The Mech Touch

What Ves had done was extremely risky!

Though Ves had never figured out how his mother turned the Superior Mother into her incarnation, he could make a couple of guesses.

The most likely theory he came up with was that Cynthia cut off a piece of her spiritual essence and transplanted it into the Superior Mother in a sophisticated manner.

This was different from donating a portion of her free spiritual energy.

Ves guessed that this technique was meant to establish a form of parasitism or mutualism between two different entities.

Whether one side gained more advantages than the other was not entirely certain. All he knew was that the bond between the Superior Mother and Cynthia was not constantly active. The two largely existed as separate identities.

"Maybe it takes a lot of effort for my mother to descend upon the Superior Mother." Ves speculated.

Regardless of what was going on, Ves believed this to be a flawed implementation of an incarnation.

When he tried to invent his own version of this technique, Ves set a couple of goals for himself.

First, Vulcan had to be completely under his control.

Second, Vulcan needed to retain enough autonomy to operate independently.

These goals largely contradicted each other.

If Ves gave Vulcan too much autonomy, then he risked a scenario where his own incarnation might rebel one day!

If Ves insisted on retaining too much control, then Vulcan would become a crippled design spirit that constantly needed someone to hold his hands.

Neither of these scenarios were desirable!

"The ideal relationship between myself and Vulcan should resemble my relationship with Blinky." Ves concluded.

He was highly satisfied with the way his companion spirit turned out. Although Blinky possessed an independent consciousness, the cat was also an inseparable part of himself because he originated from his own Spirituality!

To put it in simpler terms, Blinky was a split personality of Ves that had been injected with greater life!

Since Blinky turned out so well, Ves wanted to form a similar relationship with Vulcan.

"It's too bad my capacity is already spent on accommodating my companion spirit. I don't have any room left for another spirit!"

Ves had already used up as much real estate in his mind as he could get away with. If he gave up anything further, he would likely impair his own consciousness and personality in a detrimental fashion!

He needed to find a difficult solution to this problem. The model of a companion spirit was obviously not appropriate for someone who already possessed one. The incarnation that he had in mind must therefore be based on an independent, self-sustaining spiritual entity.

That was enough to make for someone like Ves. The hard part was to ensure that the Vulcan he intended to create became an inseparable part of himself!

He did not want to take any chances when it came to the loyalty of what would probably become a core part of his mech design capabilities. Ves was betting his future on the successful implementation of his Vulcan plan and he did not want to open up any opportunities for his incarnation to disagree with its own progenitor!

The only way that Ves came up with was to separate a core part of his Spirituality and consciousness and implant it onto his ambitious design spirit.

Only in this way would Ves be able to maintain solid control over Vulcan. The radical procedure was meant to give Ves an opportunity to assimilate the design spirit.

If everything worked well, Vulcan would become a more powerful and independent version of a companion spirit!

There was one huge flaw, though.

Ves needed to transplant something truly important of himself in order to turn Vulcan into another part of himself. No matter how many solutions he came up with, he did not think that this gamble would work unless he bet something of great value.

Much of the spiritual energy that Ves had injected into Vulcan so far was akin to his own blood. Blinky was an endless generator of this resource so it was not scarce.

Yet free-floating spiritual energy could not accomplish much by itself.

What Ves needed to implant into Vulcan was a part of his core Spirituality that formed the basis of his consciousness, identity, personality, design seed and so on. This was a much more sensitive and crucial part of himself that could easily cause irreparable harm to himself if it got damaged!

Cutting a portion of it away so that he could turn Vulcan into his incarnation sounded as crazy as slicing off a chunk of his brain matter only to graft it onto the brain of another human!

There was no proof that this crazy idea could possibly work!

However, Ves wasn't an average spiritual engineer. He created many design spirits and worked with all kinds of other spiritual phenomena. Even if his theoretical framework was still bare, he possessed a powerful intuition for life and could instinctively figure out whether an idea was viable.

There were several reasons why he believed that this crazy step would yield success.

He became so confident in his assumptions that he enacted his plan right away without even bothering to try it on other people.

Ves couldn't bear to waste the ingredients needed to create an incarnation on other people! Just the price of using up an entire vial of high-grade life-prolonging treatment serum was unbearable for any purpose other than empowering himself!

He could only afford to perform this extravagant and risky procedure once, so he proceeded to pull the trigger without any second thought!

"AAAGHHH! MY HEAD IS SPLITTING!"

He didn't expect this step to be so painful, though! When Blinky tore a chunk of his Spirituality from his mind, Ves felt as if he was dying!

It took at least a dozen seconds for him to regain enough concentration to inspect his current condition.

His mind and Spirituality was in an awful state at the moment! Now that he had done the equivalent of slicing away a portion of his brain, Ves felt as if he had become incomplete in a way that could turn into a permanent impairment.

