The Mech Touch novel Chapter 2971

Chapter 2971: Repurposed

Spiritual energy possessed all kinds of mysterious and profound effects. Some of these effects seemed to bend or break the laws of physics.

Yet Ves thought that was merely because his understanding of spirituality and how it functioned as part of the fabric of reality was incomplete.

As far as he was aware, spiritual energy obeyed the first law of thermodynamics, just behaved like any other kind of energy.

Otherwise known as the law of conservation of energy, this law stated that energy didn't magically come from nowhere. No matter how many transformations or movements a given amount of energy underwent, there should be just as much energy at the end, just in different forms due to the processes it underwent.

If for some reason any extra energy showed up from nowhere or a bit of energy was missing at the end, then the model applied to understand what was happening was either flawed or incomplete.

In any case, what this meant to Ves in his current situation was that he needed to find an input source in order to get his power generator working.

When cavemen created fire, they used wood as their input or fuel.

When ancient industrialists started changing Old Earth, they used coal to fire their steam machines.

When the first human spaceships started to explore the Sol System, these vessels relied on a variety of synthesized fuels to propel themselves forward.

At this point in time, human civilization had reached a point where it developed many sophisticated means of energy generation to power all of the technology it depended on to dominate the galaxy.

Yet what pained Ves the most at the moment was that he could not rely on all of this known body of knowledge to design his energy generator!

"It's not like I can go down the cargo hold of the Spirit of Bentheim and pour a glass of high-density ship-grade reactor fuel in my mouth." He depreciatingly said to himself.

Augmented body or not, ingesting all of that highly toxic fuel would definitely result in his death!

He pressed his palm on his face. The problem he was suffering from right now was an enormous disparity in understanding between technical knowledge and spiritual knowledge.

He felt very confident about his mastery of the former. Even though his utilization and fluency of advanced technical theories and applications fell short of that of his wife, he was still considerably better than the average Journeyman when it came to designing complex, technical systems.

"As for the latter…"

He felt ashamed to call himself an expert in spirituality. His current degree of mastery of the spiritual domain was so rudimentary and scattered that he might as well call himself a witch doctor instead of a scientist!

The only reason why he did not feel ashamed was because he probably grasped more knowledge in this field than pretty much every other mech designer in existence!

When every other mech designer around him only knew how to swing clubs, he felt pretty proud of himself for knowing how to mix certain weeds together in order to brew herbal medicine.

This was the basis of his strength and the foundation of his career as a mech designer. It was the reason why his mech designs became so successful.

Yet applying his sometimes experimental innovations on products meant for other people was different from performing an experiment that directly affected his own life!

Considering how the first companion spirit he had ever created became such an integral part of Ketis' mind, spirit and will, Ves was a lot more lurid about proceeding with this risky project.

He thought back on the many experiments he performed on the test subjects his airfleet captured on the surface of Prosperous Hill VI.

He couldn't even count the amount of heads he exploded in his quest to develop a safe and viable method to activate spiritual potential in people who lacked this rare quality.

In the end, he never managed to succeed. All he got in return for all of the blood he spilled was another way to kill people or drive them mad.

This incident reminded him that not all of his experiments succeeded, let alone work out well for his test subjects.

Of course, he didn't care what happened to the latter. Unless they were Larkinsons or someone else he had reason to care about, he felt nothing if they died or received a crippling injury. If they were criminals or something, their eventual fate was already set in stone. There was no way that Ves would allow them to live and expose his dubious experiments.

He never had a problem with this callous but effective approach until now. His lack of rigor towards safety and risk management became a lot more questionable when he was the one who sat in the shoes of his test subjects!

The worst part about all of this was that he could not effectively perform tests on other people in order to verify that his plan was sound.

First, he was working with scarce resources. The spiritual fragment of the Unending One was unique and irreplaceable. Even if Ves did not intend to use it all up at once and even if he theorized that he could grow it like a plant, it was still an extremely rare commodity that he shouldn't have possessed under normal circumstances!

Second, the nature of his production method inherently induced a lot of variability. The seed he created was merely the starting point of his companion spirit. Once he planted it in his mind, it could sprout in many different ways and grow to maturity in countless different ways based on an endless amount of variables.

In other words, performing an identical experiment on a different Larkinson would probably yield a drastically different companion spirit, not the least because the ingredients and the person it bonded to had already changed from the beginning!

Did this mean it was useless to perform an experiment on another person? Not exactly.

"I can still use this opportunity to verify whether some of my assumptions on companion spirits are realistic."

He had several weeks of time to plan, study, experiment and learn a couple crucial lessons.

Yet before he considered this option, he turned his attention back to his previous preoccupation, which was deciding what extra ingredients he should add to make his companion spirit.

An energy generator required a lot of spiritual energy as input, and he had a number of sources he could choose from. The most ambitious choice he had so far was to try and harvest spiritual tribute from as many humans as possible.

He stood up from his chair and approached the four Aspects of Lufa stored in his personal workshop. The organic statues looked as radiant and exceptional as ever. The texture of their skin and the fluffiness of their feathers made them seem as if they were actual angels who just happened to be put in a form of eternal stasis.

Verify captcha to read the contentVerify