The Mech Touch

Ves left Venerable Isobel Kotin to her own devices.

He possessed full confidence in her ability to quickly master the power of fire.

Out of all of the people in his orbit, there was no one who possessed an affinity for fire as high as hers! The strength and domain that she developed over the course of her piloting career had all been invested into deepening her fundamental closeness and compatibility towards fire.

Ves found this to be a fascinating process. Mech pilots essentially progressed through willpower cultivation by coming up with all kinds of self-fulling properties centered around themselves.

The sheer variety of mech pilots in human civilization led to an enormous diversity of high-ranking mech pilots.

There were pilots who liked to blow stuff up a lot, so the Destroyer of Worlds became really good at producing the most powerful explosions.

Ketis wanted to gain the power to cut everything, so Sharpie helped her enhance the sharpness of her blades to an extraordinary level.

Commander Casella Ingvar wanted to command and control her subordinates to a precise degree, so her ability to Commandeer mechs and mech pilots enabled her to direct them as if they were her own chess pieces.

All of these advantages and more came to life without the mech pilots knowing anything about cultivation science.

While the Kingdom of Mechs played a huge role making this process automatic, the general premise behind willpower cultivation was to turn the impossible into reality just by wishing for it really hard!

The power of human consciousness was truly impressive. It might not amount to much in normal times, but whenever a warrior was pushed to his limit, there was a small but realistic enough chance for that individual to break through that line and reach into an extraordinary domain!

Something like this was common in many cultivation methods, but it was especially prominent in willpower cultivation!

This was the key reason why talent and affinity never became a hindrance to mech pilots.

No matter how poor their starting points may be, as long as they piloted a decent mech and possessed adequate spiritual potential, they could always rely on their strong willpower to reshape their own image of themselves to better fit their ideals!

"It's a pity that there aren't many mech pilots under my command that are so strongly oriented towards one of the five elements." Ves sighed.

Mech pilots generally picked whatever they liked as the focus of their own power and domain. There was a huge variety of concepts for them to channel their power, and the five elements only consisted of a tiny proportion of all of the viable possibilities.

From Patriarch Reginald Cross' desire to dominate on the battlefield to Venerable Joshua's compassion for life, high-ranking mech pilots could turn any abstract concept into a form of combat power!

Not many mech pilots settled for excelling in concepts as basic as one of the five elements.

"Maybe I should change that for the Larkinson Army." Ves considered.

He briefly thought about founding a new mech legion that focused entirely on a single element.

The mech pilots would all be picked for their preference for an element and start to pilot mechs that were themed entirely around the dominant element.

In the long run, this would lead to the breakthroughs of many mech pilots who excelled in the same element. This not only made it easier to design similar expert mechs that all possessed the same kind of special features, but also enabled the expert pilots to learn from each other and combine their elemental abilities on the battlefield!

Ves quickly shook his head after he imagined the creation of such a powerful and distinctive mech legion.

"Our clan already has enough legions for the time being. We don't have the carrier capacity to take on thousands more mechs. Maybe I'll reconsider this idea in the future."

He and his clan did not have the time and resources to invest in such an endeavor. Ves needed to restrain his dreams and focus on his immediate situation.

There was a good reason why Ves contemplated the nature of a high-ranking mech pilot's power as he approached the Promethea.

After getting paired with Venerable Isobel Kotin, the living mech had been subjected to willpower baptism for an extended period of time.

Of course, the willpower baptism of a low-tier expert pilot did not amount to much, but a little transformation was better than nothing!

As Ves inspected the living mech with his spiritual senses, he could sense the growing imprint and influence that Venerable Isobel left onto the Promethea.

If the pair continued to work and fight together for a couple of decades, the Promethea truly had the potential to subtly evolve into an expert mech that was able to channel Isobel's power a lot more efficiently than normal!

The difference between a Promethea that had been partnering up with Isobel for decades and another copy of the Promethea that had just rolled off a production line would be massive!

Ves directed his attention towards the Ignitron Luminar Crystal Assault Rifle that he had developed specifically for the Promethea.

This was the key piece of equipment that he wanted to improve for the upcoming operation.

He did not have much time to do his work, so he had to find a way to quickly elevate the Promethea's combat effectiveness.

"This is quite an old weapon." He muttered.

The original version of the Ignitron was not transphasic. This was because he designed and built the Promethea in a time period where the Design Department was reluctantly able to apply third party transphasic armor systems to their high-end mechs, but could not turn to anyone to supply the corresponding transphasic luminar crystal weapons.

Ves had to do his own research in this area. He eventually managed to develop a working implementation of it, and used what he learned to develop the Instrument of Doom for the Amaranto, among other things.

He had yet to provide the same service for the Promethea because he originally intended to upgrade the entire Promethea in a single major revision.

"I can't wait that long anymore."

It might not be possible for Ves to transform the Ignitron into a transphasic luminar crystal weapon in a short amount of time, but he came up with a different idea on how to enhance its power!

He took control of a handful of heavy-duty bots and used them to take out and bring the Ignitron rifle to an adjacent workshop.

