The Mech Touch

　　Although the Glory Seekers and the Crossers had dispatched their own gear and personnel to assist in the harvesting operations, they merely played a marginal role this time.

　　The Larkinsons took charge of the examinations and harvesting operations because they possessed much greater harvesting capabilities. Ships like the Andrenidae, the Graveyard and the Dragon's Den all worked together to break apart the giant astral beast's structure so that the pieces could be processed in order to yield the most valuable substances out of all of the junk.

　　"It was worth it to acquire all of those auxiliary ships." Ves smiled as he observed the ships at work. "They are finally showing their worth."

　　Shuttles and mining craft flew back and forth in order to transport biomass and other materials to the right destinations. Tens of thousands of people were involved in the grand endeavor.

　　As much as he looked forward to getting his hands on superior exotics that may very well possess properties equivalent to first-class materials, as far as he was concerned he had already claimed the biggest prize for himself.

　　In the absence of either an organic warp drive or any quantity of phasewater, the most valuable and useful spoils in his opinion was the dying spirituality of the main brain node of the Titania!

　　Although its condition had deteriorated to an immense degree by the time that Ves had tracked it down, he had moved quickly enough to transfer it to a spare P-stone before subsequently feeding it with universal life energy in order to close its spiritual wounds and bring back a portion of its vitality.

　　Ves did not make this decision lightly. The energy derived from his stash of high-grade life-prolonging treatment serum was limited in quantity and each use dwindled his reserves even further.

　　However, by sacrificing 5 percent of the high-grade energy of a single vial of serum, Ves believe he obtained a much greater gain as a result!

　　As Ves settled down in his office again, he curiously held the P-stone in his hand that was serving as the current abode of his latest spiritual bounty.

　　"Meow!…"

　　"Stop exaggerating. I know you took a lot of bites out of the Titania's bones. My personnel has even found a few cat-shaped bite marks, you know!"

　　"Meow meow meow!"

　　Lucky was not in a good mood at the moment. After being used as an improvised deep penetration phasewater detection device, the cat left the fleshy confines of the Titania as soon as possible and returned to the comforting metal environment of the Spirit of Bentheim.

　　That did help with the trauma he acquired from diving through all of that disgusting, squeaky gray flesh! Gem cats weren't made to act like maggots!

　　In order to wash down those awful memories, Lucky resentfully chewed on a sumptuous bowl of exotics that the Larkinsons had already salvaged from the Titania.

　　Ves was afraid that Lucky needed to fill his belly many times over before the cat would finally be able to move past this traumatic experience!

　　"Well, at least we're gathering a lot of materials. The Titania ate a lot of stuff over its long lifespan."

　　Although the astral beast generally excreted much of what it ate, its biological systems possessed the capability to filter out and incorporate the stronger and more useful materials. This caused its body to accumulate a relatively higher proportion of valuable exotics.

　　The 'compensation' that Ves was forced to pay his cat was really nothing in comparison.

　　He turned his attention back to the P-stone holding his precious new spiritual ingredient. He had been thinking about what he should do with it.

　　"You've lost a lot of yourself. Even if I brought you back from the brink of death, you're so small and feeble that you have retained more than 7 percent of your original identity.

　　The loss was enormous. The main intelligence behind the Titania used to be so powerful and developed that it could govern the operation of the entire astral beast!

　　Even if it did not directly control anything, it still acquired a vast amount of knowledge, wisdom and insight on how its body operated.

　　Much of that was lost.

　　The only consolation for Ves was that the damage to the wounded spirituality mostly affected its more marginal and peripheral parts of itself. The core essence of its identity were still present.

　　Ves looked conflicted at it. He basically had two different ways to process it into a design spirit.

　　On one hand, he could continue to feed and nurture the intelligence behind the Titania and try to persuade it to live a new life.

　　The advantage of this solution is that the spirituality that might work together with Ves one day still retained a piece of its original heritage. Its age, its maturity, its intuition and other traits allowed it to stand out from the rest of his design spirits and bring advantages that were out of reach to its younger peers!

　　On the other hand, Ves could just treat it as a valuable ingredient and smash it apart in order to create a new and better spiritual product.

　　The most important reason to process the Titania's spirituality in this way was to ensure that he could create a design spirit that started off with a clean slate. It would come with none of the baggage that its main ingredient was saddled with. On top of that, Ves could exert a lot of control over his new creation, thereby making sure it provided more specific help to mechs and mech pilots.

　　Yet… this option sounded like a considerable waste.

　　"It's just like the decision on how to process the Titania's corpse. If we can keep it whole, we can derive much more use out of it than if we break it up and discard much of its structure in order to salvage the most useful materials."

　　Ves rarely worked with design spirits that were this old. His brief experiences with spiritual entities that were ancient mostly amounted to Nyxie and the dark gods.

