The Mech Touch

Mass producing totems had always been a persistent shortcoming of Ves.

His work in extending his design philosophy in areas outside of mech design were severely hampered by his continued reliance on personal intervention to make his products.

He wasn't alone in this. Every other mech designer suffered from this problem as well.

Perhaps only Master Mech Designers or Star Designers were able to rise above this limitation.

Journeymen such as Ves could forget about overcoming this issue!

At least that was the conventional wisdom.

Ves was anything but conventional.

Throughout his long career of designing mechs and solving problems, he learned that many problems could be solved as long as the solution was ingenious enough.

He did not let this mass production issue hinder him. All of the work he put in his coin designs stoked his passion and put him into a particularly creative mindset!

He didn't even need to whack his head with his hammer to gain new inspiration!

"This is an engineering problem." Ves stated. "That means that it is possible to find a solution through engineering."

It was not as simple as it sounded, though. He could just pass on a work order to the Spirit of Bentheim's production halls if he wanted his crew to produce a large batch of coins.

The complication was that the coins had to contain life and function similar to his handmade totems.

His mechs did not suffer from this problem as Ves was a mech designer.

To be more precise, he hypothesized that the design seed in his mind acted as a transmitter that enabled mechs based on his designs to carry his unique specialties without being physically involved.

The design seed only only worked for mechs because that was what it was based upon! It did not provide any boost to the production of his other products!

"If this is the case, why don't I create another 'design seed'?"

Ves fell silent as he contemplated this possible solution. Whenever he studied his design seed, he understood extremely little about it. It was a naturally-formed spiritual phenomenon that somehow performed a large amount of complex functions.

What impressed Ves about the design seed was that a huge amount of Journeymen were able to generate one when they broke through!

Each of them might be centered around different design philosophies, but each of them followed a common programming and design!

There was something extremely profound and suspicious about this realization. How come people gained the huge amount of instructions needed to formulate such a specialist product?

He doubted that it came from human DNA! Every single gene in the human genome had been deciphered long ago. He was pretty sure that none of them governed such an impressive intangible organ.

The second mystery was why it worked for mech design and not for other professions.

There were brilliant and talented professionals in many different sectors, yet none of them produced the kind of exaggerated breakthroughs that defined the mech industry.

"Do design seeds only work in mech design-related pursuits?"

This was not a question that Ves was qualified to answer. He needed to become a Master and have access to much more exclusive repositories of knowledge before he could figure out the secret behind design seeds and possibly the mech design profession as a whole.

He shook his head. "This direction is too profound for me. I need to come up with a more simple and practical solution!"

Even if he had become more passionate about it, Ves still needed to maintain a sense of proportion. This was just a side project. He had to finish his business quickly before he could go back to managing his mech design projects.

"Let's reduce the problem, then. What I truly need is a minting machine that can produce living coins on autopilot."

If that was the case, then wasn't there an obvious solution in front of him? It was obvious now that he was thinking in the right direction.

"What better to make a living product than another living product!"

As a mech designer who excelled in living mechs, he could also moonlight as a normal engineer. While he had never made an industrial coin press in his life, its function was simple enough that he could easily design a functional version of it in a few hours.

He was also a spiritual engineer. He excelled at making products alive and manipulating their spiritual designs to his advantage.

He bet that he could somehow develop a coin press that could do the work that he required.

"Let's start small. I need to obtain a working proof of concept before I go big."

A large industrial-grade coin minter was a big device. It would take a lot of effort to design such a machine. If he somehow botched the job, much of the time he spent on its design would effectively be wasted!

He manipulated his interface and started to design a small-scale coin minter from scratch.

Half an hour went by as he designed a basic device that did nothing more than take a piece of alloy as its input before spitting out a coin as its output.

There was nothing complicated about the device. It only came with a single fixed Golden Cat Coin template and could not be used to mint any of the other tribute coins he designs.

What was truly interesting about the basic automatic coin press was that he had spent a lot of attention on its spiritual design. He not only wanted to make it alive, but also impart life in the coins it minted.

"Let's hope it works."

The significance of this proof of concept was great. If Ves somehow managed to build a device that could produce living coins without his active involvement, then he could make other devices that could produce other living products!

He would no longer be constrained by the rules that constrained every mech designer and could begin with producing special products early.

As far as he knew, only Star Designers were able to match this capability!

