The Mech Touch

Since returning home, Ves and Gloriana already collaborated on more than half-a-dozen different mech designs.

Sure, the majority of the designs consisted of variants of the Desolate Soldier, but they still provided months worth of collaboration experience.

Each time they worked together, they constantly tried to complement each otherʼs design styles and achieve greater synergy.

Right now, Ves never expected Gloriana to be able to employ her specialty in this fashion!

The process of spiritual restoration had always been extremely abstruse, and Ves only managed to achieve it because he could sense and observe what was taking place!

Gloriana on the other hand lacked these advantages!

She wasnʼt even fully in control of her own spirituality. Her mind only accidentally extended a spiritual projection because it wanted to retrieve what it lost.

”How much control do you have over what you are doing?” Ves asked.

His concentration ability was sufficient enough to keep focusing on his task with some attention left to spare.

On the other hand, Gloriana could barely keep up what she was doing. Ves had to repeat his question another time to get an answer.

”Iʼm not.. sure. Whatever Iʼm doing is straining me! I donʼt think I can keep this up for long!”

”Donʼt worry about anything else, then. Just maintain what you are doing until you canʼt take it any longer. What youʼre doing is very helpful for our eventual end product. Donʼt harm yourself on my account, though! We can always do better next time!”

”Got it! I donʼt think Iʼm harming myself, though. Iʼm just getting more and more exhausted.”

Ves worried about her condition a little. He knew that she often pushed herself because she put very high demands on herself. Ordinarily, she was smart enough to know her limits, but the problem was that she possessed almost no experience with spiritual manipulation.

He extended another part of his concentration to monitoring her condition. As long as her mind or spirituality could no longer hold it, Ves would immediately pull her out.

Of course, for the moment Ves needed to make the most out of this accidental situation.

After another minute of forming his spiritual product, Ves gained a better idea on what Gloriana was doing.

Ves manipulated his spiritual projection like his arm with purposeful direction. His spiritual perception allowed him to see exactly what he was doing, even if he didnʼt know the mechanics behind what was taking place.

In contrast, Glorianaʼs spiritual projection largely moved by itself. Instead of acting like a controlled extension of herself, it behaved more like an autonomous bot that performed actions that corresponded with its primary programming.

Right now, Gloriana managed to exert enough control to switch the priority of her spiritual projectionʼs programming.

It stopped trying to retrieve her missing thought matter in favor of correcting whatever flaws it sensed in the vicinity.

Gloriana managed to come up with a clever way of stopping her spiritual projection from wreaking havoc in their current operation!

Now that her spiritual projection switched from doing damage to contributing materially to the formation of the spiritual product, the operation went smoother than ever before!

What was even more remarkable was that they didnʼt solely act in isolation.

The close proximity of their spiritual extensions led to some strange phenomena.

Chief among them was the result of their intimate familiarity with each otherʼs presence and design philosophies.

All of their prior collaborations finally bore some fruit in this instance as their spiritual projections started to grow closer to each other!

Ves felt a strange sense of longing from his design philosophy. While he could have suppressed his intuition that compelled his spiritual projection to converge with Glorianaʼs, he did not do so because he was curious.

He trusted in his intuition!

As they grew closer, the spiritual projections grew more excited as their familiarity with each other deepened. The excitement had reached such a high level that they vibrated in harmony!

”Resonance!” He whispered with gleaming eyes.

Resonance appeared to be a recurring phenomenon with spirituality. Anytime spirituality or spiritual energy resonated, something good always took place!

Ves never expected Ves to resonate with Gloriana during the creation of a spiritual product!

He compared the actions of his own spiritual projection with that of his girlfriend.

The difference was clear.

In Glorianaʼs parlance, his domain centered around life, or at some aspect of it. This shaped his spirituality in ways that granted him some superpowers as Ketis once described.

Ves took advantage of this property by performing spiritual techniques such as spiritual restoration, which was essentially a way of resurrecting a dead spiritual entity by infusing it with his own life-attributed spiritual energy.

If Ves had adopted a different design philosophy, then he guessed that he would never have been able to perform this wondrous feat.

Nonetheless, life was inherently chaotic and unpredictable.

It normally took hundreds, thousands if not millions of generations to allow for nature to filter out the most flawed and unfit to survive the circumstances.

Such a lengthy process of selection and optimization was simply unthinkable to Ves. Perhaps he might have the patience to let nature take its course if he was an actual god, but he was just a mech designer!

While Ves was able to fuse compatible spiritual shards and elements together with the help of his specialty, the mergers were far from ideal in his eyes.

The two spiritual products he created before all ended up flawed and less than what they could have been. This had always been regretful to him. It was like birthing a child who was mentally handicapped or possessed a third arm.

Though most of the flaws would eventually heal or diminish when the spiritual product matured, they would always limit its potential.

Therefore, the importance of fixing these flaws straight away so that he could birth a much healthier spiritual product became evident.

”A child conceived by two people is better than one conceived alone!”

