The Mech Touch

Ves completed his exploration of the new Mech Designer System.

His overall impression was that its name was not that accurate anymore.

While the System still offered plenty of ways to further his ability to design mechs, it gained an entirely new facet that almost completely overshadowed its older uses.

The Divine Bazaar and the Tree of Possibilities were already outrageous enough. Both of them granted him a backdoor to all of the goods and secrets hoarded by the hidden cults that were apparently rife in human space!

All of these scattered cults that may or may not have ties to the Five Scrolls Compact all possessed their unique advantages. Few people ever got in touch with these obscure cults so it was impossible for Ves to learn about them, let alone hunt them down and compel them to cough up their secrets.

With the new System upgrades, Ves did not need to take action and provoke a lot of powerful new enemies. He could conveniently obtain what he needed as long as he was willing to pay the necessary Ascension Points!

"The name of the new currency is a telling indicator of what the System is truly trying to accomplish." Ves surmised.

At first, Ves was able to earn Design Points by designing mechs. Simple as that.

Now, he was able to earn Ascension Points through multiple means. While he still retained the ability to earn points through designing mechs, he could also acquire them by completing strange missions and recruiting Chosen Envoys, whatever that exactly meant.

Although the latter two methods sounded a lot different from designing mechs, Ves was able to see the common thread that connected all of them together.

"The point of doing all of this is to ascend to godhood." Ves concluded. "Mech designers aspire to advance to Star Designer, which is an existence on the same level as a True God. Doing all of that other stuff such as practicing a cultivation scripture or filling up my Chosen Courtyard with Envoys are all different roads that lead to the same destination. The purpose of the System is to help its user reach the post-divinity phase and beyond."

This description did not necessarily fit the Mech Designer System, but completely sounded natural if it was related to the Metal Scroll!

After Ves chose the Spiritual Ascension upgrade track, the System appeared to be encouraging him to adopt a specific development strategy, one borne out of the fact that he possessed multiple incarnations.

Ves could still work towards becoming a Star Designer as usual, but his incarnations were both capable of evolving into True Gods!

The fact that Blinky and Vulcan could reach this powerful state opened up a lot of new possibilities that few people could have imagined.

"I can adopt a diversification strategy!"

Traditionally, the Larkinson Clan achieved initial success by forming a strong mech army and building up a successful mech business.

However, if either of these two activities began to stall, the Larkinson Clan would get into deep trouble.

This was why Ves and the leadership of the clan invested a lot into hedging their bets and diversifying their business activities.

Initiatives such as the Larkinson Biotech Institute, the T Institute, the homegrown shipbuilding operation centered around the Digilent Ovenbird, the Open Consortium, the Creation Association, the First Star Mech Academy and all kinds of other smaller business activities comprehensively added more insurances to the Larkinson Clan.

Though the Living Mech Corporation definitely brought in more money than all of those other business ventures combined, if the mech company ever collapsed one day, the Larkinson Clan would not become destitute all of a sudden!

"The best part about all of this is that as long as everything is going well, my clan is earning a lot more money than normal!"

Ves saw that he had the opportunity to pursue a similar strategy with regards to his spiritual development.

From the moment he obtained Blinky, he had already noticed that the growth of his Spirituality attribute vastly exceeded that of his immediate peers.

Though his wife, Ketis and a few other people had managed to close the gap after Ves gifted them with their own companion spirits, it was clear that incarnations granted him a powerful advantage over more conventional mech designers!

After years of designing mechs and working alongside other gifted mech designers, Ves had developed a pretty good understanding of the consequences.

A stronger spirit not only comprehensively improved a mech designer's understanding, learning ability and affinity towards mech, but also allowed them to imprint their design philosophies onto mech designs to a stronger degree.

In fact, Ves' growth in this aspect was so strong that he was pretty certain that his Spirituality attribute already exceeded the minimum threshold of that of a Senior Mech Designer!

What did this mean?

Ves already satisfied one of the requirements to advance to Senior!

Of course, the reason why he had been stuck at Journeyman all of this time was because the career path of a mech designer centered more around knowledge and ability rather than spiritual accumulation. It was a highly intellectual and cerebral profession by nature, which meant that brute force was not enough for him to reach the next rank.

In this regard, Blinky and Vulcan could provide relatively little help. While the latter possessed a lot of science and engineering know-how that Ves sometimes borrowed in order to solve difficult design problems, he was merely making use of theories and methods developed by other people in the industry.

Ves was confident that he had accumulated enough in other areas. He designed a lot of mechs over the years.

With no events or crises that could take Ves away from the design lab, he was able to complete one mech design project after another.

The only real distractions were his kids. As someone who felt strongly about family, he insisted on accompanying his cute little children as they enjoyed their childhoods.

Even so, Ves could not allow this sentiment to compromise his passion for mech design. He had heard plenty of cases where mech designers lost their drive to design mechs because they became too domesticated.

