The Mech Touch

The moment Ves came up with the concept of a two-stage or evolvable companion spirit, it was as if lightning had struck his body.

The potential of this idea was a lot greater than a regular companion spirit. Instead of deciding everything on behalf of the recipient from the start, Ves could just create a more open-ended spiritual product and allow the user to choose from one of several different specializations in the future!

"In fact, this idea can be applied to more than just a companion spirit!"

Ves even felt it could be applied to mechs as well as many other applications with spiritual components.

He could already imagine a future where he incorporated this novel concept in a versatile mech like the Bright Warrior Mark III. While there was no denying the mech had to be bland from the start in order to ensure maximum compatibility with different kinds of mech pilots, as they grew from continual use, that might slowly change.

Along with slowly becoming more adapted to their assigned mech pilots, the next-generation Bright Warriors would also be accumulating energy for a breakthrough. Once a given mech gathered enough energy, the pilot could choose to initiate a breakthrough, allowing the user to choose and lock in a particular spiritual specialty or advantage that complimented the person's fighting style the best!

"Still.. it's a bit premature to apply it on any mechs."

He immediately recognized several problems with this particular arrangement. First, mechs were rarely the exclusive property of any mech pilot. It was customary to reassign mech pilots from one mech to another one when situations changed.

This meant that it was not entirely practical to apply this tiered evolution concept to mass production models. The only way this arrangement would make sense was if the owners of the mechs deliberately adopted a long-term pairing approach, essentially turning mechs and mech pilots into married couples that lasted for at least a decade.

Ves could implement this easily enough in the Larkinson Army, but he wasn't entirely sure if this was the right strategy to adopt for his troops. As a mech designer, Ves frequently designed new mech and better mechs. Since the founding of the clan, the oldest Larkinson mech pilots already had to switch their mechs several times as newer and better machines became available.

"Ugh, all of this is too complicated. I'll just talk to General Verle about it in our next meeting."

The most relevant part about the evolvable companion spirit concept was that he could easily apply it to his children and other people for that matter.

The only real limitation he had to take into account was the spiritual capacity of the recipient.

While Ves could attempt to create a living spiritual construct that was stuffed with powerful abilities, that would increase its spiritual weight to a point where it could easily crush any person's spirituality if he tried to merge them together!

The good news was that his unborn child's spirituality was stronger than normal, most likely due to her lineage along with his own active intervention.

The bad news was that she was only strong in relative terms. She was still a rather small collection of cells at the moment and had many months of gestation ahead. Even if she was born and grew up into an active toddler, it was highly unlikely that her spirituality would match that of himself.

"She's too young."

Just like mech design, Ves could not possibly add everything in his wish list into a single mech design. He had to plan the capabilities of his next companion spirit extremely carefully in order to add what was necessary while leaving out as little bloat as possible.

"It's like designing a third-class mech again…" Ves depressingly said. "No, it's worse. It's like designing a fourth-class mech that is only a quarter the size of a normal machine!"

Fourth-class mechs officially didn't exist, but it was a popular colloquial term that a lot of people used to describe a mech built way below standards.

If that was the only issue, then Ves could still work something out, but the fact that he had to slim his product down by a huge amount was especially painful!

Fortunately, Ves was not completely out of options. As a mech designer who played around with the concept of growth in several different occasions, he already had a good approach in mind.

"Instead of creating a strong and functional companion spirit right out of the bat, I'll create a seed instead!"

This approach reminded him of the biotech industry's method of production. Ves could never forget how the biomech designers of the Life Research Association literally grew their mechs as if they were cloned bodies.

The key to doing this was to artificially synthesize a biological seed. This ball of flesh and bone was not a functional mech but contained the core structure as well as the growth instructions of a biomech.

By placing these biomech eggs in giant nutrient pools, their biological programming would automatically extract useful materials from the culture medium and slowly grow the seed into a biomech.

While there were pros and cons to this alternate method of production, it was a viable and proven approach that seemed to work well for the Lifers.

"I can just copy this approach and apply it to my companion spirit!"

In fact, he was already doing something similar with his own spiritual products, though he did not explicitly think about it. Therefore, he didn't need to make too many changes.

He just had to condense his initial creation into a small and tiny spiritual seed before planting it in someone's spirituality. That person's spirit would essentially act as the culture medium in this case and would channel useful nutrients in the form of spiritual energy and possibly other intangible resources in order to allow the seed to bloom into a powerful companion spirit over time.

There were several potential ways that this could go wrong, though.