Though the situation right now was not equivalent to human conception, Ves found it to be a nice way of interpreting the ongoing process.

Just as a child was supposed to inherit the traits of both parents, the spiritual product being formed received the care of two different mech designers.

Ves provided the spark of life, while Gloriana addressed some of the flaws that he left behind.

This was akin to artificial conception.

Most couples with money to spare would always go to a clinic to conceive a designer baby.

Instead of letting nature and chance select the genes of the baby, a geneticist or other specialist manipulated the genes of the unborn child to achieve a better result.

As far as Ves knew, this service was fairly prevalent in the upper echelons of third-rate states. It was even better and more ubiquitous in more advanced states.

This disparity in genes always put second-class citizens ahead of third-class citizens. Although some abnormal people were occasionally born among the latter, they were far too rare.

Now that Gloriana contributed her strength to the process, it was the same as upgrading his spiritual product from a baseline human baby into a genetically-enhanced baby!

The complementary nature of their collaboration was not limited to this! Due to the resonance that had taken hold, something profound had descended upon their ongoing creation and affected its nature!

Ves observed the changes very closely and found out that some of the inherent attributes of the broken shards of Nyxieʼs spiritual fragment underwent transformation!

Yes, transformation!

Although it was very weak and only affected a small portion of spiritual attributes, this was an exceptional effect!

The only other way that Ves could change the spiritual attribute of something was to employ spiritual contamination!

Obviously, such methods were very inconvenient because Ves had to rely on an external source to contaminate something else, changing far more than he wanted.

This was how William Urbesh became so weird and silent!

If Ves could employ a means of transforming spiritual attributes in a very focused and targeted manner, then he could drastically limit the side effects of any transformation attempt!

”This is true synergy!”

Gloriana seemed to be aware of the preciousness of the moment. Though she was nearing the end of her endurance, she continued to persist in her efforts. The main reason why she wanted to extend her exhausting efforts was because she wanted to study and enjoy the resonance they achieved!

As long as they could reproduce this effect under other circumstances, their collaboration would truly reach a greater height!

A phenomenon like this was not something that could be achieved through ordinary collaboration!

Eventually, she couldnʼt hold out anymore. Her spiritual projection visibly weakened to a point where she was no longer able to match his spiritual projectionʼs strength.

The resonance effect disappeared and the strange form of synergy that transformed some of the spiritual productʼs attributes had gone away as a result.

Disappointment welled in them both. Though Gloriana only merely missed the chance of becoming more familiar with the exceptional form of synergy they achieved, Ves lamented the premature end of the transformation and error-correcting processes.

The transformation process changed only a fraction of the original spiritual attributes. However, the importance of this effect couldnʼt be overstated!

That was because Ves discovered that some of Nyxie��s original alien attributes had transformed into attributes that corresponded to the common vision that Ves and Gloriana maintained while they concentrated!

The spiritual product leaned a bit more towards masculinity, which was very welcome news to Ves! Transforming pollution into something pure had always been one of his thorniest problems!

The fact that they managed to transform attributes that originally belonged to a very powerful spiritual entity was even more exceptional!

If Ves and Gloriana employed the same synergistic effect on something weaker, their refinement attempt would definitely achieve greater results!

As for the error-correcting process, Gloriana managed to fix or improve over half of the flaws that Ves had left behind after he was done fusing spiritual elements together.

Though not all of the flaws had been addressed as well as he hoped for, just the fact that it was possible to correct them gave him a lot of hope for the future!

”Withdraw. Youʼre at the end of the rope. Donʼt break yourself. Youʼve done enough.”

His words broke her concentration, causing her to collapse on the deck of the testing chamber. She breathed deeply and nursed her head as if she was suffering from an enormous headache.

Ves couldnʼt spare the time to attend to her as he was rapidly trying to wrap up the spiritual restoration process. Enough time had passed for him to fuse the remaining elements and cause the new spiritual amalgamation to come to life as a new spiritual product!

A celebratory pulse emerged out of the spiritual product that was considerably more pronounced than Ves had ever sensed before!

Luckily, the pulse hadnʼt radiated very far. At most, only the entire floor felt its birth.

As Ves slowly wound himself down, he studied the newborn spiritual product that was locked inside the P-stone.

He felt a strong sense of masculinity from the spiritual product. Not just that, but the masculinity was tinged with both immaturity and false bravado in a roughly equal proportion!

”Success!” Ves announced with a grin. ”Weʼve succeeded! Not only that, but we achieved more than we set out to make!”

Ves moved over to his exhausted girlfriend and carefully placed the P-stone in her hands.

The direct contact enlivened her for a moment as she sensed something akin to a glow but much more lively from the rock!

”Itʼs a boy!”

”Uhhh..!”

”How about calling him Bravo?” Gloriana weakly smiled.

Though Ves didnʼt like this simple name, he acquiesced considering Glorianaʼs fragile state.

”Sure.. letʼs call him Bravo. Weʼll make sure to take care of him! Rest now. Iʼll take care of the rest.”

”Sure…”

Gloriana finally fell asleep.