The Mech Touch

The Larkinson fleet made some big movements. Not only were clansmen taking exceedingly great care to move Gloriana's precious production equipment from the Spirit of Bentheim to the Vivacious Wal, the Swordmaidens and Heavensworders were also making arrangements.

It was impossible and highly irresponsible for the Swordmaidens and Heavensworders to leave their posts at the same time. They had to set up at least a partial rotation to make sure the ships were taken care of and that they had sufficient mechs on hand to guard against unexpected incidents.

The planning of the ritual also took a bit of time. Ves only came up with it a short time ago, so Ketis and her circle had to scramble to come up with a ceremony that was elaborate, impressive and authentic enough to achieve the desired effect.

Fortunately, the Heavensworders came to the rescue. Relying on many millenia's worth of heritage and traditions, they were easily able to come up with thousands of large-scale rituals that served to bless the making of a heroic sword or the ascension of a swordmaster.

To Ves, it didn't matter what kind of weirdness the Heavensworders had in mind. As long as they believed in their own nonsense, the mood in the mech arena should be sufficient enough to give Ketis and perhaps the other mech designers enough stimulation to make the Decapitator Project a little more exceptional.

During all of this whirlwind of activity, Ves received a surprising request from the Cross Clan to travel over to their flagship.

"What do the Crossers want?" He asked his assistant as he was petting Lucky.

"The Cross Patriarch wants to talk with you. He hasn't told us why, but if I had to make a guess, he probably wants to begin discussions on the design of his next expert mech."

"Ah. Well, if he expects something from me, then he'll have to wait for a while. After we complete the Decapitator Project and Vanguard Project, we still have to finish the Bulwark Project and the Chimera Project. That will take at least three more months or maybe four due to the greater complexity of the latter projects. After that, there are a lot of other projects that need to be taken care of as Brutus' expert mech and so on. I hope they'll understand."

"Uhm, you should tell that to the Crossers yourself, boss. Anyway, you can head over to the Hemmington Cross whenever it is convenient."

"I'll travel in a couple of hours."

Ves took care of some other routine matters first. He checked up on the preparations aboard the Vivacious Wal. He quizzed his students to see whether they kept up on their studies.

One of the more interesting talks he conducted was with Dr. Ranya. With the growth of the Larkinson Biotech Institute and its importance in ensuring his future daughter grew up healthy and without any flaws, he took the time to shuttle over to the Dragon's Den.

By now, the bioresearch vessel's utilization was much higher than before. Her biomes already hosted hundreds of different designer beasts and exobeasts. Many of them were purchased from market, but a couple of the organic products were actually homegrown.

Dr. Ranya personally brought him to a viewing area where they could watch the first of many designer beasts that the Lifer beast designers had cooked up in recent times.

"What am I looking at?" He asked as he strode to the windows of the high tower.

The windows did not just provide a clear view of the forested terrain below, but also projected enhanced and alternate viewpoints that were currently tracking a sample of the interesting creatures that prowled this biome.

Lucky flew over to the windows as well, but quickly grew bored with the sight. Cats were much more interesting than other animals in his opinion.

"Meow."

The gem cat flew over to Dr. Ranya and landed on her shoulder.

"When you gave our teams the task to develop useful designer beasts that can produce powerful mutations, they began with their original research projects first. We have a host of beast designers aboard this ship that have already worked on numerous existing designer beasts. We have been digging them up and used them as the base of what you want to obtain. So far, the designer beasts we have made range from flying fish, poisonous primates, long-living dogs and gigantic armored snakes. The latter should currently be in your sights."

Though Ves wasn't able to see any snakes from his high vantage point, the projectors already tracked numbers of members of this artificial species. The snakes were just as big as she described. One of them was as thick as the leg of a humanoid mech and was impressively long. It probably took a lot of tons of food to fill up the stomach of such a massive creature.

When Ves swept the forest below with his spiritual vision, he failed to encounter any strong presences. His enthusiasm level immediately dropped.

"I take it that your teams didn't have much luck in producing any mutated beasts."

"Our researchers tried their best to induce more mutations." She said. "This big snake that you're observing now is considerably larger than it ought to be because of that. Sadly, that is the most that we have been able to achieve. All of the mutations that we have encountered so far are either inconsequential or purely physical in nature. We haven't created any designer beasts that can exhibit strange abilities like Arnold."

Ves began to look skeptical. "Maybe your approach is faulty. Physical mutations aren't useful at all. What I'm looking at are mutations in the mind. I'm not sure how you can encourage that, but I feel that randomly messing with the genes of these beasts will not increase our chances of gaining a new Arnold."

