The Mech Touch



Ves was in an excellent mood from the moment he announced the start of the fabrication run!

As Ves, Gloriana, Miles, Cormaunt and Master Benedict split up and approached their respective stations, they began to show their skills right away.

With Zimro Belson standing by the side, Blinky tied the expert pilot along with all of the mech designers in a design network.

As Miles, Cormaunt and Zimro all became fascinated by the novel experience of sharing minds with other minds, Ves mostly focused his attention on what he could do to improve the results of this fabrication run.

He first spent a bit of time surveying everyone's conditions.

Gloriana worked a lot more proficient than before. The advanced materials and designs no longer hindered her as much as before. Her understanding of mech design and her own work had improved by a small leap. This granted her the confidence to complete all manner of difficult tasks.

Ves admired how much she improved in a short span of time. She no longer underestimated the difficulty of fabricating a quasi-first-class transphasic expert mech and approached her work with an earnest mindset.

Master Benedict held a lot of expectations towards the Ghost Project. His work on the energy transmission systems interested him a lot because the last Superpublished mech had given him a lot of lessons on how to optimize his work even further.

However, the eager Master was saving up most of his ammunition for the moment when they would put together the full version of the Geist System.

Object 335 which Venerable Zimro Belson used to practice his control over the spiritual fiends did not count. The True Geist System was designed to be a lot more powerful than a simple pet carrier.

Just the thought of working to extract power from the decapitated head of a still-living expert pilot made the Master excited beyond belief!

Ves also shared the older mech designer's enthusiasm. The Geist System was just as powerful as the Carmine System as far as he was concerned.

Even if the former did not have the potential to accomplish a feat as massive as allowing ordinary people to control their own mechs, the latter opened up many other possibilities that may not be any weaker!

The only issue was that Ves primarily wanted to research the internal applications of his design philosophy. He could not afford to spend as much time on messing around with external spiritual entities as before.

That did not mean he was willing to abandon this field entirely. He craved variety and he still had a few ideas that could help him empower his mechs in unconventional ways.

Thinking about how the Geist System could turn the Ghost Project into a terror that could not be stopped or defeated through conventional solutions made him even more excited than before!

Ves truly wanted to hurry up and complete this expert mech as soon as possible so that he could finally witness the Geist System at work!

"I need to be patient." He muttered.

Fabricating a mech of this caliber was no joke. Ves needed to go through all of the steps without losing his focus.

As he continued to fabricate the transphasic parts that comprised the highly sophisticated  Optaar Integrated Solutions Seferath AQ-3M Active Stealth System, he became surprised by how much less demanding his work had become.

Many difficult operations that Ves struggled to do well suddenly became a lot less stressful than before.

Though Ves still encountered plenty of challenges, he managed to resolve them without losing his rhythm.

Did his advancement to Senior make that much of a difference?

As Ves continued to keep track of his own condition as he fabricated more and more stealth-related parts, he understood why he became so much better.

The Kingdom of Mechs played a major difference. Its value was greatest whenever Ves worked with advanced technological components that demanded a high degree of theoretical understanding in order to fabricate correctly.

With the Kingdom of Mechs providing hidden guidance every now and then, Ves no longer had to spend his valuable time and brainpower on figuring the right solution! His 'intuition' simply pointed him in the right direction so that he could easily move on to his next work assignment!

Another reason why he improved so much was that he was simply more effective as a mech designer in every way.

His mind and Spirituality had not evolved as drastically as when he created Veronica, but it became more attuned to mechs and mech design.

The advancement process of mech designers was a journey that enabled ordinary humans to evolve into higher life forms.

The further a mech designer climbed up the ranks, the closer they became to turning themselves into energy-based lifeforms!

Though Ves was still a long way to breaching the critical threshold of Master, he already understood that he was anything but an average Senior!

His Spirituality was much stronger!

His cognitive functions enabled him to design mechs without relying on any tools!

His affinity to mechs was abnormally high after fabricating more than half-a-dozen masterwork mechs!

His three incarnations granted him additional abilities and made him a lot more versatile!

All of these factors already empowered his mech design capabilities to such an extent that he had probably become the most powerful Journeyman among the second-raters!

Now that he had advanced to Senior, his upper limitations had been raised to a huge degree.

He no longer experienced any constraints for the time being, which meant that all of his design-related attributes were able to grow unscrupulously!

If Ves' previous self was like a bathtub that was overflowing with water, he could now be likened to a swimming pool that already had enough water to allow his kids to have fun!

Of course, the swimming pool was still nowhere close to being filled. The upper limitations of Senior Mech Designers were so high that even Ves had to work honestly for at least a couple of decades in order to reach the minimum threshold for becoming a Master.

