The Mech Touch

It had been a while since he last entered the System Space.

He made a lot of progress in the last year. He completed a bunch of mech designs, many of which were so innovative and meaningful that he had significantly expanded his toolkit.

He managed to broaden and deepen his application of his design philosophy. He not only managed to develop the second generation Carmine System, but also determined the direction of the even more promising third generation Carmine System.

He adapted well to the Hyper Generation. He utilized all of his progress into spiritual engineering to quickly get started in both hyper technology and E-technology. Every mech he completed in the last months introduced significant advancements in the way in which he applied these new technological fields.

His personal cultivation advanced by leaps and bounds. Blinky and Vulcan both made massive progress once he bestowed them with their own custom cultivation methods.

The Imaginary Universe Method Version 3.0 and the Metal God Method were both characterized as relatively weak in the early stage but incredibly powerful in the later stages, but that did not mean they were useless after attaining a bit of progress!

The oddest and most perplexing development was the explosive increase in his phase lord cultivation. Even though he could still be regarded as a beginner in the path to attaining native godhood, the jump from 0.01 percent to 1.4 percent was so massive that he gained access to a whole new set of advantages that not only drastically increased his comprehension of space, but made him a lot harder to kill!

When he thought back on all of the progress he had made in these past few months, Ves couldn't help but feel proud at how well he had utilized his time.

He thought back on the valuable piece of advice given to him by Professor Velten early in his career.

She had taught him the valuable lesson that time was all too precious for mech designers. It seemed that they had many years to explore and improve their craft, but if they spent too much time on side activities that were not related to mechs, they might find themselves reaching the twilight of their years with few accomplishments to their name!

Her warning had stuck to his mind like a barnacle ever since. He was already in a hurry of sorts, but Professor Velten's impactful lesson had contributed much to his drive for constant progress.

Only under constant pressure would Ves have the motivation to work hard and push himself to his limits all of the time!

Accomplishing little in a year was one of his worst nightmares. If he hadn't made so much progress in the last few months and years, Ves would start to lose his confidence in himself.

From the moment a mech designer stopped making any further advancements, his chances of promoting any further became a lot bleaker!

"I can't grow complacent now that my lifespan has increased by a huge extent." He reminded himself.

The native method of cultivation was dangerous, backwards, primitive and exceptionally resource intensive.

Yet it also had its strong points. Just the physical longevity provided by reinforcing his flesh and bones with phasewater was enough to make countless old geezers jealous of what

Ves had inadvertently gained!

Whenever he thought that he could potentially live for thousands of years even if he made no effort to increase his phasewater concentration any further, he felt it was more of a curse rather than a blessing.

Ves truly could not bring himself to appreciate the extended lifespan brought by being a phase lord.

Instead, he lamented the loss of his humanity. Not only did he feel more and more alienated with the people that he was supposed to serve, he also lost a powerful motivating factor that pushed him into improving his ability to design mechs.

If he had 10,000 years to live, would he still be able to force himself into taking risks?

The last thing he wanted was to suffer from the same faults as the long-lived phase whales!

This powerful aquatic species obviously had great strength and potential, but their endowments also caused them to grow extremely complacent as a result.

Ves did not want his efficiency to drop to this level!

Every day, every month and every year was precious. He could get so much work done if he continued to utilize his time efficiently.

When Ves thought about what he wanted to gain from the System this time, he needed to remind himself that he needed to utilize it correctly.

"I shouldn't use it as a shortcut to quickly master stuff that I can already acquire through my own effort. The more correct way to use it is to gain access to knowledge, skills or goods that are unobtainable through other means. The more these gains expand my possibilities, the lower chance that I will run out of interesting research topics."

Before Ves made use of his radiant lottery ticket, he first decided to make his rounds.

He visited the Divine Bazaar, the Mission Hall and the Tree of Possibilities in turn.

Many of the items offered in these places had been refreshed since his last visit.

The goods offered by the Divine Bazaar were completely random. Though Ves felt awfully tempted by a few offerings, he had way too little resources to squander on these goodies.

"I only have 177 AP to my name. I really should get around to completing a few missions and completing a lot more mech designs." Ves frowned.

However, the Mission Hall did not really offer any easy Missions this time. He would have to fulfill inane and time-consuming tasks such as designing a five-pilot juggernaut or personally ending the lives of every member of the 13 major alien races of the Red Ocean.

Perhaps he might be able to earn a few hundred AP in a short amount of time by completing a lot Missions while constantly extending his stay in the System Space, but this was an intensive and mentally draining activity.

Ves needed to complete his vacation before he was ready to test his mental endurance again!

The Tree of Enlightenment merited most of his attention.