"What if the relationship between the two becomes parasitic instead of symbiotic?"

If the companion spirit voraciously absorbed its partner's spiritual energy, then the spiritual growth of his daughter might become stunted!

Even if companion spirits were supposed to be equivalent to the person they were merged with, who knows whether there was a way they might become separate.

Ves needed to employ a lot of precautions in order to avoid such a disaster.

"I'll have to account for a lot of other scenarios as well." Ves sighed as he pensively pressed his fingers against his forehead. "If I had more time, I could have performed experiments on other embryos in order to test my assumptions."

It was too late for that. Gloriana's belly was already growing as a child and Ves only had a limited amount of time to complete the initial spiritual augmentation process of his daughter.

Once she was born into this cosmos, Ves suspected that she would become a 'finished' spiritual product in the perspective of his life domain, and thereby close off any easy opportunity to 'design' her any further.

"Damn, if I knew about this earlier, I would have experimented on more unborn kids!"

Even though Ves felt a bit distressed at feeling compelled to experiment on his own unborn child, he wasn't too worried about it. He had tried out potentially dangerous innovations on himself and other people without thoroughly verifying whether his designs were safe.

His life domain was no joke. His intuition was directly tied to it, allowing him to detect many dangerous design elements in advance.

"Besides, this isn't even my most radical experiment. I'm just altering and expanding the concept of a companion spirit so that it can seamlessly merge with a child who hasn't even been born yet. This is totally not crazy!"

After assuring to himself that his plan was sound, he began to revise his initial design. He heavily reduced the companion spirit that he had initially designed until even he could barely notice it anymore. He then gradually added a few minimal spiritual components to it in order to put together its growth framework.

Essentially, Ves imagined a semi-structured growth process and programmed these instructions into the design seed. Since they were merely instructions rather than actual spiritual components, they hardly took up any capacity in the seed.

It took days for him to think up and define a complete spiritual growth process. He could not employ any simulations or calculations. He could only base this complicated process around his own theories and assumptions. If not for his highly-sensitive intuition towards these matters, he would have probably ended up with an abomination.

"I'm still not too sure about this design, though." Ves frowned.

He was reasonably confident that the growth framework he came up with would allow the spiritual seed to grow from a tiny presence into a mature spiritual cat that was able to help his daughter develop her spirituality while at the same time providing her with powerful spiritual abilities.

The issue was that he could not account for the details. The growth framework was supposed to be adaptable. Just like every other form of life, the seed could grow in slightly different ways depending on the life experiences of his growing daughter.

If his daughter wanted to become a soldier, then her growing companion spirit would develop combat abilities.

If his daughter wanted to follow her mother's plan and become a politician, then her companion spirit would develop social abilities.

This was not possible if Ves imposed too many rules and restrictions. He had to loosen up the growth framework so that it offered room for flexibility. The danger was that each relaxation also opened up the possibility of undesirable mutations.

After all, an absence of rules often led to chaos!

"I need to find a middle ground that I'm comfortable with." He muttered. "I have to offer enough flexibility but only enough to give my daughter a better-fitting cat."

It was all down to how much risk he was willing to expose to his child.

If he took a big gamble, then there was a good possibility that his daughter's companion spirit would be able to mold itself into a highly potent assistant and protector that was completely right for the job!

If he made a more conservative bet, then the companion spirit would still be powerful and useful. The fit wouldn't be as good though and its potential would also be lower.

Faced with these two options, Ves didn't hesitate for long and decided to go big!

"Life is never completely certain! It is filled with random chance and happenstance! Even if I have to subject my child to greater risks, then so be it. I'll always be at hand to mitigate any accidents if anything goes wrong."

With that decision set, he rounded out the growth framework and largely completed the design for the first evolution phase of his companion spirit.

"Now for the second evolution phase."

This was the point where the companion spirit would truly come into being. Ves did not want to add a single evolution path to his daughter's companion spirit, but multiple ones. The more, the better, although adding too much would probably exceed his extremely limited design budget.

"I'll have to package all of the potential spiritual specialties as seeds as well."

This was challenging but not impossible. Ves merely had to treat them the same way as the core companion spirit seed. They would start off completely dormant, but would slowly grow as his daughter developed. The ability seeds might even be able to grant her some weak abilities.

However, it was only when the companion spirit was ready to evolve that his daughter had to pick a specialization to unlock.

The premise of this was simple. What Ves found difficult was selecting the possible options that he wanted to impart to his daughter.

"Which ingredients should I choose?"