"I'm pretty sure I designed enough mechs considering how productive I've been in the last five years."

However, that was still not enough for Ves to feel that he had reached the turning point of his remaining time as a Journeyman Mech Designer.

Seniors reached their position by relying on their inventions. Ves had already asked for advice from numerous mech designers who completed the same journey.

Whether it was Termanao Dervidian or Benedict Cortez, both of them told him that his time would come sooner or later. He could not rush the process because it mostly came down to waiting until he received enough inspiration to know how he could substantially push his design philosophy to the next level!

It was because of this limitation that Ves did not put too much emphasis on developing Blinky and Vulcan in parallel.

"I could be wrong, though."

There was a possibility that advancing to Master Mech Designer or Star Designer made it a lot important to possess enough spiritual accumulation.

If that was the case, then having a couple of powerful spiritual incarnations would provide Ves with an immensely valuable advantage!

Of course, it would take many years for that to become relevant.

"I need to take care of my more immediate needs."

He left the Sacred Hearth and went back to the Pantheon in order to check his Status. It had been years since he last inspected it, and a lot of subtle changes had occurred over the years.

[Status]

Name: Ves Larkinson

Profession: Journeyman Mech Designer

Specializations: Mutual Growth

Ascension Points: 34

Attributes

Strength: 1.6

Dexterity: 1.7

Endurance: 2.0

Intelligence: 2.6

Creativity: 2.5

Concentration: 3.2

Spirituality: 10.6

Neural Aptitude: F

Skills

…

Abilities

[Superpublish]: Available (Used in Bardo Star Cluster). Can be activated once a year.

[Inventorize]: Available. Can be activated a single time.

[Time Gate]: Available. Can be activated once a year.

"Damn I'm good."

Ves did not need to inspect his Status to know how much he improved. He was able to use his own judgment to determine how much his attributes had improved and how many Sub-Skills he acquired over time.

Still, he felt a lot of psychological satisfaction when he was able to compare his new figures with the older ones that he recalled from his memory.

The most notable change aside from switching his Design Points with Ascension Points was the massive increase in Spirituality.

Since the Status page merged both his and Blinky's numbers together, it had exceeded the score of 10, which was probably an important threshold!

"It's too bad that my Skills and Sub-Skills haven't improved as drastically." Ves sighed.

He was too lazy to study each of the improved and added Sub-Skills in detail, but no matter how much he had managed to absorb during his time in Davute, he had yet to make a breakthrough in understanding that was significant enough for him to advance to Senior.

Ves paid special attention to two new Sub-Skills. 

[Phasewater I]

[Offensive Phasewater Technology I]

"Damnit! I spent so much time on studying Phasewater, but all I managed to do was get my foot in the door!"

The difficulty of learning enough about phasewater theory in order to develop a basic understanding of the exotic was too great!

Ves was actually one of the faster mech designers to comprehend phasewater. There were many other Journeymen who had spent just as much time and effort on studying phasewater theory and failed to reach half of his level of understanding!

Compared to expending years worth of time on trying to understand how this mysterious dimension-manipulating exotic worked, Ves would rather pluck an enlightenment fruit from the Tree of Possibilities and absorb everything he needed to know in an instant!

"The problem is that I need to wait for the damn tree to spawn the right enlightenment fruit!"

Ves had scanned all of the available enlightenment fruit during his first visit to the Tree of Possibilities and failed to find anything related to phasewater technology.

This was the downside to covering so many different scientific and spiritual fields! The tree only grew a couple of hundred fruits at a time, so the chances of stumbling upon the ones he needed the most were low!

"Even if a phasewater enlightenment fruit is available, it is not certain that I can pay for it." Ves admitted with a sigh.

The System was absolutely fair in this regard. Rarer, more exotic, more powerful and more novel knowledge cost far more Ascension Points to obtain.

Ves couldn't afford all that much with just 34 AP to his name at the moment!

Just as he began to think about setting his sights lower and starting off with a few modest purchases to set him on the right path, he suddenly remembered that he still had a bunch of lottery tickets that were begging to be used.

His eyes lit up again.

"Yes! How could I have overlooked them? The golden lottery tickets might not be that precious, but the radiant lottery tickets are absolutely fantastic!"

Based on what little he obtained from a radiant lottery ticket in the past, he guessed that the value of goods they spit out ranged from 100 to 10,000 AP!

In fact, it may very well be the case that the radiant lottery tickets could potentially give Ves items that were worth far more than the upper boundary, as he hadn't used them often enough to figure out their distribution pattern.

"No matter whether I can get a prize that is worth 500 AP or 500,000 AP, I will always be able to obtain a windfall!"

Compared to what he could gain from spending 34 AP, the potential prizes he could win from using up his lottery tickets were far better!