The Mech Touch novel Chapter 3540

Chapter 3540: Low Yield Beasts

One of the downsides of traveling alongside an MTA frigate was that Ves couldn't get away with as many shenanigans.

For example, Ves did not dare to allow Director Ranya Wodin to proceed with the more controversial secret experiments that they had initially planned.

They even had to remain mindful of the words they said to each other lest they inadvertently ran afoul of the MTA sensibilities.

Fortunately, the Larkinson Biotech Institute was not short of research topics. One of the more relevant and interesting activities to Ves was the acquisition and rearing of mutated beasts.

When the expeditionary fleet last stayed in Vulit, the LBI acquired large batches of exobeasts and designer beasts to fill up the remaining biomes of the Dragon's Den.

It was only now that the large bioresearch vessel was truly being utilized to her fullest. The amount of animals her hull contained were so significant that it became a real challenge to recycle all of the alien waste products and make sure that the vessel did not require an excessive amount of resources to sustain all of these creatures!

As Ves toured one biome after another, he encountered many interesting beasts. Many of them were native to the Red Ocean while others were unique specialty products developed by renowned beast designers that had initially risen up in different parts of the old galaxy.

Yet despite all of the biodiversity in the Dragon's Den, many of the unusual and exotic abilities these creatures exhibited were ultimately mundane in origin.

Ves had little use for animals that derived their power from their biological structures or because of the strange exotics they ingested.

Ultimately, more than 99.999 percent of beasts acquired by the Larkinson Biotech Institute turned out to be duds. While many of them were so abnormal that they were worthy to be called mutated beasts by others, Ves had higher standards.

The only mutations that he was interested in were the kinds that could become the source of a new design spirit or spiritual ingredient.

In other words, Ves wanted to obtain more creatures like Arnold.

After completing his extensive tour, he ended up detecting just 12 individual beasts with activated spiritualities. They consisted of 9 natural exobeasts that had evolved from different planets and 3 artificial designer beasts that several biotech experts had cooked up in their labs.

Director Ranya looked quite relieved after hearing that Ves managed to find at least some suitable creatures among the ones her institute had recently acquired for over a hundred MTA credits!

"I was afraid our selection wouldn't yield anything. At the very least, we haven't wasted our budget."

"That's true, but the yield is too low." Ves frowned. "In effect, we spent a dozen MTA credits for each mutated beast. While our clan can still tolerate this spending rate, over time we need to develop a more efficient approach to this. I don't want to waste too much money on overpriced beasts that serve little practical value to us if they don't have any extraordinary powers."

Ranya sighed. "It would help if you could develop a tool or a detector that can facilitate our detection process."

"If I was capable of doing that, I would have already provided you with one. This matter is way more complicated than you think."

To be honest, with his current level of spiritual engineering, Ves thought it was possible for him to develop a detection device that could detect whether humans or beasts possessed active spiritualities.

He did not dare to make it, though. Ves was reasonably certain that the MTA did not possess this tech. If it did, then the higher ups certainly kept it close to their chest!

In any case, Ves wanted to keep this capability for himself for the time being. Ranya would have to wait a few years more before he would even consider changing his stance.

Ranya turned the discussion back to the detected mutated beasts. "What do you wish to do with the twelve?"

"Keep them alive and well for the time being. I don't have a use for them right now, but that might change in the future. Some of them are too weak and useless in their current states. If possible, try to train them to use their abilities more. The more they exercise their powers, the stronger they become. I will make sure to drop by at least once a month to track their progress. Once their value becomes high enough, I might make other arrangements."

Ves truly hoped the mutated beasts he detected would become more useful to him. While they did possess interesting capabilities, none of them were as potent as that of Zeigra or Arnold.

A typical example was a jumping twelve-legged lizard creature that could make the air around it vibrate at a high frequency.

What was the use of such a useless power aside from making a high-pitched noise? A simple sound speaker could generate a much louder noise with ease!

It seemed that finding good mutated beasts was a lot more challenging than he thought.

Buying lots of random beasts from the market in the hopes of winning the lottery enough times was not economically viable.

Visiting untamed planets and scouring their surfaces for unusual alien beasts was too inefficient and time consuming.

Developing designer beasts inhouse in order to breed new mutated beasts was likely to fail more times than he could count.

The problem was that Ves still didn't understand why certain humans or creatures developed spiritual potential. As long as he was not able to figure out the reason and replicate the process himself, he had little choice but to settle for one of the aforementioned solutions.

Ves placed his hand on Ranya's shoulder. "Keep researching the mutated beasts that I have pointed out for you. Try and find a common marker that only they possess. Whether it is biological in nature or not, as long as all twelve of them possess this particular quality, then we can go much further."

"Understood, sir. I suspect that one of those common markers is heightened intelligence and self-awareness. All twelve creatures that you've mentioned are either sentient or behave close enough to pass off as one. We still need to investigate further to see whether their thinking has actually evolved."

"Good idea, I can imagine it is difficult to test for heightened intelligence among lots of different beasts. This is not a marker that we can use to effectively find new mutated beasts. We need to find a more solid alternative."

That was a huge challenge and Ves did not think that Director Ranya would succeed.

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