Even though Ves did not treat this as a critical project, he still took the time to do it right.
This was the first companion spirit he made after a long time. Much had changed since that time.
He recently completed a comprehensive evolution that not only turned him into a phase lord but also boosted his Spirituality to a new height.
He completed a lot of interesting projects and improved many aspects of his spiritual engineering.
He became exposed to many new and interesting phenomena that allowed him to harvest a lot of useful insights.
All of these gains and more granted him much greater confidence in his ability to implant useful companion spirits into other people.
No matter whether they possessed active spiritualities or not, Ves would find a way.
After all, if he had been able to grant companion spirits to his unborn children, then doing the same to a bunch of average people should not be challenging!
What played in Nitaa's favor was that she was one of the few people who possessed active spiritualities. Her strength in this aspect was not strong when he initially found her. A secret splinter organization affiliated with the Five Scrolls Compact had experimented on her and many other people, causing her ability to smell certain spiritual properties to become abnormally strong.
Years of spending time in an unusual organization like the Larkinson Clan had grown her spirituality by a lot. Ves theorized that frequent exposure to spiritual entities along with other forms of spiritual stimulation had caused his bodyguard to exercise her 'spiritual muscle', for lack of a better term.
Once Ves harvested a couple of spiritual fragments from the Solemn Guardian and Ylvaine, he brought out Blinky and instructed his own companion spirit to get to work.
Mrow~!
There were many circumstances where Blinky could offer no assistance, but this was not one of them. Ves had originally created Blinky to augment his spiritual engineering endeavors and creating a new companion spirit definitely qualified!
Compared to where Ves manually cut into people's spiritualities and messed around until a part of themselves transformed into semi-autonomous spiritual entities, Blinky could perform the same procedures with much greater finesse.
Mrow mrow mrow.
The cat's remarkable affinity with spiritual energy allowed him to skillfully manipulate Nitaa's spirit while inflicting as little harm as possible.
Though there was no way to avoid causing pain akin to an enormous migraine, Nitaa gritted her teeth and relied on her willpower and training to remain as calm as possible.
"It will take a little longer than I initially expected." Ves reassured his struggling guard. "Your spirit is stronger and more resilient than I expected, which is good news because your new gift will have a higher starting point. The only trouble is that Blinky has to put more effort into cutting and reshaping parts of your inner self. Please bear with it. You will get your new hound soon enough."
Both Ves and Nitaa sighed in relief as Blinky finished much of the rough cutting and shaping work.
It was at this point that Ves added the spiritual fragments that concentrated the energies donated by both the Solemn Guardian and Ylvaine.
As old humanoid design spirits, both of them got along with each other remarkably well. They were old friends who graced the earlier glow mechs that Ves had designed and introduced with great fanfare back when he was still an Apprentice Mech Designer.
Although the two older design spirits lacked the strength and extraordinary abilities of the likes of the Superior Mother and the Phase King, Ves never questioned their utility. Not all powers had to be flashy or attention-grabbing.
Breaking up the spiritual fragments and merging the shards with the new spiritual construct proceeded smoothly enough.
He recently understood that attributes mattered and that it was not that simple to merge contradictory or opposite attributes together.
While it was not impossible to fuse light and dark, life and death and other opposing concepts together, Ves had to be more creative and create a logical construct that could harmoniously fuse them together.
It was like the time he created the Ouroboros. He imbued the mech with the opposing concepts of life and death by imagining it as a cycle. It was one of the chief reasons why he chose that particular name for the first-class mech.
Fortunately for Ves, the domains of the Solemn Guardian and Ylvaine were not incompatible with each other. At best, they had little to no intersection, which meant that they did not naturally clash when squashed together.
The challenge was to draw out the strengths of both design spirits while also creating greater combinations that produced fantastic synergies.
Ves and Blinky tried their best to come up with such synergies, but they hadn't been able to do much due to lack of resources.
He knew that if he wanted to make this companion spirit start off on a stronger and more robust footing, he would have to 'expand its capacity' by feeding it with a moderate amount of universal life energy.
As much as Ves cared about his bodyguards and his safety, the universal life energy derived from high-grade life-prolonging treatment serum was still a finite resource. He was too reluctant to make such a heavy investment even if it benefited him in various ways.
Eventually, his cheapskate tendencies won out as he decided not to draw on that particular precious resource. This decision may cause Nitaa's initial companion spirit to start off weak, but it was not as if there was much of a hurry to create the strongest spiritual hound right away.
If the Compact needed to take its time to infiltrate the new frontier, then Nitaa would have plenty of years to slowly train and shape her companion spirit to sniff out the most acute threats to his life in advance.
"Let's keep it simple for the time being."
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