This was the risk that Ves was afraid of. If he wasn't able to heal his spiritual injury, he would turn into a spiritual cripple.

Not only would it become more difficult or even impossible for him to advance to Master, he might even end up in a condition similar to that of his mother where he was constantly leaking spiritual energy.

"I can't let that happen!" Ves gritted his teeth!

His current condition indeed looked bad. The terrible wound he inflicted on his Spirituality caused him to feel as if he had shot himself in his head. Not only did he lose a portion of his brain, the hole in his head was also spurting out his lifeblood at a steady rate!

Fortunately, the wound was still fresh and he was in his peak condition just a short moment ago. Ves predicted that he could remedy his injury as long as he acted quickly.

While Ves was trying his best to resist the pain, Blinky was also affected by the damage he inflicted.

The main reasons why the cat wasn't affected as much was because he was a different kind of life form and because Ves bore most of the burden.

Mrow!

Blinky knew he had a crucial role to play and did not delay in bringing the precious portion of Ves' spirituality to Vulcan!

Once Blinky reached the design spirit, he began to launch another attack that sliced out a portion of Vulcan's head.

After opening up a cavity, Blinky roughly pushed the spiritual essence taken from Ves into the hole and tried his best to merge it all together.

Since Vulcan had not yet been born, this process went fairly smoothly!

The reason why Blinky broke this crucial ingredient into shards was because it had to stay together in order to remain connected to Ves. Normally, it was not desirable for the sources of spiritual ingredients to maintain control over new spiritual products, but this was an exception!

Even as Ves felt as if the missing portion of himself had found a new home, the constant pain caused him to feel as if a hundred Glorianas were shouting in his ears at the same time!

"Hurry up, Blinky!"

Mrow mrow!

Blinky quickly returned with a piece of Vulcan in his maw. He deftly entered Ves' mind and quickly inserted this piece into the gaping spiritual wound.

Normally, this should never work! His Spirituality should have rejected the foreign spiritual matter if it was strong enough. If it was weak, then the transplanted essence from Vulcan should have tried to take over its new host!

Yet at this moment, the piece taken from Vulcan was not producing any of these reactions.

Ves grinned even as his pain had intensified. "I knew this would happen!"

The reason why the foreign matter did not try to assimilate his Spirituality was because Vulcan was not alive yet! He was on the cusp of being born, but he was still offline in his uncompleted state.

The reason why his Spirituality did not generate any rejection against Vulcan was because the overwhelming majority of ingredients originated from Ves himself!

"I'm merely reclaiming my own stuff!"

Of course, much of it had also been blended with other foreign matter, but the proportion of the latter was small enough that it did not pose a major risk.

At best, Ves was just contaminating his own Spirituality a little bit!

"Blinky, let's merge it all together! This is the last step!"

Mrow mrow mrow!

The companion spirit knew how crucial it was to succeed at this juncture. The cat split his concentration in half and focused his attention on both Ves and Vulcan.

At this moment, the spiritual pieces torn from each other were merging in their homes. This was not a smooth procedure and shouldn't even work.

Ves had already thought about it, though. He hypothesized that it would be possible to force the merger as long as he employed brute force.

"Use up all of the energy left in the vial, Blinky! Don't spare anything!"

The vial of high-grade life-prolonging treatment serum only retained twenty percent of its potency. Now that Ves had issued the decisive command, Blinky did not hesitate in drawing out all of the remaining concentrated energy before allocating them equally to Ves and Vulcan!

"AHHH! IT'S HOT!"

Life was good, but too much of it was not necessarily a good thing!

Ves felt as if Blinky was pouring molten lava straight into his brain cavity! He collapsed on the ground while clutching the sides of his head as the extremely potent universal life energy merged into the damaged portion of his Spirituality in its rawest form.

Though Blinky possessed excellent control and was able to make sure that the Universal life energy was being used to merge the transplanted spiritual essence into their new homes, the process was anything but natural!

Since Vulcan was not alive yet, he did not experience any pain. The design spirit became more and more complete as the final piece of the puzzle was being set.

As for Ves, his spiritual injury was being treated in the most crudest fashion possible. He almost blanked out a few times but tried his best to persist in order to make absolutely sure that the procedure was going as planned.

By using up 10 percent of the energy left in the serum, the spiritual essence taken from an unborn design spirit successfully settled into Ves' Spirituality!

At the same time, an equal amount of highly-potent energy successfully enabled a design spirit to integrate a human element in its spiritual makeup!

Mrow!

Ves and Vulcan both opened their eyes.

From the moment they did so, two powerful spiritual eruptions exploded their positions and spread through the hull of the Blinding Banshee!

Everyone aboard the capital ship spontaneously lost consciousness!

The twin waves continued to spread in space and engulfed the entire Larkinson fleet!

The God of Dwarves, Mechs and Craftsmanship had finally been born!