"I know that." Dr. Ranya sighed. "We know too little about.. Non-physical mutations. The few specimens we have are too few for us to observe any solid patterns. We can either continue to play with genes as we have done before, or…"

She did not say anything more as she grabbed Lucky from her shoulder and started to inspect him from every angle. She looked as if she had become a vet who was performing a biannual checkup on the gem cat.

"Meow?"

"What did you want to say, Ranya? What idea do you have in mind that you're not sure whether you want to share?"

Ranya sighed as she let go of Lucky. The cat floated back to her shoulder and used it as a perch again.

"I've been thinking a lot about the phenomenon that you call spirituality. According to you, spiritual energy is derived from sentient creatures and sentient thought. However, there is obviously more to the story since only a fraction of organisms possess enough spirituality to do anything with it. Currently, Arnold is our only living specimen. A few months ago, I started to take samples of his cells and merged them into other designer beasts."

That was quite an interesting idea!

"Did you get any useful results?"

"No, though my experiments are still in an early stage. To be honest, I don't have much hope that this experiment will yield a mutated beast. However, I think we can produce more drastic results if we adopt a slightly different approach."

"What do you have in mind?"

"I'd like to borrow an active sample of the life-prolonging treatment serum that you hold. If my assumptions about its formula are correct, it should contain the raw energy needed to boost an ordinary designer beast."

"No. Absolutely not. This is a strategic resource that I can only spare for vital projects that deliver a guaranteed pay-off. We can't squander it on spurious experiments." Ves responded.

Dr. Ranya looked a bit disappointed, but she anticipated this answer to an extent.

"Then what about borrowing your own cells?"

"What?!"

"Please hear me out, sir." She quickly said as even Lucky started to look oddly at her. "While our attempts to implant Arnold cells into other designer beasts has not achieved any immediate results, the story is slightly different when we attempted to use your cells. Do you remember the examinations you went through in order to prepare for the formation of your designer baby? Well, we still have some tissue samples of your flesh in storage, so I decided to take one out and implant it into a simple creature."

Ves became a bit alarmed all of a sudden. "Ranya! I did not give permission for you to use my cells in an unauthorized and unannounced experiment! Has it ever occurred to you that you should inform me before you use my own tissue samples in some crazy experiment?"

"It was just a tiny sample!" Ranya defended herself. "To be honest, we were getting rather desperate back then. I wanted to show a positive result to you so that you won't think that we haven't made any appreciable progress."

He sighed. Ranya might have acted a bit unethically, but she didn't do anything too egregious. The deed was already done so there was little point in sticking to it. Besides, even he was curious at what this experiment yielded.

"So what happened?"

"I think it's best that I show you in person. Let's head over to my private lab."

They exited the observation area and moved to her laboratory. As the head of the Larkinson Biotech Institute, she claimed the largest laboratory and filled it up with all kinds of advanced lab equipment. There were numerous machines at work at the moment. Many of them cultivated different kinds of plant life while others were trying to perform deep analysis on different tissue samples.

Ranya ignored all of that and strode straight to a side chamber which turned out to be a dissection area. She approached a wall and pulled out a transparent cube which contained the corpse of a simple white lab mouse.

The cube kept the mouse's body frozen.

When Ranya placed the cube onto the table, Lucky flew down a bit in order to inspect the mouse.

"Meow."

"Of course it doesn't look appetizing to you. It's an organic mouse, after all." Ves rolled his eyes at his cat.

When Ves inspected the little mouse carcass with his spiritual senses, he became surprised by what he noticed.

He detected the tissue sample that used to come from his body. Though it had already lost almost all of its potency, Ves did manage to detect a small whiff of spiritual energy.

What really caused him to be surprised was that he managed to detect an even smaller trace of his spiritual energy had managed to spread across the mouse's entire body! Though it was extremely faint, it reminded him a bit of how he and subsequently the Superior Mother infused his unborn daughter's body with their energies.

The difference was that it didn't seem to have ended up well for the mouse.

"How did it die?" He asked. "I see its head didn't blow up. That's different."

"Should I expect that to happen?" Ranya raised her eyebrow.

"Erm, nevermind. Just tell me what is going on with this mouse."

"It's a bit of a mystery to me, honestly. Normally, the method we use to integrate human tissue samples to mice is highly mature and almost completely safe. Sure, the mouse will be burdened by extra tissue or organs that aren't meant to be there, but we have always managed to keep them alive. Not this time. Just hours after grafting your tissue into its body, it started to exhibit less activity. This slowly continued until it became comatose. An hour later, its unconscious body functions shut down, causing it to die."

This was an interesting sequence of events. The mouse had died gradually and over time. Also, it didn't suffer any deadly physical maladies. Instead, it slowly grew sleepy until it finally entered its eternal slumber.

As Ves continued to inspect the carcass with his spiritual senses, he developed a suspicion of what had happened.