The Mech Touch

The demands of designing a five element variation of the Fey Project were harsh.

Ves needed to be skilled, proficient and knowledgeable in integrating five different types of hyper materials into his work.

Due to the short time that passed since hyper technology became accessible to red humanity, Ves had not worked with too many variations of hypers.

The last four expert mech designs gave Ves a bit of exposure towards hyper materials related to the attributes of metal, water, light and so on, but that was not comprehensive enough to cover the current range of elements.

Ves specifically lacked essential experience in working with the wood, earth and fire elements.

Fortunately, this was not an insurmountable shortcoming.

Many of the general methods and solutions he developed over the course of working on the other attributes were universal in nature.

He could readily apply his toolbox to the elements that he had yet to work upon after adapting his work.

Ves also had a basic degree of familiarity with handling the five elements through the spell manual that he had learned a long time ago. The benefit of swallowing an enlightenment fruit provided by the System was that he could not only gain immediate understanding of all of the theories, but he could also get started on many of the techniques!

Of course, enlightenment fruits did not grant him the highest level of comprehension and proficiency right away. Ves still had to put a lot of time and effort into deepening his mastery. Much of this work consisted of moving beyond the basics and trying to adapt what he learned into adaptations that specifically fit his circumstances.

One of the characteristics of the Beginner Five Elements Spells Manual was that it was specifically designed to be broad and accommodating to many kinds of cultivators.

The theories were all based on basic fundamentals that did not contain too much weirdness that increased the difficulty of understanding them. That said, they did not go too much into depth about the five elements, but that was not the purpose of this beginner book.

The associated techniques were all relatively clean and simple. They taught Ves how to shape an element into different forms based on its various strengths and possibilities. The spells effectively taught Ves how to harness elemental E energy in a safe and reasonably effective manner.

While none of the spells were particularly powerful, they were stable and had a low chance of producing any backlash if anything went wrong.

Right now, Ves was drawing increasingly more on the knowledge of the Beginner Five Elements Spells Manual to weave an intricate spiritual design for the Fey Project.

His ambition was great. He had come across plenty of warnings about recklessly toying around with the five elements. Combining three or more of them at once usually produced violent reactions and could easily cause any arrangement to go out of control!

However, Ves had become so inspired that he believed he could overcome a problem that had plagued many cultivators in the past!

Ves was not arrogant enough to combine the five elements on his own. He would definitely cause an accident if he tried to make such a foolish attempt.

What gave him so much confidence was the fact that he was attempting this fusion indirectly through his work!

Every living mech started off with a blank slate. Ves had a unique capacity to shape his products into living entities. Each of them could integrate certain traits and behaviors in order to strengthen and differentiate them from the competition.

Ves wanted to take this a few steps further by not only integrating multiple elements in his Fey Project, but also form a mutually reinforcing cycle that would cause each of them to feed into each other!

The most perfect outcome that produced the strongest results would be if he was able to form five sequential relationships where the five elements attained complete harmony without getting into conflict with each other!

However, it was that last demand that vexed cultivators the most.

For example, mixing fire and water almost always produced explosive reactions, making this particularly unsuited for sustained effects.

There were many relationships that caused the elements to weaken, destroy, restrain or stabilize each other.

All of it was incredibly uncomplicated and made it a nightmare to combine the elements in any application!

Ves could not completely guarantee that the Fey Project would be able to maintain a stable elemental cycle after he completed it. His ideas were too rough and his prior work and experiences provided far too little reference value.

If not for the fact that his current inspired state helped him come up with many inventive and promising solutions on the spot, he wouldn't have the courage to proceed at this point!

Vulcan's expertise provided him with a lot of assistance. Traditional craftsmen earned their renown for their ability to harmoniously combine and balance out different hyper materials based on varying attributes.

Even so, a traditional blacksmith hardly dared to forge a weapon or other item that combined all five elements at once!

It took a lot of experience and comprehension in working with the five elements for an artisan to become qualified. Even then, a blacksmith had to resort to secret methods and techniques that were specifically developed to channel the five elements in a stable manner.

Vulcan was way too immature as a creation cultivator to be able to make such an amazing work.

Even Divine Blacksmiths had to work a little more seriously in order to produce any work that incorporated the five elements!

How could Ves overcome the insanely high threshold of working with the five elements and turn his remarkable variation of the Fey Project into a reality?

Ves smirked again.

"It is all in the spirit."

This was his main area of specialization. It was the key factor that granted him an unreasonable amount of confidence that he would be able to succeed in this experiment.

The theoretical premise of his idea was rather simple.

The four fey and the main body each encompassed a different element.

