the Illustrious One to achieve a better result. The most they could do was to give him some hints and give him some sporadic warnings whenever he was doing something wrong.

Hency why he had to create a lot of different iterations and perform live tests on what he made. The more data he generated, the more prompts he received from Blinky and the Illustrious One.

His hand tapped on top of the crystal cube. "It would be nice if you came with an instruction manual."

This was the downside of working with alien technology. The crystal cube could strengthen many crystals by processing them in a way that caused them to acquire a lot of internal circuits.

These alien circuits were completely unfathomable and indecipherable to Ves. Yet they were also the primary reason why the crystals were able to exert additional power or impart different effects.

At the end of his session, Ves looked at the five new crystals that he deemed the best of the bunch.

He picked up a specially-fabricated laser rifle that he had specifically designed for testing purposes. He then proceeded to slot in the first crystal into a chamber that was also designed to accommodate the experimental products.

He didn't fire the rifle himself. That was too dangerous. Who knew if the crystal overloaded and caused the entire weapon to blow up in his face?

Instead, he handed the rifle over to one of his honor guards. The soldier moved to a shielded firing range further back that Ves had set up for this purpose.

When the guard fired the rifle, an invisible beam struck a metal dummy bot. Bubbles appeared across the poor target. Soon, the bot shattered as all of its metal surfaces were torn apart by strange bubbles!

Ves could only scratch his head at this result.

"Next one."

The second crystal slotted in the test rifle fired a purple beam that caused the target to erupt in corrosive fire. The fumes were so toxic that portions of the platform underneath started to get covered by holes!

"Next."

The third crystal fired an ordinary white beam that did not consist entirely of photons. Though the light beam traveled considerably slower than light, it was able to inflict a small but noticeable degree of physical damage towards the target dummy, causing it to get knocked back by a few meters!

"Next."

The fourth crystal produced a more esoteric effect. Whatever Ves put into it caused the energy beam to follow a spiralling trajectory towards its target. Other than that, it behaved like a normal laser beam, which meant the spirals were almost completely pointless.

"Useless. Next."

Ves perked up a bit after his honor guard slotted in the last crystal. The soldier carefully took aim and pulled the trigger.

PVOOMPH!

A surprisingly loud noise echoed across the firing range as a blinding white beam almost blinded the visual sensors in the space.

Ves couldn't even see the light beam that had slammed into the latest dummy bot and blasted it into lots of tiny pieces!

The power of this last crystal was the most formidable that he had ever witnessed so far, but it came with a very troublesome downside.

The honor guard had already let go of the rifle. Its entire middle section had melted from the excess heat released by the disintegrating crystal!

Ves could only sigh at this mixed result. "How the hell did you luminars come up with this weird tech?!"