He first tried to confirm whether the expensive enlightenment fruit containing the Divine Blacksmith Records was still present.

"Damn. It's gone."

Ves wasn't too worried about losing the opportunity to redeem this precious inheritance. The same fruits rotated in and out every once in a while. He just needed to earn enough AP so that he could be ready to pluck it from a branch when it showed up again.

He did not really study the hundreds of other enlightenment fruits too carefully this time. He did not want to diminish his AP reserve any further, so he refrained himself from buying any enlightenment fruits even though he thought it was relevant to his current interests.

"I can get way better stuff by using up a radiant lottery ticket."

He wanted to go for quality rather than quantity. The expensive enlightenment fruits might not necessarily provide as much raw information, but they were the only ones that contained the most valuable insights!

This was why he paid more attention to the patterns contained in the descriptions of all of the enlightenment fruits.

He knew that whenever he was able to use a radiant lottery ticket, he could narrow down the range of categories of his prizes.

However, there was always a limit to how much he could exclude unwanted traits. He would have to rely on his luck to see whether the lottery delivered anything that was actually useful to his current situation.

Ves made an assumption that whenever the radiant lottery ticket was fixated on enlightenment fruits, it would draw from a pool of them that roughly corresponded to the distribution of fruits hanging from the Tree of Possibilities.

In other words, there was an equal chance that he could gain an enlightenment fruit that was either relevant to mech design or other forms of cultivation.

What Ves sought at the moment was not the former, but the latter.

Now that he not only promoted to a tier 3 galactic citizen but also started to cozy up on the Terrans and the Rubarthans, Ves was able to gain access to much more exclusive knowledge than before.

While it would be difficult to learn anything related to the core trade secrets of powerful mech designers, Ves was still able to obtain plenty of high-end learning resources that were not as exclusive!

In that regard, the only reason for him to obtain an enlightenment fruit related to mech design was to cut short his study time, but even that was no longer as valuable to him as before.

"I can rely on the E-computers in the Blinkyverse and my phasewater-expanded brain to devour all of this knowledge myself."

With all of these cognitive upgrades, Ves was confident that he could accelerate the learning needed to gain the minimum qualifications of a first-class mech designer.

He believed that his current capabilities should be enough for him to get started with first-class mech designs within a single year!

"However, that is just the minimum of what is expected from a first-class Senior Mech Designer." Ves grumbled to himself.

His standards were much higher than that. He needed to master more extensive fields of high technology in order to design the high-end first-class mechs that would turn the Premier Branch into a frontline fighting force.

"I should probably get that done in a few more years." Ves estimated.

What Ves truly valued was the forbidden and possibly lost knowledge related to cultivation science.

Now that red humanity had broken off most of its connections with original humanity, it had become a lot harder to gain access to exclusive secrets that were unique to the Milky Way!

The mechers and the fleeters had done a good job at keeping the agents of the Five Scrolls Compact away from the Red Ocean.

Perhaps too good.

That meant that relatively little ancient cultivation legacies had bled over into the new frontier.

Outside of scattered and dusty remnants such as the Aduc Family's Annals of Terra of Terra Vita, it was impossible for Ves to get his hands on any secret tomes of this kind!

Only the System could remedy this shortcoming. Secrecy and restricted access posed no hindrance to its powerful and unfathomable capabilities.

After scanning the enlightenment fruits for a while, Ves managed to identify many pertinent patterns.

He frowned when he saw how difficult it may be to gain the knowledge that he truly wanted to obtain this time.

"There are too few enlightenment fruits related to space and spatial manipulation." Ves frowned.

He learned from his mother and other sources that space and time were both high-grade concepts that were extremely difficult to get started with. They were virtually inaccessible to low-level cultivators, and even high-level ones found it difficult to gain true comprehension into these mysterious domains.

Their exceedingly high thresholds combined with the difficulty of making progress in these fields meant that the amount of cultivators who mastered any methods related to them were small.

"That means that there are not that many cultivation methods and techniques to begin with." Ves sadly concluded.

What was even worse was that the Tree of Possibilities did not offer a lot of enlightenment fruits that were directly related to phase lord or phase whale cultivation.

That said a lot about the opinions of the System towards native cultivation methods.

The current iteration of the Mech Designer System put a lot of emphasis on both mech design and 'Spiritual Ascension'.

Perhaps from the perspective of the System, any alien methods that were either unrelated or harmful to his spiritual cultivation were not eligible to turn into enlightenment fruits!

Of course, it could also be that as a product of the Milky Way, the Mech Designer System was ideologically opposed to providing cultivation methods that were strongly related to the Red Ocean.

"All in all, I probably won't be able to kill two birds with a single stone this time." Ves sighed in regret.