It was not that difficult to design five separate metallic objects that embodied the power of fire, water, wood, earth and metal.

The fact that the mech frame and its four fey could detach from each other already prevented a lot of possible dangers.

However, too much separation defeated the point of working with the five elements.

What Ves wanted to make was a drone mech that could fuse and combine the five elements.

This meant that the five objects needed to become connected in a way that enabled them to transfer their elemental E energies with each other!

He needed to integrate them well enough to produce strong enough synergies. His ultimate goal was to produce an outcome that was way more powerful than the sum of its parts.

"If this ambitious idea works out the way I hope it will, it is not impossible for all of the amplification and reinforcements effects to achieve parity with an expert mech!"

This would be an astonishing result!

It was not unheard of for standard mechs to gain enough power to fight against an expert mech on equal terms.

However, much of these incidents involved battles between low-class expert mechs and high-class standard mech.

Any sufficiently powerful first-class multipurpose mech could defeat a second-class expert mech.

Ves did not take this seriously because the cost of the former was far greater than the latter!

It was essentially a form of attaining victory by spending a profligate amount of money!

What truly attracted him to his current idea was that it gave an ordinary mech pilot the hope of defeating an expert pilot with a cheaper mech!

Even if Ves was forced to raise the cost of the Fey Project by adding additional modules and integrating several more varieties of elemental hyper materials, it would still be cheaper than an expert mech of the same class and tier!

Ves did not actually think his five element mech could reach this amazing standard upon completion.

The interactions between the five elements were bound to be rough and imperfect at the start.

This was fine. The Fey Project was a living mech, which meant that its main personality and four sub-personalities would be able to grow, adapt and learn over time.

His five elements mech would inevitably be able to master its endless applications after many years of growth!

"It is just like a qi cultivator in that regard!" Ves realized.

What Ves was attempting to do was nothing less than creating an artificial qi cultivator that possessed an inherent talent in working with the five elements!

This was absolutely unique and would probably be regarded as a miracle in both ancient and modern times!

It was exactly because it was unheard of that Ves needed to work harder than ever to solve its many issues.

One of the dilemmas that troubled Ves a lot forced him to make highly consequential decisions that directly affected the success rate of this experiment.

On the one hand, he needed to make the five living entities independent enough to prevent their elements from conflicting with each other.

On the other hand, he had to make them close and interconnected enough to enable them to reinforce each other!

These were two contradictory goals. Ves could not go too far in one direction without causing the Fey Project to weaken by a considerable extent.

Ves was unable to calculate the sweet spot that would lead to an acceptable balance between conflict and reinforcement.

A Fey Project that was overly prone towards conflict would be able to gain a lot of combat power at the cost of stability. The threat of a backlash would constantly loom over the drone mech's shoulder!

A Fey Project that erred too much on the side of caution would not be prone to producing accidents, but the reinforcements between the elements would become so weak that the mech would fail to live up to its potential!

Neither of these outcomes were acceptable to Ves.

He needed to resort to other means in order to find an acceptable balance.

When Ves surveyed the spiritual design of his Fey Project, he paid constant attention to the strength and intimacy of the permanent spiritual bonds between the fey and the main body.

Ves had created many different spiritual connections over his career.

The relationship with the fey and the main body reminded Ves of himself.

"The fey are sort of similar to the companion spirits or the incarnations of their principal."

This comparison granted Ves another insight that might help him determine the elusive sweet spot!

If Ves regarded the mech frame of the Fey Project as an artificial qi cultivator, then its four fey could function as its companion spirits!

"Can mechs have companion spirits?"

Ves asked this question multiple times before. One of his original goals in designing the Fey Project was to find the answer!

In any case, Ves could use his own situation as a template.

He had created multiple incarnations of himself, each of which were at least somewhat separate from his core self.

Blinky and Vulcan were definitely connected to him, but they were also separate enough to develop their own powers and domains.

Despite the fact that they wielded their power differently, they still cooperated well with Ves!

Ves directed his attention back to the Fey Project. He felt a lot more certainty than before.

"Instead of trying to explore the unknown, it is better to settle on more familiar ground. I can use the spiritual bonds between humans and their companion spirits as a model for my five elements mech!"

He was not completely sure whether this design choice could lead to a successful result, but he felt confident enough in it that he proceeded forward anyway!

It took a remarkably short time for Ves to redesign the Fey Project in the mech workshop. Only a couple of hours had gone by, which meant that he still retained all of the momentum that he accumulated before!

His current situation was highly conducive to resuming his fabrication work, only this time he intended to produce a remarkably different mech.

"Nothing will stop me from realizing my vision!"