In any case, his new condition had lifted a weight that Ves never really noticed in the past. He had the impression that he no longer operated under an artificial handicap that forcibly locked him within the boundaries of a Journeyman Mech Designer.

"I'm free!"

Ves could clearly notice the differences when he compared his own performance to that of his wife.

The two had already started to diverge, but the gap between the two had become even wider!

While Gloriana still struggled to fabricate the most difficult first-class components, Ves could complete the same job with plenty of attention to spare.

"That is not all." Ves thought.

Becoming a Senior Mech Designer meant that he had come one step closer to assuming the powers of a Star Designer.

Even if the gulf between the two ranks was still huge, Seniors could come a lot closer to touching the essence of mechs!

As Ves continued to get into a good rhythm, he felt that his high affinity for mechs provided him with a significantly greater boost than before.

He felt closer to the Ghost Project in a way that he couldn't fully describe. It was as if he was not just making a new mech, but also his own child!

An hour into the fabrication run, the work pattern began to shift.

Ves gradually became more dominant while the other mech designers started to take a few steps back.

He occupied an increasingly greater presence in the design network that connected their minds together.

This not only caused him to become the fulcrum of the fabrication run, but also allowed him to dictate the pace, allocation and order of work tasks.

Given that he was able to complete his work assignments 20 to 40 percent faster than before, Ves took the initiative to fabricate a few parts that were originally left to his collaborators.

He was not being selfish when he claimed this additional work for himself. He did this because he knew without a doubt that he possessed the closest connection to the Ghost Project!

The way he perceived his expert mech design had changed. He understood nuances that weren't as apparent as before, and he felt more than ever that it was alive and responsive in a way that he felt stupid for overlooking when he was a Journeyman!

As Ves continued to fabricate the parts of the large and expansive active stealth system, he continually tried to figure out a way that could increase his advantages.

He did not have the impression that he had reached his limit. He felt he could do a lot more in order to improve his results.

His eyes suddenly widened as he connected a few ideas together.

"Wait a minute. As a Senior Mech Designer, my life stage has improved even further compared to before. What if…"

He issued a brief warning to the others through the design network in order to prevent them from getting surprised. He did not want them to botch their current tasks.

Once he was sure that everyone else was mentally prepared, Ves took the initiative to loosen his own restraints.

His presence grew stronger as his aura spread across the workshop.

He had unveiled his glow yet again!

This was absolutely unique among mech designers below Star Designers!

Not even Masters could radiate a glow-like effect and sway everyone around them with the essence of their design philosophies!

Right now, Gloriana and everyone else became subjected to a strong sensation that combined life and mechs.

While they were all strong enough in their own right to resist and ignore this glow, that was not what Ves wanted to happen.

"The design network allows me to share a portion of my perspective of my design philosophy, but that is not the full story." Ves explained. "If you truly want to understand the Ghost Project from my perspective, you will need to feel the life I infused into its design."

Although opening themselves up to Ves' glow made it a little more difficult for the other mech designers to stick to concentrate on their own design philosophies, they suddenly understood living mechs on a deeper level!

The only regret was that the difference this made was not that great. Ves' glow had become a bit stronger and more developed than before, but it was hardly comparable to the overwhelming domain that the Polymath had once unveiled!

Compared to that grand demonstration of power, Ves fell so far behind that he was like an ant in front of a CFA battleship!

This was not the extent of his plan, though.

Ves could still do more.

"Blinky!"

"Mrow!"

The cat maintained his design network for a time now, but this was not even his main function.

Ves and Blinky took the initiative to contact the Superior Mother.

The powerful design spirit harvested so much spiritual feedback every day that most of it went to waste!

It was not much to ask for Ves to borrow a heap of energy. Even if the transfer was incredibly wasteful, the Superior Mother could still bear the loss!

As soon as the Superior Mother supplied Blinky with a stream of spiritual energy, the Star Cat swallowed it all up and digested it into a more familiar form.

Ves took in the newly-converted spiritual energies that were attributed to both life and mechs and used it to supercharge his glow!

Each and every step in this chain produced a lot of loss and waste. However, he thought it was worth it as his glow intensified to the point where he was able to establish a pseudo-domain!

Everything and everyone in a sphere around became exposed to Ves' interpretation of mechs!

Now that his supercharged glow had become strong enough to produce qualitative changes, its effects on the mech designers and the materials they worked with became a lot more noticeable!

For a moment, Ves felt as if he had transformed his workshop into a paradise for living mechs.

Even if the other mech designers such as Cormaunt Hempkamp understood little about living mechs, Ves had the illusion that his glow could make the neural interface specialist add a touch of life to his own work!

This had major implications!