Though the workshop next to the hangar bay was not as well-equipped as his personal one, Ves did not intend to make heavy use of the equipment at hand.

Ves only needed a quiet place that was devoid of people in order to engage in spiritual engineering.

He predicted that what he was about to do next might produce a lot of disruptions.

"Blinky, Come out. I will need to rely on your power a lot this time."

"Mrow."

A different purple spiritual cat emerged at this time!

Though Blinky and Kiroshi practically looked like siblings, the former was considerably older and more developed.

Having cultivated the Internal Universe Method Version 3.0 for a time, the reflection of the Blinkyverse on his fur had grown a little more complex.

It displayed a larger landmass that was already in the process of turning into a round planet. A relatively powerful point of light as well as smaller dots of light formed around this developing globe.

"What do you think, Blinky? Are you up to the task?"

"Mrow..."

"I know it will cost you a lot, but all you will be spending is a renewable resource. Just focus on absorbing a lot of fire energy from the environment if you are so afraid of putting the Blinkyverse out of balance."

"Mrow mrow."

Ves came up with a relatively simple plan at this time.

What Ves envisioned for Venerable Isobel and Kiroshi was to enable them to leverage prime resonance to produce a powerful effect in battle.

More specifically, he wanted to replicate the way in which Venerable Irene Mox was able to attach Emma to a projectile and launch both of them at the enemy at the same time!

This was not easy considering that the circumstances were entirely different at this time.

Ves believed that he could still make it happen so long as he satisfied a number of conditions.

As long as Kiroshi was able to turn herself into a flaming and self-sustaining projectile, at least one condition would be satisfied.

However, if the Promethea was not able to properly make use of prime resonance in a targeted manner, it would be useless even if Kiroshi learned a new trick!

What Ves needed to do was to alter the Ignitron into a weapon that could effectively deliver Kiroshi to the enemy.

Yet how could he do that if the luminar crystal rifle fired continuous energy beams in short bursts as opposed to launching a physical projectile?

The answer he came up with was to incorporate a hyper material into the weapon and turn it into a prime weapon!

Another problem emerged when he settled on this decision.

Where could he get a sufficient amount of fire sympathetic material?

The T Institute only started to cultivate prime materials a short time ago, and Ves only had a batch of weak and fragile D-i in storage at the moment. This was completely useless to his current plan!

This was why Ves came up with an alternate idea.

It was based on an assumption that he only recently came up with after connecting a lot of different theories and observations together.

"Luminar crystal technology was originally developed in a time where the Milky Way was not yet broken." He speculated. "At the time, the luminar race was not only gifted in spirituality, but also developed their crystal technology to work the power of heaven that used to be abundant at the time."

If this guess was true, then that essentially meant that luminar crystals may essentially function as an artificial hyper material!

This was a shocking conclusion if it happened to be true!

Ves felt this idea made a lot of sense even if he lacked strong proof to back up this amazing assertion. He just thought that it made a lot of sense given what he learned about the luminar race and spending a lot of years researching and applying luminar crystal technology to his mech designs.

Though Ves had yet to see any existing luminar crystals undergoing any transformations so far, he had a faint guess that the intensity of E energy radiation was not high enough to meet the required threshold.

If luminar crystals were fairly powerful and high-end to the luminar race, then it may be a given that they could not be produced so easily!

"It does not cost that much to verify this new theory." Ves smirked. "At most, I'll only waste a bunch of time."

He did not delay any further and resumed his operations.

As the Ignitron's internal components became exposed to his sight, he thought about commanding a bot to take out one of the six attack phase crystals integrated into the weapon.

"Which one has the greatest relation to the fire element?"

He chose to set aside the positron beam attack phase crystal after a brief period of consideration.

A laser beam could inflict a lot of thermal damage, but its greatest advantage was that it propagated at the speed of light. This was ideal for attaining higher hit rates in long-ranged combat in space.

However, a positron beam consisted of actual antimatter, though at a scale and power that was far below the level of an actual weapon of mass destruction.

Since a positron beam weapon essentially emitted a large amount of positron particles at a distant target, it was a beam that actually possessed mass and substance, even if it was not heavy at all in absolute terms.

However, Ves prized this property because he guessed it would be a lot easier to enable Kiroshi to hitchhike an energy beam when she could attach herself to actual physical particles as opposed to tiny and much less substantial photons!

"Aside from that, a collision between positrons and normal matter releases a lot of energy that mostly comes in the form of heat. This reaction should have an excellent compatibility with the element of fire!"

Once a bot placed the positron beam attack phase crystal in a secure chamber, Ves proceeded with the next and most important step of his experiment.

Blinky slowly flew closer until he stopped next to the luminar crystal.

After a brief pause, the Star Cat slowly opened his maw and began to channel a small fraction of the huge fire energies contained within his Blinkyverse!

This was the essence of Ves' plan!

He wanted to see if he could force a luminar crystal's transformation into a prime material related to the fire attribute by essentially flooding it with energies of the same element!

"Come on, Blinky! I'm relying on you! Just dump out as much fire energy as you can channel!"

"Mrow!"