　　None of them were particularly friendly. Why should they? They had grown to become extremely formidable leaders and tyrants. These hostile entities would probably fight Ves tooth and nail if he dared to turn them into his servants!

　　The question now was whether the Titania's remnant spirituality would be any different. Did it possess a strong and arrogant personality? Would it be able to recognize its current reality and bow its head to Ves?

　　Right now, the remnant spirituality had undergone too many shocks. Even if Ves had brought it back from the brink of death, it experienced so many changes that it had fallen into a healing coma.

　　It would take a while for it to wake up again. Until that happened, Ves could do little except gather clues by observing its spiritual makeup.

　　He could already sense its age. There was nothing like an old spirituality. While it wasn't necessarily stronger than his other spirits, it was much richer and more complicated than many other forms of life that he had encountered.

　　Each year that passed and each event it experienced added another mark to its spirit. Over time, all of these marks built up to an impressive tapestry that served as an organic record of some sorts.

　　Life matured by going through experiences. That was his belief. For an astral beast to grow this old and grow into such a formidable apex predator, the value of this alien spirit was inestimable!

　　Ves became more determined to preserve it whole and to coax it into becoming a new design spirit. Every other solution was suboptimal in his eyes.

　　"I already have plenty of alternatives in my collection that are new and purpose-built. It would be boring to add a similar entity to this group. It's much more interesting to do something different this time!"

　　He considered it an experiment of sorts. He not only wanted to know whether he could succeed in taming such an old spirit, but also wanted to observe the differences between it and his young and artificial spiritual products.

　　If the former turned out to possess greater advantages that Ves had never thought about, then there might be a way for him to apply a similar advantage to his future design spirits!

　　As Ves thought about how to actually make use of this interesting new spirit, he tried to imagine what kind mech paired best its inclinations.

　　"You're like the queen bee of the hive, aren't you?"

　　Although Dr. Ranya had cautioned him that this was not an accurate description of the mutated brain node's actual role in the Titania, it was a convenient analogy that helped Ves understand its overall role.

　　As Ves examined the complicated spiritual attributes of this remnant spirituality, he could sense notes that alluded to control, coordination, planning and other related attributes.

　　Though these attributes certainly played a key role to the beast entity, there was a lot more to it than these essential functions.

　　There was another aspect of the Titania's guiding intelligence that was… like a parent.

　　Although this wasn't a precisely fitting description, it was the best that Ves could come up with after examining this side of the remnant spirit.

　　"It's strange."

　　On one hand, the spirit cared a lot for its offspring. While Ves wasn't sure whether the concept of gender even applied to the Titania, the astral beast was definitely capable of producing children in a way.

　　Those living flesh torpedoes that the Titania utilized as its main attack method in the last battle were not mindless drones but true descendants of the astral beast that had spawned them in rapid tempo.

　　From what Ves was able to guess, attack and procreation meant the same thing to the Titania.

　　During its long life, the astral beast confronted enemies by launching its characteristic flesh torpedoes at them, each of which could grow up into another astral beast like its progenitor.

　　However, unless the offspring successfully reached a ship or other astral beast, it wouldn't be able to gain the nutrients and energy it needed to grow into maturity.

　　"In a way, this is a rather cruel way of raising offspring."

　　The Titania produced lots of children to use as missiles, but only the ones that struck their targets and managed to take them out would gain the capital to survive.

　　"Survival of the fittest. Only the best projectiles get to live."

　　The Titania must have produced a lot of successful offspring like this over its millenia of life. Many of its descendants were probably roaming the other parts of the Red Ocean at this time!

　　"It's like a matriarch… of warheads."

　　That was the most succinct way to describe the Titania. It was an amazing lifeform that was much grander and more powerful than he initially thought. Its struggle against the expeditionary fleet really didn't do justice to it. If not for the fact that an unknown alien enemy inflicted heavy damage to it, the Larkinsons and its allies wouldn't have been able to pick up such an enormous bargain!

　　Ves furrowed his brows when his thoughts strayed to the enemy that had managed to cripple the Titania.

　　Though the remnant spirituality didn't convey any clues about this matter, the exobiologists that had spent a lot of hours examining the astral beast's massive body had already come to a preliminary conclusion on the identity of the attacker.

　　"A phase whale."

　　The hole-like wounds inflicted on the Titania's enormous body looked as if an enormous creature had taken bites out of it. While it was improbable that a gigantic phase whale had utilized its maw to chew on the Titania, they were known to possess phase powers that could essentially remove a pocket of space and everything inside it to a different dimension!

　　"That's certainly an effective way to separate parts of an enemy body!"

　　The implication here was that there might be a phase whale lurking in this region!