"Hahahaha! It's already impressive enough to be able to make masterwork mechs at the Journeyman-level. How will the public react when they learn I can mass produce other kinds of living products as well?"

The Creation Association would definitely take off if that happened!

One of the biggest reasons why he told Director Samandra Avikon to take it slow and limit her recruitment to craftsmen was because Ves couldn't be bothered with making so many Vulcan totems in person.

If he could make a machine that could at least pump out the small and medium totems in batches, then he would be set for life!

Once he finished the design, he exited his office and headed straight to his personal workshop.

A short time later, he ended up with a minting machine the size of a dog. It was so small and basic that Ves did not encounter any difficulties during the fabrication process.

Since he had made it himself, the coin minter was alive, if only modestly. He could have done better in this regard if he spent more time on it and if he scaled it up, but he was satisfied with what he managed to accomplish in a few hours.

"Let's hope it is strong enough to work." He whispered.

He retrieved a small bar of Breyer alloy and put it inside the input tray of the coin press.

After switching on the device, he waited while the device drew power and hummed for a while. The sound of clattering metal objects soon emanated from the output tray as the machine just pressed its first coins!

Ves immediately grabbed the freshly-made coins and studied both sides.

The obverse of the coin displayed a pretty accurate representation of his own head.

As he flipped the coin around, the head of the Golden Cat proudly looked forward in a ferocious but cute manner!

His mood quickly sank as he extended his spiritual senses towards the coin.

"It's… not alive."

He already took this possibility into account, so it was not completely outside of his expectations that his first experimental product failed.

It was more difficult to accept this result than usual because he enjoyed a string of successes as of late. Turning the Minerva into a masterwork mech probably swelled his head a bit too much.

"Ah, I need to temper my expectations. It's only natural that I can't succeed in the first try. If this problem was so easy to solve, then it wouldn't have hindered me for so long!"

He did not admit defeat because of this initial failure. Instead, he became more determined to overcome this engineering challenge and produce a workable version of a production machine that was able to make totems on demand!

"Let's see what isn't working with my coin press."

He began to feed more materials into the device while he employed a large scanner to track what it was doing inside.

There was nothing wrong about the mechanical process it performed. The coin minter handled the input materials correctly and transformed them into coins that were all accurate enough to pass muster.

Yet no matter what it did, the coin minter simply did not impart any life to the materials it was working with. It was as if its spiritual design was completely ineffective!

When Ves employed his spiritual vision to observe the production process on a spiritual level, he could tell that despite being programmed to perform an action, the coin minter truly wasn't able to turn the coins into totems.

"There is at least one missing link!"

Although his first attempt was definitely a failure, he was happy enough that he was able to learn what wasn't working.

Ves leaned back in his chair and rubbed his smooth-shaven chin. "Hmmm. The spiritual design isn't working because of several possible reasons. First, it is not driven by a strong enough spirit that is comparable enough to my own. Second, the process requires input in the form of spiritual energy in order to fuel this process."

These were the two likeliest explanations that he could come up with to explain this failure.

He returned to his coin minting machine design and adjusted his work in order to address the perceived shortcomings.

Once he was finished, he made a second coin press. This one was intended to utilize spiritual energy as additional input.

When Ves let his second coin press do its job, he held the side and channeled steady portions of his spiritual energy inside the machine.

The coins it made were just as lifeless as the first batch.

"Damn!"

To be honest, he could already tell that it wouldn't work. His spiritual energy didn't do anything inside. It just passed through everything before fading off into the imaginary realm.

"Then what about addressing the other problem?"

For his third coin press design, he decided to make it a bit more special. He used Vulcan as its design spirit in the hopes that this would lead to a breakthrough!

The logic of utilizing Vulcan was sound. It not only excelled in craftsmanship, but also happened to be his own incarnation!

If Vulcan was another side of Ves, could it borrow the powers of Ves as well?

This was an interesting puzzle to solve. He hoped that his third coin minter would be able to present him with a satisfactory answer.

"Failed!"

Not even a coin press that obtained the support of Vulcan was able to do any better! The Golden Cat Coins it produced were just as devoid of life as the darkest reaches of the cosmos!

Ves had already wasted several hours on these experiments. Although he was determined to solve this frustrating puzzle, he could not obsess over it for too long without affecting his other duties.

"What am I missing?"

He felt that similar solutions wouldn't work. He needed to work from a different tangent and come up with an approach that introduced a different factor.

"Let me think… how can I create new life?"